Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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The master scolds the timid servant, who (being afraid of his master's judgement) had buried the money: "That's a terrible way to live," he shouts! "It's criminal to live cautiously like that!" Eugene Peterson, whose paraphrase I read this morning, doesn't call this story by its traditional name, "The Parable of the Talents." He calls it, "A Story About Investment." I would add, "and the courage it takes to invest." Of course, the parable teaches many things. It teaches that God gives people different abilities ("talents"), and expects from them not equal but proportional returns (which can be either a comfort or a warning, depending upon how able we are and how well God's investment in us is doing). It also teaches that Jesus' kingdom should grow while he is away, so that when he returns he will not find us as we were. And, if our faith is a living faith, it will grow. But the main subject of this parable is courage. Investing wisely takes courage (among other things), and that is true whether we are investing a dollar in the stock market, or investing ourselves in some cause, some project, some love. It takes courage, because, whenever we invest ourselves like that, whenever we throw ourselves into something, or commit ourselves to something, or someone, we might lose. And losing hurts. On the other hand, what isn't invested doesn't grow. If we lose our nerve and fail to invest, if we only play it safe, we bury our potential. "That's a terrible way to live! It's criminal to live cautiously like that!" And that lesson would be true even if there were no God.

The first thing that happens to me, when my courage begins to fail, is that I retreat into rules, regulations and rigidities. I try to get life structured up, and then I hide behind the structures. I stop taking risks. In other words, I make my life a bureaucracy. I circle the wagons, get defensive, spend more energy covering my backside than I do moving forward. It's a chicken's way to live, to be so cautious. It's wussy. And it is criminal. The Jews, in Jesus' time, were afraid and were covering themselves like that -- another possible meaning for this parable. There was a time when Abraham's tribe had been fearless, had invested themselves with abandon in God. They had followed Moses across the Red Sea, endured the wilderness and conquered the land. They had listened with faith to the prophets and sought earnestly to apply God's Word to their lives. But, by the time of Jesus, the Jews had lost their courage and so had reduced their faith to ritual and law -- ritual to remind them to remember, and law to keep them straight. This ritualizing and legalizing of what had been a living faith came about, by the way, after the exile in Babylon, and as the result of it. The exile was a huge defeat for Israel, and one from which she never fully recovered. After it was over, looking back, the Jews said to themselves, "We lost God's favor because we didn't obey him, so from now on we will leave nothing to chance, we will write down every rule and regulation, down to the finest detail, and we will spell out which holy days are obligatory, and what should be done on those days, so that God will never again have reason to forsake us." But it was misguided. Real love between man and God, like real love between people, arises from the heart and not from a rule book. It can't be made to happen. Now listen to the little man with the thousand dollars. He tells us exactly why he hid it: he was afraid, "I know you have high standards…demand the best…make no allowances for error. I was afraid I might disappoint you." So he did the careful thing. But this, of course, produced no return. Jesus told him he could at least have put it in a CD and earned a little interest. But his fear of the master's judgement had governed what he did. And we do similar things when we're afraid, afraid of man or afraid of God. We play it safe, choose the most cautious way, take no risks. And earn no reward. Jesus' point is this: to live in the Kingdom of God demands courage.

As Christians, we must be ten-thousand-dollar men and women. We must take the gifts and graces God has entrusted to us, and invest them, and then (by the power of the Holy Spirit) they will (absolutely) increase and multiply. That's why Jesus compared faith to a mustard seed, and the kingdom of God to yeast in a loaf of bread. Amazing, miraculous growth will take place, if we let it happen, if we're not too timid. If we don't hide our lights, but become like a city set on a hill. When Matthew wrote his Gospel, the church was expanding miraculously, growing like wildfire. (So Matthew's readers could see, in the growth of the church, that mustard seed growing into a mighty tree, that yeast rising in the pan. Miracle.) But rapid growth meant that the church was becoming a threat to the Empire, so persecution loomed. If the growth were to continue, in this new and tougher age, with Rome breathing down their necks, Christians would need courage. They would need to throw themselves headlong into the cause, and not be timid. Only in that way, that fearless, courageous way, would they be found ready when the Master returned. And that is exactly what they did. Little people, with courage, can do amazing things.

The disciples were quite ordinary men. (Not one of them would have been selected by a modern personnel department for a responsible job.) But look what they did! Little people, with courage, can do amazing things. A young black girl from Memphis, Tennessee, Rosa Parks, sits down in the front of a bus one day and refuses to move. White people sit up front, blacks in the back. Not any more. Don't you think it took courage to do that, to defy "the man?" I'll bet that Rosa Parks was shaking inside. But she sat there. She found the courage and took a huge risk, and America was never the same. In "The Days of Wine and Roses," the one alcoholic who is trying to stop drinking says to his counselor from AA, "Look at me, I'm shaking all over!" To which his counselor replies, "Nobody said you wouldn't shake." Whether we shake or not is not the measure of our courage, but whether we do what must be done. We have this building program, involving a lot of money and a thousand details, and with many places where things might go wrong, and if I think about it, in a certain mood, I can get to shakin'. I can catastrophize. You probably can, too. But then I remember, in faith, how great God is, and how well he has taken care of Oak Chapel over the years. Little people with the courage to invest themselves can do amazing things. Let me tell you a secret, dearly beloved: church buildings are not built by rich folk making large donations. (We need them. God bless them!) But churches are built by people of modest means, little people making sacrifices, giving regularly, over a long period of time. It takes courage to invest ourselves in a project like this. The simple fact is that we are not alone in our efforts. If we were, we would have something to be afraid of. The secret of that amazing growth Jesus taught about (with his mustard seed, his yeast, his investment doubling) -- the secret of that amazing growth is that we are not working alone. God is with us. We do our part, and he will do his.

Dotty Winter sent me a nice story by E-Mail this week. Dotty, of course, is a pianist, so it didn't surprise me that the story was about the great Polish pianist, Paderewski. (He died in America, in 1941, with Poland under Nazi control. He had wanted to be buried in Poland, but he said not until Poland was free. So they buried him at Arlington. The Nazis were defeated, but the Soviets immediately took over Poland, so it was a long wait. A few years ago they took him back and buried him in his native land. There's a plaque at Arlington, where his body used to lie.) Anyway, Paderewski was scheduled to play an important concert, and a young mother (wanting to encourage her nine-year-old son on the piano) bought two tickets so they could attend. Just before the lights went down, the mother turned to a woman next to her to say a few words, and when she looked back her son was gone. And then, to her horror, she looked up to the stage, and there was her son, sitting at that Steinway concert grand, beginning to pick out "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." At that moment Paderewski appeared, walked over and sat down on the piano bench next to the boy, and whispered to him, "Don't quit. Keep playing." He reached down with his left hand and began filling in the bass part, and then his right arm encircled the child, and he began to play a beautiful and intricate obbligato to that simple tune. And the two of them held the audience spellbound. That's a parable, isn't it? We're the little boy. We need courage to get up on stage, and play our little ditty. But when we do it, God joins us, encircling us with his love, and turns our simple tune into something wonderful. It's up to Him to get this building built, it's up to Him to get the mortgage paid, it's up to Him to make this new facility a center of ministry in this community. We just have to do our part. And that's what next Sunday is all about.