Sermon — November 15, 2020

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Last week, Alice and I took advantage of an earlier-than-usual bedtime to play a hard-earned game of Scrabble. Toward the end of the game, I struck gold. As I pulled a handful of letters out of the bag, they looked awfully familiar. After a few seconds, I rearranged them to form one perfect, seven-letter word: “MISSION.” And then I sat and stared at the board for what felt like about fifteen minutes, trying to find the perfect place where I could play the whole word at once. All I needed was one common open letter: an E and I’d have EMISSION, an O and I’d have OMISSION, an S and I could play MISSIONS. I was so dedicated to finding the perfect place to play my perfect word that I spent several turns making little one-letter moves, playing one of my S-es and hoping I’d eventually be able to use the rest.

Then Alice played “HE” across and I could finally play “EMISSION” all the way down to a triple-word. 80 points! And the crowd goes wild! Granted, this involved some cheating. In other words, I told Alice I needed an open E, and she obliged. If we had followed the rules of Scrabble, I never would have played the word; I would have just wasted turn after turn waiting for that perfect moment. (Luckily, we’re both so competitive about Scrabble that we don’t keep score any more, and we’re both perfectionists, so we tend to work cooperatively toward the end to use up all our letters.)

So maybe, Scrabble perfectionist that I am, I understand this third servant’s fear when he buries his talent in the ground.

This parable is tricky, because it’s become so much a part of our culture that we take its meaning for granted. A typical interpretation goes something like this: God has given you many blessings in this life, among them your personal talents. If you put them to use, you’ll be rewarded. But if you bury your talents in the ground—if, to borrow a phrase from another saying of Jesus, you “hide your light under a bushel” (Matthew 5:15)—well, God won’t be so pleased.

This understanding of the parable is where our English word “talent” comes from, not the other way around; people have assumed for so long that the parable is about our innate skills and abilities that we’ve started calling these things “talents,” after the parable. Originally, a talent wasn’t a skill; it was a unit of measurement, of weight; the “talents” in this story are huge chunks of silver worth around fifteen years’ wages for an ordinary worker. What the servants have been entrusted with in this story are those literal talents, those blocks of precious metal. The master in this parable goes off on a journey and hands over his incredible wealth to his slaves: decades’ worth of their salaries, to be guarded until the boss returns. This was normal in the ancient world. Unlike modern American slaves, Roman slaves often occupied roles in their masters’ household like butler, or teacher, or, well… wealth manager. Now, two of these slaves pursue what seem to be almost reckless strategies, throwing the whole principal into what turn out to be successful investments, and receiving huge rewards. The third takes an approach that seems at first to be entirely reasonable; afraid to lose this huge wealth entrusted to him, he hides it as best he can. If the first two servants could be said to be a bit reckless, this third is clearly fearful. He seems to be so risk-averse, so afraid of failure, that he precludes the possibility of success. And that’s one way of preaching this sermon.

But even more than fear, he starts from a place of misunderstanding. Because he was not afraid, as I was in my Scrabble game, that he was going to miss the big opportunity to invest this talent in the right thing. And he wasn’t even quite afraid that he would lose this wealth that his master had entrusted him to keep safe. When he explains his fear, he doesn’t say either of these things. He says, “I knew that 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.” (Matthew 25:24-25) He calls the master a kind of thief, harvesting the fruits of others’ labor, reaping where he didn’t sow and gathering where he didn’t scatter seed. He seems to think, in other words, that the talent is rightfully his.

So this third servant’s fear is complicated. He’s not only afraid that thieves will come and snatch away what he’s been given in trust. He’s not only afraid that he’ll invest this talent in the wrong way, and miss out on some better opportunity, or even worse, lose the whole thing. He’s also afraid to face the fact that it isn’t his; that he’s not its ultimate and rightful owner, but only a temporary steward.

This, I think, is the key to the parable of the talents. It’s not about how to offer something to God and to the world with the talents we possess. It’s about how to be good stewards of the things God has entrusted to us.

