“So, You're Talented, Eh?”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Text: Matthew 25:14-30
I have a bone to pick. It is this: America's Got Talent, Britain's Got Talent, Britain has the X-Factor, the Americans have the American Idol and Canadians have nothing. When I realized that these programs that I have loved watching, do not find their way into the Canadian mind and Canadian broadcasting, I am upset. We had Idol, Idol is gone. It appears that we don't have any talent because there are no talent shows. It's one thing to have skaters and celebrities and great dancers, pirouetting like none of us could do but to see ordinary people doing extraordinary things, now that catches the imagination. That makes my heart leap with joy, so I want to propose a title for a new show: So, You're Talented, Eh? A good Canadian program, I would think.
I think there is something marvellous about watching the ordinary do extraordinary things. It's only a year ago, is it not, that the world was watching Britain's Got Talent and they saw a woman from Blackburn, West Lothian in Scotland, sing her heart out and win the hearts, souls and minds of so many people. Her name of course is Susan Boyle. There was an ordinary person who had an extraordinary gift and used that gift to bring joy to millions.
When you look at her story it perhaps wasn't as straight forward as one would think, for here was a woman who had talent but was frightened to use it. She had made a CD in 1999 to raise some money for the Catholic parish that she attended along with her mother. She was well known in the area for having a very good voice but after her mother died, her great inspiration, she went into a depression, she locker herself away and her voice as well. It wasn't until members of her parish and her priest convinced her that she had a God-given gift that she should use that she decided to sign up for this great program. What many people don't realize is: she didn't win the competition. A dance troupe actually won, not her. Nevertheless, she won the hearts, she won the minds, she won the souls of those who listened to her magnificent voice. Had she not been inspired by people of faith to use the voice that she had been given, not to bury it, to be oppressed by fear and grief, then the world would have been deprived of the blessing of hearing such a great talent. I'm sure it will only stay on the radar for a while and her name will recess into the annals of history but still for a moment one talent shone.
Now, there are some who think that today's passage from the gospel of Matthew was Jesus' way of saying exactly the same thing. You have to use a gift or you lose it. You can't bury your light you have to let it shine. His parable was actually nothing more than stating what common wisdom would often say. The parable of Jesus goes beyond the story of the Susan Boyles of the world, goes beyond the simple aphorism: Use it or lose it. Jesus is going much, much deeper. I would suggest to you that it goes deeper because it has to be understood within the context of his whole ministry. You can't just pluck out a word or a phrase or a story that is separate from everything else going on. Most scholars agree now that Jesus told this very parable more than once. Luke recounts it one way, where a king leaves his money to his servants. Matthew has a master leaving money to slaves. There is another ancient story in another text that is not in the Bible, which recounts Jesus saying something very similar. But I think most scholars agree that Jesus most probably told parables more than once. He was in different settings, had different audiences and the writers themselves would have picked up on those particular nuances from the sources they had.
Why would he tell them more than once? Why is this parable so important? Why is the parable of the talents so disturbing to many and frightening to read near the end? What is it about this great parable that is so wonderful and so mysterious? And why on Thanksgiving would I draw on something like this? The answer is that the parable is about faithfulness. The faithfulness that comes from using a talent that you have been given for the cause of God, and by talent, we don't just mean currency, although in this particular story the talent was that. We don't mean something superficial like the ability to sing or write or tell jokes or speak in public. We are talking about anything that God has given you that you must use for the sake of the kingdom. All of this results in the need for faithfulness.
There are two components to this. In this story there is both the word of judgement and the word of joy. We would not be faithful to the parable if we didn't deal with the word of judgement, so I am going to get that out of the way, so when you go home today you will with the word of joy in your heart, not the word of judgement. Listen to the word of judgement anyway. Jesus is abundantly clear. There are three persons who have talents: one who has five and uses them and makes more, one who has two, used them and makes more, and one who has one and buries it and it stagnates. Jesus is critical of the last one and I think that most scholars agree now that Jesus was addressing here, along with all the other parables around it in Matthew, the religious leaders of his day, leaders who had this great gift, this great promise, this great covenant but buried it in the ground. They did it because they want to keep Yahweh, God, to themselves. They want to worship God in their own way, within their own power, within their own limitation, within their own knowledge and within their own ecclesial base. They do not want to share God with anyone. They want to ensure they protect God and their unique relationship with him.
