24th Sunday after Pentecost
November 19, 2017
Matthew 25:14-30
The middle hymn we just sang, “A Charge to Keep I Have,”
is one that holds special significance for me because of my mom. My mom is a
pediatric nurse practitioner and, a few years ago, won an award for excellence
in nursing. In her speech, she quoted from this hymn. “A charge to keep I have,
a God to glorify… To serve the present age, my calling to fulfill…” You see,
for my mom, being a nurse has always been about fulfilling God’s call. She has
always felt very clearly called to be a nurse. She has certain gifts for it and
she was called to it. When I was in college, we had this ongoing conversation,
because while I was an elementary education major, I never felt called to be a
teacher. Teaching is a gift, and so I shared it. Another gift is an ability to
connect fairly easily with most children, and so I went into elementary education. God gives us gifts
to share, and so I was sharing. It was as simple as that for me. But later, I
did feel called to serve in Nicaragua, and y’all have heard at least part of my
call story to become a pastor. Teaching was my idea; being a pastor was not.
The Gospel we read this morning, often called the parable
of the talents, or the eight bags of gold, is the third out of four stories
Jesus tells back to back in this part of Matthew. For Jesus, it’s Tuesday,
during what we now call Holy Week. It’s after the triumphal entry of Palm
Sunday and two days before the last supper and the events of Holy Thursday, or
Maundy Thursday. During that time, Jesus tells the disciples four stories about
what the kingdom of heaven is going to be like at the end of time. The first
story is a comparison of a faithful servant whom the master finds still at work
upon returning home versus a wicked servant who gives up watching for his
master’s return and stars beating his fellow servants and getting drunk. Lovely
story, huh? The second one is the one we read last week about the ten
bridesmaids who were waiting for the groom. Five of them had enough oil to light
their lamps until the groom came and five of them ran out. So we have stories
of be prepared and don’t give up waiting and watching. Today’s story is about a
master who goes on a long trip and entrusts significant amounts of money to
three of his servants. Each bag of gold was worth around 15 or 20 years of
earnings as a day laborer.[1]
One servant gets five of these bags, so around 100 years of wages; the second
servant gets two bags, which amounts to about a lifetime of earnings; the third
servant gets one bag. The first two servants use what they’ve been given. They
invest their gifts and get double back. The third servant buries it in the
ground. Doesn’t use it. Doesn’t invest it. Doesn’t even seem to want to think
about it. After a long time, the master comes back and wants to hear accounts of
what happened while he was gone. The first two servants are rewarded for being
faithful with their gifts; the third one is punished for being so paralyzed by
fear that he didn’t use his gift at all. He played it safe.
Do
you see where I’m going here? We have all been given gifts. Some a lot, some a
little, the amount doesn’t matter. The servant with two bags of gold did just
as well as the guy with five bags. First,
you’ve got to know what you’ve been given. What are the gifts God has given
to you? If you don’t know, then let’s do a spiritual gifts inventory or just
have a conversation. As I asked the children earlier, what are you good at?
What do you like to do? What are you passionate about? What do you get
complimented on for doing well? Is there something that overlaps all those
categories? Or a couple of them? What are the gifts God has given to you? What
are your talents? What are your passions? If you’re completely stuck on this
question, give me a call this week. Before you can do anything with the bag the
Master gave you, you need to know what’s in it.
Once
you know what you have, then you can move on to discernment. This is praying and asking God and listening for an
answer as to what to do with those gifts. A gift of teaching doesn’t always
mean you’re called to be a schoolteacher. What is God calling you to do with
what he’s given you? And a related question, what is God calling you to do today? Because what God has called you
to in the past may not be what he’s calling you to do today. Some gifts, some
callings are only seasonal. My mom’s nursing vocation was for a lifetime. My
call to Nicaragua was only for one year. Some gifts change as well. We can’t do
everything we used to be able to do, but there are things we can do now that we
couldn’t before. So, what are your gifts? What is God calling you to do with
them? There are a million different answers to that question, but I guarantee
you that “bury them and ignore them” isn’t on the list.
So, the third thing is follow-through. Do what God is calling you to do. Use
your gifts that God has given you. Don’t bury them. Don’t ignore them. Use
them. Invest them. It may take some figuring out, some trial and error
experimenting, and that’s okay. God isn’t looking for a 200% return like the
first two servants. He’s looking for faithfulness
like the first two servants. God expects us to use what we’ve been given. He’s looking for us to not be
overwhelmed and paralyzed by fear. God’s looking for us to resist fear, the fear that we are too small to make a difference,
the fear that we’ll fail. Resist the temptation to be jealous of what others
have, or even what we used to have.
