Judges 4:1-7
Psalm 123
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Matthew 25:14-30
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and redeemer. Amen.
I have said before that the source of our readings every Sunday is something called the Revised Common Lectionary. Lectionaries have been around since before the beginning of Christian worship. A professor once told a class at Austin Seminary that when Jesus was in the synagogue reading from Isaiah, that was a lectionary reading for that day.
It makes sense, back in the day, finding a specific reading wasn’t anything like it is today. The Isaiah scroll would have been huge, and finding one specific reading within that huge scroll would have been both difficult and time consuming. So it makes sense that the scroll would have been open to that reading when it was handed to Jesus. It would have been open to that reading because that was the lectionary reading.
The Revised Common Lectionary is the second generation of lectionary readings used by Protestants. The first is still used extensively by Lutherans and Episcopalians while the revised version is used more by Methodists and Presbyterians. The lectionary splits scripture into three different years, one year assigned to each of the first three gospels. John’s gospel is sprinkled among all three years, especially in Advent, Lent, and Easter. With these gospel readings there are also readings from the Epistles, Psalms, and Old Testament.
I like the lectionary because it provides me a discipline of reading through the year. It makes me take a hard look at specific readings and keeps me from focusing on just what I think is important or interesting.
That being said, it has holes. One of these holes is that the Old Testament is just too large to fit in the lectionary. There are over 150 weeks within the lectionary, but still a full third of the psalms and a major chunk of the law, prophets, and other writings are missing. Today gives us one example.
Over the three year course of the lectionary, our Old Testament reading this morning is the only time the book of Judges is read in worship. We don’t hear the stories of Samson and Delilah. We don’t get to hear the glorious call of Gideon. At that, we don’t hear the meat and potatoes of the story of Deborah and Barak, just this introduction to the story, and that’s a shame.
It begins with Deborah telling Barak, “The LORD the God of Israel, commands you: ‘Go, take with you ten thousand men of Naphtali and Zebulun and lead them up to Mount Tabor Kishon River
What comes up missing is Barak’s answer to Deborah, “If you go with me, I will go; but if you don’t go with me, I won’t go.” Deborah responds, “Certainly I will go with you, but because of the course you are taking, the honor will not be yours, for the LORD will deliver Sisera into the hands of a woman.”
This is how it happens too. In verse 17, after Barak and his army have routed Jabin’s army and Sisera is on the run, we meet Jael. She’s a lovely homemaker, the wife of Heber the Kenite. Sisera and Heber have done business in the past so Sisera thought Heber’s tent would provide safe haven. Not so much.
Jael covers Sisera with rugs to hide him. He feels safer. Sisera is thirsty so Jael gives him warm milk. He feels rested and falls asleep. But instead of hiding Sisera from his enemies, Jael kills Sisera with a tent stake through the temple. When Barak came looking for Sisera, Jael showed him where to find him, snug as a dead bug in a rug. Barak took the field, but a woman took the general of the army with rugs, warm milk, and a tent stake.
As I said, there are holes in the lectionary. We read the glorious prophecy that the army of the Lord will prevail under the leadership of Barak, but we don’t hear the consequences of his response, his defiance of God’s prophet. These are consequences worth hearing.
Our Gospel reading has its own consequences. Three servants, three slaves are trusted with the wealth of their master who goes away on a long journey. One slave is trusted with five talents, one with two talents, and the third with one. Each is given a very generous gift from the master. A few weeks ago we learned how much these are worth, so we won’t do that again. Let’s just say that these riches had value beyond imagination.
Let’s also remember that the master gave to each slave a number of talents according to their ability. The master didn’t burden the slaves with riches they were unqualified to handle. They had the faculties to work with what they were given. They were not given too much nor were they given too little. It’s the Goldilocks of trust, what they were given was just right.
The master’s trust was met with fulfilled expectations from two of the three slaves. The servants who were given five talents and two talents doubled their master’s trust. The servant who performed under expectation buried his treasure. It didn’t appreciate even one denarius in that hole.
Now, the master was away for a long time, scripture doesn’t say how long but in the history of the faith it is safe to say that “a long time” is a very long time. When he returned, the master settled accounts with the servants.
Those who doubled what the master gave received even greater in return. These servants were trusted with “a few things,” and anyone who can call even one talent “a few things” knows wealth far beyond my wildest imagination. In return for their faithful service, they are put in charge of many things and welcomed into the “master’s happiness.”
