"Ways & Means" - Sermon from November 13, 2011
Listen to audio of the sermon from the worship service on Sunday, November 13, 2011 titled "Ways & Means" by Rev. Dr. Larry Bethune.
The Twenty Second Sunday after PentecostNovember 13, 2011“Ways and Means”Psalm 123Judges 4:1-71 Thessalonians 5:1-11Matthew 25:14-30
“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” – Psalm 19:14Interesting picture of God this parable gives us today: the generous and absentee landlord. The old word for it is “Providence.” God gives us everything we need and more. We are born gifted with life itself, a beautiful creation, resources, opportunities, connections…. As Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “All that we own we owe!”It all comes from God and belongs to God. Ever seen a hearse pulling a U-Haul? We’re all just passing through. What we have belongs to God and is entrusted to us for a little while to do some good for God. The old word for God’s trust and our responsibility is “Stewardship.”Not everybody is entrusted with the same amount, but they all get more than they need. The biblical ta,lanta represents 15 years wages, so even the servant who gets one talent has enough to do something good. And the servant with five has more than a person could earn in a lifetime.The God pictured by this parable entrusts the wealth and then goes away. God isn’t in our face about it all the time, but leaves the choices to us. What will you do with what God has entrusted to you? But notice, this is not a God who has abandoned the servants. The day of accountability hangs over this parable from the beginning, what R.G. Lee called “Payday Someday.” We know it’s coming for all of us, yet still somehow it catches us by surprise. The old fashioned word for this is “Judgment.”The Judgment in this story is not necessarily something to dread. In fact, it’s a day of great joy for two of the servants. The story makes a point of emphasizing it’s not the amount they start with, but what they do with what they have that matters to the Lord. The script for the first two is exactly the same: “The one who had received the five (or two) talents came forward, bringing five (or two) more talents, saying, ‘Master, you handed over to me five (or two) talents; see, I have made five (or two) more talents’” (Matt 24:20, 22). And they get the same reward: “His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master’” (Matt 24:21,23).Now if you know anything about trading, you know how remarkable it is to double your investment. Any accountant will tell you, you have to risk the principle. High gain means high risk of losing it all. Low risk means low gain. To double their trust, those first two servants have put themselves out there and do the work! Their Lord is impressed, trusts them with more, but also welcomes them into closest friendship.Judgment doesn’t go so well for the third servant. To be sure, he starts with less – only fifteen years of wages. But what does he do? He buries it! And here’s his excuse when he’s called to account: “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 talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours” (Matt 25:24-25).He’s not a bad person, just a timid one. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said the sin of respectable people is running from responsibility. He takes no chances. He thinks he’s been prudent. He proudly returns every penny he was given. And, as John Buchanan notes, “he is treated as harshly as anyone in the Bible:” His Lord says, “You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents…. As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt 25:26-30). And this is where the point of the parable becomes clear. No human has the power to cast someone into the outer darkness. This is a parable about God and God’s servants and our accounting for what we do with what God entrusts to us.This is not a story of no risk, no gain. No risk means loss, the loss of everything as it turns out. His fear and distrust paralyze him. That’s what fear does. His image of his Lord is nowhere reflected by the other two servants who receive gratefully and risk trusting their Lord to reward. His image of his Lord creates the very outcome he fears. As Mark Douglas reflects, “Perhaps for Matthew, the God we imagine is the God we face.” The opposite of faith is not doubt, but fear.What does this story mean for us on this Stewardship Sunday at UBC? The saints who founded our church struggled financially. My first week at UBC in 1987 I noticed a set of dust covered books on a closet shelf in the church office. They were bound minutes of deacon meetings from years past. I pulled down the volume from 1952, the year I was born and randomly opened it to a meeting in April. I was surprised by how many names I recognized who were still active deacons in the church, which speaks of their commitment. But the topic of discussion that day was how much the church was struggling financially. And every year I’ve been here the budget planning process has felt more like Halloween than Thanksgiving: impending catastrophe as the clouds of doom gather. When I think of it, it’s amazing we are still here.Let me tell you why we are still here. We are here because God is faithful. The God who calls us to our mission provides what we need to accomplish it. If we follow God’s ways, God will provide the means. God has provided through resources we could not have planned or even imagined: a generous endowment from “a little old lady school teacher” as Doren Eskew liked to say; a generous fund given by a young couple whom the Lord had prospered; unexpected income from an oil and gas lease donated to the church years ago.These extra funds God has provided have supplemented our budget in lean years, but they aren’t what has kept us going. The faithful, generous, consistent giving of God’s saints at UBC have kept us going, and without those gifts, we wouldn’t be here. You have kept us going by risking and trusting, by investing your life in what God has given you to do with what God has given you. We are here because you are faithful. “Well done, good and faithful servants!”But it is always our temptation to reduce stewardship to what Washington Irving called “The Almighty Dollar.” Stewardship is more than money. It is taking responsibility for what has been entrusted to us, the resources, yes, but as a part of the larger mission to which generations of saints have given life. It means being faithful to our calling to embody the love of Christ to one another and to every person God sends our way, to create in a fearful and selfish time a place of generous grace celebrating God’s good news. It means giving of our money, yes, but also of our time, energy, attention, abilities, and love in being church with one another. What does it mean for us to be faithful now, to be trusting and risking to serve God?God has provided an answer to our prayers of many years. From the property the saints who went before us provided we will soon have a steady flow of extra income, covered parking as a blessing and extra source of revenue, and over 800 student residents to welcome to the neighborhood. But construction will take two years beginning in January. Not only will we have no parking revenue; we will have to pay for your parking on Sundays and walk a little farther to get to worship! We will have to face a budget deficit for two years, and be tempted to take the path of least resistance and find reasons not to come on Sundays. If we do that, we will be burying our treasure and there won’t be much of a church left to welcome those 800 students when they arrive.Or, we can take responsibility for what God has given us, risk and trust by showing up, reaching out, giving more generously, loving more attentively, renewing our church and growing over the next two years. Because I have seen you rise to the challenge before, when our church was despised and rejected for ministering with the despised and rejected, I believe you will rise to this challenge, too, and “enter into the joy of God.”So let us come to this table of grace today rejoicing with gratitude in the rich heritage God has entrusted to us, and let us consider God’s call to stewardship in faith that God will continue to provide what we need, to do what God calls us to do if we are willing to do it. Amen. Thanks be to God! May we pray?O God, we believe in you. And you must believe in us because you have entrusted us with so much. Help us to live up to your trust. And thank you for everything! In the name of Christ, Amen.
-Rev. Dr. Larry Bethune, Head Pastor