James E. Thyren
Sermon preached at First Presbyterian Church, Clarks Summit, PA on November 15, 2020
Psalm 123; Matthew 25. 14-30
Four years ago, Bill Carter and I went up to Yale Divinity School to attend the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching. In addition to inquiring minds like ours, the Beecher Lectures serve as the centerpiece for reunion gatherings, drawing graduates from across the decades back to campus. So there we were, two graduates of Princeton Theological Seminary, rubbing elbows with all these Yalies, young and old, some of whom graduated be-fore either of us were born. We tried our best to blend in. We had on our khaki pants, our navy blue blazers and button collared shirts, but neither of us was up to adding the bow tie to complete the outfit.
Presenting the lectures was Thomas H. Troeger, recently retired Professor of Christian Communica-tion, a talented musician, and gifted poet and hymn writer. The provocative title of his three-lecture series was “The End of Preaching,” which, it turned out, was not a commentary on the demise of the Sermon amid all our 21st Century communication options. Instead, having read, listened to, or watched many of the Beecher lectures presented since 1872, Tom proceeded to add his contribution to the perennial question: “what is the purpose of preaching?”
After surveying how a variety of voices had answered over the years, Tom built his answer on two lines from a poem called The Temple, by English poet George Herbert. Those lines read:
“Resort to sermons, but to prayers most:
Praying’s the end of preaching.”
[i] In the book compiled from those lectures, Troeger notes that “the word end can be taken simultaneously to mean two different things,” namely, “the purpose of preaching is prayer, and the conclusion of preaching is prayer.”
[ii] Playing with those two meanings, Troeger suggests that preaching should lead both preacher and hearer to respond in prayer. He writes: “Since prayer, whatever form it takes, culti-vates a living relationship to God, Herbert’s statement means that the end of preaching is the vitalizing, the nurturing, the enriching, the deepening, the broadening, the heightening of our relationship to God. If the end of preaching is prayer,” he continues, “the richness of prayer, the fullness of prayer, the com-plexity of prayer, the multidimensionality of prayer, the primordial character of prayer, then a question every preacher and every listener to sermons needs to ask is, what kind of prayer is awakened by the sermons I preach or hear?”
[iii] You see, some sermons lead us to proclaim: “O sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvel-ous things.”
[iv] Others are designed lead to confession and penitence: “Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin…Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.”
[v] Some sermons lead to a cry of desperation: “How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long?”
[vi] Still others inspire a request for guidance: “Make me to know your ways, O Lord; teach my your paths. Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all day long.”
[vii] Sometimes a sermon leads to a prayer on behalf of others, “The Lord answer you in the day of trouble!”
[viii] Another sermon may elicit a prayer of dedication: “I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.”
[ix] Of course, not all sermons lead to beautiful prayers like these lifted from the Psalms. We preachers hope our words don’t result in silent prayers of gratitude throughout the congregation: “Thank God that’s over!”
So what kind of prayer is this sermon seeking to awaken in our hearts, minds, and souls today? One answer comes from the Psalm 123 which you heard a few moments ago. It is a prayer of humble sub-mission based on trust grown from relationship. It identifies the only source of help we can count upon in life:
“As the eyes of servants look to the hand of their master,
as the eyes of a maid to the hand of her mistress,
so our eyes look to the Lord our God
until he has mercy on us.”
[x] By the time we are done considering three servants who looked to the hand of their master from dif-fering perspectives, I hope we will come away with prayers that speak of our trust in God’s abundant provision and patience and express our appreciation and thanks for the privilege of being invited to partner with God in the work of the kingdom.
The parables in Matthew 24 and 25 are part of what some call the Second Sermon on the Mount. It was delivered on the Mount of Olives in the days between Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday. Instead of the crowds gathered on a hillside, the audience is comprised of the disciples. And this time, instead of the instructions on living God’s way contained in the first sermon, Jesus uses a series of stories to illustrate the consequences of living in those ways…or not!
The parable of the talents is the third of four such stories. All four have something to say about how one lives while awaiting the return of Christ. The first involves a “faithful and wise slave,” entrusted with the care and feeding of others while the master goes away. In that story, Jesus said, “Blessed is that slave whom the master will find at work when he arrives.”
Last week, we heard the story of the ten bridesmaids and their oil lamps. The five who had an ample supply of oil were called wise, while the five who did not were labeled foolish. Oil is a traditional Jewish symbol for good works. The parable holds up the example of those who, by having extra oil gave evidence of living in ways pleasing to God.
