Sermon: The Stewardship of Our Lives

THE STEWARDSHIP OF OUR LIVES

Matthew 25:14-30

Sermon preached by Dr. Mark Smutny

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Pasadena Presbyterian Church

Matthew 25:14-30 “For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them; ¹⁵to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. ¹⁶The one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded with them, and made five more talents. ¹⁷In the same way, the one who had the two talents made two more talents. ¹⁸But the one who had received the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money. ¹⁹After a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them. ²⁰Then the one who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five more talents, saying, ‘Master, you handed over to me five talents; see, I have made five more talents.’ ²¹His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.’ ²²And the one with the two talents also came forward, saying, ‘Master, you handed over to me two talents; see, I have made two more talents.’ ²³His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.’ ²⁴Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, ‘Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; ²⁵so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.’ ²⁶But his master replied, ‘You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? ²⁷Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest. ²⁸So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. ²⁹For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. ³⁰As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

Every year in mid-October, I visit my parents in southern Idaho for a week. It’s a time I set aside each year to catch up with them, to share stories, to talk about family, church and politics and to simply relax in each others presence for a whole week. It’s a very special time and I wouldn’t miss it. Mom and Dad are now 79 and 80. They finally retired this past spring after sixty years of hard work dairy farming seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, year after year. While my brothers and I never thought they would give up farming, they finally did. In October during my annual visit, they were more relaxed than I had ever seen them before.

During my visits, one of the serendipitous things that usually happens, and it inevitably happens in the wee hours of the morning, when we are drinking coffee waiting for the sun to come up, is that I hear stories from them from way back, often from their own childhoods, some of which I have never heard before. My mom and dad have this gorgeous, panoramic picture window that faces to the east and southeast. The window looks out over a pond lined with trees and cattails that attracts great blue herons, geese, ducks and other water birds. Further in the distance are mountains which in early fall are snow-capped. The sunrises can be simply gorgeous—absolutely out of this world.

There’s something about the quiet and beauty of that setting early in the morning while sipping coffee that creates a place of extraordinary safety. This safety allows whatever comes into the mind to surface. Sometimes what emerges is playful. Sometimes what surfaces is a detail of family history that I find absolutely fascinating. Sometimes what is brought forth is so gently painful that I realize that right there in the bosom of my own family the safety that is created is nothing other than holy.

I don’t know how it is for you, but in my experience we don’t have that many settings in our lives where we experience that kind of safety—where we are safe to say whatever comes into our minds, safe to express the deepest part of ourselves, safe without worrying whether we are going to look right.

One of the threads that weaves through the story of my father is how he has managed through the course of his life not only to with what in today’s parlance we would call an abusive childhood, but to be transformed by it, to rise above it by embracing its most painful aspects. In the safety and holiness of my visit I learned something more of that transformation and how my maternal grandfather provided a positive role model for my dad in a critical moment in his life.

My maternal grandfather was always called “Granddaddy Don.” I never knew him. I only knew of him as he died when I was three. One of the stories that emerged of Granddaddy Don this past October was that my father’s relationship with his father-in-law was very close. We were talking about grandfathers because I had just become one. I had said one early morning that I hadn’t known Granddaddy Don and so inquired of my mom and dad, “What was he like?” And the stories poured out about what a good man he was. My Dad talked about what it was like to get close to a man his father’s age who didn’t yell at him, who would joke with him, and pass on wisdom about farming, and call him a “Bohunk.” Bohunk is slang for a Czech person, a native of Bohemia. My dad said, “Granddaddy Don did not mean anything derogatory at all; he was just poking at me.” My Dad said that Grandpa was the first man he knew that loved him. To understand how important these disclosures were you need to understand that my Dad’s dad, my paternal grandfather, was an abusive alcoholic—a very bright man, extremely intelligent, except that when he was drunk, he lost control and went into an alcoholic rage. More than a few times I heard my father talk about how his father blamed his own parents for not giving him the proper inheritance back in Nebraska that he deserved. That was the reason he had not done well in his life. He always had excuses. Dad’s dad beat his wife, my grandmother. My Dad witnessed some horrible things. My Dad finally put a stop to it when he was sixteen and took a loaded shotgun from his father’s arms and called the sheriff who arrested him. Dad vowed when he was a teenager never to be like his father. He joined the Presbyterian Church in his hometown and has been a part of the church ever since. He’s spent his life managing his anger, mostly successfully. He’s a gentle, compassionate soul. When he met my Granddaddy Don at age 20 after he fell in love with my mother, he found a man who was gentle and wise and who took him in and showed him another way to be. He found a father who really cared.

This past October, in the wee hours of the morning, two grandfathers, one grandmother, drinking coffee in the safety of family as the sun rose over the horizon, opened up about pain from the past and it was good.

My father has had a good deal of pain in his life—as all of us have had. But you know, he’s been a good steward of it. Yes, he’s been a good steward of the pain in his life. The way he’s taken the pain of his childhood, the broken places and dealt with them. He’s been a good steward of his life. He’s decided to take his painful past and say, “I’m not going to be like my father. I’m not going to make excuses for the circumstances of my life. I’m not going to drown my pain with booze. I’m not going to blame. I’m going to manage my anger as best as I am able. I’m not going to inflict others with my garbage. I’m going to look into my past and squarely face it. With God’s help, I’m going to be compassionate and gentle. In so many words, I’m going to be a good steward of my life.” He is not perfect, but I believe my father has done a good job with his life and I am proud of him.