It goes even further. They then emphasize the laws and their minute details, knowing that ordinary people cannot live up to those statutes, cannot live up to the demands of that law. They, the religious leaders can, and so they are the faithful and they have God and are blessed. They have the talent and they are keeping it to themselves. They are also frightened of the Romans who are controlling Jerusalem. They are frightened that they might offend, that if the word of God goes too far, if there is too great an explosion of the movement of the Spirit, then in fact, they will be threatened by the power of Rome. Therefore to appease Rome, let us keep God neatly buried where others can't see him and we can keep him to ourselves.
Jesus saw that this one talent, buried, was a travesty. It was a travesty because it was a great talent. Jesus is no way, and I want to be clear, is turning his back on his Jewish and Hebrew roots. He is not turning his back on the Old Testament. He is not walking away from the covenant. On the contrary, Jesus is concerned that the great legacy of the covenant with Abraham, on Sinai, that the great message of the prophets, that the magnificent wisdom literature of Psalms and Proverbs and Solomon could be heard and shared and nurtured. He wanted to draw people into this covenant. He wanted the Gentile world, he wanted the whole world to know that through what he was doing the world might know and love the Lord, God. That Zion might be great, that Jerusalem may be splendid, that Yahweh might be glorified. But what he saw around him was the burying of that talent, the keeping of that talent to itself and the unwillingness to share it, Jesus condemns it.
There is also a sense here in Matthew's Gospel that it's going beyond the confines of the people to whom Jesus spoke. There is a word here for the church. There is a word for the early church, for the first who would read this parable as penned by Matthew or Luke. It is a word of warning that in the midst of possible persecution, in the midst of tyranny and darkness, the destruction of Jerusalem that people need to keep their faith. They should not bury the gospel and the good news of what he was about to do. They should not keep it to themselves as if they are the only people who matter. Is there not, sometimes, a great temptation for people of faith to do exactly that? Is there not a temptation for people to be comfortable in their religion, to be comfortable in the community that they belong to, to see it as a place that nourishes them, but wanting to maintain it just for themselves? Is that not part of the cultural captivity of Western Christianity? That we have so hoarded it and buried it in the ground and been embarrassed by it and frightened to share it that it is withered and dying?
I think one of the great challenges of our day is to understand the parable of the talent and for it to be a warning, a reminder, that if you've got something good, something wonderful, something marvellous from God, don't bury it, don't hide it, invest it, share it magnanimously give it away. That's the word of warning, that's the word of judgement.
This is Thanksgiving. There is more to this parable. There is a joyful component to this parable that is truly inspiring. Jesus said that you may enter into the joy of the master. He said that to the one who had five talents and uses them, to the one who had two talents and manages to make two more, they will enter into the joy of the master. What is the joy of the master? What is this happiness? What is this blessedness of which Jesus speaks all the way through the Gospel of Matthew? It is the joy of faithfulness. “It is not,” said Jesus in implying this in this text, “that wealth will bring you joy.” Or affluence will bring you joy, or power will bring you joy, or glory will bring you joy, or success will bring you joy. Faithfulness brings you joy.
What does this faithfulness look like? What do we mean when we say, “Faithfulness?” I think there are three components that come out of this marvellous parable. The first of these is courage. The one who invested the five talents had the most to lose but they invested them and made more, the one who had two talents had a lot to lose but invested them and made two more. We are told that the one who had one talent and buried it was frightened. They did not have the courage to move out of the confines of what they knew.
