The Vital Matter At Stake

 Sermon by James W. Crawford

November 17, 1996

Matthew 25:14-30

Do you feel for that little guy in the parable we just read? Edmund Steimle calls him "the one talent man." Steimle wonders why he deserves this scathing rebuke. He suggests that if Jesus blasted the receivers of the five or two talents many of us could have settled back and enjoyed the story a lot more. After all, he asks, don't we get a lot of "unholy pleasure," when we see Jesus cut down some smug Pharisee, or when he shows us a rich person collapsing under the weight of some stupidity, or leaves a religious hierarch mumbling in his beard?

Some years ago, when I tackled this passage, the treasurer of Look Magazine-remember Look?--heard the sermon. During the following week he sent me a letter, very upset by the passage. And like Dr. Steimle he wondered about the harsh treatment of that one talent man. "I would not gamble or risk another's money as I would my own," he wrote,

Jesus' castigation of that poor guy is out of character with his normal love and concern for the little people. Indeed, Jesus did not ask how those who increased their resources succeeded. How? Robbery? Deceit? Extortion? My experience in business, not bitterly, is that these multiply-your- money-tenfold types get there by stepping on someone's toes. I know some of them that I like personally, but whose success I don't envy or whose process toward the top I could never emulate. I suspect I have more friends and fewer enemies than they. I would have been happier if this parable had been omitted.

Thanks, Your friend. . . .

Now, of course, to give the one talent man his due, prudence in investing is not a bad thing. Indeed, it can be the better part of wisdom. Another commentator, looking at that one talent man and his encounter with the master, suggests we not be too hard on him, because even though those two and five talent characters made a ton of money, there were certainly no sure bets out there. What Matthew does not tell us is what might have happened had the master returned and our "one talent man" greeted him with something like this: "Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you do not sow and gathering where you did not scatter seed. So I invested your money with this guy who had a terrific idea about how to make a real bundle. I checked it out with some shrewd analysts who assured me it was a marvelous opportunity. If it had worked, you would have gotten back ten times what you gave me to invest. But it didn't pan out and the guy went bust." I wonder what the master would have said? "Hey, nice try. You've got the right spirit. Here's another chunk of money, let's see how you do this time." Maybe. But if the master is this harsh with the one talent man who lost nothing, someone who loses it all might get boiled in oil.

So what do we have here? The first of the great capitalist manifestos? The New Testament's underpinnings for the economic theories of Adam Smith? A biblical mandate for laissez-faire economics? Not on your life! This parable is not a primer for capitalists. It does not put the sanctions of scripture behind social Darwinism. This parable does not provide a Wall Streeter's divine justification to pursue the sure thing and the fast buck; it is not a frontice-piece for one of those "I-Started-with-a-Dollar-and-Made-a-Million-You-Can-Do-It-Too" frauds we can pick up at Barnes and Noble for $17.95. Matthew composes this parable for Christians who wonder what we should be doing between the occasion of our Lord's ministry and the fulfillment of that ministry's promise on this earth. Matthew and his friends see in Jesus what God wants for all of us. They yearn for the compassion and healing promised by the presence of Jesus, but here they are, 50 years later in their little church in Antioch, and the human condition is still riddled with suffering, sin and death. As they look out on the world they see, as one observer writes, "the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of brutal facts." This parable is written by Matthew for those of us who live in a time between the times. Jesus is gone. The master, gone away. And we are left in the meantime with what he leaves us to invest while he is away.

