Southminster's Got Talent!

A Sermon preached November 9, 2008
Southminster Presbyterian Church

Matthew 25:14-30


Before we can really dig into this parable, we need to clear up what the word “talent” means here. It is a Greek word and was a unit of measurement in many middle eastern cultures. One talent was not just one coin. A Talent was what a laborer would earn in 16.5 years. So in ancient terms or in today’s terms, we’re talking about a lot of money. It might have been more helpful had the translators said, “A man, before going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them. To one he gave two and a half million dollars. To another, he gave one million dollars. And to a third he gave five hundred thousand dollars.”

Does that change the story for you at all?

It sure changes it for me.
To start with, it gives me a different appreciation of the Master. Anyone can leave people with $10 or $20 to invest. And while it would be nice to get it back, if you lose $10, you still might have some other options. But this master didn’t hand out $1, 5, and 10. He gave out, conservatively, $4 million.
That’s quite a gift. Staggering, really. It is quite a responsibility. If the investments don’t work out, the master is the one who has lost. His relationship with these servants must be unique. You wouldn’t just hand $4 million dollars over to servants if you didn’t know them well enough to know if they were going to leave town with your money. He clearly trusted these servants with something of great value.

Putting this parable in modern economic terms also gives me a different appreciation of the servants who receive the gifts. If I were entrusted with $1 million to invest, I’d be humbled by the trust that had been placed in me. It would probably make me reconsider my relationship to the master and my appraisal of my own abilities—“I didn’t know he thought I was capable of this. Wow. I wonder what else I might be capable of?”
What could you do if someone placed that kind of trust in you? Could you live into bigger dreams for yourself?

Two of the servants seemed to do just that. They took the talents they’d been given and they immediately went out and invested them. When he returned, they had doubled his money.

I confess that it has been hard for me to read this text while the stock market keeps falling. Because, I’ve been wondering, how do you DOUBLE an investment without doing something very RISKY? I don’t think you can. What did they invest in? The Damascus Stock Exchange? Camel stock futures? Olive oil? Credit Default Swaps? Housing developments on the Dead Sea coast?
Whatever it was, these servants took risks to double their investment.
We have seen these risks playing out rather badly lately. And so when we see the third servant, the one who buried his talent in the ground, we likely have some compassion for him. He may not have taken any risks, but he didn’t lose the money. Right?

I think the parable I’d like to see is the one where the man leaves his servants with the money, goes on his trip, and while he’s gone, the economy goes down the tube. How would he have responded to the servants who had gone out there and made those risky investments had the investments not made money? What if they had taken the gifts they’d been given, gone out on a limb to do something new, and then failed?
Perhaps we can see the answer in the parable we already have. Did you notice the response from the third servant when the man came back? “Master, I knew 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.”
What?
Who’s he talking about? The same “harsh man” who just left him with $500,000?
The other servants didn’t say anything like that. And his responses to the first two servants—“well done good and trustworthy slave. You have been trustworthy in a few things. I will put you in charge of many things. Enter into the joy of your master.”—those responses don’t seem to support the third servant’s claim.
But, for whatever reason, two of the servants seem to have a good relationship with the master, and one of them does not. The first two servants were comfortable enough in their relationship with the master to respond to his gift, to respond to the task he gave them, with confidence. Despite the risks. And, I suspect that had they lost everything when the Jerusalem Stock Market crashed, I think his answer to them might have been the same. “Well done good and trustworthy slave. Enter into the joy of your master.”
Because, of course, this parable isn’t about money. It is about these other staggering gifts we’ve been given. These talents, as it were. Interestingly, because of the usage of this word in this parable, the Greek word talent is carried over almost intact to mean “a natural aptitude or skill”. There may be other examples, but this is the only one I know of where the figurative use of a term by Jesus becomes a new word with new meaning. The word talent moves from a staggering amount of money to become a description of the gifts we’ve been given.

