Buried Treasure

Scripture: The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 33), A.D. 2014 A

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

“Enter into the joy of your master.”  How does one do that, exactly?

Brothers and sisters, we are coming to the end of our Church year.  There is only one more Sunday left before we start our spiritual calendars anew!  We will sing new music, drape our worship space in new colors, share a new liturgy, preach a new Gospel.  We will hang the greens.  But before the dawn comes the dusk. As we say farewell to the Gospel According to St. Matthew, from which we will not read for another three years, we turn to Matthew’s parables regarding the realized Kingdom of God, the new Creation that Christ builds here amongst us. It is a Creation so revolutionary, so unexpected—that we often find we have no idea what Jesus is talking about.

Christ regales us with the tale of a great and powerful master who leaves for a long journey, and while he is gone he entrusts to his slaves vast sums of wealth to do with as they please!  A talent, if you can believe this, works out to roughly one square foot of solid gold—the equivalent of 15 to 20 years of a working man’s wages.  It is an amount so extravagant as to be a bit ridiculous. Two of the slaves each go off into the marketplace to trade with every penny of the riches entrusted to them. Lo and behold, they double their money!  But that third slave, he gets scared.  He doesn’t want to risk this impossible treasure.  And so he buries it—every last denarius—as if he had never come across it. The years go by, the master comes back, and the industrious, savvy slaves reap praise and reward for their successful business ventures.  But the third slave, what has he done?  Why, nothing at all.  And that’s what he reaps in reward.

Over the centuries, Christians have been a bit perplexed as to what exactly we are to do with this twisted little tale.  The steam-powered titans of New England industry took it as divine endorsement of venture capitalism. Others found this parable so seemingly unfair, so judgmental, that they concluded this to be Jesus’ example of what not to do.  Rather than represent the ways of God, they reasoned, the harsh master stands in for the ways of this world—which thankfully will be swept away. Surely the most common take, however, has to do with what has become a play on words: the golden talents standing in for our natural talents and abilities.  Thus, the moral of the story becomes, “Use what God has given to you.”

The real core of this morning’s Gospel, however, has to do with two things: abundance and fear.  And Americans, I dare say, are no strangers to either.

Fear has been the currency of the realm for a very long time indeed: fear of violence, fear of crime, fear of disease or death or uncertainty, fear of loss, fear of the other, fear of planes bearing Ebola to our shores. We live in a society which has granted to us unprecedented safety.  Banditry and invasion are forgotten relics of the past.  Plague and epidemic have been largely tamed.  Ailments which once would have claimed our youngest and our oldest now find themselves exorcised by the skillful scalpel and appropriate antibiotics. We are rich, we are safe, we are free in ways that previous generations could scarcely imagine.  And yet we are afraid.  Fear of violence leads to violence, fear of war leads to war.  Fear of “the other” insures that he always will be “the other.” And fear of age robs us of the joys and wisdom of life. We have so much—yet the more we have, the more we fear losing it.

Abundance, on the other hand, is a concept we have trouble swallowing.  Rarely do we look at our cars and restaurants and televisions and smart phones, and realize just how opulent these blessings truly are.  We view life as more of a zero-sum game. Everything in our world seems to be a competition for resources: competing for limited job openings, competing for limited oil, competing for ever-smaller stretches of arable farmland.  Nature itself seems to operate on no other principle than competition for scarcity—isn’t that, after all, the very heart of Natural Selection? How absurd to talk about abundance in the midst of the Great Recession!

And that’s part of why our Gospel reading this morning might elicit a snicker or two, don’t you think?  Because of how ridiculously overabundant the master is. The man whom Christ describes in this story starts off by giving to the lowest of the low more money than any sane person can possibly fathom. Moreover, he gives to them the gift of time, and complete freedom to do with such riches whatever they please. Two of the slaves in question react with joy, exuberance, and fearlessness!  As the talents have been freely given to them, so they freely distribute and invest and risk them out in the world.  Lo and behold, they do not lose the master’s gifts, but rather free them to grow exponentially. Only the third slave is held back by his own selfish fear.  He clings to the master’s gifts, even though they are not truly his. He hoards what should be unleashed.  Alas, his master’s gifts, like those of God, do not work in isolation.

Dear Christians, God gives to us unfathomable riches: clothing and shelter, family and friends, food on the table and warmth at the hearth.  He gives to us security and order, freedom and hope, the respect of our peers and the love of our children, more bounty than anyone could ever truly appreciate. Yet that’s just the appetizer! God gives to us a Spirit of boldness: the sure promise that God Himself stands by us, loves us, cares for us, shares in all our joys and sorrows, and will lift us at long last from every infirmity, every limitation, even from the black earth of our own grave.  We will know health and wholeness and life eternal unlike anything we could imagine here and now—and we need never fear death again!

What then have we to fear?  What then can threaten us or hold us back?  Though the entire world be broken and pass away, we have the promise that outlives every catastrophe.  You heard such a promise from St. Paul this very morning: “God has destined us not for wrath but for salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, Who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live in Him.”

These are the gifts of God, my friends.  Abundance and joy, freedom and boldness, to watch as death dies and fear flees in terror! The gifts of God are not like gold, limited in its amounts and fought over by pauper and prince alike.  No, the gifts of God are like fire—unquenchable fire that does not consume, but which grows and spreads, increasing in intensity with every new person touched, every new blessing given away, every new life set burning with promise and laughter and love.

But wait, there’s more!  God is not done yet!  There is for us more than the abundance of this world, more than the promise of love and health and life forever—for ultimately, what is the Master’s gift?  What is it that God gives to us?  He gives to us Himself.  He Himself leaps down from Heaven, down from that perch so high above, and comes crashing into this world of mud and of blood. He comes as an infant, helpless and crying for a mother’s warmth, a father’s care; comes as a poor man, a wandering ascetic with no place to rest His head, no job to pay the bills; comes as a teacher, a brother, a compassionate preacher of truth so radical, so unconditional, so overabundant that out of fear we crucified Him for preaching it!

We took this most precious of all gifts and buried Him in the ground—sealed Him in a tomb for three long days—for we feared, then as now, a God of such radical love, when we had expected only harshness, reaping where He did not sow.  Thus might we have remained, weeping and gnashing our teeth. But He came back! Even murdering our God could not keep Him from us.  Why, it barely slowed Him down.

Brothers and sisters, in these days of hardship and trial, when so often we hear only of a harsh and unforgiving Master coming to bring judgment and fire, remember this: In the waters of your Baptism, God comes to you and gives to you far greater treasures than mere talents of gold.  He gives to you an unending relationship with Him. He gives to you an unconditional promise that shall not be shaken by time or disease, wickedness or grave. And He gives to you His own death, already died for you, and His own eternal life, already begun. The only fire He has brought is the light of the living Spirit, which will ever dance with you in this world and the next.  The only Judgment here proclaimed is that of our Lord from the Cross: “In the Name of Christ, Ye Not Guilty.”

So give yourself away, my friends, without thought of loss or gain.  Live with courage and trust in Christ Jesus—for the gifts of God are not simply abundant. They are inexhaustible.  And they are yours, now and forever. Come to the Font, O children of God.  And enter into the joy of your Master.

Thanks be to Christ!  In Jesus’ Name.  AMEN.