“Stewardship” is one of those words that has become an unfortunate shorthand in the Church. We’ve turned it into a term of art, so that “stewardship” has come to mean the pledge drive that happens in the fall, and the “stewardship committee”—if the chair is lucky enough to have a committee—is the group who organize it. This is important work, and pledges are an important commitment; but this is only a fraction of what “stewardship” means. Every one of us is a member of the stewardship committee; every week of the year is part of stewardship season.

And I don’t just mean that you should pay your pledge every week.

“Stewardship,” after all, is the state of being a good steward, of being like one of those “good and trustworthy” servants who, entrusted with great wealth, built up what they’d been given and then gave it up when their lord returned. Our stewardship certainly includes the practices of giving money to the church and to the poor, but it’s broader than that. It’s not about what we give to God from what we have; it about what we do with what God’s given us. To be a good steward, the parable seems to say, is to recognize that all that we have, and all that we are is a gift from God; and not our own. That gives us some freedom, and some responsibility. We are free to take risks, to think big, to be bold, because ultimately, we’re playing with God’s money. We’re not free to do whatever we want with our bodies or our fellow human beings, with our earth or with our wealth; we’re not free to claim them for our own and hide them from our God, to abuse them or exploit them or try to possess them.

But we can put our talents to work to grow and multiply. We can put our money to work, giving to organizations that are loving our neighbors. We can put our bodies to work, baking pies or shoveling neighbors’ sidewalks or marching in the streets. We can put our earth to work, cultivating and tending it like a garden, not using and polluting it as though we can throw it away when we’re done.

This practice of good stewardship isn’t something we do for the church, on a pledge card, once a year. It happens every day, everywhere, at every moment when we face the choice between cultivation and exploitation, between sharing what we have and hiding it away—at every moment when we make the choice to act in love, as we walk ever closer those precious final words: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.” (Matthew 25:21 KJV) Amen.

Sermon — November 8, 2020

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Back in March, people kept reminding everyone that this year was going to be a marathon, not a sprint. As a runner for many years, I found this metaphor kind of strange. After all, a marathon is a race too; it’s a longer one, sure; you have to pace yourself; but you still leave everything out on the course. The next few months, I thought, were going to be some of the hardest of our lives, and I wanted to do my part. In thirty years, when my grandkids interviewed me for their school history class about what I’d done during the great coronavirus pandemic of 2020, I wanted to have a good answer. I wasn’t a doctor or an EMT or a grocery-store clerk, but I wanted to be able to say that I’d done my part. And so I threw myself into caring for other people in the midst of a catastrophe, doing way more than I could handle.

As the year ground on, though, I came to realize something. It wasn’t a sprint, and it wasn’t a marathon. There was no defined distance we were going to run. I couldn’t carefully manage my energy to have just enough to reach the finish, and then be able to take some vacation and collapse just on the other side. It wasn’t a sprint, it wasn’t a marathon; it was as though the world’s supplies of gasoline had disappeared, and we all just had to walk everywhere for eighteen months. It was never going to work to push as hard as we could to get to the end, and then collapse six inches past the finish line. We had to wait, and to wait, and to wait; and if we didn’t change how we lived our lives during the waiting, we would never be able to make it through.

I’m not sure these eight months of waiting really prepared me for the waiting of the last week, but in a sense they’re the same; not a sprint, not a marathon, no pre-determined finish line or end date; just waiting as sustainably as possible for something to change.

The early Christians thought a lot about waiting. There are clues, scattered throughout the New Testament, that the earliest followers of Jesus expected him to come back, in person, and soon. In this morning’s epistle, for example, Paul writes to the Thessalonians twenty or thirty years after Jesus has died, and tries to encourage them to be patient. Reading between the lines of the letter, it seems that they’re concerned about their church members who have died before Jesus returned. These faithful people waited patiently for years, praying for Jesus to come back soon and rule the world—and it hadn’t happened yet, and they’d died before they could see that day. What a crushing blow for these faithful few to miss out on their victory. I don’t want to take this metaphor too far, but it was as though a fervent supporter of one political party or the other had died between Tuesday and today, never knowing who had won the election, never getting to celebrate their candidate’s success.