This was manifested in the power of this parable to me to me some years ago only over the last few weeks because I have been asked to work on the planning of a conference in 2012, which will be one of the world's gathering of the study of missions at a college at the University of Toronto. And so, I have been reading and rethinking some of the missions I have heard about or known and there is one particular person who came to my mind in this: Dr. Motlana was a boy born in the Eastern Cape in South Africa. He was born the child of a herdsman. His mother and father and siblings would move with the cattle all over this poor area of Southern Africa. He grew up having to follow his father and the cows. One day his father found out that a Catholic school for orphans was offering free education to non whites. He went to the school and handed over his son saying, “Consider this child now without parents. Would you please educate my child for me?”
Young Motlana went and studied in this Catholic school. He did not see his parents or travel with them. This boy grew and finally graduated from school. At the end of the graduation he was encouraged to go to university but said, “No, I won't go to university. I refuse to go. I know that if I go to university it will be a complete waste of my time because there will be no good jobs available to me when I graduate. I will go back to being a labourer or an artisan or back to the herds. They are the only opportunities I have.” So he refused to go… until his Catholic priest took him to one side and read to him a parable by Jesus: “There was a master who was going away and he left some talents…” Then he said, “Now, here is the challenge for you, because if you do not go on to get a university education at Fort Hare University you will never have a hope of being able to better yourself or serve God. If you stop now and do not invest what you have been given in the future then you will die on the vine as sure as we are here. But, if you go, you never know what God can do with you.”
Motlana read this great parable. He went to Fort Hare, graduated with honours, got a scholarship to a British university, studied medicine and became an eminent doctor. He went back to Lusaka in Zambia. He went to Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape and worked in the HIV clinics. He brought healing to hundreds and thousands of his people because he had the courage to do what providence seemed to say no to, all because of the parable of the talent. He knew that faithfulness was the only true response to the gifts of God and used it.
The parable is also about contentment, it's about recognizing that what you have is a wonderful thing. I suppose the person with one talent buried it and you might say that that person was content with their talent. Oh no they weren't, they were frightened of it. The ones who had many used them. The one who had one didn't use it at all. No, those that had the five were content with their talents but they wanted more to happen because of it. They realized that in their contentment these talents were worth losing. They risked everything because they were content. Who knows if they had lost five instead of gaining five, or lost two instead of gaining two? We can only speculate how they would have felt but they probably would have been content.
Nobody displayed that more in the last century then Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In his wonderful prison chronicles he wrote these incredibly inspiring words. These words change the whole way you look at life.
Don't be afraid of misfortune and do not yearn for false happiness. It is, after all, all the same. The bitter doesn't last forever and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if hunger and thirst don't claw at your sides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms work, if both eyes can see and if both ears can hear then who should you envy and why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart and prize above all else in the world those who love you and wish you well.
Faithfulness - for what are you thankful today? Do you need much or have you got much? Do you desire more or have you got an abundance? And, if you have, contentment with your talent is a blessing.
The final thing this talent does is show you that you have to have commitment. The one who had one and buried it - no commitment. The one who had five and investment them - commitment. Going beyond the boundaries of what you have. Giving and risking beyond the boundaries of what you have, that is faithfulness.
In my missions reading I came upon the name of a man called Dr. Hugh McKean, who runs a hospital in Chiang Mai, Thailand. It was created by his father in the early part of the 20th century to help lepers and eliminate leprosy. It is an amazing story. You can go onto the Web and type in “Hugh McKean” and it's all there for you to see. But there is a story about him that is not on the Web, it is recounted in things that he has written. It is a story of how in Chiang Mai he went to a church that had 400 people in it who were very poor. Their combined income was 20 cents a week. These people decided, all 400 of them, to tithe: to give one-tenth of their income to the church. They paid for a pastor. They paid for two missionaries to go to other parts of Thailand. They supported in-home ministries. They gave to people who had nothing. They provided for what they considered the poor people in their community. Four hundred tithed and they did marvellous things. All 400 people were lepers themselves.
Dr. McKean said, “These are not people who buried their talents in the ground. They are people who use their talents and God gave multiple blessings because of it.” Faithfulness, that's what Jesus was getting at, faithfulness. To take the Gospel that you've been given and live it and use it and share it and he will take care of the interest. I ask you, “So, You're Talented, Eh?” Amen.