A Fourth Church Sermon by Calum I. MacLeod

November 13, 2005 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Talented

Calum I. MacLeod
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 119:97–105
Matthew 25:14–30

“I have made five more talents.”

Matthew 25:20 (NRSV)

Highly intelligent people often have reservations about the Bible.
Without question, honest uncertainty beats hard-nosed certitude.
But it is a mistake to be paralyzed by uncertainty, especially when
life so frequently calls upon us to act wholeheartedly without absolute certainty.
Moreover, wrestling with Scripture, far from a sign of weakness,
is a reflection of religious faithfulness. What else should you struggle with
if not the Bible? What struggle offers more reward?

William Sloane Coffin

In the time that I’ve lived in the United States—some eight years now—I’ve often been struck by a conversation that happens in this society around the place of the Bible in the communal life of the country. It seems to be an ongoing struggle between two groups of people: One group who want the Ten Commandments to be posted in courthouses and public places; want prayers and Bible readings in school; in the current discussion on creationism vs. evolution are like the Kansas Board of Education piling in with their approach to teaching the concept of intelligent design. And then the other side—those who argue and push for continued enforcement of a separation between church and state. It’s my sense that in this ongoing debate, the Bible, our Scriptures, the basis of our communal life together, is often forced to play the part of a kind of a cultural artifact, almost like an autonomous, independent football to be kicked around by the opposing parties and used for their own agendas.

There was an interesting piece in the New York Times yesterday in the Op-Ed section, where the Dalai Lama was writing about faith and science. He told an extraordinary story, which caught my eye because of its relevance to some of these thoughts. The Dalai Lama was explaining how, as a child, he was given various things to use and work on. He was given a telescope once, and he used that telescope to look at the moon, and when he did that, he realized that there were shadows and craters and hills on the moon. This bothered him because it went against the ancient teaching of Buddhism, which is that the moon is a heavenly body that emits its own light, and so as a young child, he who was to become the Dalai Lama, realized that that was wrong. He says this: “If the author of that fourth-century treatise were writing today, I’m sure he would write the chapter on cosmology differently.” He goes on to say, “If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change.”

Let me share a favorite story of mine, which imagines a situation of a desert country where trees are scarce and fruit is hard to come by.

It was said that God wanted to make sure there was enough for everyone, so he appeared to a prophet and said, “This is my commandment to the whole people for now and for future generations: no one shall eat more than one fruit a day. Record this in the holy book. Anyone who transgresses this law will be considered to have sinned against God and against humanity.” The law was faithfully observed for centuries, until scientists discovered a means for turning the desert into green land. The country became rich in grain and in livestock, and the trees bent down with the weight of unplucked fruit, but the fruit law continued to be enforced by the civil and religious authorities of the land. Anyone who pointed to the sin against humanity in allowing fruit to rot on the ground was dubbed a blasphemer and an enemy of morality. These people who questioned the wisdom of God’s holy word, it was said, were not being guided by the proud spirit of faith and submission whereby alone the truth can be received. Nothing could be done to change the law, because the prophet who had claimed to have received it from God was long since dead. He might have had the courage and the sense to change the law as circumstances changed, for he had taken God’s word not as something to be revered alone but as something to be used for the welfare of God’s people.

Now I share those perhaps random but perhaps connected stories as a way of framing our engagement with the text that we read earlier, the parable of the talents. I often think of this well-known passage as being every capitalist’s favorite parable of Jesus: “Invest your money well, for good returns,” says Jesus. But we have to remember always that this is a parable, and therefore we have to be careful. A parable is a story in which Jesus invites us in with an accessible concept but then turns the meaning, challenges us to understand where we might be in that story. Of course, some people argue that it’s the perfect text for stewardship season, a good lesson for stewardship: get your pledge in and support the church. I’m not disagreeing with the concept of pledging, just to be clear—get your pledges in—but Jesus is not acting here as a financial advisor. He’s not offering himself as the director of the stewardship and giving campaign. The parable of the talents is a story for a community, a community that is living in a place where the reign of God, the kingdom of God, is a present reality, a community like ourselves. The kingdom of God is a present reality, but we are waiting—waiting for the fullness of the final act of God, which is spoken of as the fulfilling return of Christ. Biblical scholar Charles Cousar has a good word on this and on this parable. He says, “Waiting and watching for Jesus’ return really means being good stewards of all our resources, especially the gospel.” “Especially the gospel”—what does that mean? It might be easier if this were a simple lesson in the ethics of financial investments. What does it mean for us - gathered here to be servants of the one who entrusts to us stewardship of the gospel? How do we find ways to be talented servants producing twofold of what we have been given and not be buriers of the gift?

