Sermon: Big Risks

 Matthew 25:14-30
Big Risks
James Sledge                                                                                       November 15, 2020 

The Parable of the Three Servants, JESUS MAFA, 1973
from the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN

In every place where I’ve served as a pastor, I’ve become a part of some sort of clergy group, sometimes multiple ones. Some were purely social; some were lectionary study groups; some were meant to be support groups of some sort. But whatever their primary purpose, all of them featured a certain amount of pastors sharing, and sometimes complaining about, their congregations.

Different congregations can have very different personalities. Just like people, some are introverted and some are extroverted. Some always worry about money, no matter how much they have, and some manage to keep conflict going most all the time. But congregations that are very different can still share things in common.

One thing I’ve seen in many congregations is a kind of conservatism. I’m not talking about politics. This conservatism can be quite strong in the most politically liberal congregation. Merriam-Webster gives two different definitions of conservatism. One is a “disposition in politics to preserve what is established,” The other is “the tendency to prefer an existing or traditional situation to change.” I’m talking about the second.

There’s an old church joke that gets used interchangeably with Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and a few others. It goes, “How many Presbyterians does it take to change a light bulb?” The answer, “Change?!!” Generally speaking, the times when people have gotten the maddest at me was when I changed the order of worship or the doxology, or when I was seen as supporting a change from “the way we’ve always done it.”

As a general rule, church congregations are not big risk takers. They adopt new ways very slowly. The new hymnal that the Presbyterian Church put out in 2013 has a much more diverse selection of musical styles than any previous ones, but just glancing through it, it appears it still contains a majority of hymns from the 19^th, 18^th, and 17^th centuries.

I don’t suppose it’s all that surprising that this sort of conservatism got baked into American, Mainline Christianity. The newest parts of our sacred texts are close to 2000 years old, and our theological underpinnings are nearly 500 years old. Plus institutions by nature tend to be conservative in the sense I’m using the word. But I do wonder what Jesus would think of such conservatism, something our parable this morning perhaps addresses.

This is one of my favorite parables, partly because it’s so subversive and partly because it’s so widely misunderstood, making it enjoyable for me to help people rediscover it. If the parable doesn’t strike you as all that subversive, I’m actually a little glad. That means I have the enjoyable opportunity to try to show that to you.

Two aspects of the parable help rob it of its original, subversive intent. The first is the term talent. In Jesus’ day, the word did not refer to one’s abilities. It was measure of weight, as well as a monetary amount based on that weight. It was a very large sum of money. Most estimates I’ve seen suggest that the typical laborer would have to work for fifteen years to earn a single talent. And so the monetary amounts in the parable are extraordinary.

 But it’s the second aspect that causes the most trouble. When modern people hear that the third slave dug a hole and hid his single talent, they typically assume that this is something ridiculous, a little like a crazy aunt or uncle who keeps all their money under the mattress because they don’t trust banks. But in Jesus’ day, such behavior was considered the prudent and cautious thing to do. There were no banks as we understand them, no government regulations, no money market funds, not really anything you’d call a safe investment.

The Jewish audience originally hearing this parable, and the Jewish audience in Matthew’s congregation, may well have been impressed that the first two slaves somehow doubled their money, but most would probably have done exactly what the third slave did. The parable is clear that the master is a “harsh man.” Would you want to lose a harsh master’s money in a risky investment? But the parable seems not even to consider that the first two slaves could have lost it all.

Jesus rarely uses parables to illustrate conventional wisdom. He uses them to help explain the strange ways he asks his disciples to follow, the strange ways of God’s coming new day. And this parable praises two slaves who took incredible risks and condemns the slave who did the cautious, prudent, conservative thing.

For many years I heard people treat this parable like a fable with the simple moral, “Use your talents wisely.” But clearly that is not what Jesus is saying. When Matthew includes this parable in his gospel, it is a time of great turmoil. Rome had been besieged and destroyed Jerusalem. The great Temple was gone. In its absence, a power struggle took place within Judaism. Priestly Judaism lost its base, and Pharisaic or rabbinical Judaism became dominant. As it did, it began to push the Jesus movement out of the synagogue.

In such a time, many Jewish Christians likely thought it best to lay low and keep their heads down. They should be cautious and prudent, not draw attention to themselves, huddling in their homes to worship, but keeping their faith hidden otherwise. But Jesus’ parable reminds them that they have been entrusted with great treasure. He has already taught that they are not to hide their light, but to be the light of the world. Now he praises great risk-taking with their treasure, and condemns as wicked simply holding onto it.

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In our denomination’s Book of Order, the opening chapter is titled, “The Mission of the Church.” There it says this. “The Church is the body of Christ. Christ gives to the Church all the gifts necessary to be his body. The Church strives to demonstrate these gifts in its life as a community in the world: The Church is to be a community of faith, entrusting itself to God alone, even at the risk of losing its life.”

That’s a pretty big risk. But despite such theological statements by our denomination, despite Jesus’ teachings about denying ourselves and being willing to lose our lives for his sake, most congregations are pretty big on self-preservation. They rarely try new ministries unless they are quite sure they will work. They don’t take on a big new mission unless they know exactly where the money is coming from. And they are some of the most prudent, cautious, conservative organizations you can find when they set budgets for the coming year.

I understand. I was raised in a very frugal family. I don’t like to borrow money, and we pay off our credit cards in full every month. But in the next to the last parable Jesus tells as he gives his disciples, gives the Church, final instructions in how to live once he is gone, Jesus praises boldness and risk for his sake while condemning caution and prudence.

What is that asking of us as people of faith, as a congregation? Could it be that the only way to truly experience the fullness of faith, to discover spiritual abundance, to enter into the joy of our Master, to be the church Jesus is calling us to be, is to risk doing what we could never do without God’s help?