Sunday, November 16, 2014 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.

Our Theological Economy

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 123
Matthew 25:14–30

The major themes of the Christian faith—caring, giving, witnessing, trusting, loving, hoping—cannot be understood or lived without risk.

Fred B. Craddock

This past July 4, my family and I stood on Lake Shore Drive and watched the firework show at Navy Pier. Unfortunately we were too far away to really hear the noise. And while the show was beautiful to see, being far away dampened its impact. In particular, it dampened the experience of the finale. My family loves a good fireworks finale. Even when we have to put our hands over our ears, we love it when the fireworks start going off in rapid-fire sequence filling the air with sparkles and colors and loud booms of noise—bam, bam, bam, bam. It is big and loud, and if you don’t like loud noises, a fireworks finale can fill you with both excitement and a good dose of fear.

My preacher-friend Pen Peery claims that Matthew is executing his own fireworks finale with this part of the Gospel (an image shared by Pen Peery, Pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Shreveport, Louisiana, at the spring 2008 meeting of the Well). As you’ve heard over these past few weeks, Matthew structured his Gospel so that Jesus’ teaching ministry ends with four dramatic parables. Each one drives home the demands of discipleship as we await Jesus’ return: bam, bam, bam, bam. These parables are big and emotionally earsplitting, and if you don’t like thinking about the life of faith as demanding, then they might fill you with a strong dose of fear. In fact, your first reaction in hearing them may be to put your hands over your ears to mute the theological impact.

Look at today’s parable. First and foremost, let’s deal with the word talent. In our day, the definition of a talent is a natural aptitude, a skill. But in Jesus’ day, a talent was a financial description. One talent was equal to what a laborer might earn in 16.5 years of work (Marci Auld Glass’s sermon “Unburied Treasure”).

So translating this parable into our categories might sound like this: “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.”

When we make that translation leap, we quickly see that when the master gives the slaves five talents or two talents or even just one talent, the master is actually being extremely generous with his money. I imagine that as Jesus told this parable to his original listeners that kind of generosity stretched their imaginations. A master trusting his slaves with that kind of money was not a normal storyline. That was not how the world worked. The listeners must have been stunned in the face of the master’s extraordinarily trusting, generous, and benevolent actions.

I surmise the first two slaves felt the same way. Did you hear how Matthew put it? When the one slave received the five talents, he took off at once to make them work. When the next slave received the two talents, he did the same thing. Neither of them waited around, wishing the master had left detailed instructions on how to invest, where to invest, etc. Rather, those two servants immediately went to work, seemingly without a second thought. I am struck by the immediacy of their response. It indicates that for some reason, even though they belonged to the master, they must have felt free. Or at least they felt free enough to risk their entire initial investment in the hopes of doubling their money. You have to be very adventurous, a risk-taker, to try and do something like that. You have to decide that not only do you have the freedom to succeed, but you also have the freedom to fail. So clearly the first two slaves must have felt they had that kind of freedom. Each of them could risk it all on the off-chance their risk might really work for the benefit of the master. And work it did! They each doubled their initial investment.

Now apparently the master was gone for a very long time. Yet, in the way Jesus told the story, neither slave grew nervous or rethought his investment plan. They just kept taking risks, being as faithful as they could, and trusting it would all work out by the time the master returned. When the master found them again, they joyfully showed him their investment portfolios. And the master was pleased. “Well done good and trustworthy slave,” the master proclaimed. Then he gave both of them even more responsibility and invited them into his presence to stay. Those two servants had done well in that waiting time.

But I wonder if part of the reason they did well was because of an early decision they made. Somewhere along the way they had decided to live out of the confidence that their master was trustworthy, faithful, and generous. Holding that kind of image of their master seemed to free them up to take all kinds of risks and to live boldly. And as a result of that bold living, they discovered the master was even more trustworthy, even more faithful, and even more generous than they first imagined. What a wonderfully happy ending for these two servants.

But alas, there is more to Jesus’ parable, isn’t there. Lurking around the fringes of all that happiness is the one-talent slave. Now, like the first two slaves, he, too, acted as soon as the master left. But he did not run off to the marketplace. Rather, he went off by himself, dug a hole in the ground, and buried the talent. To be fair, according to rabbinic law, burying money was the safest course possible. If you were entrusted with someone’s money and you buried it, then you were not liable for anything that might happen to it. It was a no-risk, safe thing to do. But while his behavior might have been safe, it starkly contrasts with the behavior of the other two, doesn’t it? So we have to wonder why the one-talent slave acted so differently. Why didn’t he feel the freedom to take risks and to venture out boldly?

I believe we hear a clue as we listen to how that slave responded to the master’s return: “Master,” he says, “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. Here, have what is yours.” Now let’s pause for a moment and think back. Given what we have already seen in this story, does that characterization of the master seem odd to you? Nowhere in the story do we see the master painted as a harsh extortionist.

This servant’s perception of his master seems cloudy, to say the least. The other two servants felt freedom, but all he felt was captivity. They saw generosity, but he saw a trick. They ventured out boldly, risking it all for the sake of a great return, but he decided to play it safe, concerned only with self-protection and not being held liable. They seemed to be buoyed by trust, but he seemed to be absolutely immobilized by fear. And unfortunately for him, his fear finally engulfed him. As Tom Long writes, in theological terms, this one-talent slave gets the peevish little tyrant master he believes in (Tom Long, Matthew: Westminster Bible Commentary, p. 283). He insisted on viewing the master as oppressive, cruel, and fear provoking. And that perception gets him tossed into the outer darkness, a place of despair and isolation I am sure he had visited before.

