Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost
Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary TimeJudges 4:1-7 OR Proverbs 31:10-31
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Matthew 25:14-30With the attention demanded by All Saints, Christ the King, and the First Sunday of Advent this month, the preacher has little time to spend with this last so-called Ordinary Sunday of the Church year. In my own United Methodist tradition this also happens to be the time of year when Finance committees are urgently preparing 2012 budgets and pastors are nervously writing stewardship sermons in hopes of funding those budgets. This weekend’s gospel text seems to play right into this pattern with a pre-packaged message about stewardship lined up for the occasion. Investing our time, talents, and even money for the up-building of the Kingdom of God might well be a legitimate reading of this text, but could likely fall on deaf ears this time of year. Who, while readying themselves to enter the bustle of this season of the year, wants to be told they’re not already doing enough for the Kingdom of God?
Earlier this week I was reflecting with a group of pastors on a sidebar comment made by Eugene Peterson in his book
The Contemplative Pastor. He writes: "How can I persuade a person to live by faith and not by works if I have to juggle my schedule constantly to make everything fit into place?"
This comment plays into the worst of my pastoral tendencies and names the weariness I feel when reading this text alongside each of the other end-times parables of Matthew’s gospel. Will I ever work hard enough to satisfy the Master? I know that it is not pastors alone who feel this weariness. I see it in the eyes of many of the faithful saints in my pews each week who work relentlessly supporting our congregation and its ministries. Do we, in fact, encourage our church members into a sort of works righteousness with our insistence on giving more and more of themselves and miss the point altogether?
Upon further reflection, I would suggest a different sort of stewardship message out of this text of Matthew for this penultimate Sunday of the church calendar. It is to skip along past those two commended slaves—whose parallel stories are rather uninteresting—and listen awhile with the third slave as he answers to this demanding Master. The third slave was stalled in his investing not so much by inertia as fear. Fear of what? Fear of the Master? Fear of failure? Whatever drives this fear, it paralyzes him from taking any real risk with the Master’s gift. And risk seems to be exactly what the Master wanted from these trusted slaves. While this slave’s fear plays itself out in buried treasure, I am left wondering what fear looks like in 2011. Is it possible that the flurry of programs, ministries, and other events in the life of our congregations is nothing but fear playing itself out in activity? So fearful are we (of failure? Of denominational check-points? Of God?) that our lives and churches will not pass muster when we are called to account for our work that we can no longer take any real risks of discipleship.
Playing it safe makes us unable to take anything that resembles an unpopular stand. This is why it’s so easy to talk about charity and not justice in most churches. Playing it safe means that we direct our evangelism energy towards the new gated community down the street rather than the underserved neighborhood around the corner, knowing that they can’t bolster the bottom line of that budget and we wouldn’t want to risk losing anyone who would leave if “they” showed up. Even taking a Sabbath has become risky business for pastors and church members alike, having fallen into the trap of our capitalist society that fears that rest means lost profit, lost time for networking, or worse…
The struggle of preaching this text is that we are quite comfortable with running, not just our stewardship campaigns but the entire life of the church, like local businesses competing in a capitalist economy: demanding of folks that they must give more so that we can do more in order to get more people in here who will give more so that we can do more. The struggle of preaching this message is that, like the third slave, in doing so we are entirely motivated by fear.
I was intrigued by one remark by a commentator on Matthew’s telling of this story: “The God we face is the one we imagine.” Those first two slaves recognized in the graciousness of the gift, the graciousness of the Master. It was a grace that freed them to invest wildly and reap such grand profit. They lived out of trust and not fear. The third slave’s fear makes him unable to risk anything at all, though it turns out in the end that the greatest risk of all is playing it safe. What risks might we take if we no longer lived out of fear, but love—unquenchable love of God, undying love of our neighbors, passionate for justice and peace, and eyes wide open for opportunities to go all-in for the Master?