Sermon from April 17, 2005

To the best read people of His day Jesus said, “Have you never read the Bible? Six times in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus raised that embarrassing possibility (Matthew 12:3, 5; 19:4; 21:16, 42; 22:31). It stands as a reminder to us that the Bible gathers more dust than any other bestseller. Esteem for scripture is no substitute for knowing scripture.

I’d like to propose to you that there is a scripture with which we are quite familiar, so familiar in fact that we may be losing the ability to hear its shattering message. I’d like to reread that scripture with you today and offer a way of recovering our ability to hear it.

It is another of Jesus’ parables. That means that a child can understand the story (and remember it), and wise ones will struggle to exhaust its meaning for human experience. We find the parable in Matthew 25:14-30. Please join me there.

The Parable of the Talents
Most people label it “The Parable of the Talents.” The first five verses set the stage. “Again, it (the kingdom of heaven) will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his property to them. To one he gave five talents of money, to another two talents, and to another one talent, each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey.

The man who had received the five talents went at once and put his money to work and gained five more. So also, the one with the two talents gained two more. But the man who had received the one talent went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master's money.

A talent was a measure of money. It is virtually impossible to convert a talent into current dollar values, and that doesn’t matter. The story makes sense without that knowledge. It’s what the people did with their gift that mattered, as you can see from verses 19ff.

“After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them. The man who had received the five talents brought the other five. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with five talents. See, I have gained five more.’

“His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness!’

It’s the same with the second person. “The man with the two talents also came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with two talents; see, I have gained two more.’

“His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness!’

The man who had received the least had the most problems. “Then the man who had received the one talent came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.’

“His master replied, 'You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest. Take the talent from him and give it to the one who has the ten talents.’”

Verse 29 gives the punch line. “‘For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.’”

The Meaning of the Parable
“The point is simply that different amounts of money were entrusted to the three servants, and that the two who received the larger sums used them in profitable transactions and so doubled their value, while the man who received the smallest sum was so afraid of losing it that he buried it in the ground, where he knew that at least it would be out of the range of burglars and not subject to the hazards of a fluctuating money market” (Tasker, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 235).

The “master” in the parable refers to Jesus, and this parable, like the other two in chapter 25, instructs followers of Jesus on how to be ready for His Second Coming at the end of the age.

But it’s a parable about money, and that won’t do, will it? That’s why the fine English commentator, R. V. G. Tasker, says the parable is actually talking about how Christians use the gifts of the Spirit (ibid, 236). The parable does apply to how we use the gifts of the Spirit, but the passage does not say anything about the Holy Spirit.

The Anchor Bible commentary says it refers to “the ministry of Jesus as the means by which God called Israel to account” (Albright & Mann, Matthew, 305). It is possible that Jesus used this parable as a challenge to His unsympathetic Jewish acquaintances about their divine calling, but the New Testament uses the parable to speak to Christians.

Alfred Plummer is closer to the mark, when he says that the “parable teaches that (the servant of Christ) ... must be prompt, active, and efficient in promoting the interests of his Master” (The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 346). In the same vein, the German scholar, Jeremias, said that the parable “was intended to stir up the disciples to ‘the most earnest fulfillment of their duty toward God’” (The Parables of Jesus, 17).

Now, Plummer is not specific about the interests of the Master we are to promote, nor does Jeremias give specific duties toward God we are to fulfill. No doubt there are many interests and many duties. But this is a parable about money. Does the parable possibly tell us duties toward God we are to fulfill when it comes to money? I think it does, and the implications are stunning.

Possibilities and Objections
In the parable we don’t know how long the man who entrusted his property to the three servants was away from home. Verse 19 only says that it was for a long time. Now, let me ask you a question. If the man who buried his talent had had $5000 and had put it into an interest-bearing account at today’s CD rates, how long would it have taken for him to double his money? A very long time!

And yet the first two men doubled their money. How do people double their money in much less time than is possible with interest-bearing bank deposits? They do it by sound investing of one sort or the other, particularly in a business venture with wide profit margins. What if one of our duties toward God is to invest money profitably?

This is a sensitive topic. After all, the proper name for investing profitably in a business venture with wide profit margins is capitalism or a free market economy. There is a powerful hostility in many academic and religious circles that calls such economic activity immoral.

Max Weber, the author of The Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism, said that capitalists are “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart” (quoted in First Things, “Max Weber Goes Global," Michael Novak, 26). Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute says that, when he was at Harvard, he “was instructed by Paul Tillich . . . that a Christian theologian must be a socialist. It went without saying that capitalism is . . . vulgar and ethically corrupt” (The Universal Hunger for Liberty, 54). Joerg Rieger of SMU’s Perkins School of Theology describes capitalism “as though it were a disease expanding ‘into the farthest regions of the globe and into the most private realms of our lives’” (ibid, 64).

