A Sermon for Proper 28 A
"For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned
his slaves and entrusted his property to them.
Today’s Gospel tells the familiar story of 3 slaves entrusted with significant wealth by their master before he goes on a journey. The servants are not stupid - they know this is some kind of test. So each slave plans how to use the money to please – or at least not displease – the master. When the master returns, we learn that two have succeeded in this task. They actively used the money entrusted to them to make more money for the master, who is pleased with them and rewards them. But the one who carefully kept the master’s money safe is deemed to have failed miserably. He has displeased his master and is punished.
Yet curiously, it is this third slave – the one who fails the test -- who helps us know why the master praises the first two, while condemning him. When the master asks him why he hid the money entrusted to him, the third servant’s answer gives us a window into the master’s character: Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed. This master is a hard-driving man who seeks to make the most of any opportunities that come his way – sometimes, the servant hints, in unscrupulous ways. He probably would have done very well on Wall Street until about 6 months ago. Such a master, intent on making the most he can, engaging life with its risks and opportunities, is impatient with the slave who comes at life cautiously and who hides the master’s money, fearing that if it should be lost, he will face the master’s wrath. Yet his very caution is what gets the master mad at him.
By contrast, the master is pleased with the first two slaves – for they acted in the same way the master himself acts. They took the opportunity he had given them and ran with it. They traded, no doubt taking risks in the process, in order to make the most of the money he had put in their care. These two slaves, like the third, knew the kind of master they served. But unlike the third, they used the master as the model for their own behavior. They got engaged with the opportunities life gave them, took some risks and reaped rewards. They earned their master’s praise and trust.
What are we to make of this story for our own lives? Well, given what high-risk behavior has done to financial markets recently, I’m not proposing this story as a guide to investment strategy. But it does tell us something important about our life with God. If we want to please God with how we live our lives then we should do what the first two slaves did -- we should take a cue for our behavior from that of our master. If we want to please our God, we should seek to live in the ways God lives. Our God wants us to be servants who have learned from and gotten excited by the master’s way of doing life and who are eager to act in the same ways ourselves.
But if we are to live with God as our model, its important to have some sense of who our God is; of how our master comes at life and here we have to read today’s parable with some care. Often when reading Gospel parables, we assume that a master or king is a stand-in for God – but that is often not the case, and is not so today. The point of Jesus’ story is that servants should act like their masters – not that God is a hard-driving, opportunistic capitalist with a mean streak.
Still, there is one feature of the master’s character that does connect with what the rest of Scripture tells us about our God. The master in the story doesn’t hang back from life, frightened or cautious like the third slave. Instead, he gets involved with life, creating the most he can out of whatever he has to work with.
Surely, this is also true of our God who, for starters, made the whole wild and wonderful world teeming with life and energy -- and once it got going, could never walk away from it. The God who called Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob, Rachel and Leah to birth a people to be God’s own; the God who called Moses, fought with Pharaoh and led Israel to freedom through the sea in the dark of night; the God who made the shepherd David a king; the God of the prophets who cried out for justice and faithfulness to David’s heirs; the God who finally sent the chosen people to exile when justice could not be found and then brought them home again to rebuild their community; the God who finally risked everything on this world; enduring human birth; sharing human life; suffering human death in order to save sinful humanity and bring the kingdom of justice and peace to a broken world -- this is not a God who sits back, safe and secure, making only the most prudent investments in a topsy-turvy world. No. Our God gives all because God wants all – the best possible return on the investment of creation; the making whole of all that God has made. Our God is active, engaged, caring, committed, involved and willing to risk for what really matters.
How then are we live to live as servants of this God, modeling our way of life upon God’s? By engaging with life actively, lovingly and openly, not being fearfully self-protective;
by living with openhearted, open-handed involvement in the opportunities God puts before us; by giving everything we have and everything we are for this world our master loves so much. If we live this way, we will not only be following our master, but will receive the richest return on God’s investment in us as well.
It occurred to me just a few days
ago that the trip to
Humanly speaking, I would have been well justified in not going, and I came close to saying “no” more than once. But the persistent invitation of my Liberian host; the needs of a church that has suffered much; a moving magazine article I stumbled across over the summer about other American Episcopalians who had recently visited Africa; an awareness that human contacts across the Anglican Communion are especially important these days; a wife who said to me, “Do what you need to do” – all this and more I eventually came to see as an invitation from God that a good servant would accept.
In the light of today’s Gospel, I’ve now begun to see it as an opportunity not to play it safe, but to let myself be engaged openly and actively in God’s work in ways that might, to a small degree, mirror God’s active, engaged, caring, committed, involvement in the world God made and loves.
In closing, I want to leave you with two sets of questions to reflect and pray on. The first has to do with your life: Where in your life is God inviting you to set aside the cautious prudence that so often gets in the way of faithful Christian living and to engage with God’s world with the sort of passionate, open-hearted, open-handed involvement that we see again and again in our God? What are the God-given opportunities God wants you to take into life’s arena where new riches can be made for your master? Where are you being invited to live with the active, engaged, caring, committed, involved willingness to risk that marked the life of our Lord Jesus Christ?
The second set of questions is exactly the same – except they are for us a congregation:
Where in our life is God inviting us to set aside the cautious prudence that so often gets in the way of faithful Christian living and to engage with God’s world with the sort of passionate, open-hearted, open-handed involvement that we see again and again in our God? What are the God-given opportunities God wants us to take into life’s arena where new riches can be made for your master? Where are we, the people of St. Francis, being invited to live with the active, engaged, caring, committed, involved willingness to risk that marked the life of our Lord Jesus Christ?
Reflect and pray on these questions for yourself and for us as a congregation. Listen for what God may be saying to you and to us. Share what you’re hearing with each other. And please pray for me also, as I travel.
The Rev. Jack Zamboni
November 16, 2008