Sunday, November 16, 2014 | 8:00 a.m.

Risky Business

Judith L. Watt
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 90:1–8
1 Thessalonians 5:1–11
Matthew 25:13–30

I now see that “hanging on” is a fearful, needy, and clinging way to be in the world. But looking for what I want to give myself to transforms everything. It’s taking me to a place where I find energy, trust, and new life.

Parker Palmer

Some of you have heard this story—the Parable of the Talents—several times. Others of you perhaps never. No matter which category you fit into, there’s a need for sharing some basics first.

The Parable of the Talents in Matthew’s Gospel comes toward the end of a long discourse Jesus delivers on the end times. That’s our first challenge in hearing this parable. We modern people don’t spend much of our time thinking about the end times, thinking about Jesus’ return. The hearers in Matthew’s Gospel thought about it a lot. They had come to believe that Jesus was the Messiah. They had started to sense that he wouldn’t be with them forever. In fact, at this juncture in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is actually preparing to leave Galilee—safe and familiar territory for him—and travel to Jerusalem, where the opposition would be stronger and the tension would be greater. Not only did they begin to worry about his leaving them, but they also then had questions about when he would return that second time, in those end times. When would they experience the parousia, when the world as they knew it would come to an end and the fullness of God’s kingdom would reign? They wanted to know what would be considered proper conduct for themselves as they awaited the return of the Son of Man in glory. And so this parable that Jesus tells is the third in a series Jesus uses to try to answer their questions.

So here we are, two-thousand-plus years later. The world hasn’t ended. Jesus hasn’t returned. The question of the end times isn’t so front and center for us. But the question of proper conduct—or what God would want from us or how we are to live and act and be faithful in these in-between times—is something we ask. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t interested in that question. If you weren’t interested in knowing what God wants from you or how you are to live as a Christian or what any of this has to do with you or your life now, you wouldn’t be here.

The challenge in gleaning answers from these parables is that they are confusing. The people ask a question: When will this end of time be? How will we know it’s here? What will be the signs of your coming again? And Jesus answers with these stories, each time not offering an answer to their question, but each time giving them hints about what they should do, how they should live, no matter when those end times come. In this story, he tells about a master who entrusts to his first slave five talents, with little or no other instruction. He gives two talents to the second slave, with no instruction. And he gives one talent to the third slave, still no instruction. And then he leaves. You should know that a talent was a huge sum of money, equal to roughly a lifetime of wages that a slave would earn. So five talents was an enormous sum—more than anyone of that day could imagine. If you were to calculate your lifetime of wages and then multiply by five, that’s what five talents in your life would be. The first slave quickly went and traded with those talents and earned five more. Now ten times a lifetime of wages. The second slave took his two talents and traded with them and quickly earned two more talents. Now four times a lifetime of wages. Huge. And the third slave took his talent and buried it in the ground, thinking he was doing the best thing, being the most careful.

The master comes back. Most of those first listeners to this story would have expected the master to praise the third slave—to praise him for his living according to the expected norm of the day, praise him for his care and frugality, praise him for having taken safe and acceptable precautions, praise him for respecting his master’s property and for not taking wild risks. The average peasant did not look kindly on wealthy people who multiplied their wealth without honest labor. The prudent and just thing to do would have been exactly what that third slave did: bury the wealth he received. Those first hearers would have been floored by the master’s reaction of anger and dismissal to the third slave.

You and I aren’t as floored as they would have been. Our immersion into capitalism, our knowing that investing is good if one has the resources, the knowledge that earning compounding interest is something that’s viewed as smart—smarter than squirreling away your money under a mattress or letting it sit in a bank savings account, earning very low interest. To us, whether we can invest or not, those who do invest are seen as wise, smart, fortunate, lucky.

What gives with this story?

