Union Church

November 16, 2008
Matthew 25:14-30

A master is going on a trip and he entrusts money to his slaves, vast sums of money. One receives 30,000 silver coins, another 12,000 and to the third, 6,000 silver coins.

Now 6,000 silver coins amount to about 20 years’ wages of a common labourer, so imagine how great a sum the other two receive.

For any landowner to have this kind of wealth, he has to have exercised questionable business practices, he has to have reaped where he did not sow and gathered where he did not scatter seed. And in fact, this is spelled out in the story.
So, let’s not make the age-old mistake of turning this into an allegory which has God as the landowner.

This parable has been used time and time again for Stewardship Campaigns. Don’t bury you talents. Don’t squirrel your money away. Rather, risk and it might double.

Well, in the face of this year’s stock market roller coaster ride, we might come to different conclusions.
Interesting how context changes things.

Many of us are affected by the stock market fluctuations.
Today, the one who buried his master’s money in a hole might be praised as one who read the signs of the time.
The ones who risked everything in the stock market probably lost a great deal of money and perhaps even lost their positions in the company.
This is what the early listeners of Jesus’ time would have thought also.
Gaining interest was immoral in Jesus’ time.
Hiding the money to protect it from theft and risk was the safe and correct thing to do.

But believe it or not, Jesus wasn’t talking about the stock market. He was talking about the Kingdom of God, God’s New Day.

So, how is this story like the Kingdom of God?
How is it like God’s New Day?

As I said previously, context is everything.
In the story and in God’s New Day, context is everything.
We have to play in the game of life.
But in God’s investment practice, when we invest in God’s New Day there is no down side.
Blessing extended multiplies the grace.
Love shared only creates more love.

In our Christian context, we followers of Jesus must play Jesus’ game of compassion.
That means we must invest the grace we have already been given. We do this by blessing others.
Our faithfulness is to bear fruit by multiplying the blessings of a God invested life.
A God invested life enters into the joy of our God.
A life that refuses to invest misses out on this joy.

So the question is: How are we doing?
What’s happening with our God invested lives?
How much love are we generating and giving away?

Now, I see this parable as a parable about choice. Consciously and unconsciously we make choices all the time about life. But I think we spend more time in the unconscious realm.

Folks, we need to pay attention to our choices.
We need to choose which Master we will serve: The master of money or the master of compassion. The master of success or the master of helping the neighbour. The choices go on and on in the game of life.

So the application for today:

We need to play in the game of life.
How we play makes a real difference.
What Master we choose makes all the difference in the world.
As Christians, we are called to invest ourselves in God’s system which is a system of compassion.
So let’s pay attention.
Let’s see how much love we can give away.

1 Thessalonians 5: 1,2,5,6,8b-11

As I said earlier, we need to play in the game of life.
How we play makes a real difference.
What Master we choose makes all the difference in the world.

As Christians, we are called to invest ourselves in God’s system which is a system of compassion.
In order to invest ourselves in this system, we have to be children of the light, children of the day and leave the darkness behind.

How do we do this?

Paul tells us that we do this by putting on the breastplate of faith and love and for a helmet the hope of salvation.

Faith, hope and love.
We have heard this before. Faith hope and love, and the greatest of these is love.

So we have to believe that our acts of kindness and community, our lifestyle of sharing and caring really make a difference in our world.
We have to believe that what we do keeps the darkness at bay.

A world without our compassion would be a very desperate place.
A world without our concern for those in need would be very bleak indeed.

So the application for today:

Our actions, our practices must be connected to and informed by our tradition which connects us to the wisdom of our way of living, which in turn connects us back to our actions, our practices.
When we do this, we are investing in God’s New Day, we are giving love away and we become a vital and vibrant community of faith.
In this way, when we have this circular flow of energy, memory and Spirit, we can be sure that the darkness of human greed and folly is held back through us.

Faith, hope and love become a powerful protection for the weak and needy of this world.

Faith, hope and love become a powerful protection against the distractions of this world.

Faith, hope and love become a powerful protection against the greed of this world.

Faith, hope and love usher in God’s New Day and makes us children of the light.
So let’s do it now.