And what is that? What has Jesus Christ left us to invest while he is gone on his journey? What do we parlay in Christ's behalf until kingdom come? It is the Gospel, my friends. We are responsible for investing the Gospel during this interim time. The commodity given to us by Christ to trade is not, first of all, money. It is not as talents would have it, our native abilities, our brains, our ingenuity, our resources, our gifts and inclinations. It is not our bank accounts, our possessions or our position. All these things are important, and they become tools to effect a large vision. But in this case, the Master leaves us with the particular coin of his realm: the communal healing and transforming vision of Jesus Christ. As we wait in anticipation for the new age of justice, grace and peace radiated through the Gospel, the Master leaves us that Gospel to invest, to demonstrate, to proclaim, to magnify, to testify in behalf of, to sing about, to celebrate, to act out, to live for, to die by. The master leaves the promise that ultimately right makes might; that the prisoner, the outcast, the brokenhearted, the disinherited, the discouraged, the oppressed, the lonely, the lost--all of these hold a special claim on the heart of God and make a special claim on those of us who, like Matthew's church, wait and hope for the resolution of the injuries and tragedy of life. The Gospel promises --and illustrates--a world where sickness dissolves; where mental, emotional and moral chaos breaks into coherence; where the seeming finality of death shatters before the power of life. The master goes away, my friends, but he entrusts us with a tremendous privilege and high responsibility, a marvelous opportunity and absolutely vital commission: to broadcast and exercise the love, compassion, the new community seen and experienced in Jesus Christ.

So the question hits us head on: What are we doing with this Gospel while it is in our hands? How faithful are we as stewards of this Gospel in our own time and city? How do we shape up? How do you shape up? How do I?

Well, I know that some of us receive our share of the gospel and make magnificent testimony to it. Like those two and five talent folk, some of us invest the Gospel with enormous impact. To be sure, we are not all St. Francis or Mother Theresa; we are not Dorothy Day nor Desmond Tutu, but you and I can testify to vast numbers whose names do not make the front pages nor the official list of Saints, but whose gracious acts of love, joy, and mercy impinge upon us--many of you sitting in this congregation this morning. You make up the society of wise, compassionate spendthrifts of the Gospel. And you know what Matthew means when he promises you an inexhaustible source of replenishment for your witness.

But back to that little guy, that one talent man we have taken pity on. Why does he catch the fury of the evangelist? Why does he catch it to the extent he is sent to the place of weeping and gnashing of teeth? It is because he takes the most important and vital resource he can be given--the vision and hope of a community where love rules, forgiveness radiates, and justice binds--it is because he takes the Gospel and holds it, hides it, strips it of power, and buries it. And Matthew suggests some of us and our churches are like that one talent man: we take the substance we have been given--the Gospel of Jesus Christ--and frequently we bury it.

How? Some of us bury love in our churches by turning away from the world, bandying a special language about Jesus back and forth, honing our rituals, preening our orthodoxy, talking to ourselves.

Sound familiar? I will never forget one of our drives up to New Hampshire last summer and our passing a line of gorgeous antique automobiles. There was a magnificent 1931 V-16 Marmon, 7 passenger sedan, a 1914 Stutz Bearcat sports car, a gorgeous 1926 Dusenberg Phaeton, a 1931 Auburn speedster and, yes, a 1936 Packard all-weather custom town car. And I wonder, as I look back on that august line of automobiles, if somehow some of our churches aren't something like those classic cars: handsome, elegant, comfortable to ride in, mechanically smooth, costing top dollar, but miserably inefficient, driven finally from the market by cars a little more aerodynamic and much more fuel efficient, with more horsepower in a V-6 than that V-16 1931 Marmon could ever dream of handling. And you know who drives those gorgeous museum pieces? A sort of elite, esoteric cult who no longer keeps the cars for their original purpose, to get people from here to there, but retains them to admire, to tinker with, to relish, to collect. I wonder if churches and their ministers can get caught in that kind of antique car mood. It can bury the Gospel--and God help us.