As you know, I look at several different translations to see how other folks render the scripture. In this case some translations say “enter into the joy of your master”[1] and another has the master saying “Let’s celebrate together.”[2] I’m not going to say that one is a more faithful translation or one is better. What I will say is that when you consider all of these translations together we get a glorious view of the master’s joy with these good and faithful servants and that is a wonderful thing.
The third, the one who was trusted with least didn’t live up to that much trust. He took the gifts of his master and put them in a hole in the ground. We need to remember that in the first century burying treasure in a hole in the ground was like an earthen safe deposit box. So if he wasn’t going to do anything with his master’s talent at least he did nothing safely. But where the servants who doubled their master’s talents were invited to share in his joys, this servant was given a different invitation.
This servant approaches his master with his dirty bag of treasure and says, “Master, I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.”
In counseling there’s something called phenomenology. The simplest way I can explain it is that we create our own reality and respond accordingly. This servant feared his master and responded in fear. He felt the best he could do is return the talent unscathed. So how did that work out?
The master responds, “So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest. So take the bag of gold from him and give it to the one who has ten bags.” The servant who lived in fear, not despite his fear, was cast from his master’s sight.
As for the faithful servants, “whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.” As the master has already said, the faithful servants are welcomed share their master’s happiness. The third fearful servant, he was cast out of the presence of the master and into the darkness.
Oh, by the way, we don’t know, but perhaps the two other servants thought the same of their master. Their difference may not have been their opinion of the master, but their difference was their response. There are consequences we face in receiving and rejecting the gifts and talents of our Lord. We have heard them in Judges and we have heard them again in Matthew. God’s gifts are wonderful, and even more so are God’s rewards.
But there is one more consideration worth our attention. There is a question left unanswered in scripture I want us to wrestle for a moment. It’s a sensible question, it’s an obvious question.
What if the servant had lost his master’s fortune? What if not from theft or negligence, what if by circumstance and poor investing the servant had lost his master’s wealth?
It’s not as unusual as you might think. In this economy it’s probably more common than I think. In the past few years we can see how downtowns have turned over businesses. We can look at the Wall Street and banking debacle of a few years ago to see just how easy it is to lose five talents. Shoot, on Wall Street the losses surpassed hundreds of thousands of talents.[3] So how do we think this master would respond to losses if return of riches earned one slave a one way ticket to Weeping-and-Gnashing-of-Teeth-Ville.
Theologian Karl Barth once wrote that God created man in his own image and then man returned the favor. If we think our heavenly master would respond the same way a 21st Century banker would react to a defaulted business loan we have committed the sin of creating God in our own image. What if the value isn’t in succeeding in the ways that we know using dollars and disciples and such? What if the value is in using the gifts? What if success is answering the call?
I believe that in the kingdom of heaven it is better to try and fail than to not try at all. It’s better to work for the kingdom and not see the results in our time than it is to see nothing and give up. I believe it is more noble to try and have faith that the master and the master’s talents are enough than it is to seek achievement in the short term that we can see and touch.
I believe it is more noble to have faith and use the gifts and talents God has granted us individually and as the body than it is to live in fear. Recently we read from Exodus “I the LORD your God am a jealous God,” so fearing God isn’t wrong. But if that is all, if that’s all we think of our Lord then we are guilty of using human economics, accounting, and legalism to define the power and the grace of God, and this is not our Lord.
Our Lord, the master of this parable, welcomes slaves to share in his joy. It’s humanly typical how the wealthiest and most powerful people in our world don’t welcome their servants to share in their joy. Our Lord offers his greatest gifts to us and simply demands we use them. Yes, the Lord is a fan of good stewardship (You knew this was going to be a stewardship sermon, didn’t you!), but the Lord measures our success in ways we cannot know.
It is better to use the time, talents, and treasure we have been given than not because even if it seems that we have lost all, we are not the judge of what losing all truly means. Ultimately, failure can be expressed in the old expression, “you can’t win if you don’t play.” We face the consequences of not living in God’s love, the God who shares the overflowing bounty of talents, who calls us use those talents.
So let us answer the call. Let us live into the best of our heavenly vocation with the talents God has given us. Let us share in the master’s happiness. Truly, the worst thing we can do is say, “No.”
No comments:
Post a Comment