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Sermon November 19, 2023
The Rev. Canon Robert Schiesler
The Church of the Nativity and St. Stephen’s
Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A, Track 1, Proper 28
http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp28_RCL.html
Audio: /documents/Eucharist__November_19__2023
Video: https://youtu.be/kBS-cIfliMo
PENT 25A (MT 15:14-30 "Talents") Nativity, 11/19/23
In this post pandemic age where prices have yet to stabilize, the job market still righting itself and the value of higher education is being questioned, we are given this parable of the talents. The Master generously offers a gift of money to his servants. Each servant is expected to be a good steward of the gift by trade or investment. Yet, the third servant buries his gift, seeking security against theft but also freedom from liability.
In the Jewish community, steeped in the law and its demands of God and from God, was the burden of accountability. All are entrusted with the development of the community in the anticipation of the return of God and the divine embrace or divine rejection. However, by the time of Jesus, this religious understanding had become so encrusted by law and regulation that few of the community understood the deeper truth of community building, respecting the abilities and gifts of all of God's created; like that single talent freely given, the truth graciously given was buried deep in the earth.
As the world grows smaller regarding relationship, too often talents are measured by the standards of a superior culture and those assumed standards superimposed, often by the few over the many. Such measurements have discouraged so many from finding and nurturing their own gifts and contributing fully to community. For me, a vivid example of this was within my own inter-racial marriage, early in the post Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision. Toni was a wonderfully talented, multi gifted, woman of African descent. In public school, she was relegated to home economics rather than the sciences in which she excelled. Moving through higher education, her academic advisers pushed her to always do more, be better, always proving her worth. Obtaining a duel doctorate in chemistry and education and serving in both university teaching and federal service, a major university, in her employment interview, advised her that she did not have the "right" credentials and could only qualify for a lectureship, not a tenured professorship. Toni once remarked that "walking into a room of peers, with more than enough credentials, I am always, not peer, not professor, not woman... .I am always Black.. ..always"
The Gospel message within this parable of talents is that every child of God is of worth and of equal value in God's holy hope and purpose. Each person has something to offer in nurturing God's community and these gifts are best identified when we feel comfortable and comforted, loved and needed. We all need, in a time when we only hear the politics of winning and playing zero sum games of competition and so called merit, an assurance of our "somebodiness" in the ability to recognize and utilize our gifts. We might well remember that phrase of the social activist, Jesse Jackson, as he has exhorted so many to proudly remember that "YOU ARE SOMEBODY!"
We are all somebody, created in the love and by the grace of God; we are servants, one to another, entrusted with the property of the Master. It is not a matter of counting gifts; it is a matter of using them well and to the fullest. As servants of God we are expected to return, with interest and accountability, the gifts entrusted to us.
This servanthood requires risk and trust was well as reliance on the other. It requires an awareness of what and who surrounds us and our attention or lack of, that will be employed or discarded. In a sense, the parable we are offered today about servants and entrusted gifts is actually a fearful one. The fear is not in the demand that we recognize our gifts to the fullest extent and nurture others in that same opportunity. The fear arises when we contemplate losing and revert to our base need to hold on, grasp hard, fight against, hold down.....all to our benefit and the detriment to others.
We live in a time of great discovery and opportunity; we also live in a time of increasing waste: thrown away food; misappropriated and ill used monies; rationed health; numerous "isms" that hold so many down and out, not far away but nearby. Prodigals all, we so often squander our inheritance rather than expanding our lives, risking and trusting little or few.
Our relationship with the Lord Christ, however, means just that, daring to risk and trust in the "somebodyiness" of all in God's hope, to revel in God's love that casts out fear and invites generosity. The creative artist, Michelangelo, once said: The great danger for most of us is not that we aim too high and miss; but that it is too low and we reach it."
Rejoice in your "somebodyiness"; rejoice in and nurture God's gift of "somebodyiness" in each and all. Always.