Or again, we can bury the Gospel in some narrow or personal perspective. You may remember, a month or so ago, Rick Chrisman and Karen and Chris Chase participated in a forum entitled: "Will the real Jesus please stand up." The discussion focused on what is known as the new search for the historical Jesus. It uses texts by scholars who talk about "Meeting Jesus for the First Time" or capturing a new vision of Jesus, or encountering Jesus as he must truly have been walking and teaching and healing in those dusty Palestinian settlements. I have never forgotten an insight of former Dean Willard Sperry, of Harvard, reflecting on Joseph Ernest Renan's great 19th century "Life of Jesus." The book, said Sperry, is "patently three parts Renan and one part Jesus." Again, sound familiar? It illustrates a major way we bury the Gospel: each of us tempted to attribute to Jesus our own interests, inclinations or favorite cause. You have seen it work. Those with pastoral instincts see Jesus as a gentle pastor; those with prophetic inclinations present Jesus as a fiery social reformer; the financially privileged see him, in this parable especially, sanctioning their success. Go to a religious bookstore today and you will find Jesus putting an imprimatur on violent revolution, on laissez-faire capitalism, on every kind of feminist ideology from the far left to the far right. You will discover Jesus supporting huge arsenals to keep the peace and to retain American hegemony in the world. You will find Jesus espousing radical pacifism. You will not have to look far to find our Lord practicing as a Jungian analyst, an Eastern mystic, a dynamic pedagogue, a family values advocate. How do you like him? How do you want him? How do you perceive him? Careful. As Dean Sperry remarked, "It may be three parts Renan, and one part Jesus."

Oh, the ways we bury the Gospel! We bury the love seeking to reconcile humanity through our platitudes about community and our relentless efforts to draw lines around "my neighborhood," "my school," my family," "my church," "my race." We bury the Gospel by building a church on this corner and that one over there and the one down the street, and by defining our churches and denominations not so much by the faith they proclaim and the hope they live out, but by their reputation among the "right" people.

And do you know what? The consequences will be the same for us as for that so-called one talent man--stripped of the substance of the Gospel and sent to that place of weeping and gnashing of teeth. We know what that means. It signifies the urgency of the Gospel for our time. It tells us we deal here with a matter of life and death. It insists with this dramatic imagery that the way we mediate the Gospel and the seriousness of our missionary effort is in this world the most vital matter we have at stake. It warns us that if we do not do the job, we forfeit our calling by our incompetence and faithlessness. This side of heaven we stand accountable for exercising the Gospel's inexhaustible love. And if we coddle ourselves while the world yearns for compassion, while it dies for love, while it pines for joy, while it hungers for justice, while it starves for peace and community--and if we want to indulge ourselves in a tragic and needy world, we can, but we will be pathetic, irrelevant and ignored. Failure to invest in the freeing, saving Gospel visions and to encourage those visions with money and people, failure to bend our means to the end of Love providing hope beyond what we can count or quantify, failure to proclaim a faith that handles the worst in our lives without cynicism, failure to trade with and invest the Gospel leads to its withering and dying among us--our losing it. Heaven forbid this in your life, in mine, in the life of the Old South Church in Boston. No way!

Well, we began this morning by reflecting on that so called "one talent man." Let me close by introducing you again to one of those who took the Gospel and made the most of it during the lifetime of many of us in this room. She died last month, on October 10, at age 94. Magda Trocme was host during the Second World War in a little French town called Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Her husband, Andre Trocme, served as pastor of the French Reformed Church in Le Chambon, and today she stands as a heroine to Yad Vashem, Israel's holocaust martyrs and Heroes Memorial Authority. As the French Vichy government collaborated with the Nazis in the hunting down of Jews, and their deportation to inevitable death camps, Magda Trocme opened her door one day to a solitary woman, a German Jew. And before the war was over, under the hostile scrutiny of the Vichy Regime, she provided shelter for over 5000 refugees, more than 3500 of them Jews. To her dying day Magda Trocme said it was not more than doing what had to be done. "I opened my door," she writes, "and said 'Come in. Come in'. . . How could we refuse them? . . . Sometimes people ask me, 'How did you make a decision?' There was no decision to make. The issue was: Do you think we are all brothers and sisters or not. Do you think it is unjust to turn in the Jews or not. Then let us try to help." She was an anomaly, says her recent obituary in The Times, a woman "whose life was dedicated to the curious principle that just as food is the answer to hunger, the only rational antidote to violence is nonviolence."

Magda Trocme. Not herself a very big deal. But she knew in this glorious but troubled world of ours the most vital of matters. The Gospel: its patience, its hope and its love. God grant we too nurture, proclaim and invest it wisely, compassionately, courageously.