Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church

Texts: Joshua 1:1-9; Matthew 25:14-30

It’s Pledge Commitment Sunday, and time to preach about stewardship. Of course, the fundamental assumption underlying stewardship is that it is about how we care for that which belongs to someone else. Like when I’ve taken youth on a retreat or a mission trip. I am entrusted with other people’s children, and asked to care for them as well as I would care for my own. When someone is a financial steward, they are expected to manage the money of another as if it were their own. So the central issue in stewardship is that in life, we are caring for God’s stuff as if it were ours. Most of us miss the “as if” and believe that the stuff we are holding in life is actually ours – we can do what we want to with our money, our children, and our stuff – after all, it’s ours. Except that a major claim of the life of faith is that not only is our stuff not our own – we are not our own. We belong to God.

The parable of the talents tells us about this, but it tells it a little more powerfully if we understand ancient Mediterranean culture. This parable has always bothered me, and in working with it and studying it more closely, I’ve come to understand why. The parables of Jesus always have something shocking in them. You know, like in the Good Samaritan, the good guys fail to do good, and the outcast becomes a neighbor. But this parable, the parable of the talents doesn’t seem quite so surprising. Yeah, we think, the rich man is very happy with the slaves who made him more money – makes sense. Maybe he’s a little hard on the guy who plays it safe, but you know: use it or lose it. Interesting, but not shocking. But if we learn more about ancient Palestine, we discover that this parable was indeed shocking to the folks who heard it first.

In our culture, we have long made the assumption that goods are in unlimited supply. Jay Leno speaks out of this assumption in the old commercial for Doritos: Crunch all you want, we’ll make more. We have expected the economy to always expand. We think there’s always more, or at least, the possibility of more. In the world of Jesus, they believed that there was a limited amount of everything: limited wealth, limited love, limited honor, friendship, status. Everything existed and was already distributed. If you got more of something, it came from someone else. So, although there were wealthy people, there was a real moral imperative against trying to build wealth because any gain you achieved had to come at someone else’s expense. If you got richer, someone else was getting poorer. Life was a zero-sum game – nothing more could be added. So in that culture, seeking wealth was anti-social and immoral. Being rich meant that you had the power and the willingness to take away from someone else what was rightfully theirs. Stability was valued, and maintaining the way things were was a morally good thing. God had dealt the hands, righteous people didn’t mess with God’s order.

Now let’s look at this parable again. The man gives money to three slaves – and it is an astonishing amount of money. Five talents was approximately 75 years of wages – for our purposes, equivalent to a couple of million dollars, and even the one who was given only one talent is holding several hundred thousand dollars. And in Palestinian culture, the righteous way to deal with such a large sum of money was to keep it safe – later Jewish law even requires burying it in the ground. That was the prudent, appropriate, good way to handle the situation. So the good guy in this story to the people first hearing the story was the third slave. Yet, when the man returns, he rewards the two who have taken the fabulous amounts of money he has entrusted to them, and made them even larger. This was a shocking story to the hearers of Jesus – I’ve looked at the story from a number of angles, and it only makes sense that the man in the story is God. And the original listeners would have been familiar with the concept that God had entrusted things to them. But God doesn’t just give the slaves was they need to get by, he gave them an extravagant amount of money. That in itself is a shocking concept, and shocking to many of us, too. We think in terms of getting what we’ve earned – being given what we deserve. But Jesus tells us in this story (and several other places in the Gospels) that God is not going to give us what we deserve. He says that God is giving extravagantly to us. The grace of God – God’s reaching out to us – is an astonishing and abundant gift. We don’t have to live out of fear – God is showering blessings on us.

Remember, this is a parable, so we should probably not understand it purely as financial advice (although we in our culture are comfortable with this story on a financial level). What is it that the master has entrusted to our care? What are the assets that we are holding on his behalf? Everything that we are, everything that we have is a gift from God. Our lives, our loves, our abilities all come from God. And what are we doing with these astonishing gifts with which our Creator has blessed us?

This last week I returned from a trip to Colombia – no, not the university in NYC, the country in South America which borders Panama, Ecuador and Venezuela. One week ago, I preached my first sermon in Spanish at the church in Apartado. Our presbytery has had a sister relationship with Urabá Presbytery for 5 years, and we were going for two primary reasons: to renew this relationship for another five years, and at their request, to learn about the human rights and environmental challenges facing them as Presbyterians in Colombia. The most significant human rights issue in Colombia is quite significant, and yet is almost unknown by most Americans: it is the issue of the displaced persons, or as Colombians call them: Los Desplazandos.

