In Celebration Of The One-Talent Person
Preaching
The Parables Of Jesus And Their Flip Side
Cycles A, B, and C
Object:
Some parables of Jesus are really upsetting. This is one of those. But then, that's what parables are supposed to do: challenge our normal way of thinking. If understood, they question our present priorities and punch us in the stomach like a hammer with a different way of considering a situation.
Here is a story told by Jesus and written down for us by Matthew and Luke which performs all these radical actions.
A man was leaving the country for a while so he gave five bags of money to one person, two bags to another, and one bag to a third. When he returned and asked for an accounting of their stewardship, those people who were given five or two bags had invested wisely (or were very lucky) and doubled the absentee landlord's wealth.
Then comes the central focus of the story which makes me very uncomfortable, as a parable should. The poor fellow who had received only one bag was afraid to risk investing it and thus hadn't gained a penny. He returned just what he had received.
The owner was angry and according to Matthew, said to the one-bag man: "You wicked, lazy servant!... you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest" (Matthew 25:26-27).
I'll have more to say later about why I don't like how this one-talent man was treated.
Why do you think Matthew and Luke wanted us to know this story? At the time I'll bet it was aimed at the scribes and Pharisees who were the super religious of the day. They thought of themselves as protectors of the faith and saw any change as threatening their position and their God. So Jesus said they were like this one-talented man who was not willing to risk. He saw his religion as something which demanded it remain exactly the same.
It's what eventually brought about Jesus' crucifixion outside Jerusalem's walls. The pillars of the church just couldn't stand being challenged -- not in Jesus' claiming to forgive sins, not in his calling the dead out of their graves, and not in questioning the money exchange policies in the temple courtyard could they tolerate the newness. So in this story Jesus doesn't focus on the many-talented men and women who appear on the cover of Time and Newsweek, but he zeros in on this one-talented person cowering behind his skirts of littleness.
There are times when all of us are tempted to act like the one-talent person. We consider the little we have to offer, the minimal difference we could make, the risk in venturing out or trying something new and different, and we never get started at all. Yet, God depends on us with few talents. God wants us whether we have one, two, or five talents to take what we can contribute and offer it, trusting God will use it to great advantage.
Think of those great Bible heroes we hold up as models of the godly life and how imperfect and sometimes one-talented they were. And yet think what God was able to do through them because they trusted God would use whatever they offered, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, to great advantage. If you took their halos off, they'd be a motley crew: Moses with a stammer in his tongue and blood on his hands; James and John, loud-mouthed fishermen boasting about their place in the kingdom; Peter, a big hulk of a man usually with his foot in his mouth; Paul, a beady-eyed, humpbacked, ugly man chasing the early Christians; and Luther, grumpy and very troubled by constipation in his old age. Oh, how God used the likes of these. God would like to work through us also.
Our temptation is to think we ought to bury our talent in the ground and keep it safe. We try our best to keep everything in our congregation as it was in the good old days when we were growing up. So we fight new forms of worship and music. We oppose trying new paradigms of ministry. We block attempts to reach the young generation with different approaches. We vote against the congregation's attempts to be dynamic and creative.
Jesus was aiming right at the religious of his day who fought change every inch of the way. He aims still at us when we try to do the same. He holds before us this pitiful little untalented man and says, "Be careful lest this be you."
Because the church is our place of precious memories, it's very tempting to behave like this one-talent man. We often feel we owe it to the past. We owe it to those who have gone before us -- to our parents and grandparents, to the memories of our childhood, to keep it like that forever.
But the church must be a dynamic organization always applying the gospel to the present situation. We must continually update and risk experimentation in order to make our vital religion relevant in our time. When we keep it the same, like burying the one bag of money, it surely will cause the church to move from being a mission station to being a museum where we view the old, gold coins as a curiosity of days long gone.
Perhaps this is a valuable story for us today. It certainly points out the truth that we individuals are variously blessed with different amounts of talents. Some are so gifted and some have so much wealth. Some of us have much less. We must take it into account as we organize for ministries in our congregation. It's just not fair to ask a one-talented disciple to lead the choir when there are those who can do it so well.
And when it comes to wealth, there are some of us who could give a lot more. We can easily afford it and really need to share a lot more of what we have as a way of knowing the blessing of correct priorities. It's a way for us to live together. We recognize that each person is different and there are different ways each can and ought to help out as we serve in our ministries on God's behalf in the world.