If you’re in business, or if you invest the stock market, you might want to know if that is what your son or daughter is learning at college. It is an attack on the integrity of what you do every working day of your life.

Michael Novak in his book, The Universal Hunger for Liberty, expresses my sentiments exactly. “Those of you . . . who are called to vocations in business have a great chance to swell the numbers of people around the world now exiting from poverty, by means of the creative economic enterprises that will spring from your own imagination, discipline, sweat intelligence, and hard work” (ibid, 70).

Communism failed to elevate populations out of poverty or stimulate them to be creative. Liberation Theology was highly touted among Latin American intelligentsia and largely ignored by the masses. It has been a free market economy that has elevated tens of millions of people worldwide out of poverty and released their creative approach to economic issues.

If the two guys in Jesus’ parables were capitalists, they wouldn’t have hoarded their handsome profits; they would have used them to create jobs and improve other people’s lot in life. We don’t usually think of generating wealth as an act of Christian love, but when you elevate people from poverty, cure their diseases, provide clean drinking water, and enable them to own private property, it feels like the results of love.

I have said all this, because I wanted you to know that I don’t agree with those who are hostile to business in a free market economy. Your participation in management, research and development, manufacturing, sales, and support is an economic vocation from God to be carried out with thanksgiving, discipline, and profitability.

I have also said all this, because I wanted you to have a context for what I say next. Capitalism has a dark side. I want to focus on one part of that dark side that is relevant to my calling as a pastor and to my purpose in this sermon.

Secular, capitalistic culture is tempted to define human beings as nothing but consumers and freedom as only the freedom to buy. At street level this philosophy of human nature expresses itself in the slogans, “Shop ‘til you drop,” and “He who has the most toys in the end wins.”

Advertising, brilliantly researched and memorably presented, is the major evangelist for this philosophy. Malls of every kind stand ready to satisfy the yearnings fed by the ads. Creatively and insistently, the subliminal message goes out: the material takes priority over the spiritual.

Above this chorus of consumerism the Church hears the voice of Christ saying, “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.” My task is to hold before us a different vision of what it means to be human and a different vision of what it means to be free. Can we live in this commercial society and give priority to the spiritual over the material?

That means, as the Bible says (1 Cor. 7:30-31), that with renewed minds we buy something, as if it were not ours to keep, and that we use the things of this world, as if not engrossed in them. That means we remember that our pursuit of money and things can wither our souls. Jesus said, “The worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth, and the desires for other things come in and choke the word of God” (Mark 4:19).

Giving the spiritual priority over the material means that giving ourselves and our resources away to serve our neighbor matters more than enriching ourselves.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
Giving to this church and its ministries is a powerful way to demonstrate the priority of the spiritual, and a powerful way to serve our neighbors. Our stock in trade here is the invisible. What matters to us is the quivering needle inside the mysterious compass of every person, seeking its true north. All we do here is to build an apparatus that encourages people to find it. We do it for everyone who comes our way.

I brought along a video that will illustrated part of that apparatus, namely, small groups. As you watch it, be alert to that quivering needle in each person.

Since we married, Carole and I have given 10-12% of our pre-tax income to our local church. I don’t know where I learned to do that. As the years have gone by, we do it, because we can see the results in so many lives that are impacted by the love of Christ.

In addition, we have given something every year to Campus Crusade for Christ, YFC, Young Life, Dallas Seminary, Compassion International, and others. Along the way, one or more of our children was in a private Christian school for 20 years. All three finished college, one of them finished a Master’s degree, and none of them entered the work force with a college debt. It’s been hard to outgive God.

But I’m preaching to the choir. BVBC is a generous congregation. Year after year, you respond to special projects. You gave after September 11. You gave to relieve Hurricane victims in Haiti. You gave to help tsunami victims around the Indian Ocean literally. Year after year, you support this ministry.

If the spiritual is a priority for you, and if you believe in what God is doing here, then giving yourself and your resources away will make sense. Many of you already do that week in and week our, or month in and month out. If it is a new idea to you, and if you are beginning to catch the vision of giving priority of the spiritual over the material, become a regular supporter of BVBC.

God has made BVBC a blue chip ministry. The spiritual profit margins here are wide. I would hate to see you, in effect, bury your talent, when you could have so much more. The Master of this place expects better. Don’t disappoint Him.