Let me offer for you two interrelated understandings of the gospel that I hope might inform some engagement with this parable.

Hebrews 4:12: “The word of God is living and active, sharper than a two-edged sword.”

The gospel, at some very real level, lives for us as the scriptures that are at the basis of our faith, the stories of God’s loving relationship with humanity and the inadequate broken response of humanity to God until God ultimately acts in the person of Jesus, the Christ. As Paul says, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to God’s own self.” Scripture, a collection of stories, is at the center of our communal life of faith. The minister reads the scripture and says, “The Word of the Lord,” and the congregation responds, “Thanks be to God.” So how do we understand and engage with the word of God as living and active?

Brian Blount is a fine academic at Princeton Seminary. He wrote an extended essay that he ironically entitled “The Last Word on Biblical Authority,” and in that essay, he explores how, for example, the social context in which the scriptures were written impacted the writing of scripture, and he argues how, when contexts change, so must our interpretation and understanding of the text. I think in this I hear echoes of those words of the Dalai Lama. Brian Blount uses as an example the New Testament texts that supported slavery, devalued women, seemed to encourage blind obedience to the state. He writes, “Making the biblical words the last word turns them into literary artifacts. Over time any church working with such a word becomes fossilized and becomes an archaeological dig rather than a living faith.”

That’s what the story of the fruit law is about, and remember the third servant burying the master’s gift. Blount gives a remarkable example of what he means by the living word and active engagement with the living word. He shares a story from Howard Thurman, a well-known African American minister who was once dean of the chapel at Howard University:

My regular chore as a child was to do all the reading for my grandmother. She could neither read nor write. With a feeling of great temerity I asked her one day why it was that she would not let me read any of Paul’s letters. What she told me I shall never forget. During the days of slavery, she said, the master’s minister would occasionally hold services for the slaves. Always the white minister used from his text something from Paul. At least three or four times a year he used a text “Slaves be obedient to them that are your masters . . . as to Christ.” Then he would go on to show how if we were good and happy slaves God would bless us. And, she said, “I promised my Maker that if I ever learned to read and if freedom ever came, I would not read that part of the Bible.”

There’s another example in the story of Mary Slessor, who was a great Scottish woman missionary in Africa during the Victorian era. Her Bible is still in existence, and like many people, Mary Slessor annotated her Bible. She would write notes in the margins as she was reading through it. At that text where Paul says, “Woman should not speak in church,” Mary Slessor’s annotation is “I disagree with you here, Paul.” Good and faithful servants and active engagement with the living word of God.

Brian Blount, in summarizing, says something that is at the heart of this interpretative strategy. Blount says, “The text must be in line with God’s being and God’s agenda of liberation. Where it is not, the text must be challenged”. A powerful concept, I believe. It takes us into that realm that T. S. Eliot describes in the “Four Quartets”: “The intolerable wrestling with words and meanings,” but that is what it is to be a good and faithful steward of the gospel.

So there’s the gospel as scripture, but more than that, the Gospel as being active and living, and to be God’s stewards, we must be active and act upon it. Helpful in this, I think, is a very fine definition of gospel from the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann. Moltmann says this: “The full content and whole aura of the gospel and its practice is evangelization—that is to say the liberation of the world in the future of God.” So the gospel is not simply black ink on white paper that sits in front of us in the pew, but it is action, the practice that brings liberation to the world. Our wrestling with the gospel text must ultimately result in actions that are rooted and grounded in love, for the gospel is the good news of the transforming grace and love of God in Christ. Our stewardship of the gospel, of the great gift that the master gives us, will double its return where we practice healing and mending the world through love. In big contexts, when the church stands with the poorest and those most marginalized, when we gather together to amplify the voices of those who have long been silenced, or when you or I as an individual celebrate the potential and invest in the future of another individual, then we are good and trustworthy servants. Then we will be truly talented. Thanks be to God. Amen.