In this week’s story, the focus is the same: how one lives in the time in between the Master’s depar-ture and return. Of the four characters in the parable, most of the attention is paid to the first and last players, the Master and the third servant. However, if we skip over the two characters in the middle too quickly, we might miss some helpful hints for living in these Covid-tinged times.
The story tells of a man going on a journey. Before departing he entrusts his property to three ser-vants, “each according to his ability.” In each case the sum added up to a big chunk of change. One talent, according to The New Interpreter’s Bible, was “equal to the wages of a day laborer for fifteen years.”
[xi] Do the math and you see the first man was given 75 years wages, more than a lifetime’s worth. The second man receives a 30 year pile. Even the third man’s single talent was worth the equivalent of fifteen years of income.
The first two, on their own initiative, double the master’s dough. When he returns he is pleased and rewards them each with more responsibility. Each is invited to “enter into the joy of your master.” Some interpreters warn against linking the master with God or Jesus, primarily because of the third servant’s description of his reaping practices. Taking a different view, Lindsay Armstrong, a Christian educator sees in all of this an insight into the way God works. She describes how the master in the parable gets out of the way once he has entrusted the gifts to the servants. She writes that in going away the master provides “the distance and room needed for others to lead, grow, take chances and flourish. Here the exceptional love of God is not only shown by the generosity in entrusting full talents; it is also demon-strated by God’s willingness to self-limit so that we may exist and live creatively in the image of God. God offers gifts and space so that we may have a hand in shaping talents, lives, communities, futures and fortunes.” She concludes, “God demonstrates love, not always by doing for us, but by limiting self and letting us learn.”
[xii] The parable doesn’t tell how the two servants doubled their master’s money. Neither does it betray any hint of fear on their part when they step up and hand over the fruits of their labor. To me, that sug-gests their eyes “looked to the hand of their master,” had learned his ways, and when they had oppor-tunity, put them to work. In the interval between the master’s departure and return, they took initiative, took risks, and trusted their efforts would be respected, if not rewarded, by the master.
Today, we find ourselves in the interval between the sudden halt to everything we knew as normal, and whatever awaits when, “after a long time,” the pandemic is finally in the rearview mirror. Since March we’ve heard stories of folks who have shown initiative and taken risks to make the most of what has been entrusted to them. The family business that figured out the fabric it used to make one product could be repurposed to make masks. The father out West who designed and enlisted a cardboard manu-facturer to make desks so every child in their school district could have a suitable place to do their on-line schoolwork. And churches like this one and so many others, who have come up with innovative ways to Worship, do Bible study and Christian Education, conduct business, reach out to the lonely, and continue mission projects, often on-line and sometimes in person, socially distanced, of course!
We don’t know how long our wait is going to be, and unfortunately it looks like things are getting worse again before they get better. Nevertheless, there is reason to hope that when we do get to the end of all this, there will be better days ahead. A few weeks ago, a commentary by Thomas Friedman ap-peared in The Scranton Times. It began with this familiar phrase: “The good Lord works in mysterious ways.” It continued: “He (She?) threw a pandemic at us at the exact same time as a tectonic shift in the way we learn, work and employ. …When we emerge from this corona crisis, we are going to be greeted by one of the most profound eras of creative destruction ever—which this pandemic is accelerating and disguising.”
[xiii] Friedman goes on to describe how every facet of life as we know it will be impacted: “No job, no K-12 school, no university, no factory, no office will be spared. It will touch white- col-lar and blue collar workers…How we provide portable health care, portable pensions and opportunities for lifelong learn-ing to get the most out of this moment and cushion the worst is what politics needs to be about…”
[xiv] Claiming that we’re “going to see some amazing stuff emerge, some long established institutions disappear—and the nature of work, workplaces and the workforce be transformed.”
[xv] Friedman says, “The reason the post-pandemic era will be so destructive and creative is that never have more people had access to so many cheap tools of innovation, to high-powered inexpensive computing, to such cheap credit--to invent products and services, all as many big health, social, environmental and econo-mic problems need solving.”
[xvi] With all God has entrusted to us individually we too will have opportunity to be innovative as we seek to be Christ’s people, blessed to bring blessings to others. Together as a church, it is ours to risk being creative as we seek to fulfill the last of the Great Ends of the Church that Brent Eelman talked about last week: “The exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.”
