Sermon: Risk, Risk, Tsk-tsk
Texts: 2 Corinthians 9:6-15; Matthew 25:14-30
Date: November 16, 2008
Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church
Two farmers are sitting down at the counter at the corner café drinking thin coffee from thick white mugs. Keith pushes his greasy green John Deere cap back on his head and says to his friend, “Well, Jake, what are you going to plant this spring? Corn?” Jake skritches his whiskers and replies, “Nope, I’m scared of the corn borer.” So Keith asks, “What about potatoes?” “Nope,” Jake answers, “too much danger of potato bugs.” Keith says, “Wheat, then?” Jake comes back with, “Heck, no! Have you heard about that wheat head blight they’ve got over in Sanders County? I read all about it on some guy’s Fungus of the Month website, and it looks real bad.” “Well, then,” Keith wants to know, “what are you going to plant?” And Jake answers, “Nothing. I’m going to play it safe.”
If Keith were a biblically literate Christian, he might be apt to testify to ol’ Jake at this moment, quoting from our 2 Corinthians text: “The one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly…” More likely he would slap his friend upside the head and tell him not to be an idiot. There’s no playing it safe in farming. You can do what you can to manage or mitigate risk, but farming’s just flat-out risky business. If you’re a farmer with no stomach for risk, you’re in the wrong profession.
I guess that’s why there are so many farming stories bundled with Matthew’s parable in various preaching resources. The whole parable was re-cast by Richard Milham as a farming story. There’s this wealthy landowner in Texas who leaves 500 acres of land which is mountainous and rocky in the care of his best employee. To a second employee, he entrusts 200 acres of land which is productive if it is irrigated. To a third employee he assigns ten acres of rich, river-bottom land, his best acreage. The first man invests in imported sheep, running them in the mountains. The second lays a lot of sprinkler pipe and plants a crop of popcorn. The third does nothing. When the landowner returns the next year to check on his investments, he gives the first two the deeds to the land they worked because of their ingenuity and faithfulness. He fires the third man because, he says, “I have no room for a man who lets my gift to him lie fallow and unproductive.” [1]
I appreciate that re-telling of the parable because it takes the focus off of money. Jesus tells this parable using financial transactions as the vehicle for making a point. If we think Jesus is teaching about actual money in this story, it’s bound to hit some sore spots because the story seems to echo unjust economic systems wherein the rich get richer and the immobilized poor get the shaft. And we might wonder how this could be about God at all. But the story is not really about money per se any more than Jesus’ other stories were about bread, coins, Samaritans, virgins with oil lamps, or sheep. Money is a illustration of a spiritual principle in this parable like yeast, mustard seeds, pearls, and so forth illustrated other spiritual principles in Jesus’ other teachings.
That may be a little hard to grasp since right about now money is a giant distraction that’s taking up a lot of space in our field of vision and making a big ruckus in the traffic of our thoughts. If your blood pressure ratcheted up at the sound of words like “property,” “accounts,” “bankers,” and “interest” when you heard the story, take a deep cleansing breath. Let’s see if we can get behind the financial illustration to the spiritual principle.
Not everybody who studies this parable agrees that the master in the parable stands for God. Some think that the harsh words and actions of the master with the third slave disqualifies the master from representing God. Let’s suppose that the master is supposed to reveal something about God, though, which many interpreters would affirm. One thing you might notice is the spectacular amount of wealth this master is entrusting to the slaves—one talent is worth fifteen years’ wages. So we’re talking about maybe 5 million bucks handed over to the first servant, and so on down the line. It’s a treasure, in other words; wealth beyond any regular person’s wildest dreams.
What does it stand for? Although the use of the word “talent” to refer to our human abilities evolved over centuries from this parable to land in our language as is, it didn’t start out that way. It was a boatload of money. Biblical scholars seem to agree that the investment from the master stands for the gospel, or the good news of Jesus Christ. God gives us the tremendous treasure of the gospel, the liberating news of Jesus and the kin-dom of God, and leaves us to make use of it.
