All about the Benjamins (and the Creflo Dollars)

Scripture: Matthew 25:14-30

Often times, reading through the Bible, it’s easy to obsess over one point of view against another. God cares for the poor and the downtrodden. That’s absolutely true. God cares about the widowed and the helpless, the ones without power or influence. Also true. God loves the widow for giving her tiny mite as much as the wealthy for their gifts out of their riches. True and true and true.

            But God is not an economist like we are economists. God doesn’t care much for bookkeeping when it comes to faith. That’s easy enough for us to see with the widow’s mite but much harder to see with the parable of the talents, even though it’s making a very similar point. We have to understand from the start that God doesn’t fit any of our conventional economic molds. This is in part because God is not really an economist at all. God tells parables about money that are not actually about money. We hear parables about money and we can’t see past the Benjamins. While we’re busy figuring out if God’s attitude reflects a conservative or liberal slant—and (surprise, surprise) we’re likely to find exactly our point of view regardless—Jesus is busy telling us a story about faith that is going over our heads. Jesus tells us that God gives faith liberally but he also expects, as we see in today’s reading, a good deal of interest in return. This is a challenging parable largely because nothing gets us as hot and bothered as money. This is not a parable about money. It’s a story about faith. It’s a parable, remember, and its economics are of a different sort.

            In order to understand what this means let’s start with the perspective of the servant who buries the one talent. For those of us who are incredibly careful with gifts we have been given his punishment seems not just extreme but patently unfair. If you’re like me you’re probably fairly risk averse especially when it comes to economic security, so I can resonate with the servant’s behavior. The talent wasn’t his in the first place, so what business did he have investing it? We’re not talking about sticking his talent away at United Valley or American Federal or anything. Every investment in the ancient world carried with it a good amount of risk. More to the point, if the servant was a strict Jew (which we can probably assume he was) he would know that Jewish law advises not to place all one’s money (or resources) in a single position (cf. Genesis 32:8-9). What if he lost it in a risky investment? Wouldn’t that be the one irresponsible thing to do?

Every one of those questions is good and practical if we’re dealing with money, but we have to remember that that is not what we’re dealing with here. This is a parable about faith, and yet Jesus knew exactly the subject matter to use in the parable to trip us up. We are all slaves to money, not so different from these slaves. Jesus’ point here is not about the rate of return but instead about the necessity of taking the risk. That’s not a smart financial plan, but it is the only faith plan. Jesus tells us all the ways that we do treat our faith like it is a currency—how it is something God has given to us which we are treasure and guard in our hearts—but then Jesus smashes our expectations again, lambasting the poor servant who hid his faith away. Faith that is hidden away is worthless; the only faith that is worth anything is one risked, one spent, one tested out in the world. It would have been far better for the servant to go out into the world and risk his talent—to risk his faith—than to live in fear of what may come. Faith not used, not tested, is weak faith indeed.

            We remain in the practice of faith-bookkeeping. We see the servant with 5 talents and the one with 2 talents and we, being the lowly servant with one talent, imagine that there is no way we will ever reach their rate of return unless something God-awful happens to the markets. So, the only practical step is to guard our one talent and never invest it at all, then, if the markets crash, we will be the wealthiest of the bunch. And we imagine, of course, that the only way we will be rewarded by the master is if we finish with the most moola.

            Don’t you see? This is just another parable of comparison! And as with the parable of the one lost sheep and the widow’s mite and the wedding banquet and the disciples arguing about who was the greatest, Jesus utterly destroys our comparisons. The servant with only that lone talent cannot look past his imagined spiritual poverty to see a reality where it does not matter if you have one talent or one million; we have a God who turns just a few loaves of bread and a couple fish into a feast for thousands. God doesn’t care if you have a little faith, or occasional faith, or so much faith that everybody knows it; God does not care if you’re a pastor or a deacon or a charter member of a congregation or if you’ve been a Christian for one hundred years or just a few minutes. All the ways that we enumerate and quantify our faithfulness are obliterated by a God who cares only for one thing: that we take whatever faith it is that we have, small or mighty as it may be, and put it to work. God only cares that we respond to the radical grace we have been given by putting our faith to work.

            This means there is no spiritual ladder. There are no people more holy than anybody else. Those slaves with their ten talents and their four talents? It’s all the same, because the requirements for entrance into the kingdom of heaven are infinite talents, so the only thing that matters is whether their talents are being put to work for the one who is infinite, who does the divine multiplication and can make their little inroads into something magnificent. The only one with nothing to show is the one who refuses to put their talent to work in the first place.

            This is a parable of judgment because all of us can see at least a little, and probably quite a lot, of ourselves in this lowly little servant. We value our safety more than anything. But you have to remember where it is that Jesus stands speaking this story. He is on the precipice of Palm Sunday, he’s a week away from the betrayal and the crucifixion. This is Jesus unplugged, shaking us with the reality that our safety is an illusion. All of us are called to stand before God—could be today or could be tomorrow—and what will you have to say in that moment? Will it be about how you guarded your faith, sheltering it from a scary world, or will it be about how you put your faith to the test?

            As a brief aside, this is part of the reason why I’ve been cringing every time a well-meaning parent has brought up concerns about safety with their children going to Detroit next summer. I understand your natural inclination to care for your child’s safety, but security is also an absolute hindrance to faithfulness. Those young people are going to discover how alive their faith can be in large part because they are going to a place that will be big and different and scary and potentially even just a little dangerous. But seriously if we can’t go to Detroit then where can we go? Surely not into the world at all, because danger lurks everywhere. We might as well bury our youth’s talents for them. We’ve decided to bury our own well enough.

            In this parable, Jesus does more than frighten us into submission, because he knows you better than this. Fear only turns us in on ourselves further, causing us to retreat deeper and deeper into our imagined security. Instead, Jesus offers something different—something that at first seems like judgment: he offers us grace. And why does grace seem like judgment? Because we would rather do our own accounting, thank you very much! We don’t trust it. We don’t trust any system that throws out the ones and the zeroes and replaces it with only ones. We’d much rather have a ladder we can ascend toward heaven. But, at the end of the day, grace is also the only thing we have. And grace compels us to live as if our salvation no longer depends on it, which means we could sit on a couch all day, comfortable in the knowledge that we are OK, or we can do what the wise servants did and go out and invest our faith as riskily as we can manage.

            That’s living. It’s putting our trust fully in a God who will do amazing things, even if it means risking our safety (even our lives) with people who are bent on terror and destruction. This is not a story about money. Jesus is not telling you to put all your life savings in risky investments and that your faith will reward you with good things. He’s certainly not giving you the Creflo Dollar utterly sinful shtick about investing in the church. No. He’s telling you that your life is a risky investment, so embrace it. Hiding away won’t do you any good, and it certainly won’t do the world any good. You’ll just have wasted the time given to you.

            Too many of us are.

            That’s the judgment. It’s not the last word, but today, like Jesus, I’ll just let it sit with you.