Sermon for November 15, 2020 Pentecost 24 A House of Prayer Lutheran Church

Matthew 25:14-30 Rev. Karl-John N. Stone

Enter into the Joy of your Master

When I was in high school, I had this English teacher, Ms. Rheinhart. At the beginning of the year, when I looked at my schedule and saw I was assigned to her class, I didn’t know anything about her. None of my friends had ever been in her class. So on the first day, I sit down at my desk and Ms. Reinhardt introduces herself to us: “I’m mean,” she says. “Don’t mess with me. You’d better not try anything in my class.” And on she went with a few other choice warnings and expectations for us. After class, we walked into the hallway shaking our heads, wondering what we had just gotten into.

Well, a couple of months go by and we’ve been working hard at fulfilling her expectations and in our fear we’re trying to avoid the wrath of Ms. Rheinhart. But then we start to realize that she hasn’t been mean this whole time. Yes, she has expectations of us, but actually she’s pretty nice. Not only was she a good English teacher, she turned out to be one of the nicest teachers in the whole school and once I realized that, I ended up really enjoying her class. I guess you just can’t judge a book by it’s cover.

But has that kind of thing ever happened to you? Where you misjudge someone, for whatever reason. Maybe based on a first impression, or maybe a preconceived notion? And while you operate under that misjudgement, you are missing out on enjoying the goodness of that person, and on finding goodness in your life because of things this person has offered.

In the Parable of the Talents that we hear Jesus telling today, we see what a difference it makes when we use the freedom God gives us to misjudge--and of what happens when we misjudge the best way to serve God, and to even misjudge the true nature of God himself.

This is another parable about the Kingdom of God. In the story, a man goes away on a long journey. He’s someone with lots of resources, and he entrusts his property to his servants. He gives one servant 5 talents, another 2 talents, and a third servant 1 talent. In those days, a talent was a huge sum of money. It was worth a lot--like 20 years worth of pay. So in these details we see the master’s generosity (allowing his servants to use these large sums), as well as the freedom he provides (because he goes away for a long time and allows the servants to make their own choices). Along with this generosity and freedom, the master also takes care to not overburden his servants--the amount of talents he provides to each one is given “according to each one’s ability”. So he’s not expecting them to do something they’re not capable of. He gives each one a great opportunity to make the most of the gift they’ve received, in whatever way seems best to each servant.

Two of the servants respond to this generosity and freedom by putting their talents to good use. They live as trustworthy stewards of the gifts they’ve been given. The master is well-pleased at what they’ve done, and they’ve enjoyed finding goodness in the way they’ve lived their lives. “Enter into the joy of your master”, they hear.

But one of the servants--the one who had the least to lose, even--does nothing with the talent he’s been given, except bury it in the ground. Why? Well, it seems he’s misjudged the nature of his master, and because of that he’s also misjudged the best way to use his talent. “I knew” he says, “that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you go--you can have it back now.”

It’s like Mark Twain once said, “It’s not what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for certain, that just ain’t so.” This servant just knew for certain that his master was mean, harsh, unjust--and so in fear he tried to avoid his wrath. And living out of this fear caused him to misjudge the true nature of the master, who was actually quite willing to be generous the whole time. The servant’s misjudgement became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and because of his misjudgement he looks inward by doing what he thinks will serve himself, rather than looking outward and trying to put his talent to good use as the master expects.

The servant didn’t use his talent, and because of that he missed out on two great things. (1) Enjoying the goodness of the master, and (2) serving and helping others, which would have helped him find meaning and purpose in his life. By living from a mindset of fear, however, he ends up casting himself out of “the joy of his master”.

God has entrusted each of us with talents--with resources and abilities that are gifts from God in our lives. The resources and abilities are different for each one of us, but God has given them to us all. God doesn’t ask us to do the impossible with them--he just calls us to use our talents the best we can, to serve and help others, to encourage one another and build each other up; to live our faith in daily life as our offering to God. And because God has given us freedom to decide how we’ll use what he’s given us, we will probably make plenty of mistakes along the way--which is why we need to turn to Christ for forgiveness on a daily basis; and slow down enough to listen for God’s guidance and be on the lookout for nudges from the Holy Spirit. We don’t have to be perfect--in fact we are not able to be perfect in how we use our talents--and that is the risk God was willing to take when he created us with freedom to make choices.

Yet even with all the mistakes God is willing to risk us making, God was not afraid to take the biggest risk of all--when God gave his very self, sending his Son Jesus into the world: being born in a humble manger as a vulnerable little baby; preaching a message that challenged the religious and political leaders of the day; living a life that called for radical trust in the goodness of God; healing the sick, yet as a healer willingly becoming a victim at the hands of sinners; giving his life on the cross so that we could have forgiveness, salvation, abundant life--so that we could enter into the joy of our master.

He did all of this out of perfect love for us, and as it says in 1 John 4:18, “there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” As we put our faith in God--faith based not in fear, but in love--and as we open our hearts so we don’t misjudge the true nature of God’s generosity revealed to us in Jesus Christ--then the door to true joy is opened for us. Enter into the joy of your master. Amen.