Don’t let fear or resentment paralyze you into inaction. Don’t bury your gifts.
Use them. In the 2002 sleeper hit movie,
“My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” there’s a scene where Toula is concerned about her
father’s response to her marrying someone who’s not Greek. She tells her mom
and her mom basically says, don’t worry about your father. “I gave you life so
you could live.” Go, live your life. Now, while Jesus said practically the same
thing in John’s Gospel, “I came that you might have life, and have it
abundantly,”[2] I
can also hear him saying, “I gave you gifts so that you could use them.”
Now, using the gifts God has given us is risky business.
You may get hurt. You may be rejected. You may fail ten times before you find a
better way to use it. Thomas Edison is quoted for having found a thousand ways not to invent a lightbulb before he
figured it out. You see, this parable isn’t as much about using your gifts
wisely as about just plain using them.
Name and move past whatever fear is holding you back and trust God will see you
through it. Failure isn’t the end of the world. Imperfection isn’t the end of
the world. Not being faithful, lack of integrity, choosing to play it safe by
not doing anything, these things are all problems. God calls all of us to
faithfulness, and faithfulness involves trust and risk and the unknown. When
God called Abram back in Genesis, he asked Abram to leave his father and his
home, the only home he’d ever known, and go with Sara to a land God would show
him. God didn’t tell him at the beginning that he was going to Canaan. God
said, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the
land I will show you.”[3]
Not the land I’m showing you now. Not a land that you know. A land I’ll show
you later down the road. We don’t know what the future’s going to be like
exactly. We don’t know what Lisbon Church will look like. But if we’re faithful
now, if we trust God will be with us along the journey, then we know that we
will get there. God is leading us to a future he will show us. Later. Down the
road sometime. We don’t even know what the future of our denomination is going
to look like after the special General Conference called for in February 2019.
But we know that if we keep the faith, which, by the way, means more than just
believing ideas about Jesus but following Jesus and going where he leads and
calls us to follow. If we continue to faithfully answer Jesus’ call to follow
him, then we’ll get there, wherever it is God is leading us. Remember, the
future’s in God’s hands. God is calling us to be faithful, to trust, to take
the risk of investing our gifts. “Faithful living is not static.”[4]
It’s not same ole, same ole. It’s working and investing and experimenting and
learning what works and what doesn’t work.
Sometimes we do get hurt. I mentioned that I usually find
it relatively easy to connect with a child, but that is a gift that’s changed,
and is different from how it used to be. When I left Nicaragua, and left my
students there, and came back to the U.S. and started seminary, for most of
seminary, I didn’t use that gift. And it was weird, because I couldn’t remember
the names of the children at the church where I interned. And I started helping
with Sunday school at the church my husband and I went to in seminary but I
couldn’t remember the names of those children, either. It was like a mental
block. And I didn’t recognize it until near the end of seminary. As a teacher,
I had said goodbye to so many students, where I student taught in St. Louis,
where I did grad work in Philly, the daycare where I worked for two summers in
college, my students in North Carolina and my students in Nicaragua, that it
hurt. And it hurt too much to allow myself to get attached to any more
children, and it was like some automatic defense mechanism that had kicked in,
until I recognized it and named it and decided that in my first appointment, I
was going to make it a point to connect with kids again.
When it comes to church life and gifts and passions from
God, I’m a higher risk taker. If you have a decent, faithful idea that uses
your and our gifts, let’s try it. It may not work. It may only work for a
season, but you know what? It’s using our gifts, and that’s what God wants.
There’s a quote from St. Irenaus from the second century that says, “The glory
of God is man fully alive,” or “a living man.” God wants people who are alive,
not burying their gifts, not ignoring God’s call, not playing it safe all the
time, taking risks for his kingdom. And here’s the last question I’d really
like you to share your thoughts on: What is God calling us to as a church? We
haven’t updated our mission and vision as a church in a few years; it’s time.
It’s something we’re going to work on next year. But it’s not something that
can be done in one hour or one meeting. Discernment takes time. It takes
prayer, which is two-way communication, us talking with God and listening to
what God tells us. What is God calling us to as a church for this season? What
gifts and resources do we already have that will help us get there? This isn’t
so much who we want to become, but
who God wants us to become. What does
God want to do through Lisbon United Methodist Church? What does God want to
happen here? What is God calling us to? And what does that look like? I want to
hear your answers, so think about it, pray about it, and remember, faithfulness
is a lot riskier than giving into fear. Yet, God will see us through. Thanks be
to God.
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