Sermon: Entrusted with a Great Treasure

Matthew 25:14-30

Entrusted with a Great Treasure

James Sledge                                                                                       November 19, 2017

If you’ve ever explored the buildings here at Falls Church Presbyterian, you’ve no doubt noticed that things have been added onto many times over the decades. The back of the sanctuary, the narthex, and steeple date to the first construction in the 1880s. Since then there’ve been a number of additions, expansions, and renovations, the last being the new Fellowship Hall, kitchen, and classrooms added less than fifteen years ago.

As with many congregations, these building and renovation projects involved stepping out on faith. Would there be enough money to pay the mortgage? Was the hope that the church would grow well founded? Prior to seminary, I was on the Session of a church that decided to build a new sanctuary. It’s now clear that was a great decision, but at the time, it was a difficult one. Many were worried about the cost and the risk the congregation was taking on, not to mention worries that growth might change the character of the congregation.

I was not here for any discussions about whether to build or renovate, although I was here for the discussion on hiring a full time youth director. That’s not permanent like a building, but it also involved stepping out on faith, of saying this is an investment in the future and we trust that the money will be there.

When you’re part of a church that isn’t brand new, you inherit a treasure from those who came before you. You’re entrusted with structures, a music program, children’s programs, Christmas Eve and Easter traditions, and so on. That means that most churches have to decide how to take good care of their treasure and how to utilize it well, But decisions about utilizing treasure sometimes run afoul of the desire to care for and protect it.

In the first church I served as pastor, the Mission Committee wanted to find a significant, ongoing project that would engage a lot of volunteers on a regular basis. Such an opportunity almost fell in our lap. A local homeless ministry was building a day center not from us that would allow them to accommodate more people, and they were seeking additional churches to host five homeless families for a week at a time, multiple times a year.

It was quite a system. On Sunday afternoon, a truck arrived with portable beds and mattress that had been taken out of another church early that morning. Volunteers would set up five bedrooms for families who arrived that evening and left around seven each morning. Supper and breakfast were provided, along with bag lunches for the day. The following Sunday morning, volunteers would turn bedrooms back into classrooms and put the beds back in the truck that would move on to another church later that afternoon.

It seemed a perfect fit. We had a number of classrooms that were not used during the week. The day center was less than a mile away, making transportation back and forth easy to manage. It needed a lot of volunteers to set up and tear down, serve as hosts, make supper and bag lunches, spend the night, tutor children, etc. It was exactly the sort of opportunity the Mission Committee was looking for, and so they brought a recommendation to the Session that we become an Interfaith Hospitality Network congregation.

Many greeted this as a wonderful opportunity, but not everyone. Some were worried about added wear and tear on our building and added risks from families and children we didn’t know using our classrooms and kitchen as their home for a week. For some, the need to take care of the treasure bequeathed to us made this a risk they did not want to take.

In the parable we heard from Jesus this morning, three individuals are entrusted with treasure, quite a bit of it. For those who originally heard Jesus tell this parable, the term “talent” had no connotations of one’s abilities or gifts. It was simply a great deal of money. It took fifteen years of hard labor for a worker in Jesus’ day to earn single talent.

If you were a person of modest means, and your boss gave you a couple million dollars to manage while he sailed around the world, what would you do with it? And what if your boss was a pretty demanding guy who didn’t respond well to people who lost money for him or his company? How much risk would you be willing to take with his treasure?

If you would choose CDs, low risk mutual funds, or some other vehicle that you were reasonably sure couldn’t lose the principle, that’s pretty much the same choice as the third slave. There were no banks as we know them in Jesus’ day and no banking regulations. The laws of Moses prohibited Jews from lending money at interest, and so the “bankers” in the parable would not have been seen as the most scrupulous sort. Burying money in the ground was considered an acceptable way of safeguarding it.

Then there are earnings of the first two slaves. No doubt they worked hard and were industrious, but doubling their money surely involved some significant risk taking. I wonder if many who originally heard this parable weren’t inclined to identify with the third slave.

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We church folks are often some of the most risk averse people around. I suppose a certain amount of that is prudent, but it easily turns into a focus on preserving what we have, on protecting our treasure, and that can easily become about fear: fear of what could go wrong, fear of what we could lose, the very sort of fear our parable condemns in the harshest terms.

Fortunately in that first congregation I served, people were open to the Spirit’s call to put our treasure to work for Jesus and the Kingdom, and they did not listen to the voice of fear. That ministry to homeless families became a big part of who we were as a congregation, not unlike what Welcome Table has become here.

We have been entrusted with tremendous treasure here at FCPC. That includes the wonderful facilities and the great programs and traditions. It includes the community and country we live it. And most of all, it includes the treasure of the gospel, the good news of God’s love in Christ, God’s desire for everyone to experience love and acceptance and wholeness and renewal as beloved children, no matter who they are.

In God’s great generosity, all this treasure has been entrusted to us. What will we do with it?