When the first two slaves take the talents out into the marketplace, the gift grows exponentially—the investment was doubled in both cases. And what does the master say? “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!” So far, so good. The third slave, however is…afraid. He has the impression that this master is harsh, so out of fear he takes his treasure and buries it in the backyard. He’s ready to return the gift, but nothing has happened to it or with it while the master’s been away. And rather than entering into the joy of the master, he gets a tongue lashing, loses that which has been entrusted to him, and gets pitched into the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Bummer.
Here’s how one United Church of Canada renders the parable, if you think of the treasure as the gospel entrusted to the members of the church. One third of the members of the church took that treasured gospel and let it take over their lives. They took it to work, into their homes, into the homes of friends and neighbors. They told their children and grandchildren wonderful stories that painted an alternative vision of the way things could be. They kept the treasured gospel alive, enriched others by the way they lived—working for peace, advocating just and fair treatment for all people, sharing generously their time and their resources. They spoke the Word of God in public places and risked ridicule and rejection.
Another third of the church members also took the gospel treasure into their lives and helped it grow. In their quiet ways they put their life and love on the line. They took time to buy a sandwich for the bum on the sidewalk. They went out of their way to be hospitable to strangers who walked into the church on Sunday morning. They volunteered at the food bank and helped the elderly in their community with transportation and companionship.
The last third of the church membership kept the treasure to themselves. They did not speak the stories—maybe they thought they didn’t know them well enough. They didn’t outwardly show the love that had been poured into their hearts—maybe they were afraid of being hurt. They did not dare to be disciples, didn’t grow in faith. They hid the treasure away—maybe they were afraid their lives would be broken open and they would be changed in ways they did not want to be changed.
That’s not the only way to interpret this parable for our time and place, but I do think her version sheds some light on the parable. The aspect of the story that might be overlooked is that the first and second groups of people, in addition to keeping the treasure of the gospel going and growing, also entered into the joy of abundant life. I think we have all seen over and over again that people who are involved with something bigger than themselves which they can give themselves to are a great deal more likely to be joyful and content. Because joining God by sharing in the extravagance of love which God demonstrates again and again is the deep joy we are made for. It’s what makes us happiest in the long run.
What about the fearful servants? Are they right to be afraid of the master? Seems like there are a lot of people who are genuinely afraid of God’s judgment. Should they be? Should we be afraid? Hearing the angry words of the master in the story certainly might give one pause.
Here’s what I think. Just because the third servant believed that the master was harsh did not make it so. I think of the people who stand around on street corners popping a vein and screaming about how God hates gay and lesbian people, and how God is itching to send whole populations of people packing off to hell. They seem sincere in their belief in a harsh Lord; but just because they believe it doesn’t make it so. In the story the wickedly timid slave did indeed encounter an angry God; but it’s quite likely that it was the misapprehension of God’s character in addition to the slave’s faint-hearted inaction that inspired fury. Robert Farrar Capon breaks open God’s reaction like this: “Look…I invited you into a fiduciary relationship with me. That’s fiduciary, f-i-d as in fides in Latin—and as in …faith in plain English. I didn’t ask you to make money, I asked you to do business…to exercise a little pragmatic trust that I meant you well and that I wouldn’t mind if you took some risks with my gift of a lifetime. But what did you do? You decided you had to be more afraid of me than of the risks. You decided. You played it safe because of some imaginary fear. And so now, instead of having gotten yourself a new life…you have only the crummy excuse for a life that you started with.” [2]
It’s not the unpredictable wrath of an angry God. It’s frustration, disappointment, and unmistakably being held accountable. This is a parable of judgment; it hints at God’s accounting of not whether we are successful, but whether we are faithful. Whether we took the gift of the gospel and did something with it. Capon points out in his book on the parables that the overwhelming message of Jesus is great news about a divine party we have been invited into—he calls the insistent proclamation God “beating us over the head with the balloon of grace.” The only reason that judgment comes into it at all is “the sad fact that there will always be dummies who refuse to trust a good thing when it’s handed to them on a platter.”