There is a certain teaching here which is a little more difficult to understand. This story tells us that we ought to use our talents or we may be in danger of losing them. It's true in playing a musical instrument, playing a sport, speaking a foreign language, and many other talents. It's "use it or lose it." And those who have been blessed abundantly in sharing will find they are blessed with even more. Listen: "Take the talent from him and give it to the one who has the ten talents. For everyone who has will be given more, and he (she) will have an abundance" (Matthew 25:28-29).
Many years ago, before the Great Depression, a very wealthy man donated the money for a fine organ for his church in Toledo, Ohio. He lost everything he had during the depression of 1929 and was forced to take a job as janitor in his church during the sad 1930s. I've been told you could go in that church and hear him playing the organ he had given. He became well known for saying that what he had kept he lost, but what he had given away he still had. It's a point of this parable as well.
The story seems to say to me that the reward for doing a good work is more work to do. We preachers know that to be the case in our ministries. But this seems to say it is also true for all the people of God as we work together. While we must be careful lest we burn out and work to death the five- and ten-talented folks, we also must recognize that's the way it is in the kingdom -- good job well done means another and even larger job to do!
I've tried to come up with a pithy way of summarizing the heart of this story with the traditional interpretation. It's simply that the one who is punished is the one who wouldn't try.
There is a flip side to this story I'm anxious to explore with you. I doubt either of these items is often proclaimed the way this parable is assigned to us: We all have a ministry using our talents given to us and we need to be a lot more sensitive toward the one-talented person than this owner was.
When we speak of ministry we immediately think of what the preacher should or shouldn't do. But isn't it true here that God calls each one of us to identify what our gifts, abilities, and wealth are and use them in a ministry we practice every day of the week?
So it's not only here under the church roof as we do all those things we must do to carry out our life of faith together, but it's also what we do the rest of the days of the week where and when we work, live, and play. Some have been given the natural ability to make peace, some to pray, some to love the unlovely, some to teach, some to witness to their faith, some to feed and clothe the poor. The list is endless. Through our baptism we have been called to be ministers in the world and apply our talents given us (one or ten) in order that God's kingdom might be lived out through them and us.
When we gather for worship, it's not so much if we like it or not, but rather how we can help each other identify our talents and give encouragement to go out another six days and minister with what we have been given, trusting God will use it in marvelous ways beyond our wildest expectations.
Now the flip side which won't be found in any Bible commentary or heard from any other pulpit: This owner who gave out the talents "... each according to his ability" (Matthew 25:15b) should have been a lot more sensitive to the feelings and abilities of that one-talent person! Perhaps this poor soul just wasn't smart enough to invest with the bankers. Perhaps all his life he had been told he was inadequate and thus did not have the self-confidence to do more than hide and thus protect the one bag of money.
I believe this story illustrates a certain lack of compassion and understanding which should have been there all along. The one-talent person did not waste or lose the money. Have some compassion for the little guy here! Jesus taught that in many ways. How could Matthew let this come through to us in this way? I celebrate the one-talent servant today.
In congregations like ours we must always be sensitive to those who feel inadequate, under-educated, or of less wealth than the rest. They, too, are God's called disciples. It's much more difficult for some than others to live the life of a disciple. It's harder for some to risk, to venture out, to be faithful in Bible study, worship, and prayer than others. It's easier for some to go the extra mile or turn the other cheek or pray for and love their enemies than it is for others. We must accept them too, and not judge them harshly because it's easy for us.
If I had been Matthew I would have wanted to rewrite this story to end something like this: "His master replied to the person given one talent, 'I'm sorry you saw me as such a hard man gathering where I have not sown. I'll try to show you a different side of my behavior more consistent with how I believe God wants us to be. Take this one talent you have saved of mine and meet with the servant to whom I gave five and ask him to help you learn how to invest it. There are better ways to use your talent than to bury it in the ground. For everyone who has much will be encouraged to share with those who have little or none at all. Bring the servant in from the darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth that he might also share in our joy.' "
It's dangerous to try to rewrite scripture, but you might think about this flip side which says we all have a ministry to share and we need to be sensitive to the many one-talented people as well as to the multi-talented people. So we add this to the main focus of talent use which includes these thoughts: we often lose what we don't use; we must be careful about our resistance to change; and we are blessed differently with a variety of gifts to be used for the kingdom.