Let’s rephrase the parable again, in non-economic terms.
“For it is as if God summoned God’s servants and entrusted his belongings to them. To one he gave the gift of hospitality. To another, he gave the gift of evangelism, and to a third, he gave the bread of life and the cup of salvation. The one who received the talent of hospitality went out and invested the gift by being welcoming and providing safe space for those she met along the way. The one who received the gift of evangelism went and invested the gift by sharing the good news of the Gospel and invited many others to join him. The third servant took the gift of bread and wine and buried them in a hole.
When God returned, the first servant shared stories of how she had overcome her fear of being rejected and how, as a result, the gift of hospitality had made a difference in the lives of the people with whom she had shared it. The second servant shared stories of how God’s confidence in him had allowed him to overcome his fear of public speaking and how the gift of evangelism had allowed him to share the good news of the gospel with others, that they might also know the love and grace of God. To both of these servants, God said, “well done good and trustworthy servants. Enter into the joy of your master.”
The third servant came to God and said, “I didn’t know you well enough to overcome my fear, so I buried the gifts you’d given me and put them in a hole so nothing would happen to them. They’re a little dirty, but here they are.”
“You wicked and lazy slave,” God replied, “I’d given you gifts of life to share—what good were they going to do in a hole in the ground? If you weren’t going to invest them in other people, you could have at least passed them on to someone who would have.
“For to all those who have, more will be given and they will have an abundance. But from those who have nothing, who have buried their gifts in the ground, even what they have will be taken away.” (Thanks to Anna Carter Florence in Lectionary Homiletics for this rephrase of the parable.)

Friends, the good news is that God has given us all gifts beyond measure. I may not know what your talents are, but I hope you have a sense of them. And I hope you notice the talents in others. Often we don’t recognize how our talents can be invested until others suggest things to us. And I pray that you are cultivating and sharing your gifts for the betterment of the Kingdom of God.
Because, for you to not share your talents is the equivalent of burying them in the dirt.
And we all have reasons when we dig those holes. We’re busy. We’re afraid of failure or rejection. We don’t think our talents are worth sharing. We think other people are more talented. We don’t think it matters—to others or to God.
But this week, I invite you to lay down your shovel. I invite you to consider that your talents do matter—to this community and to God. Where would we be if people hadn’t shared their money and talents with this community? We wouldn’t have this building, or a choir, or Sunday school teachers, or the flower beds weeded, or bulletins typed, or any of this. Where would our community be without churches and individuals to support the homeless shelters, to provide thanksgiving dinners for children, to send shoeboxes to children around the world so that all children will receive a gift on Christmas, to offer assistance to refugees who are trying to resettle, to provide free medical and dental care to those who can’t otherwise afford it? It would be a sad world, indeed. A world full of buried talents.

I’m not, in general, a big fan of “reality” kinds of TV shows. And I don’t watch American Idol or America’s Got Talent, but after reading this parable, I think it is good that those kind of shows are on the air. Because those shows are FULL of people who want to share their talents. And they share their talents with JOY. And not all of them succeed, because in our world, we like to narrow things down to “winners” and “losers”. But I think that if God were the judge of one of those shows, God would be sitting right there next to Simon, Randy, and Paula, and would thank each and every one of those contestants for showing up and for sharing the joy. God would give a thumbs up and a high five to all of them. Because God looks at talents differently than we do. They aren’t commodities with a limited supply and demand. They are gifts. Gifts that are only of value when shared with others. And gifts that only expand once they are shared.

We are wrapping up our stewardship campaign this morning. In a little while, we will all walk forward to place our offerings, our pledge cards, and our Time and Talent forms in the baskets. I realize that many of you have already turned in your pledge cards, and I thank you for doing that. But I still invite you to walk forward. Because, really, it is ourselves we are offering to God.

“For to all those who have, more will be given and they will have an abundance.”
May it be so. Amen.

