23 Pentecost A p. 28 November 16, 2014
Judges 4:1-7 Psalm
123
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Matthew 25:14-30
How many of you when you have gone
to Reno or Las Vegas and done some gambling come away telling all of your
friends how much money you lost? No, you
tell only about the time you hit the jackpot in the slot machines. And you conveniently omit to tell the truth
about the cumulative total of your losses.
And do you tell everyone about all of the dollars you have spent buying lottery
tickets? Or do you only tell about the time you won $50 dollars from a scratch
off? And what about all of the amazing
stock investments? Do you broadcast your
losses as much as you broadcast your winning stock investments?
We conveniently like to accentuate the positive and broadcast our
winnings and we don't air our losses in public.
And perhaps that is the psychologically healthy, even though it is the practice of a
very selective disclosure.
Our faith life needs to be encompassing; in our faith we need to embrace
all and still live integrated lives in the face of a wide range of uneven and
different events which can happen to us.
And this is where the parables of Jesus help us the most; they are
wisdom parables which encourage us to understand faith as the ability to integrate
everything which happens to us in life and keep us hopeful about life.
We have often been taught by the interpretative traditions of the church
to try to assign certain groups of people to which the judgments in the parable
of Jesus are referring. The Gospels
present Jesus in dialogue with the Jewish religious authorities even as the
Gospel were mainly written during and after the process of the gradual separation
of the Jewish and Christian religious communities from each other. So, the parables are often used as a polemic
against the Jews to imply that "they were wrong about Jesus."
However in the actual time of Jesus when the parables of Jesus would
have been told, such divisions did not yet exist and so it behooves us to
recover the original wisdom of the parables of Jesus as being honestly
descriptive of the conditions of freedom of life and coming to have faith.
Faith involves hope and belief that our lives are still worthwhile, no matter
what happens to us.
The parable of the talents occurs in the middle of Every Member
Canvass Season and how convenient is that?
So we may be tempted to expound upon the terrible life principle of
atrophy, the use it or lose it reality of life.
The truth of life is that when we choose to develop one gift or aspect
of ourselves, some other part of ourselves experiences atrophy through lack of
practice. No one is omni-competent to
everything that needs to be done in life and so one is forced to make choices
about what skills one wants to develop in one's life. The skills that we do not have or develop may
be the ones which cause us distress.
We are tempted to think that the Master in the parable of the talents is
God and God assigns different measures of talents to different people. And God requires that each person doubles
one's talents.
I think it is more intuitive and consistent with other words of Jesus to
understand that the Master of the parable is the freedom of human conditions in
the uneven distribution of the nature and nurture of talents in one's life.
I think that each person has the five talent experience, the two talent
experience but each person also has the one talent experience and the
experience of weeping and gnashing of teeth.
There are some things in life which just come easier to us and we
discover a gift and we have fulfillment in developing a skill and it pays us
with very great reward. And we are
blessed in life if we have found the "five talent" aspect of our
personal development.
We also have the "two talent" aspect of our personal
development. By this I mean that outside
of our five talent investment, we have avocations, hobbies, and other personal
skills which complement our main life vocation. A person is blessed in life to find in
addition to one's main vocation to have enjoyable avocations where one finds the
expression of creativity and joyful rewards.
Further, each of us finds out that one is not superhuman in all manner
of living. We find that we have the
proverbial Achilles' heels; the parts of our selves which are not natural or
fun or easy to develop. We find
ourselves in certain areas of our personality paralyzed and unable to perform
up to preferred levels. We experience
the weeping and gnashing of teeth in the experience of our own mediocrity and
it can be a humbling experience. It
sometimes feels as though we over-compensate in our areas of strength so that
we don't let our areas of weakness bother us too much or we hide those areas of
weakness from others.
The parable of Jesus presents us with an artful understanding of the
human experience of encompassing great talent, moderate talent and mediocre
talent in the experience of each person.
The reason that I view the parable in this way is that I think it would
be a mistake to live this life believing that God as the Master of life is someone who
we would be so afraid of as being so demanding that we cower in fear and not
even try to develop our gifts at all.
And if God is not represented as the Master of life to be feared if we
don't develop our gifts, who is this master of life who is presented in the
parable?
I believe the master of life represented in the parable is the
experience of the conditions of freedom which means that each person has an
uneven distribution of talents and levels of personal development. And in the areas of our strengths and success
we can feel proud and affirmed. But to
be honest to the conditions of freedom in life, a real exacting master, we know
that we can fail because of our fear. We
may have a personal tendency to fail to develop some important skills in life
which frustrates us and makes us feel like life is unfair to us in some regards
in not allowing for the development of ourselves into superhuman species.
So faith and wisdom have to do with recognizing the conditions of
freedom which face us. Let us be wise
about having any pretense about being omni-competent in life. If I can be honest about not being
omni-competent in life, then I will not give up because I experience weakness
in certain areas of personal development; rather I will let my strengths
compensate and carry me, not through denial, but in faith I attempt to weave
together the human experience of having strengths and weaknesses.
Where I am weak, I am complemented and made complete by seeking and
receiving the gift of my brother or sister who is strong in the area that I am
weak. The experience of weeping and
gnashing of teeth is an important experience for us to know if we are going to
gain the ability to have empathy for other people and also have the humility to
ask and receive help when we need it.
This parable of Jesus is also a wisdom parable about the importance of
community. When I am frustrated in the
development of a certain talent, I need the supporting gifts and talents of
others to make me complete within the community. But also when I experience the blessing of my
own talents, I need to be willing to help and lift up and complement with my
strength of gifts the weaknesses of other.
And so I believe that this parable of the talent exposes the mixed
blessing of life in the manifestations of our gifts. We have great gifts or dominant personal
gifts; we have other moderate personal gifts but we also have some areas that
for various reasons remain underdeveloped or weak.
The wisdom for our parish community and families and community at large
is to work for the common good. The
common good consists of learning how to put together pieces of the puzzle of
effective human community by seeking to find the interlocking fit of our gifts
so that the strong and weak get properly matched for a successful community to
complete its mission.
The parable of the talents invites us to the puzzle of the work of finding
complementary human relationship with our community of faith for the common
good. May God grant us wisdom to
discover honesty about the strengths and weaknesses in our gifts and talents. May God give generous hearts to share our
strengths to complement those who are weak..
May God give us humble honesty about our weakness and the vulnerability
to confess that we need each other and we need the experience of the grace of
God to make us to be a community of people who can do much more together as
people who complement each other than we can do as presumed omni-competent Lone
Rangers or those who suffer in silence and loneliness.
Let us pray that God would give us grace and wisdom to be the church as
we need God's grace and we need each other here in this place. Amen. 
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