[xvii] What will that look like? Well, we’ll discover it as we go. That “faithful and wise slave” in the first parable in the series was blessed for being caught at work, which was to feed the others in the master’s household. So that’s a hint. The five wise bridesmaids were prepared with the oil of good works, but those are not specified. The two productive servants in today’s parable are aggressively innovative, but exactly what they did is left unsaid. However, in the parable that follows, Jesus gets specific, but since Bill Carter will be preaching about, you’ll have to tune in next week to find out more!
All I’ll say for the moment is that faithful discipleship will be shown to be active and not passive. Being passive and not active, let alone aggressive is where the third servant in today’s parable went wrong. Unlike the first two who take some risks with the master’s money and make it grow, this man plays it safe. He buries it in the ground. When the master returns, he is proud as a peacock that he is able to hand the bundle back to its owner without a single penny having been lost or tarnished.
In some eyes, the third servant might be seen as prudent. In some circles he would be lauded as a careful keeper of what had been entrusted to him. To some ears, specifically the disciples who were hearing the story as Jesus told it, the next sound expected after he handed the money back to the master should have been his own “well done good and faithful servant” like the other two heard. After all, he had followed CDC guidelines and stayed home!
However, where the first two gave no explanation of how they doubled the master’s dough, the third man prefaces his return of his stash based on his perception of the master. He reveals his motivation for hiding his talent in a hole in the backyard. Fear. He too, had looked to the hand of his master, but he came away with a different conclusion than his compatriots. The bountiful reaping and gathering of the master, the result of bountiful sowing and scattering of seed, became not an example to follow, but a standard he was unwilling to meet.
His perception of the master--or should we say misperception-- led him to act in a way that caused him to miss a great opportunity to share in the joy of the master. “In this parable,” writes Lindsay Arm-strong, “it is fear and distrust that paralyzes the third slave. His view of the master (who has generously and freely entrusted him with fifteen years-worth of an average laborer’s wages) keeps him fearful and constricted, to the point that he neglects or rejects the master’s graciously given opportunity.”
[xviii] It seems the third servant could not conceive that the hard-driving master could be miserly when it came to expecting his investments to yield and magnanimous when it came to sharing them. He was captive to a dualistic world view which still inhibits many in our time as well. Of this, Parker Palmer writes: “Because we live in a culture that prefers the ease of either-or to the complexities of both-and, we have a hard time holding opposites together.”
[xix] The implications for the here and now we live are obvious. Our airwaves and screens are filled with either-or characterizations leaving no room for both-and considerations. Yet, it is possible to support the police and proclaim “Black Lives Matter.” Wearing a mask to control the virus does not mean you don’t love our country. As the parable shows through the two servants, you can believe in a God who pro-vides abundantly and yet expects accountability.
Hopefully, as our eyes “look to the hand of the Lord,” such knowledge of the God who provides abundantly yet expects accountability-- will lead us to offer prayers thanking God for the abundant provision and patience we have enjoyed, and to express thanks for the privilege of partnering with God in the joyful work of the Kingdom of Heaven. Amen.
[i] George Herbert, The Complete Poetry, (United Kingdom, Penguin Random House UK, 2015), p. 23
[ii] Thomas H. Troeger, The End of Preaching, (Nashville, KY: Abingdon Press, 2018), p. 10
[iii] ibid., p. 18
[iv] Psalm 98. 1
[v] Psalm 51. 2, 10
[vi] Psalm 13. 2
[vii] Psalm 25. 4-5
[viii] Psalm 20. 1
[ix] Psalm 22. 22
[x] Psalm 123. 2
[xi] Eugene Boring, The New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume VIII, ©1995, Nashville, Abingdon Press, p. 453
[xii] Lindsay P. Armstrong, Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 4, ©2010, Louisville, Westminster John Knox, p. 311
[xiii] Thomas L. Friedman, “Pandemic clears deck for economic reset.” The Scranton Times, October 24, 1920, OP-ED page
[xiv] ibid.
[xv] ibid.
[xvi] ibid.
[xvii] Book of Order, The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) 2019-2021 , F-1.0304, p 5
[xviii] Ibid., Armstrong, 311,313
[xix] Parker J. Palmer, On the Brink of Everything, Grace, Gravity & Growing Old, (Oakland, CA, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2018), p. 167