The Vineyards

Isaiah 5:1-7
Matthew 21:33-46

A Sermon preached at Southminster Presbyterian

In the mid 8th century BCE, it was a lousy time to be an Israelite. The kingdom has been divided into Northern and Southern factions. Neither of them is militarily strong enough to defend themselves from the Assyrians.
The Assyrians had been the big bully neighbor on the northern and eastern borders for a while, but you can see on this map that they move on down the coast, swallowing up Israel and Judah. They eventually move all the way down into Egypt. And their particular way of maintaining political stability was to dislocate people. They sent the inhabitants of the lands the conquered back to Assyria.
How, as a people who made a covenant with the Lord to be the Lord’s people and to live in the Lord’s Promised Land, how do you reconcile what you know to be true of yourself with the reality of exile? Remember that for the Israelites, God and real estate are closely related. We still see that today being played out in the Middle East in a way that we in America don’t quite understand. If God has given you a land and you then get evicted from that land, what does that say? About God? About the Assyrian Gods? About you? About the future?
So the Israelites get escorted out of the Promised Land and into exile by the Assyrians. And it is in this political, economic, and existential crisis that the prophet Isaiah shows up.
Unlike some of the prophets who seem to have come from the margins of society, Isaiah appears to have come from the center. He is from Jerusalem and seemed to be familiar with the inner workings of the Temple, which likely made him a religious professional of some sort. He had access to the palace.
And, rather than fighting Assyria with force, Isaiah argued for repentance and trust in divine salvation. Isaiah had a long view of the political reality in which he found himself.
Isaiah’s writings are beautiful, which is all the more striking considering the violence and dislocation in which he lived.
“Let me sing for my beloved my love song concerning my vineyard.”
We begin with a love song. It is easy to forget this is a love song by the time you get to the end, with all of the trampling, devouring, and desolation. This oracle of doom takes place in a love song. Perhaps it is Isaiah’s way of reminding his hearers that despite their current situation, they are still characters in a love story with God. The collapse of the Jerusalem economy in no way impacts God’s love and concern for Israel.
The owner of the vineyard puts love and care and back-breaking labor into this vineyard. Digging and clearing a field, investing in choice vines and the infrastructure needed to make wine are all signs of the owner’s love and of his hope for a future of prosperity.
But, as evidenced by the wild bitter grapes, there is clearly only so much that the owner can do to affect the harvest. What else, he asks, was there for him to do for the vineyard that he had not already done? With that, Isaiah calls the hearers of his message to make their own judgment. If the owner of the vineyard had done everything he could do, who is left to pick up the blame but the plants themselves? “For the vineyard of the Lord is the house of Israel and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting.”
While this tactic does have the unpleasant side effect of kicking people who are already down—“Yes, you are in exile and let me also point out that the fault is yours”. It also serves to reassure the people that they aren’t where they are because God has abandoned them. God did not change his mind and get a new people. “You want to know who to blame for this mess you’re in?”, God seems to be asking them, “here’s a mirror.” But when you are in the midst of crisis, it helps to take stock of your responsibility. When you feel you’re hanging on by a thread, it can be helpful to figure out which part of the problem is within your control. What role did you play in getting here and what can you do, now, to get through the day.
In light of the world falling apart around him, Isaiah is wise enough to suggest that our response to God matters. God expects a right response to the love, care, and work that God has put into the people. “He looked for justice but saw bloodshed. He listened for righteousness but heard a cry of oppression,” is another translation of verse 7.
While the Israelites can’t immediately change the reality of the crisis, they can start paying attention to justice and righteousness. They can take control of their own behavior. They can turn back to God.
Notice that nowhere in this parable are people invited to assign blame to someone other than themselves. I know that Isaiah wasn’t writing about the financial crisis on Wall Street, exactly. But consider how much time has been spent in the ‘blame game’ this week. If you google “financial crisis blame”, you will come up with 2,070,000 hits on the internet, leading you to articles about who is responsible for the mess we’re in. And I didn’t hear a single voice on the news this week saying, “perhaps we all should have been living within our means and should have been paying more attention to what was happening in the markets.” Politicians were saying, “now is not the time to assign blame, but this wouldn’t have happened had the other guys not done x,y, or z.” Republicans, Democrats, liberal media, deregulation, taxes, tax cuts, wall street tycoons, risky mortgages, Fannie Mae, Jimmy Carter, community organizers, the list goes on. All of those people or groups were blamed this week.
But Isaiah is having none of that. He doesn’t want to hear any excuses Jerusalem might have to explain its role in the exile. The vineyard didn’t produce bad grapes because of any external factor. He calls on them to acknowledge their role and to move toward a better relationship with the God who loves them, who created them, who planted and watered and protected them.
Isaiah leaves his audience and leaves us with this question. What kind of fruit are we producing? Righteousness and justice? Or bloodshed and oppression?

