Buried Treasure

Judges 4:1-10, Matthew 25:14-30

November 16, 2008

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

Did you hear about the wild hoax put together by some very creative writers and satirists this past Wednesday? Over one million copies of what looked like the New York Times were handed out at subway stations in New York and 5 other U.S. cities. People who thought they were getting a free copy of the Times then looked carefully to see the date of the paper as July 4, 2009 and the motto next to the masthead reading “all the news we hope to print.” The main headline was “Iraq War Over!” and there were 14 pages of other stories of how the writers hope the world will change, some lighthearted and some very serious.

I was thinking what a newspaper like that might have looked like if the disciples had put one out in the days just before Jesus was killed. What might the headlines have been? “Roman Emperor Denies His Divinity, Calls for Elections” or perhaps “Epidemic of Forgiveness Spreads Through Judean Families” or maybe “War, Hunger, Homelessness Eradicated World Wide.”

Obviously those wished-for headlines have not yet, after 2000 years, been written, not even in one region of the world in which there are Christians, not even in places, like the U. S., where Christians are nominally in the majority and in control of government and society. There are lots of reasons for that, and my purpose this morning is not to scold and blame us for not living up to all that Jesus hoped. But I do want to say that I think Jesus feared exactly this would happen, that we Christians would not fulfill our early promise, and in this much misunderstood parable, he tried to urge his followers to work as hard as each of them were able to change the headlines of the future, not to bury the great treasure he had given them, but to use it to increase the joy of God and the goodness of the world around them. Let me explain.

As I said in the introduction, the word “talent” does not refer to the ability to sing, dance or paint, it is an amount of money. It is a huge amount of money, so large as to be beyond the imagination of any of those disciples (except maybe Matthew, the former tax collector). When Jesus uses hyperbole, exaggeration, in his parables, he’s trying to shock hearers out of their usual assumptions. So, you see, the first point to make is that this sermon is not about money at all, nor is it about what we usually think of as “talents,” or at least it is not entirely about those things.

Earlier in Matthew, Jesus used the image of a “pearl of great value” to describe the Kingdom or Realm of God. The Kingdom of God, in contrast to the nations of the world, was the reality Jesus kept trying to urge his disciples to live into. It is not a place at all; it is a way of living in the world, the way that God is trying constantly to re-create on earth, the way God imagined the earth would be when Adam and Eve lived in harmony with each other and the rest of creation in the Garden of Eden. The Kingdom is characterized by justice, peace, prosperity and sharing, forgiveness, love and hope. It is not a reality you and I have ever experienced, except in glimpses from time to time, often in the church. One major reason God came to earth in Jesus was to lead us again into understanding how God wanted us to live with each other and give us the tools to live that way.

Now when he tells this parable, Jesus is very close to death, knowing that his time is limited. He knows that the only way his mission has any hope of fulfillment is if this rag-tag band of followers somehow are able to live into this reality themselves and help others to find it. To do this will take courage, initiative, energy, trust and the willingness to take risks. Each one of the followers of Jesus has the capacity to do this at some level. None are being asked to do more than they are capable of, with the help of God, but they are being asked to do something.

That’s what this parable is about. The treasure entrusted to the servants is not money, but the Kingdom of God, the future of the project undertaken by Jesus, the hope for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. The servants are the disciples, and by extension, us. We are being asked to do all we can, according to our ability, to spread the word Jesus brought and so help the coming of God’s realm.

Now Jesus was realistic about the possibilities of this happening. He knew some of the disciples would indeed go forth with energy, creativity and joy to spread the gospel. But he knew that his death would hit this little band very hard, and that some might, in fear, decide the task was too large. They would cherish their time with Jesus, even live their own lives as he taught, but they would not continue the project. They would, in effect, bury the treasure. And when they were called to account for this by God, they would make lots of excuses, just like the third servant in the parable does. This servant excels at rationalizing his own failure. No other servant in this tale says that the Master is mean or greedy or unscrupulous; we only have this on the word of the servant who makes excuses for his own behavior. “I couldn’t hit the ball; the sun was in my eyes!” “The dog ate my homework.” “I couldn’t stand up for my principles because people would laugh at me.” “I’m not a good enough Christian to tell others about God, they won’t believe me and so there’s no point in putting myself out there.” “I have enough trouble trying to be good in my own life let alone trying to get others to do it.” If we were as good at evangelism as we are at excuses, the world would be a different place.

