Scripture text: Matthew 25:14-30
Last weekend, I spent most of my time at a continuing education event in Harrisburg. Christian singer Michael Card, whose music I’ve admired for many years, was doing a seminar on the Gospel of Matthew. He proposes that the Gospel of Matthew is a Gospel written to a community of Jewish Christians who have seen Jerusalem burn, who have seen the Romans pillage and destroy their country, and who also been kicked out of the synagogue because the religious leaders of the day have determined that Christianity is a heresy and those who believe in Jesus can no longer belong to the Jewish community. These are people who have had everything that defined their identity destroyed or taken away from them and do not know who they are anymore. Matthew, in writing his Gospel, is trying to give them their identity back.
It’s an intriguing idea and also I believe rather germane for our times. Consider for a moment the church in the modern world. We’re having a hard time figuring out who we are because we now live in a pluralistic and secular society that is not centered on church. The 20th century spoiled us. For a time, this was the center of American social life. If you wanted to be somebody in American society, you were a church member. Not anymore. There are other options. You have the Mosque, the synagogue, the business world, the academic world. You have clubs, fraternal societies, sports, and other social venues. You have atheism and agnosticism. New Age and Neo-paganism. You have “spiritual, but not religious.” And we don’t quite know what to do about all that. The fastest growing religious group in America is “no religion at all.” All the things that we have used to define ourselves are slowly but surely being taken away and we do not know who we are anymore.
I saw that very dynamic playing out in that conference. The conference was held in at one of these hand-waving rock-music-playing non-denominational churches up in Harrisburg. Think LCBC or Living Word; only there instead of here. I’m in the midst of all these people who go to those kind of churches. And I also know that we here in mainline churches spend a whole lot of energy envious of those churches. They have energy. They have fire. They have success. They have money and members. And we wish we could be like them and have all that too.
Michael Card gets up there and he’s teaching on Matthew. And the background material he’s providing is all boilerplate modern Biblical scholarship. It is what I learned in seminary. It is what I teach you here at Canadochly. It is the foundation from which I draw out the ideas that I present in my sermons. None of it is new to me. I’ve heard it all before and I’ve taught it to you. Your other pastors, my predecessors, had the same training and they taught it to you. And those Evangelicals are eating this stuff up like it was manna from heaven. They are astonished by this information. They were starving for this teaching that you and I take for granted.
As much as we envy them, they envy us. Who’d have thought?
But this is what happens when you do not know who you are. You forget what you have. And you can only see what you do not have. And envy begins to creep in. We want what they have, those people over there. They, in turn, want what we have. That’s a symptom of an identity crisis. The grass is always greener and all that. This sort of blindness however is dangerous.
And that brings me back to Matthew and specifically to the teaching of Jesus that he records as our Gospel lesson today: the parable of the talents.
The verse that jumped out at me is actually at the conclusion of the text, verse 29. For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.
It hadn’t occurred to me before, but there’s a certain illogical element that statement. He’s summarizing this story about these three servants who are entrusted with various quantities of talents, which is a very large sum of money in the ancient world. From those who have nothing... But none of these servants have nothing. Even the least has at least one talent. Depending on how you measure it, that’s either $30,000 dollars in today’s money by currency conversion or ten years wages for a common laborer, which if you do the math, is around $166,000 at the current minimum wage. That is a long way from nothing. So Jesus’ words don’t make sense unless he’s not talking about reality. He’s talking about perception.
Did that servant think he had nothing because he did not have five talents? Or two? Was he unable to value what he already had because someone else had more? Is that why he was afraid to use that resource? Is that why he hid it and did not spent it or invest it?
People who do not know who they are are blind to what they have. And this servant is blind to what he’s been given. He has as much money as most of us make in a year or two or three or even four in his hands and he thinks he has nothing. How many of our churches are like this servant? Paralyzed with fear and blind to what they’ve been given.
How many don’t try because they are afraid to fail? How many sit and do nothing because they don’t look like the big megachurch down the road? How many lament what once was and cannot and will not see the gift of what they are now?
One of the oddities of this parable, aside from Jesus’ summary, is the missing servant. The one who tries and does fail. I’ve long argued that he’s not there because such a thing does not exist in God. Failure, to quote NASA, is not an option. It doesn’t happen. Oh, it might look like it happens. Churches die. Communities dissolve. But is this failure?
Come on, we’re Christians. We mark as God’s ultimate victory his son hanging on a cross drowning in his own blood. We celebrate what the world would call the ultimate failure and yet that’s our triumph and God’s glory made manifest. Things aren’t always what they appear to be in our worldview.
We don’t remember who we are because we do not remember whose we are and in whose hands our fate is entrusted. We do not remember that our identity is not in a building or in membership numbers or a fat nest egg or in memories of better times. A church with no building, no money, and only five stalwart souls that live, eat, sleep, and breathe the faith in everything they do is not failure. They have Christ. They have Jesus. That’s not nothing. That’s everything. It is gift beyond price; wealth beyond value. It is who we are. It is who we are called to be. Everything else is irrelevant. Amen.