The story we read in Matthew today suggests that Jesus was asking the same question in the Temple as Isaiah had asked. As the religious leaders are asking Jesus about authority, Jesus answers their question with a whole different premise. Using the Isaiah text to start out his parable, he begins. “Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower…”
You can almost see the audience acting like eager school children around him, wanting to impress the teacher. “Pick me! Pick me! I know this one. It’s from Isaiah. We’re supposed to be good grapes! Good grapes! Not nasty wild grapes!”
But then the story changes, as Jesus’ stories are wont to do. God, the owner of the vineyard becomes an absentee landlord. All of the hands go down. “Nevermind. I thought I knew where he was going with this,” they think to themselves. “But why would God be a landlord? All the peasants I know who work for a landlord all the live-long day, don’t have one good thing to say about them. They take every penny earned and they the peasants end up with nothing to show for it. Why would he possibly equate God to a landlord?”

But Jesus is okay with the discomfort we feel when God does not behave as we think God should and he goes on with his adapted vineyard story. Landlord sends slaves to collect the harvest, but the slaves are killed. So he sends more slaves. Same thing. Then the landlord sends his only begotten son. Hmmm…why does that sound familiar?
Oh yeah, Jesus.
But now it takes an even bigger twist. Because the tenants decide that by killing the heir, they will become the new heirs.
Now where does that ever work out? Any economic system you know of?
The tenants on this vineyard seem to be operating on a false assumption. This land is not theirs. The harvest is not theirs. The labor is not even theirs.

And Jesus, like Isaiah, calls the priests in the temple to pronounce judgment on themselves. “Now, when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”
They answer: “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”

I think parts of their answer are correct. Their answer acknowledges that the next people on that land will also not be the heirs. The mistaken assumption of the wicked tenants—that they could kill the heir and then inherit—is done away with. And I think they are correct that the new tenants will be people who will hand over the produce at harvest. Because I think this is where Jesus is answering the questions about authority.
“You can ask me about authority all day long”, says Jesus, “but let’s talk about your obedience to God’s authority. You walk around this Temple as if you own the place. Who made you the heir?”
It scares me, this Jesus.
He seems 12 feet tall, angry, uncontrollable.
And then he starts quoting scripture. “Have you never read in the scriptures?”, he asks the people who read scripture professionally. This is angry Jesus.
“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone….therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.”
I would love to wrap this parable up in a bow and present it to you, neatly explained.
But I won’t be doing that.
Because I’m left with more questions than answers.
I wonder why Jesus would cast God as a vacant landlord.
I wonder about a part of the crowd’s answer. They said that the wretches should be put to a miserable death. And maybe that is what Jesus means when he says the kingdom will be taken away from them. But Jesus then goes on to say, “The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.” So, I wonder. Who is the “one”?
In previous readings, I had always figured that if Jesus was the cornerstone, then the ones who got crushed would be the “wretches”. And maybe that’s it. But, this week, as I was thinking about World Communion that we’re about to celebrate, it occurred to me that this life-giving meal is available to us because Jesus, in dying on a cross, was broken to pieces. What more was there to do for God’s vineyard than God had already done? Death was crushed under a stone that rolled away from a tomb, leading us to new life.

So, I wonder if God’s mysterious justice means that the wretches don’t suffer a miserable death after all. Perhaps Jesus’ parable, like Isaiah’s, is also a love song.

And, finally, I wonder about the new tenants. Who are they? Are they people to whom we would never rent? Who have we not invited to join us here in this room, at this table?

Or are we the new tenants? If so, are we producing the fruits of the kingdom?
Are we speaking up for justice? Are we leading people to know God’s love in the things we do and say?

This week, I invite you to look both for new tenants who may have been invited to join us in the harvest, and also for signs of the fruit of the kingdom in our own lives. Around this table, we will gather. The grapes at this table are good grapes. And we have been invited to enjoy the harvest.
Like the vineyard, this table does not belong to us. It is the Lord’s Table. And due to the mysterious justice and grace of God, we have been invited to the feast.
Thanks be to God. Amen.