There are other approaches we humans can take. One approach is to deny that suffering and pain exist. There are individuals and families and organizations and structures that choose denial. From Penn State to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, from bishops to politicians, churches and families, boardrooms and bedrooms, whole systems and individuals, even whole countries choose to deny pain. They say, “Don’t talk about things that are painful. Don’t bring them to the surface. Don’t make me squirm. It’s not polite. Where are your manners? Don’t talk about injustice. It’s class warfare. Don’t talk about abuse. Are you crazy, hysterical, bankrupt? At all costs, keep secrets hidden. Paper them over. Protect appearances. Protect and deny. Keep them hidden even from yourself so you don’t even know what you feel.” This is the path of denial and it is sick.

My God, why is denial so powerful? Is it that we have such a weak doctrine of evil? Is it that we prefer denial over the pain of the little ones? Or is it that we are afraid to look squarely at the pain of our own suffering and therefore can bear the pain of others? Denial is pervasive—denial of our own pain.

Another thing we do with our pain is we use it as an excuse for our failures. If only I had not failed. If only life had broken this way for me and not that, I would have, could have been better. If only, then I would have been somebody.

Still another thing we do is to be embittered by our pain and thereby enshrine it. We hold on to it like it was a sacred treasure. I was wronged long ago and so I dress it up in a little chapel and now I worship it so I don’t have to move on.

The alternative to all these ways is to be a good steward of our lives: to take the hard times, the sad and painful times and not be afraid of them but to be in touch with them, even embrace them because in doing so we can become most alive. We can become most vital in what it means to be a fully alive human being. We can become most open and compassionate to other people. Like my father we can become gentle and compassionate even as we manage the most painful and damaging aspects of our life journeys. To be a good steward of our lives is to be fully aware of the depths of who we are, who we have been, especially in the most painful places, so that we can become fully alive and liberated, fully free and healed.

This stewardship of our lives is what Jesus may have been talking about in the parable of the talents, a parable that on the surface seems harsh and judgmental but with a second reading is an affirmation to live life courageously and to face it squarely. The parable tells the story of the Master who doles out talents to three servants: to one he gives five talents, to another two, to another one. Off they go with their investments. He comes back on a day of reckoning and he asks the five-talent man what he’s done with his money and he says, ‘Master, you handed over to me five talents; see, I have made five more talents.’ ²¹His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.’ The two-talent man goes through the same procedure and has also doubled his earnings.

The one-talent man, you’ll remember, is a different case. He says, ‘Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; ²⁵so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.’The Master says, ‘You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? ²⁷Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest. ²⁸So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. ²⁹For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. ³⁰As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

The one-talent servant seems to represent the kind of person who, as I said before, buries that part of himself or herself that most needs to be alive. The treasure that is buried is that which most needs to be brought into the fullness of God’s light so that it can be transformed from darkness into something of power and beauty. The one-talent servant who buries his treasure maybe represents the kind of person who buries his pain, who buries her suffering so deeply that it hides down deep, buried low in the ground, covered over with dirt about six feet deep.

I think each of us knows that when we cover over our pain so deeply, our life becomes diminished. We become isolated and cut-off. When Matthew speaks of the outer darkness, maybe the place is not so much a place of punishment and judgment as it is a place where God has not been allowed to work, a place where there is so much darkness that it feels like you are all alone and there is no one to help.

But there is much good news in this parable. The two-talent and the five-talent servants trade their talents away. They trade with their lives—a wonderful concept. We trade with our lives. You need what I have to give. And I need what you have to give. And in this wonderful reciprocal relationship our community is transformed. We are life traders, you and me. This is the joy to which the Master invites us: a community of talent trading. In the community of shared suffering we are transformed into a community of shared joy.

In our shared sufferings, in the sharing of our lives, a sacred trust is forged. In the community of the church, in the safety of this community, in the bosom of this church family we share our stories of heartache, injustice, abuse, sadness and grief. We share our need for forgiveness, our need for redemption, our need for belonging. In the miracle of shared suffering our stories become sacred treasure. Our pain and suffering are transformed. God takes what was buried and raises it up. Pain becomes treasure. Treasures are multiplied. Treasures of compassion, healing and hope are poured out, and then doubled, tripled, quadrupled, not only for ourselves but for others as well. It’s the Parable of the Talents, you see.

It’s like my father taking his painful childhood and choosing to face his pain, not bury it, even embrace it, and with God’s help become the good man he became and is, my father, a compassionate, decent man who has done well with his life.

This is the stewardship of our lives: that we can look at our lives and treasure them. That we examine even the most painful aspects of our life journey and embrace them and by so doing discover that God can bring healing and new life. The alternative is to bury our pain. Like the one-talent servant who buried his treasure deep underground, we stuff our pain or deny it, thereby cutting off what can most bring growth and new life, energy and compassion.

Ultimately, it is the cross that speaks the most powerful word about the relationship between facing our pain and the stewardship of our lives. It was Jesus, the pioneer of our faith, who in love and faithfulness faced great pain and suffering and brought to our lives and world new life, great compassion and hope. May we, with the prodigious talents we have been blessed: with the life experiences, the heartaches, the curveballs, all the choices we have made, all of them, the shabby ones we would not choose to repeat, and the ones we would repeat, the pain, the suffering, the injustices, all the treasures with which we have been blessed, may we trade them away. May we trade them for God to use, not to hide them, nor to bury them, but let us trade them away! And in so doing, in the company of shared suffering, in the miracle of shared community, may we find healing! May we find energy! May we find power! May we find new life! May we find compassion for ourselves and for one another! May we be found to be worthy stewards of our lives, the lives we have been given, sacred treasures of a loving God who yearns for us to be free, whole, empowered and compassionate human beings! With God’s help let it be so. Thanks be to God. Amen.