Here is a story told by Jesus and written down for us by Matthew and Luke which performs all these radical actions.
A man was leaving the country for a while so he gave five bags of money to one person, two bags to another, and one bag to a third. When he returned and asked for an accounting of their stewardship, those people who were given five or two bags had invested wisely (or were very lucky) and doubled the absentee landlord's wealth.
Then comes the central focus of the story which makes me very uncomfortable, as a parable should. The poor fellow who had received only one bag was afraid to risk investing it and thus hadn't gained a penny. He returned just what he had received.
The owner was angry and according to Matthew, said to the one-bag man: "You wicked, lazy servant!... you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest" (Matthew 25:26-27).
I'll have more to say later about why I don't like how this one-talent man was treated.
Why do you think Matthew and Luke wanted us to know this story? At the time I'll bet it was aimed at the scribes and Pharisees who were the super religious of the day. They thought of themselves as protectors of the faith and saw any change as threatening their position and their God. So Jesus said they were like this one-talented man who was not willing to risk. He saw his religion as something which demanded it remain exactly the same.
It's what eventually brought about Jesus' crucifixion outside Jerusalem's walls. The pillars of the church just couldn't stand being challenged -- not in Jesus' claiming to forgive sins, not in his calling the dead out of their graves, and not in questioning the money exchange policies in the temple courtyard could they tolerate the newness. So in this story Jesus doesn't focus on the many-talented men and women who appear on the cover of Time and Newsweek, but he zeros in on this one-talented person cowering behind his skirts of littleness.
There are times when all of us are tempted to act like the one-talent person. We consider the little we have to offer, the minimal difference we could make, the risk in venturing out or trying something new and different, and we never get started at all. Yet, God depends on us with few talents. God wants us whether we have one, two, or five talents to take what we can contribute and offer it, trusting God will use it to great advantage.
Think of those great Bible heroes we hold up as models of the godly life and how imperfect and sometimes one-talented they were. And yet think what God was able to do through them because they trusted God would use whatever they offered, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, to great advantage. If you took their halos off, they'd be a motley crew: Moses with a stammer in his tongue and blood on his hands; James and John, loud-mouthed fishermen boasting about their place in the kingdom; Peter, a big hulk of a man usually with his foot in his mouth; Paul, a beady-eyed, humpbacked, ugly man chasing the early Christians; and Luther, grumpy and very troubled by constipation in his old age. Oh, how God used the likes of these. God would like to work through us also.
Our temptation is to think we ought to bury our talent in the ground and keep it safe. We try our best to keep everything in our congregation as it was in the good old days when we were growing up. So we fight new forms of worship and music. We oppose trying new paradigms of ministry. We block attempts to reach the young generation with different approaches. We vote against the congregation's attempts to be dynamic and creative.
Jesus was aiming right at the religious of his day who fought change every inch of the way. He aims still at us when we try to do the same. He holds before us this pitiful little untalented man and says, "Be careful lest this be you."
Because the church is our place of precious memories, it's very tempting to behave like this one-talent man. We often feel we owe it to the past. We owe it to those who have gone before us -- to our parents and grandparents, to the memories of our childhood, to keep it like that forever.
But the church must be a dynamic organization always applying the gospel to the present situation. We must continually update and risk experimentation in order to make our vital religion relevant in our time. When we keep it the same, like burying the one bag of money, it surely will cause the church to move from being a mission station to being a museum where we view the old, gold coins as a curiosity of days long gone.
Perhaps this is a valuable story for us today. It certainly points out the truth that we individuals are variously blessed with different amounts of talents. Some are so gifted and some have so much wealth. Some of us have much less. We must take it into account as we organize for ministries in our congregation. It's just not fair to ask a one-talented disciple to lead the choir when there are those who can do it so well.
And when it comes to wealth, there are some of us who could give a lot more. We can easily afford it and really need to share a lot more of what we have as a way of knowing the blessing of correct priorities. It's a way for us to live together. We recognize that each person is different and there are different ways each can and ought to help out as we serve in our ministries on God's behalf in the world.