What gives with this story is that the point of it isn’t anything about money. The point of the story is how we respond to God, and how we respond to God is influenced by who we think God is. The third slave saw the master as someone who was to be feared, and because he saw the master as someone to be feared and as someone with tight rules and regulations, he didn’t have the courage to risk—to risk stepping out, to risk using his gifts, to risk going outside of a narrow view of what he thought God would accept. What he missed in the master’s actions, and we miss so often in the story, is the sheer abundance the master entrusted to each of the slaves: complete abundance and generosity, even to the third slave—a lifetime of wages. He gave to each according to their ability but to each he gave an abundance. What that third slave missed was that the master attached no rules or instructions to the gift of talent that was entrusted to him. He thought there were rules and instructions, and he acted out of caution because he feared the master. What guided the third servant was his perception of the master.

John Shea, former Catholic priest, now writer and theologian and storyteller, says there are

spiritual laws, predictable ways the Divine Spirit and the human spirit work together. These spiritual laws are not inexorable juggernauts, rolling along and crushing everything in their way. Nor are they as easily discerned as the laws governing physical reality, or the certainties we can count on in the psychological and social realms. Rather they are unfolding processes, mosaics that come together again and again in the same way, sequences that string inner states together in a peculiar logic. If people contradict these laws, they suffer negative consequences. If people conform to these laws, they are positively supported. Cooperate and grow. Refuse and stagnate.

This parable, says Shea, is about “the unfolding of a spiritual law to the benefit of two servants and the detriment of a third.” And Shea then goes on, “God gives Spirit to human creatures because God is, in essence, self-donation (John Shea, Commentary on Matthew).

Don’t you like that? God is self-donation. It is God’s nature to give. So when humans receive the Divine Spirit into their human spirits, they are encouraged to cooperate with it by giving it away. And when they give it away, they become conscious of more Spirit. That’s what this parable is about. Seeing God as the giver. Believing it. Living as if God offers gift and space, rather than God offering rules and fear.

How do you live? As though God is standing before you ready to slap your hand with a ruler if you misstep? Or as though God is beckoning you forward, much like a parent beckons a child forward who is learning to walk, urging one step after another and being excited at each risky, risky step taken.

I have a friend who often tells the story of sitting in church, week after week, asking God during the prayer of confession to make her a quiet person, rather than the extroverted person she was. She was the youngest of three sisters, had always had the gift of speaking easily and engaging readily with people, and because of her family of origin, for some reason she felt the way she was wrong, was less valuable to the world, was looked down upon. And finally, in one of those prayer moments, she realized that it was God who gave her a personality of a certain sort to use in the best way possible, because who she was came from God. In that moment, she left the ways of the third servant and took on the ways of one of the first two servants. She moved away from a certain limited way of viewing who God was and what God valued to viewing God as a giver—of grace and space. In that moment, she then started being able to risk herself, her words, her ways of using her gifts.

Or perhaps something I saw this past week on Facebook will help you understand the sense of this parable. It was a posted placard that said, “‘It’s impossible,’ said Pride. ‘It’s risky,’ said Experience. ‘It’s pointless,’ said Reason. ‘Give it a try,’ whispered the heart.”

In some writing John Buchanan did about this passage, he says, “The greatest risk of all, it turns out, is not to risk anything, not to care deeply and profoundly enough about anything to invest deeply, to give your heart away and in the process risk everything. The greatest risk of all is to play it safe, to live cautiously and prudently . . . not living up to the full potential of our humanity” (Feasting on the Word, Year A, vol. 4). In other words, the greatest risk is to be ruled by fear. And when we as Christians, as followers of Christ, are ruled by fear, the world loses out, and love is diminished and the light of the world is dimmed.

How is God calling you to invest? How are you being ruled by fear and caution? What perceptions of God do you live by? Because if you live by a perception of God as ruler and judge, hand slapper, whose demands are impossible, you’ll live a certain way and be scared. If you live by a perception of God as giver of space and gift, your ability to take risks, for the sake of ushering God’s ways and love into this world, will be ever so much easier. Amen.