I had a little flashback to the Seventies when I was thinking about the master’s encounter with the wickedly timid servant. It was about Mr. T. Do you remember him—he was a character on a bad crime show called “The A Team.” What I remember about him is that he used to go around yelling “I pity the fool who…!” Maybe God in God’s Judge persona is a bit like that, hollering, “I pity the fool who lets fear control their life instead of entering the adventure of grace and love!” I believe God yearns for us to get so carried away by extravagant love that we forget about constantly weighing the risks of living God’s way. That’s why I have titled this sermon “Risk, Risk, Tsk-Tsk.” The first two servants, who were ready to “do business” with the master’s incredible gift, (Risk & Risk) are to be our role models; and we can all pity the fool who was overcome by fear (even though we have all been that servant on occasion) (tsk-tsk).
I mentioned earlier that if you’re a farmer with no stomach for risk, you’re probably in the wrong business. The same can be said for the Christian life. It certainly involves risk and adventure. It’s a bit scary, but also really thrilling. It’s exhilarating to realize that we have been given the task of nurturing the growth of God’s kin-dom in our time and place. God works through her creation, not around us. Another farming story: A country preacher was visiting a parishioner on one of the most beautiful farms he had ever seen. As they stood on the lawn talking, the preacher was impressed with the scene before him—beautiful flowers, freshly painted barns, tall corn, contented cows. “Sir,” the preacher said, “God has certainly blessed you with a beautiful farm.” “Yes,” replied the farmer, “and we’re grateful. But you should have seen how it looked when He had it all to Himself.” We all receive gifts from God. It’s what we do with the gifts that makes the difference.
God has blessed us with this beautiful church community. What a gift, what a trust, this building, this land, these people (young and old), this mission, this message! How will we nurture it? Next week we will be offering our pledges of financial support for the coming year. It’s going to feel like more of a risk to be generous in support of the church’s ministry than it did at this time last year. I think we should, together and separately, acknowledge that it feels risky to give away money in a time of financial uncertainty. But fear needn’t be in the driver’s seat when we decide what we will do. I’m grateful to Mac Gardiner, who urgently invited me to his home this past week so that I could bring him a pledge card and discuss his giving. He’s not in our bulletin insert series this year, but he is definitely joining the ranks of “cheerful givers in challenging times.” He wanted to raise his pledge by one –third, and he wanted you all to know he was doing that in order to encourage you also to be bold. Mac is turning 90 next month; he’s on a fixed income. He’s not rolling in dough. He is not boasting with this public gift—he’s calling out to his companions on the Way, “Courage!”
I said earlier that this particular parable is not about money—money serves as an illustration of spiritual principles in the story. I don’t think our lives of discipleship are primarily about money. But I do think that what we do with our money often serves as an illustration of our principles and our values. Someone has said, “Show me your checkbook and I’ll tell you what you value.” I hope you value this church’s ministry, and I hope you will continue to make your support tangible through what you give and what you will promise to give next Sunday. Because when we contemplate our stewardship, we are really asking each other, like the farmers at the corner café, “What are you going to plant next spring?” We may indeed be a mite fearful about our prospects, and some part of us may be whispering, “Play it safe.” But I am looking forward to planting with you an exciting ministry to youth, a hospitable place for the men’s breakfast and dozens of other community groups to gather, a musical feast, outreach to the needy, comfort for those in crisis, a transformational proclamation of the gospel, and many other fruits of the Spirit. Let us sow bountifully so that we may reap bountifully.
Listen again to the promise expressed by Saint Paul: “[The One] who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness. You will be enriched in every way for your great generosity, which will produce thanksgiving to God through us; for the rendering of this ministry not only supplies the needs of the saints but also overflows with many thanksgivings to God.” [2 Corinthians 9:10-12]
[1] Milham, Richard from Like it is Today, quoted in Word & Witness, Nov. 14, 1993, Vol. 93:6, p. 247
[2] Capon, Robert Farrar Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2002, p. 422