Sermon text - Hearts on Fire

Matthew 25:14-30

Hearts on Fire

James Sledge                                     November 13, 2011

For most of my life I have thought of banks as some of the more conservative institutions around.  By conservative I don’t mean politically conservative.  Rather I’m using a more basic definition of preserving and conserving what exists.  This sort of conservatism makes changes only after very careful consideration.  The default decision is the tried and true, what has worked well in the past.  This sort of conservatism has little use for the novel, and it does not take unnecessary risk.

To me, banks and bankers epitomized this sort of thinking.  At least they did until the financial collapse of 2008.  When the financial markets tumbled a few years ago, we discovered that those staid bankers had abandoned their traditional conservatism.  Far from fearing the novel, they had embraced all sorts of creative and innovative investment vehicles.  There seemed to be no worries that some of the more exotic, mortgage-based investments could fail.  People acted as though big profits were simply guaranteed.  But then it all came tumbling down.

But if the image of bankers as cautious, prudent, careful, and risk-averse folks disappeared in that 2008 economic collapse, another group still has its cautious, conservative, careful image fully intact; the typical Mainline church congregation. 

We don’t reject all innovation and novelty.  We have a somewhat contemporary worship service here, after all.  But of course traditional Presbyterian congregations generally didn’t adopt such services until they had been a huge success for many years in other, non-traditional congregations.

I let The Presbyterian Hymnal plop open in my lap.  I flipped through a few pages, seeing more dates from the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s than from 1900s, the century in which that hymnal was published.  And the couple of hymns I saw from the 1900’s were set to hymn tunes from earlier centuries.  This is not necessarily a criticism or a complaint.  There were some wonderful hymns on those pages.  And our economy would probably be in much better shape right now if bankers had retained a bit more of this sort of conservatism seen reflected in our hymnal, the conserving of what exists, changing it only after careful consideration.

Issues of caution, prudence, careful and risk-averse investing are on display in our gospel reading this morning as well.  A master is about to leave for an extended time, and so he turns over his investments to several of his slaves.  Perhaps this spreading around of his portfolio was his idea of diversification. 

There is a tendency to flatten parables and miss their many facets, reducing them to fables with a simple message.  In the case of this parable, that often becomes, “Use your talents wisely.”  But such a “moral of the story” ignores much in the parable.  For example, the third slave is called “wicked and lazy” by his master, an assessment often accepted without question.  But that master does not refute the slave’s assessment that he is “a harsh man, reaping where (he) did not sow.”

Other, perhaps more illuminating facets of the parable relate to the wealth entrusted to each slave and the huge returns earned by the first two compared with the simple preserving of the principle by the third slave.  Here, the term talent sometimes gets in the way, as does our unfamiliarity with the financial options available in Jesus’s day.

For the first hearers of the parable, a talent was a large sum of money, and nothing more.  In fact it was equal to fifteen or twenty years wages for a laborer.  And those first hearers had never seen a local Savings and Loans or bank as we know them.  There were money changers where you could invest money, but there were no regulations or government guarantees.  The only really safe thing to do with money in those days was to hide it.

Perhaps it would help if we updated a few elements in the parable.  We could change it so that the CEO of a large investment firm has decided to take an extended vacation.  And so he summoned several of his money managers and told them to take care of his portfolio.  To one he gave 10 million dollars, to another he gave 5 million, and to a third, 1 million.  The first manager wheeled and dealed and made another 10 million.  The second did much the same, doubling his portion.  But the third manager didn’t have all that much to play with, and so he opted to put it into a very secure, interest-bearing money market account. 

Or look at it another way.  Think about what you would do if it was your money.  Would you have taken the more risky investments, or would you have played it safe?

This parable has so many facets, I’m not always sure where to focus my attention.  On the one hand, the freedom and abandon that allowed those first two slaves to make risky investments and double what was entrusted to them has a powerful attraction.  What was it that let them act as they did?

But the parable itself spends much of its time with the third slave, the one who did the prudent and cautious thing.  Since the parable focuses so much on him, I suppose I should at least wonder what it was about him that makes him the bad guy in the story, even though he did exactly what many prudent people of Jesus’ day likely would have done.

“Master, 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 money in the ground.”

“So I was afraid.”  Seems to me that religion often has a great deal of fear in it.  “Do you want to burn in hell?”  Even the much friendlier, “Do you want to be saved?” carries with it implied fear.  What happens if you’re not?  And denominations’ and churches’ hard fought efforts and battles to get our theology just right seems to have more than a little fear involved.  What might happen if we got it wrong?

The Bible says that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” but in this parable the fear of the master is the downfall of this slave.  By contrast, his two fellow slaves seem to have no fear at all.  They took some pretty serious risks, acting as though they could not fail.

Where in your life have you thrown caution to the wind and acted as if risk did not matter?  Where have you broken free from caution and prudence and risked it all?  Perhaps you once fell in love, or are in love now, and you did things or are doing things that would have seemed crazy and foolish before.  Maybe some passion once caught you and swept you up, and you threw yourself into it in a way you cannot imagine doing now.  Or perhaps you’re caught up in just such a passion right now.

Is it possible to fall in love with God, to be swept off your feet by Jesus so that you act with wild abandon, dance like no one is watching, and look foolish to those who do not understand such passion?  Is it possible for the pull of Jesus to grab you and overpower you, draw you in so that you act in ways you never knew were possible?

Is that possible, Jesus?  We are here, Jesus.  We are waiting.  Will you come into our hearts and set them on fire?  We are here, Jesus.  We are waiting.  Come to us.