THE DANGERS OF RISK-FREE November 16, 2008, 33 rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Stewardship Sunday Matthew 25:14-30 Michael L. Lindvall, The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York Theme: To follow Jesus Christ means taking risks. May your word find a place to rest in our hearts, O Lord, and lodged there, may it direct our love, our hope, our passion and the choices we make. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen. The passage that Leah just read with ends on a jarring note, to say the least, especially jarring I suppose to Wall Street financial professionals. It is another of Jesus 39 parables. Like so very many of them, the narrative conceit is about financial or real-estate deals. This one ends with one of the three investment bankers who had been entrusted by their employer with loose cash to invest being cast into outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth because of his investment strategy. Wall Street can be tough, but I mean, outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth? all because the poor guy had a conservative financial strategy, namely a hole in the ground. Of course, in the fall of 2008, he would have been the most brilliant strategist on Wall Street. The story is simple enough. A wealthy man entrusts three of his servants with money to invest. The money is in the form of a Greek coin named the talenta. This talent may have been the most valuable coin in circulation at the time. Each one was worth something like a thousand dollars. Now, you have to remember that the word talent had not yet come to mean what it means to us today. To Jesus hearers, a talent was simply lots of money. Anyway, one guy gets five thousand dollars; another one gets two, and the last of the three just one. The first two invest; they take big risks and they turn a handsome profit. In fact, they double the boss's money. First-century hedge fund managers! The third guy - 1 -
is nervous about the whole thing. He digs a hole in the ground and buries his thou to make absolutely sure he's got it when his hard-nosed boss gets back. The story is so familiar that we are wont to miss its strangeness. We know it so well that we hardly see the surprise, the irony, the reversal imbedded in its ending. The risk-takers are praised, but the cautious, level-headed, judicious servant is shipped off to outer darkness. Jesus the preacher often used the rhetorical techniques of his world. One of the popular teaching methods of first century Jewish rabbis was dramatic hyperbole, the use of extreme and exaggerated images. For instance, they would paint lush word-pictures of wonders of paradise on the one hand and the horrors of whoknows-where on the other. It was later readers who made the mistake of reading this kind of rhetorical drama literally. But as I read this passage over this week, I swallowed hard at the weeping and the gnashing of teeth. I wondered to myself, Who else, besides cautious investors, gets the outer darkness treatment in the Bible? I knew that Jesus used this kind of hyperbolic rhetoric often in Matthew's Gospel. I knew it was discomforting metaphor chosen to drive his point home sharp and hard. So I spent an hour going through the Matthew's Gospel to see who else gets pulled off the stage with a verbal hook like weeping and gnashing of teeth. I was curious to know who this guy who buried his talent would be sitting next to, gnashing his teeth, in the proverbial outer darkness. Would it be sinners in general? No, I discovered: Sinners and outer darkness are never mentioned together. Fornicators, perhaps? They never come up either. Heathens, unbelievers, skeptics? Not a word about them nor outer darkness either. I discovered that it s an odd lot that finds themselves at the sharp end of the sharpest preaching jabs in the Gospel of Matthew. - 2 -
Here s a short list of everybody who gets the outer darkness, weeping and gnashing of teeth treatment: In chapter five of Matthew, it s people who call others cruel names. In chapter ten, it s people who are inhospitable. In chapter 18 it s people who lead children astray. In chapter eighteen, it s people who will not forgive. In chapter twenty-two, it s people who turn down invitations to a party. (I m not making this up!) In chapter twenty-three, it is religious hypocrites who are directed to damnation. Later in chapter twenty-five, it is people who do not practice mercy and compassion. The religious world Jesus lived in had very clear ideas about where to draw the line that divided the good guys from the bad guys. The consensus was that good guys were the ones who obeyed the rules, the guys who observed all the details of the purity codes in their diet, sex lives, and Sabbath-keeping. The good guys said the right prayers at the right time; the good guys observed the proper rituals. The bad guys were simply the ones who didn't: Romans and Greeks of course, pagans and rustics in general, as well as heretical and nonobservant Jews. In his preaching, Jesus draws a line as well, but it's not at all the same line. His line between the good and the bad weaves a strange new course through humanity. On bad guy side, he calls the outwardly righteous, the inveterate rule-keepers white-washed tombs. On the other hand, Jesus good guys are a motley crew that includes rule-breakers with hearts of gold and sinners who know how much they need God. - 3 -