There is a certain teaching here which is a little more difficult to understand. This story tells us that we ought to use our talents or we may be in danger of losing them. It's true in playing a musical instrument, playing a sport, speaking a foreign language, and many other talents. It's "use it or lose it." And those who have been blessed abundantly in sharing will find they are blessed with even more. Listen: "Take the talent from him and give it to the one who has the ten talents. For everyone who has will be given more, and he (she) will have an abundance" (Matthew 25:28-29).
Many years ago, before the Great Depression, a very wealthy man donated the money for a fine organ for his church in Toledo, Ohio. He lost everything he had during the depression of 1929 and was forced to take a job as janitor in his church during the sad 1930s. I've been told you could go in that church and hear him playing the organ he had given. He became well known for saying that what he had kept he lost, but what he had given away he still had. It's a point of this parable as well.
The story seems to say to me that the reward for doing a good work is more work to do. We preachers know that to be the case in our ministries. But this seems to say it is also true for all the people of God as we work together. While we must be careful lest we burn out and work to death the five- and ten-talented folks, we also must recognize that's the way it is in the kingdom -- good job well done means another and even larger job to do!
I've tried to come up with a pithy way of summarizing the heart of this story with the traditional interpretation. It's simply that the one who is punished is the one who wouldn't try.
There is a flip side to this story I'm anxious to explore with you. I doubt either of these items is often proclaimed the way this parable is assigned to us: We all have a ministry using our talents given to us and we need to be a lot more sensitive toward the one-talented person than this owner was.
When we speak of ministry we immediately think of what the preacher should or shouldn't do. But isn't it true here that God calls each one of us to identify what our gifts, abilities, and wealth are and use them in a ministry we practice every day of the week?
So it's not only here under the church roof as we do all those things we must do to carry out our life of faith together, but it's also what we do the rest of the days of the week where and when we work, live, and play. Some have been given the natural ability to make peace, some to pray, some to love the unlovely, some to teach, some to witness to their faith, some to feed and clothe the poor. The list is endless. Through our baptism we have been called to be ministers in the world and apply our talents given us (one or ten) in order that God's kingdom might be lived out through them and us.
When we gather for worship, it's not so much if we like it or not, but rather how we can help each other identify our talents and give encouragement to go out another six days and minister with what we have been given, trusting God will use it in marvelous ways beyond our wildest expectations.
Now the flip side which won't be found in any Bible commentary or heard from any other pulpit: This owner who gave out the talents "... each according to his ability" (Matthew 25:15b) should have been a lot more sensitive to the feelings and abilities of that one-talent person! Perhaps this poor soul just wasn't smart enough to invest with the bankers. Perhaps all his life he had been told he was inadequate and thus did not have the self-confidence to do more than hide and thus protect the one bag of money.
I believe this story illustrates a certain lack of compassion and understanding which should have been there all along. The one-talent person did not waste or lose the money. Have some compassion for the little guy here! Jesus taught that in many ways. How could Matthew let this come through to us in this way? I celebrate the one-talent servant today.
In congregations like ours we must always be sensitive to those who feel inadequate, under-educated, or of less wealth than the rest. They, too, are God's called disciples. It's much more difficult for some than others to live the life of a disciple. It's harder for some to risk, to venture out, to be faithful in Bible study, worship, and prayer than others. It's easier for some to go the extra mile or turn the other cheek or pray for and love their enemies than it is for others. We must accept them too, and not judge them harshly because it's easy for us.
If I had been Matthew I would have wanted to rewrite this story to end something like this: "His master replied to the person given one talent, 'I'm sorry you saw me as such a hard man gathering where I have not sown. I'll try to show you a different side of my behavior more consistent with how I believe God wants us to be. Take this one talent you have saved of mine and meet with the servant to whom I gave five and ask him to help you learn how to invest it. There are better ways to use your talent than to bury it in the ground. For everyone who has much will be encouraged to share with those who have little or none at all. Bring the servant in from the darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth that he might also share in our joy.' "
It's dangerous to try to rewrite scripture, but you might think about this flip side which says we all have a ministry to share and we need to be sensitive to the many one-talented people as well as to the multi-talented people. So we add this to the main focus of talent use which includes these thoughts: we often lose what we don't use; we must be careful about our resistance to change; and we are blessed differently with a variety of gifts to be used for the kingdom.