Internal displacement is what occurs when citizens of a country are driven out of their homes, off of their land, and into exile within their own country. We are all aware of the most significant displacement crisis in our time: in the Darfur region of the Sudan where six million people are internally displaced persons, or IDP’s. But how many Americans are aware that the second greatest displacement crisis, greater than even in Iraq, is in our own Western Hemisphere, in Colombia, where roughly 4.5 million persons, over 10% of the population, are among Los Desplazandos? I described this problem 4 weeks ago in a sermon, but going to Colombia certainly made this crisis more vivid to me. We went to a displaced community in Barranquilla, the city where we arrived on the northern coast – a bustling city where maritime trade originated in Colombia. We also visited 6 different churches in 5 towns in the Urabá region, a rural region unvisited by tourism, and met many people who had been impacted by displacement and violence. In Urabá Presbytery, los Desplazandos have been welcomed into church communities, where at least they have a community of love surrounding them. We also visited a museum in Medellin, which had an exhibit on los Desplazandos, and saw paintings by children of the things they had witnessed – parents lying in the street where they had been killed, homes destroyed. In Colombia, the displacement is largely carried out by the paramilitary, but it is clear that they are not opposed by the government, and in some cases even get air support in the way of bombers from the government. The displacement is carried out by violence, and the threat of violence. For example, one small town, Saiza, which lay in the path of a planned hydro-electric dam, was cleared by the paramilitary. Of its population of 1500, 22 were killed in the violence – in our area of Stevens Point, Whiting and Plover, a similar percentage would leave almost 560 dead. It is easy to understand that the violence creates great terror. Saiza had been a primarily Presbyterian town with a vibrant church, so this particular incident greatly impacted Presbyterians in Urabá. But everyone is affected by the violence, and it was clear to us, although we felt safe with our hosts, that our hosts were keenly aware of the constant threat of violence and were very careful as they cared for us.

It was a profound trip, and we all were deeply affected by what we saw. But equal in the impact of the horror was the inspiring example of the Presbyterians in Colombia. These are people who have been greatly victimized: by their own government, by the paramilitary, by the violence attending what they call the narcotraffic, by multinational corporations – yet they do not respond as victims. They are people of hope and courage, of resilience, joy and deep faith. They are warm, loving, and welcoming people, who continue to claim and build their own future, and the future of their church, which is at the center of life for them. They are, like Joshua, understanding that God is with them, and embracing their mission with courage and faith.

It would be a mistake to romanticize poverty, but it would be an equal mistake not to recognize how the prosperity of our society has impoverished us; how the busyness and materialism of our culture has distracted us. We are so busy with so many important things, and our relationships with each other and with God take a back seat. In our affluent culture that values effectiveness and personal power, it can be hard for us to depend on God. We can feel that this is a sign of weakness. We forget the Reformed understanding that God has claimed us, not only for our own pleasure, but to share in God’s work in the world. Princeton theologian W. Stacy Johnson told a gathering of the Covenant Network in Minneapolis this week, that covenant theology makes “an audacious claim that God has determined not to be God without us…God is not just for us but with us – not just sentiment but solidarity.” And we are called to, with God, bring God’s vision of the world into being. Johnson reminds us that the Bible story, “…invites us to envision a different sort of church and different sort of world than we see around us. Unless the church has a dynamic understanding of the Bible and devotes itself to re-imagining what God FOR us, Jesus WITH us and the Spirit AMONG us means for that story today, we’re going to be stuck in a world none of us wants.” Those I met in Colombia had little in the way of material resources, but they clearly had a sense of participating in God’s mission, working for justice.