As I said, Jesus used this kind of verbal hyperbole when he wanted to blast out the truth in a way that even the deafest of us could not miss. So in this parable of the talents, he uses hard language to blast out this simple message: to follow him involves taking real risks in life. No way around risk. To be faithful means doing something with the talenta we have been given us instead of hiding em in a hole. And doing something instead of nothing always means taking risks. Doing something instead of nothing always risks criticism; doing something instead of nothing invariably risks the possibility of failure. - 4 - Reinhold Niebuhr was perhaps the greatest American theologian of the last century. He was professor of Christian ethics at Union Seminary here in New York for most of his career. But before his New York years, Niebuhr had been a pastor in Detroit for 13 years. Like any preacher, Niebuhr knew a good tale when he heard one. In a sermon, he once told this story about risk. It s the story about a young boy, a flatlander farm kid who had always dreamed of going to sea. He dreamed of being a deck hand on one of the tall sailing ships of the last century. After years of planning, he slipped away from the farm one night, made his way to the nearest port, and signed on a great sailing ship as a deck-hand. It was just as he had dreamt it until the third day at sea. The captain ordered him up the main-mast to the assume watch in the crow's nest near the top. The boy climbed half-way up the towering spar and froze afraid to risk the rest of the climb, afraid of the taunts of the sailors on the deck below if he climbed down. Now, rather oddly, Niebuhr ended the story there, just ended it with the kid neither up nor down. Of course the boy didn't stay there, half-way up the mast. He either went up to the crow's nest or slithered back down to the deck. We as a congregation, a city, and a nation are at a place not unlike that. The place we find ourselves in is about as scary as mast-climbing. We are in the throes of one of the most troubling financial storms in 70 years. Some of you have lost jobs, others fear for your jobs. Many have lost huge amounts of money. Bonuses are a dark mystery. In our church, this year s stewardship campaign will obviously be a sharp challenge.
The word to us in this predicament is Jesus word in the Parable of the Talents: we are people of faith, and because we are a community of faith, we dare to take risks. We dare to risk not simply because risk is unavoidable in life. We also dare to risk because we know that we are not alone at this painful intersection. We trust that the God who calls us to risk is with us every scary inch of the way to the top of the mast. I remember a particular Session meeting at my previous church more than ten years ago. The Session of the church had just made a risky decision to undertake a major capital drive. This was during another difficult financial climate, difficult at least in Michigan. I remember leaving the Session meeting that night worried, my risk-adverse synapses firing in my over-cautious brain. I got in my car, tired and a bit anxious, and drove out of the parking lot. I was distracted, my head crammed with an army of little worries. As I turned onto the street, I saw a light green Jeep Grand Cherokee parked alone on the other side. It had one of those vanity license plates you can get by paying extra. It was dark, but the street was illuminated by a streetlight. I couldn't but smile and laugh to myself as I read that vanity plate: five letters: T - R - U - S - T: Trust. That was the word then and that s the word now: TRUST. As I noted last week, the Joint Finance Committee will soon be presenting the 2009 Brick Church budget to our Session for approval. That budget does two things you need to know about. First, overall it s a little smaller than this year s budget. This decrease is possible largely because of savings we ve realized in energy conservation, a reworked pension plan, and some belt-tightening on the part of nearly every church committee. The second thing the 2009 budget does is this. It actually increases benevolences. It increases our commitments to all our mission partners who work with people in our City who are even more vulnerable than most of us. It s a modest increase, a small risk perhaps, but it s enough to make a difference. - 5 -
This is the kind of risk that I would challenge each of us to take as members of Brick Church. Brick is tightening belts at home just a bit, but at the same time trying to do a little more for others. This would be a risk for many of us, I am sure. But here s the truth of the parable for the day: just as investing money risks and all is a better strategy in the long run than a hole in the ground, taking a risk for your church, taking a risk for the needy in our City, is a better strategy in the long run than a hole in the ground. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. - 6 -