Matthew 25:14-30
One of the most interesting facts about each one of us is not what we believe or don't believe about God, but rather what we believe or don't believe about ourselves. One of the most common tendencies among Christians is to be reluctant servants. Most of us believe that if God wants something done, hopefully God will call on someone more able than me, to do it.
No wonder when we consider the parable before us. The Bible declares that Christ has set us free. One element of that freedom is the freedom from fear, and yet a parable like The Talents, particularly if it's about developing and using the resources God has entrusted to us, does more to promote fear than alleviate it. The outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth is to be feared. If the Master's "Well done, good and faithful servant" depends upon the faithful application of the spiritual and/or material resources entrusted to us, then we do indeed have something to fear.
The Parable of the Talents that we hear in today's Gospel is one of our trickier little stories. Trickier because we want to see it as justifying capitalism or some sort of commitment to self-improvement by better using the gifts and talents we are given. John Pilch, an important biblical scholar and author of The Cultural World of Jesus, assures us that the Mediterranean peasants listening to this story would not share the modern concern for capitalism or the culture of self-improvement. The story would, Pilch would say, reinforce their view that people like the master exist in their experience, and are dishonorable, shameless, and rapacious in reaping that which is not theirs to begin with.
Perhaps Pilch suggests that we ought not to jump to the conclusion that the master is demonstrating the behavior of God. Rather the story is illustrative of the kinds of oppressive ownership issues with which people in the world of Jesus struggled every day.
For Matthew's audience of early Christians, this might actually have been descriptive of what was happening in the persecutions of the early church as they touched the lives of church members. So the question is what does it have to say to those of us who are hearing the parable this morning? What might Jesus be saying to us here and now?
It is a strong theme in Matthew, notably in the Sermon on the Mount, that we are not to hide our light under a bushel. A city on a hill cannot be hid. As the old song says, we are to let our light shine, so that others might see our good works and give glory to God. That is exactly what he says in chapter 5 of Matthew's Gospel. To hide our light, to hide the city of God, to to hide the good works God does through us, is to deny others the opportunity to know God through us. So, almost every sermon I have every heard on this parable, ends up talking about sharing your faith, your time, and your money, or your talent in better ways. But I think there is more than self-improvement being solicited here. No amount of sel-improvement will bring us to perfection. You and I are used for God’s purposes in all our imperfection and humanness. So I’d like us to consider this morning another gift we are all given, there is no one who has lived without it - and that is the gift of pain. How is it that we can be good stewards of our pain so that others might glimpse God.
In Frederick Buechner ‘s book The Wizard's Tide. He describes an episode of his childhood which stood for the shadow side of his entire childhood, including the suicide of his father, and what made it so tough.
This is the episode as Buechner describes it. It took place in the 1930's during the Depression when there wasn't much money; an awful lot of drinking was going on in the world and in my family; an unsettled and unsettling time even for a child of ten, which I was. My father had come back from somewhere. He had obviously had too much to drink. My mother did not want him to take the car. She got the keys from him somehow and gave them to me and said, "Don't let you father have these." I had already gone to bed. I took the car keys and I had them in my fist under the pillow. My father came and somehow knew I had the keys and said, "Give them to me. I have got to have them. I have got to go some place." I didn't know what to say, what to be or how to react. I was frightened, sad and all the rest of it. I lay there and listened to him, pleading really, "Give me the keys." I pulled the covers over my head to escape the situation and then finally, went to sleep with his voice in my ears. This was a sad story which stood for a lot of other sadness of those early years.
Frederick Buechner is an author who has had a lot of pain in his life like everybody else. And he has been a good steward of it. I think there are choices as to how to use your pain, I believe the most tempting is to forget it, to hide it, to cover it over, and pretend it never happened. Keeping your pain hidden is the most common way people deal with their secrets, they even hide them from themselves, but you pay a certain price for that because you stop growing in the direction of compassion and wisdom.
Another thing you can do with your pain, of course, is to use it to win sympathy. I guess a sob story is a story you tell hoping that people will sob with you. Sort of an end in itself, a way almost of giving yourself a kind of stature in the eyes of the world as a suffering one. Another way, I suppose, of dealing with your pain is using it as an excuse for failure, if you think of yourself as a failure -- "If only I had gotten the breaks; if only those bad things hadn't happened, who knows where I might have been today."
Another great temptation about pain, I think, is to allow yourself to be embittered and trapped by it. The classic example of that is the tragic character of Miss Haversham in Charles Dickens's wonderful novel, Great Expectations. She was deserted by her bridegroom on her wedding day. He never showed up. She spent the rest of her days sitting in the room where the great reception was to have been, her wedding cake moldering, her dress long since turned to rags, imprisoned in a sadness that she simply never could escape. All of these are options of dealing with pain.
What does it mean to be good stewards of our pain? First perhaps, it is to get in touch with the suffering in your life and keep in touch with it. The sad times, and the hard times of your life, impact your present for many reasons. Often it is in our pain, past and present that we find we are most alive, when we are somehow closest to being most vitally human beings.
Keep in touch with your pain, because it is at those moments where you are most open to the pain of other people -- most open to your own deep places. Keep in touch with those sad times because it is then that you are most aware of your own powerlessness, crushed in a way by what is happening to you, but also most aware of God's power to pull you through it, to be with you in it. Keeping in touch with your pain, I think, means also to be true to who in your depths you have it in you to be – because joy and pain come from the same place.
To begin with the negative part of it first, the one-talent servant represents what I said before, somebody who buried the richest treasure he had, not just pain, but the most alive part of himself, buried it in the ground. He was never able to become who he might have been. I think the outer darkness the Master casts him into is not to be thought of so much as a punishment, as it is to be thought of as the inevitable consequence of what it means to bury your life. If you bury your life, you don't leave your life. You don't meet other people who are alive. You are alone; you are in the dark.
"From him who hath not, it will taken." Those hard words. That if the life is buried, if the pain is somehow covered over and forgotten, instead of growing, you shrink. You become less; you become diminished. The positive side of it, of course, is the other ones, the ones who came back with more than they started out with. As the parable says, they traded with their talents. They traded with their lives -- a wonderful phrase. We were made to be life traders, because I have what you need, which is me, and you have what I need, which is you. That is the joy into which the Master invites his servants.
Pain can become a treasure if we treasure it to the point where it can become compassion and healing, not just for ourselves, but also for other people. If you want to see that sort of thing in operation, the treasuring of pain, the using of pain to the healing of yourself and others, someday attend an open meeting of AA or any of the related groups. That is exactly what happens there, people are sharing their hurts, their experiences and their joys exchanging them for healing.
But most of all the cross of Christ, because out of that greatest pain endured in love and faithfulness, comes the greatest beauty and our greatest hope. Amen.