“He entrusted to them
his property; to one he gave five talents,
to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then
he went away.” St. Matthew 25:14-15
Last
weekend, I went an apple butter boil, an old family tradition, at a cousin’s
farm in my hometown. By the bubbling
kettle, I struck up a conversation with another cousin, Robin. She plays the organ at Mount Carmel Methodist
Church, a mile or two up the road in Shanktown, Maryland, a place that doesn’t
make it onto the road atlas. Mount
Carmel is a white clapboard chapel, built around the time of the Civil
War. My grandparents were members and
four generations of Michaels sleep in its shady churchyard. I’ve always thought of it as a timeless
place.
But Robin
said things have changed. There are only
twenty of them in the pews most Sundays.
There’s no choir or Vacation Bible School anymore. My cousin Andrew’s baby girl is the only
child. Mount Carmel has never been a big
church, and it has always shared a pastor with the other local Methodist
churches. But it was probably two or
three times that size when I was a kid.
There’s no
easy answer to the decline. They have
enjoyed a long line of faithful pastors.
They do good work in the community.
People just don’t go to church anymore, Robin said. Even when the mall is a half hour away and
nobody plays soccer on Sunday mornings, even in supposedly pious rural America. The social advantage, the cultural
expectation that came with church going twenty years ago has pretty much
vanished.
Robin
regretted all this, to be sure. She’d be
delighted to see the glory days return.
But she really didn’t seem all that worried. “How is it?” I asked. “Well,” she said, “we’re managing.” And she flashed a confident smile. She’s grateful that there’s a place in her
hometown where she can still use her gifts to play the organ, where twenty
people will still stand up on Sunday morning and sing those old songs she
loves. She’s thankful that the Gospel is
still preached and babies are still baptized and the dead are still given a
warm and grateful send-off.
Why
shouldn’t Robin smile? I could probably
name most of those twenty people in the pews at Mount Carmel. They are some of the finest Christians I know,
kind and generous people who do so much of the good that gets done in that part
of the world. They are faithful when so
many others can’t be bothered. They love
their Lord, and they are confident that His work must be done, on the cloudy
days as much as the ones when the sun shines brightly. “We’re managing,” she said. It’s just another day in the kingdom of God.
Today’s
Gospel is about managing, the managing done by the three servants of a great master. He committed many talents, great sums of
money, to them before he went into a far country. What generally interests people like us about
this story are the spectacular returns realized by the first two servants. Through what must have been great financial
know-how, they managed to double the value of the master’s investment. We want to know if they’re still taking
clients.
But, as
one commentator I read this week pointed out, what would have caught the
attention of Jesus’ audience was that the
master went away. [1]
When he returns, he praises the servants as “good and faithful.” It’s their
loyalty and commitment that matters most.
The bottom line is secondary.
Times of
transition were beset with stress and anxiety in the ancient world. Saint
Luke’s telling of the same story adds a detail that presses home this
point. There, Jesus said that the master
went into a far country to receive a kingship.[2] He was hinting at a news story everyone in
Palestine new well. Herod the Great had
made such a trip to Rome a few decades before Jesus’ birth. He lobbied for the right to be crowned, and
returned home a king. Two generations
later, his son Archelaus had made the same trip, to ask the emperor to sort out
a dispute between him and his half brother.
Archelaus was deposed.
A master
who left for a far country might never return.
He could meet with violence or be delayed for years by bureaucratic
inefficiency. His fortunes with those in
power could change in an instant.
Wise men
didn’t carry too much gold in their pockets when they went on a journey. Putting your wealth into the hands of
reliable servants was a good option, if they were truly loyal. Everyone in the community would have known
that the servants dealt in funds that belonged to someone else. Would they go out and trade in their masters’
name? Their public faithfulness showed
that they stood by their master, that they really believed He would return and
give them what was owed. Or would they
play it safe and hide his wealth, hedging their bets to be sure they’d land on
their feet if things went badly for him?
When he
has returned, the master calls out the third servant as wicked and
slothful. He has wasted the talent and
proved himself unfaithful. He is too
afraid to take a risk. The master had
known his weaknesses—he was only given one talent after all. But he’d still taken a chance on the third
servant. He thought, perhaps, that if
only given the opportunity, he would make good.
But the servant has chosen poorly, and for that choice he is punished
severely.
This
parable comes in a series of stories Jesus tells about how it will be for His
disciples in the days to come. He will
go away from them, and yet in time, He will return, crowned in glory, to call
His servants to account.
The
waiting would not always be easy for them, or for us. Sometimes He seems very far away indeed.
Jesus told his disciples that men’s hearts would grow cold,[3]
and that they would face opposition and hardship, “hated by all for my Name’s
sake.[4]” “When the Son of Man returns,” he asked the
Jerusalem crowd, “will he find faith on earth?[5]”
The third
servant’s temptation is a real one, and not just in places where believers are
actively persecuted for the faith. We
rarely step away from the way of discipleship in a single bound. There are little excuses, good work postponed;
money frittered away, schedules we allow to become fuller than they really need
to be. Perhaps the master will look the
other way. I haven’t cast away my faith
completely. There’s still something to
show, we think, if he comes looking for me.
But before
he left us, Jesus entrusted to us great gifts—like “a pearl of great price,[6]”
he told His disciples, like “treasure buried in a field.[7]”
There are no things in this world so precious as the Word that sets us free
from sin and death, the Sacraments whose grace brings healing and renewal and
peace. These gifts can change people’s
lives and when they are used faithfully, they bring light and peace and hope to
everything they touch.
But they
must be put to work if their true power is to be seen. As my cousin said, there’s managing to do—and
it has been left in our hands.
I look back on the past year with you, my
first year as your rector. I am deeply
moved by the way that so many of you are putting Christ’s good gifts to
work. In this season, when we are
receiving financial pledges, I am grateful for the generosity you show in sharing
your wealth for Christ’s work in this congregation. You give so abundantly of your time to
prepare the Altar for worship, to help us make good decisions, to sing God’s
praise, to serve the poor. You come to
learn God’s Word and then put it to work in your lives. You join in the prayers and receive the
Sacraments with gratitude and reverence.
I’m sure
there’s still more we can do. But it is
a great privilege to lead people who bear Christ’s Name so loyally and serve
Him so faithfully while we await His return in glory. Here at Saint Francis, I’d say we’re managing
quite well.
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