But no, Paul writes! The dead haven’t missed the opportunity to meet their Lord. The dead will see Christ again. In fact, they’re with him now. And they’ll see you again too, Paul says, on that day when all are reunited, when, “Lo! He comes with clouds descending.”

Paul comforts these early Christians with a message about the next world. But at the same time, he encourages them to live well in this world. Just a few verses before our reading begins, he urges them to love one another “more and more,to aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we directed you.” (1 Thessalonians 4:10–11) Don’t let Jesus’ return take you by surprise like a “thief in the night,” he says, but live each day as though it could be the day that Jesus returns. Live each moment as though you’re about to come face to face with Jesus.

And this, of course, is more or less exactly what Jesus himself teaches in the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids. It seems to have been the custom for the groom’s party and the bride’s party to meet somewhere between their two homes for the wedding, and so these bridesmaids have gone out for the wedding in joyful anticipation. But the groom is delayed. Some of the bridesmaids have extra oil for their lamps, so when the groom finally arrives, they still have enough fuel to light their way as they walk with him to the feast. But some have used theirs up, and they’re left in the dark. No wedding feast for you!

In other words, Jesus seems to say, I’m coming back, but I might be delayed. (Little did they know…) You expect me to come back soon, and it might not be so soon at all. In fact, it might not conform to any human sense of linear calendar time, but I won’t leave you standing at the altar. I promise that I’ll return. But in exchange, you need to be prepared. You need to wait well. You need to tend to your lamp, to stock up on oil, to make sure you don’t burn through everything you have in the first few hours (or, as the case may be, the first few centuries). You need to live each moment as though I’m about to return, because when I do—there won’t be time to pop down to the corner store for more oil for that lamp. The time to prepare will have passed.

Like I said, I’m a runner. People often ask what my favorite part of running is, and my stock answer is, “Stopping.” I like knowing when the race will end. But I don’t think it’s just me. I think this yearning for a result, this need to get to the next stage of something, is part of a deeper spiritual truth, a fact about humanity that pervades every part of our lives.

There’s a constant temptation, I think, to put life off until we round the next corner. Over and over, we set our sights on the next landmark, and procrastinate on change. “Once the kids are in college,” we say, “then we can focus on our marriage.” “Once we retire, then I’ll have more time to volunteer.” “Once this pandemic’s over, then I’ll cut back on the wine.” We tell ourselves the same lie in a thousand variation: once I reach the next stage, everything will be different; then I’ll do the things I know in my heart I should be doing now.

Of course, it never happens. The next stage arrives, and it comes with its own new stresses and worries, and we don’t do what we said we would, because while circumstances around us have changed, we are still the same. And the temporary holding patterns we created while we were waiting for things to change have become more-permanent habits.

I don’t mean to be pessimistic. I don’t mean to say that nothing about your life, or your family, or your job will ever change. But I do mean to say that they’ll never change on their own. The patterns and the habits that we create now while we wait are the ones that will continue after circumstances change. A a new job or a new president, a newly-empty nest or a newly-ended pandemic won’t actually fix the problem all at once.

Paul knew this. Jesus knew, too. They taught us that the moment for change isn’t some future when it seems like it will be easier. The moment is now. This isn’t some generic advice to “live in the moment,” to “drink life to the lees,” to suck all the pleasure every day. It’s something different. It takes time and work to learn to love one another “more and more,” as Paul writes. (1 Thess. 4:10) It takes attention, like a lamp carefully kept trimmed and burning. It takes time to reshape the habits of our hearts. We can’t just wait for the magical future to arrive; in fact, Jesus seems to say, when we reach that next stage, it will already be too late for us to change.

“Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” (Matthew 25:13) Amen.