What Jesus is desperately trying to get across is that simply believing in Jesus and saying you love God and feeling all good about how God loves you and even trying to be a good person as much as you can is simply not enough. It is burying treasure. John Wesley, in writing about this text, said this: “Mere harmlessness, on which many build their hope of salvation, was the cause of [the third servant’s] damnation.” It is as if, upon hearing that the oath of a physician is “Do no harm,” every doctor in the world simply sat in his or her office, seeing no patients for fear of failing and so doing harm.

This is where we come back to the money and “talents” thing. Each of those servants in the parable was charged with growing the kingdom of God according to their ability. Who knows how they multiplied those talents? Did one work hard in the kitchen and have a bake sale? Did one invest in land and work hard to grow crops to sell? Did one do micro-loans to friends and neighbors and share in their profits? We have no idea. Each undoubtedly did what they were good at, taking some risks to use their God-given abilities, not denying what they were good at or using it only for their own enrichment, but to grow the gift given them.

Last week I said that God asks us what is in our hands, and I said that God knows what is in our hands and asks us so as to draw our attention to it. What is in our hands is not just our financial resources out of which we make a pledge to the church in its mission of nurturing believers and spreading the possibility of God’s realm being real on earth as it is in heaven, though it is that. What is in our hands is our own abilities, interests, and passions with which God calls us to do the work of evangelism, not evangelism for a creed or congregation, but evangelism for the way that God has always hoped human society would work: truth, love, justice, compassion, peace. We do God no service by burying our talents, by denying our ability to serve God in this mission, by being afraid that we are unworthy or that the sea is too large and our boats are too small. Jesus walked on water and taught Peter to do the same, until he got afraid and sank. God knows all of who we are and is so excited, so yearning for us to see for ourselves all that we are and have and get out there and live it every day.

But, my dear friends, the good news is that God does not expect us to do this alone, and that third servant was very much alone throughout the story, by his own choice, I think. The great warrior in the book of Judges, whose name was Barak, did not feel up to the task of meeting the great general of the enemy, Sisera, in battle. He turned to Deborah, the prophetess, and said, “I can only do this if you go with me.” She said she would go with him, and the battle was won. Jesus called 12 disciples, not one; Jesus called us into the church to work with one another as we meet the cost and joy of discipleship; we are not called to be Christians and to work toward the Kingdom alone.

When I was doing interim ministry, I often asked churches early in our time together to reflect on this question: “What’s the point of being church in this time and place? Would the world be impacted in any way and, if so, how, if this church closed tomorrow?” In this parable, Jesus gives us one of the many answers to the first question. We are a church and therefore have been given a great trust, not the building, not the endowment, not the organ, not our grand and glorious history. The trust Jesus talks about here is no less than the possibility of God’s kingdom coming on earth as it is in heaven. The trust is the gospel, the good news of forgiveness, love, and God’s desire for our reconciliation with God and each other as the centerpiece for justice, peace and love in the world. We are surely called to use the building, the endowment, the organ, our relationships with each other and our relationships with those outside this congregation in this work. What we are not called to do, according to this parable, is to give in to the fear of hard times and circle our wagons lest we lose what we have. That historical heritage we have here is one of risking, of reaching out, of being engaged not just with each other, but with the world.

And so I go back to the question with which I ended last week’s sermon. What is in your hands? And I add another question: what is in our hands? What happens when we open our hands fully to each other, and then even more fully to the others outside our doors? Last week we heard about bread multiplying when hands were opened. This week we heard about talents multiplying when risks were taken. All of this is about love multiplying. And the servants in question are you and me. Put away your shovels. Amen.