We have had enormous material resources, and perhaps they are distracting us from our personal and spiritual gifts. What are our gifts? Are we living fearfully, cautiously, holding our gifts (as it were) in the ground? Or are we living boldly, trusting that the gracious God who made us will equip us to do all that he calls us to? Some people live in fear of God, working steadfastly to be obedient, hoping to earn God’s approval. Jesus tells us that God is not waiting to pounce on our mistakes, but has given us outrageous and astonishing gifts. God calls us to spend our love extravagantly – embracing the gifts that we are given and developing them into blessings for others. As the global financial crisis deepens, are we going to be so worried about our financial futures that we live fearfully, cautiously, as if the material realities were more important than the spiritual realities of our lives? Can we, who believe God is welcoming all and calls us to work for justice, be as committed to God’s mission as those who focus on sin, salvation, heaven & hell, sexuality and “who’s in and who’s out”?

Now, although I said that as a parable, we can expect that it’s not purely financial advice, there is the question, is it financial advice at all? Is Jesus talking with us about money? We have a huge tendency to spiritualize the teachings of Jesus, to claim that they are only about our spiritual lives – as if our spiritual lives were separate from the rest of our lives. Because we know that there is a spiritual dimension to life, and that there are aspects to that dimension which cannot be seen, we assume that the spiritual dimension of our life is not connected to the rest of our life. Sunday is not connected to the rest of the week. But we can’t live that way if we take the teachings and life of Jesus seriously. A huge part of the ministry of Jesus was in teaching that the traditional way of dividing life into compartments didn’t work – whereas before Jesus there were holy people (Jews) and not-holy people (Gentiles, lepers, sinners, tax collectors), Jesus ministered to all people, teaching that those divisions were no longer operative. Before Jesus, there were holy places (synagogues) and not-holy places (the rest of the world), but Jesus did much of his teaching in the village square, or by the sea, or at table – all places are appropriate to learn about and celebrate God. Most important, before Jesus there was God – far away and accessible only by prayer and sacrifice, and there was not-God – humans. In Jesus, God came among us as one of us, revealing that God is standing with us in the grittiest of our experiences, and demonstrating that this life matters. By participating with us in our human experience, Jesus has revealed to us the essential holiness of life – it is not separate from our faith, but that the way we live in our work, our home, our recreation, our spending IS our life of faith. The way we treat each other matters, not only those within our family circle or congregation or race or economic level, but also the way we treat those whom we perceive to be outside our circle, like the driver in the next lane, children in another country, or business rivals. What we do with our money matters – it is evidence of our commitment to God, and to living as God’s people. The pastor Herb Miller said that he had observed a number of miracles among the members of his congregation – they had been baptized by total immersion and yet their wallets were untouched by the waters of faith. The ministry of Jesus teaches us that no part of our life can remain untouched by our faith commitment.

Our giving can lead to fullness in our own lives. By giving, and giving sacrificially – giving enough so that we notice the difference – we are practicing loosening our grip on our stuff, which loosens stuff’s grip on us. We are also investing in the Kingdom, because as Jesus said, where our treasure is, there our heart will be also. Our stuff is a monument to what we are accomplishing in our lives. By getting rid of some of it, we can make room for what God can accomplish in our lives. Jesus said, I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly – as long as we are trying to satisfy ourselves with money, or amusement, or prestige, or success, we will never get enough of it. As long as we are trying to fill our hunger for God with other things, we will never be satisfied. As we begin to loosen our hold on those things and allow God to fill us, we begin to sense the abundance which Jesus described, and which I saw the Presbyterians in Colombia experiencing.

As our country enters a new period, with perhaps diminished affluence, and greater shared sacrifice, perhaps it is a new opportunity for us to develop a new culture in which our stuff takes a back seat to things that really matter. It has been interesting over the last two years to see books by social activists such as Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy, and economists, such as Jeffrey Sach’s Common Wealth, and journalists, such as Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded – books that remind us of the link between environmental safety and economic justice, books that call us to live with less. Like Joshua facing a new beginning, it’s a new opportunity for us.

For years, I have looked for the exercise program which will make a noticeable difference in my health and appearance without making a significant dent in my schedule. It can’t be done. Likewise, we will never begin to appreciate the joy and depth that come from generosity, if we don’t give enough to notice the difference.

How much is enough? God isn’t laying some burden on us, but is trying to show us the kind of life that will bring us joy. The people I know who have embraced simplicity and generosity are joyful. They have discovered the lightness of passing along God’s blessings. In the parable the master told the faithful slaves that they could “enter into the joy of their master.” Jesus wants to bring us into the joy of life lived according to God’s design. How much do we give? How much joy do we want? Let us give abundantly as our God longs to give to us. Amen.