Sermon — November 15, 2020
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Last week, Alice and I took advantage of an earlier-than-usual bedtime to play a hard-earned game of Scrabble. Toward the end of the game, I struck gold. As I pulled a handful of letters out of the bag, they looked awfully familiar. After a few seconds, I rearranged them to form one perfect, seven-letter word: “MISSION.” And then I sat and stared at the board for what felt like about fifteen minutes, trying to find the perfect place where I could play the whole word at once. All I needed was one common open letter: an E and I’d have EMISSION, an O and I’d have OMISSION, an S and I could play MISSIONS. I was so dedicated to finding the perfect place to play my perfect word that I spent several turns making little one-letter moves, playing one of my S-es and hoping I’d eventually be able to use the rest.
Then Alice played “HE” across and I could finally play “EMISSION” all the way down to a triple-word. 80 points! And the crowd goes wild! Granted, this involved some cheating. In other words, I told Alice I needed an open E, and she obliged. If we had followed the rules of Scrabble, I never would have played the word; I would have just wasted turn after turn waiting for that perfect moment. (Luckily, we’re both so competitive about Scrabble that we don’t keep score any more, and we’re both perfectionists, so we tend to work cooperatively toward the end to use up all our letters.)
So maybe, Scrabble perfectionist that I am, I understand this third servant’s fear when he buries his talent in the ground.
This parable is tricky, because it’s become so much a part of our culture that we take its meaning for granted. A typical interpretation goes something like this: God has given you many blessings in this life, among them your personal talents. If you put them to use, you’ll be rewarded. But if you bury your talents in the ground—if, to borrow a phrase from another saying of Jesus, you “hide your light under a bushel” (Matthew 5:15)—well, God won’t be so pleased.
This understanding of the parable is where our English word “talent” comes from, not the other way around; people have assumed for so long that the parable is about our innate skills and abilities that we’ve started calling these things “talents,” after the parable. Originally, a talent wasn’t a skill; it was a unit of measurement, of weight; the “talents” in this story are huge chunks of silver worth around fifteen years’ wages for an ordinary worker. What the servants have been entrusted with in this story are those literal talents, those blocks of precious metal. The master in this parable goes off on a journey and hands over his incredible wealth to his slaves: decades’ worth of their salaries, to be guarded until the boss returns. This was normal in the ancient world. Unlike modern American slaves, Roman slaves often occupied roles in their masters’ household like butler, or teacher, or, well… wealth manager. Now, two of these slaves pursue what seem to be almost reckless strategies, throwing the whole principal into what turn out to be successful investments, and receiving huge rewards. The third takes an approach that seems at first to be entirely reasonable; afraid to lose this huge wealth entrusted to him, he hides it as best he can. If the first two servants could be said to be a bit reckless, this third is clearly fearful. He seems to be so risk-averse, so afraid of failure, that he precludes the possibility of success. And that’s one way of preaching this sermon.
But even more than fear, he starts from a place of misunderstanding. Because he was not afraid, as I was in my Scrabble game, that he was going to miss the big opportunity to invest this talent in the right thing. And he wasn’t even quite afraid that he would lose this wealth that his master had entrusted him to keep safe. When he explains his fear, he doesn’t say either of these things. He says, “I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground.” (Matthew 25:24-25) He calls the master a kind of thief, harvesting the fruits of others’ labor, reaping where he didn’t sow and gathering where he didn’t scatter seed. He seems to think, in other words, that the talent is rightfully his.
So this third servant’s fear is complicated. He’s not only afraid that thieves will come and snatch away what he’s been given in trust. He’s not only afraid that he’ll invest this talent in the wrong way, and miss out on some better opportunity, or even worse, lose the whole thing. He’s also afraid to face the fact that it isn’t his; that he’s not its ultimate and rightful owner, but only a temporary steward.
This, I think, is the key to the parable of the talents. It’s not about how to offer something to God and to the world with the talents we possess. It’s about how to be good stewards of the things God has entrusted to us.
“Stewardship” is one of those words that has become an unfortunate shorthand in the Church. We’ve turned it into a term of art, so that “stewardship” has come to mean the pledge drive that happens in the fall, and the “stewardship committee”—if the chair is lucky enough to have a committee—is the group who organize it. This is important work, and pledges are an important commitment; but this is only a fraction of what “stewardship” means. Every one of us is a member of the stewardship committee; every week of the year is part of stewardship season.
And I don’t just mean that you should pay your pledge every week.
“Stewardship,” after all, is the state of being a good steward, of being like one of those “good and trustworthy” servants who, entrusted with great wealth, built up what they’d been given and then gave it up when their lord returned. Our stewardship certainly includes the practices of giving money to the church and to the poor, but it’s broader than that. It’s not about what we give to God from what we have; it about what we do with what God’s given us. To be a good steward, the parable seems to say, is to recognize that all that we have, and all that we are is a gift from God; and not our own. That gives us some freedom, and some responsibility. We are free to take risks, to think big, to be bold, because ultimately, we’re playing with God’s money. We’re not free to do whatever we want with our bodies or our fellow human beings, with our earth or with our wealth; we’re not free to claim them for our own and hide them from our God, to abuse them or exploit them or try to possess them.
But we can put our talents to work to grow and multiply. We can put our money to work, giving to organizations that are loving our neighbors. We can put our bodies to work, baking pies or shoveling neighbors’ sidewalks or marching in the streets. We can put our earth to work, cultivating and tending it like a garden, not using and polluting it as though we can throw it away when we’re done.
This practice of good stewardship isn’t something we do for the church, on a pledge card, once a year. It happens every day, everywhere, at every moment when we face the choice between cultivation and exploitation, between sharing what we have and hiding it away—at every moment when we make the choice to act in love, as we walk ever closer those precious final words: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.” (Matthew 25:21 KJV) Amen.