Does that ending catch you off guard? After all, he was only playing it safe, making sure he was protected. We can certainly understand that, can’t we? As Trustees and Session have seen this past week, Fourth Church is still making our financial way out of the lingering effects of the Great Recession. We continue to live with the recent memory of how the recession landed here in 2012 and played itself out in drastic budget cuts and staff reduction. It is an experience no one wants to repeat. So we know the desire to play it safe, to make sure we are protected. We completely understand the one-talent servant’s conservative approach to the financial marketplace. And yet I do think we could wonder how that desire to play it safe affected his approach, our approach, to the marketplace of faith.

I ask that question because in this parable, Jesus was not just talking about financial investment decisions. This is a parable about the reign of God, the kingdom of heaven. That indicates Jesus was also speaking about a theological economy—about how what we decide about who God is, how we speak about God, how we think about God, how we relate to God—affects our lives. When we live out of the confidence that God is trustworthy and generous and more benevolent beyond our imagining, we, like the first two servants, will discover what it means to live freely and abundantly, willing to fail and learn and try again. Yet if we live like the one-talent servant, immobilized in the darkness of fear, terrified we will never have enough of whatever we think we lack to make us OK, convinced God’s wrath is stronger than God’s mercy, then we will condemn ourselves, needlessly quivering alone, discovering even the little bit of life we had has atrophied and withered away (Tom Long, Matthew, p. 283).

As I indicated earlier, Matthew places this parable in the context of waiting for God’s reign, God’s kingdom, to be all in all. In this part of Matthew’s Gospel, in this teaching finale, Jesus weaves together story after story about waiting for God’s fullness of time. With the dramatic bam, bam, bam, bam of these four parables, Jesus is trying to help the disciples imagine how they are going to live in this world, in the everyday routine and chaos, as both disciples and as community, until the time he comes back to finish making all things new. Jesus wanted to help them, help us, imagine what faithful waiting looks like and feels like.

One thing we see in this parable is that faithful Christian waiting is not passive. It does not look like simply playing it safe, burying your faith in a hole because you are scared. This parable illustrates a waiting that involves venturing out into the marketplace, into the world, confident that God really is as good as Jesus says. Confident that the One who will return really is even more trustworthy, even more faithful, and even more generous than we first imagined. Faithful Christian waiting involves boldly taking risks; being willing to fail; eyes wide open, standing only on grace, freely reaching out into the world past all fear (Tom Long, Matthew, p. 283); moving beyond the temptation of mere self-protection.

This is precisely why we might want to put our hands over our ears to mute the theological impact, for this parable could cause us to get honest about how we behave as people of faith. What are we willing to risk in discipleship—not just here within the confines of church, but out into the world? Are we governed by wanting to protect ourselves, playing it safe with what we say or do or give? How boldly are we living as children of God?

This parable also invites us to get honest about how we behave as a congregation. How many faithful risks do we take? Are we a bold congregation? Some of you have told me we could be much bolder, and I am sure you are right. We are, however, making some bold ministry moves as we journey into 2015. One of those moves is being made by our music and mission ministries. John Sherer and Vicky Curtiss are in conversation with a predominately African American church here in Chicago, putting together a music ministry mission trip focused on racial reconciliation and the building of just relationships. One of the places our congregations are considering going is Ferguson. But it would not just be a one-time thing. Our dream and the dream of the partner congregation would be that this trip is merely the beginning of a fruitful, honest relationship between our two churches. And this is a bold decision that both churches would be making. Building the kind of trust it will take so we can be real about race, privilege, justice, and reconciliation, both internally and between our churches—that’s going to be soul-shaping, refiner’s-fire kind of serious work. But our leaders are bound and determined to take that kind of risk, even being willing to fail in the chance that God might use that work and investment of time, energy, and money for God’s ongoing work of healing.

And that is just one faithful risk we, as Fourth Presbyterian Church, are poised to take. I have a list of many others that I have collected this week: everything from wanting to add a component to our Urban Farm ministry; to continue visioning about what Christian formation could be for our kids and families; to hiring a parish associate for older adult visitation so no one gets lost in the shuffle of crisis or busyness; to keep participating with the Presbytery of Chicago in bringing our Jewish friends and our Palestinian Christian friends to the same table. These are just a few of the faithful risks we all hope to take during this next year. And that is even before we begin the intentional work of discerning anew who God is calling us to be in this next season of Fourth Church’s life. We are still tilling the ground for that process.

Yet even as we actively prepare, we all know God is calling us to be more than just safe. God is calling us to do more than just maintain status quo. God is calling us to live as a people already in a world of not yet. Our trustworthy, faithful, and abundantly generous God is calling us to live in a bold, abundant way that acts as counter-testimony to a survivalist, anxious, “it’s never enough,” peevish tyrant kind of world.

And when we get afraid, which we will, and when we are tempted to shrink back, which might happen, we can remind each other who is telling this parable. He is the biggest risk-taker of all. Jesus certainly could have played it safe, burying his mission in a hole in the ground, looking out only for himself. He could have stayed in the background. But he did not. Jesus stepped right out there, risking his life for the sake of the world. He stood up for all who had no voice. He fed the hungry, befriended the outcast, healed the sick. He called all people to repentance and newness. Jesus embraced the freedom God gave him, because Jesus knew that God was even more trustworthy, even more faithful, and even more generous than we have imagined. But let’s not kid ourselves: taking those risks led Jesus straight to the cross, into the grip of death. But taking those risks also led him straight through death, breaking its grip and power once and for all, bringing him back into the fullness of God from whom he came. Jesus, our brother, our Savior, was not in life for survival or self-preservation. He was in it for the kingdom, to live the fullness of God’s reign until the time was ripe and all people can share it together. And so are we.