Faithfulness

Sermon planned for Sunday, August 14th, 2011

Texts: Galatians 5:22; Matthew 25:14-30

Love, Peace, Joy, Patience, Kindness, and Goodness – how’s the orchard coming? What’s come up in the past few weeks that has prodded you in these areas? Has something or someone tested your patience? Is there a situation that has challenged you to show kindness? Did Laverne’s sermon last week provoke you to act generously in some way? Or maybe you were tested in one of these areas and you missed your chance. Perhaps someone offended you and you repaid them with insult; or you saw someone who could have used a kind word but you passed them by.

When we talk about the Spirit cultivating these fruits in us, we’re talking about situations that God allows us to be in – situations in which our love, peace and joy is tested; opportunities to display patience and kindness. Cultivating the fruit of the Spirit is not magic hocus pocus that happens just like that; it is the Spirit leading you into and through situations that will sharpen your character. And still, in each situation we can choose to be sharpened or we can run the opposite way. I think we know this. That’s maybe why we rarely pray for God to give us the fruit of the Spirit; because, deep down, we know that this means we will face challenging situations in which we will have to choose to act patiently, joyfully, lovingly, peacefully, etc… We know that if we pray for peace, we may face difficult conflict in which to practice peace. That’s why its easier to pray for things we want; for things to be easier for us; for the load to be lighter; our bodies to be healthier; our wallets to be fatter; our children to be successful. What if some of these very challenges we want to pray our way out of – what if God has allowed us to experience these precisely because he wants to grow, in us, the fruit of the Spirit?

This morning we’re looking at faithfulness. Faithfulness means fidelity. A faithful person is someone who can be relied upon; it’s a person who does what they say they will do; it’s a person who adheres to the spoken, and sometimes unspoken, expectations in a given relationship. A faithful person will not go behind someone’s back, trick, gossip, or cheat someone in a business deal. A faithful person’s actions are in line with their promises and their values.

The outline for our sermon series this summer was adapted from a series prepared by a sister congregation in Winnipeg. The outline suggested The Parable of the Talents as a passage to help us understand the fruit of faithfulness. As I studied this passage again I realized how complex a story this is. It begins with a man owning three slaves. As he departs on his journey, he gives them each a certain sum of money, depending on their ability or qualifications. The most qualified is given 5 talents, the next 2, and the least qualified is given one talent. After the master leaves, the first two slaves invest this money and make a profit, while the last slave stores the money in a hiding place. When the master returns, the first two are rewarded for their efforts, while the last one is thrown into the other darkness – a place resembling Gehenna or hell.

The obvious connection between this Parable and the fruit of Faithfulness is the failure of the last slave to perform as well as the first two slaves. He was not faithful to his master. That’s the simple way of reading the story. We’ve heard the story so many times that we might find it difficult to consider a different understanding. And so, I want to examine this story in relation to a few others that might shed some more light on the topic of faithfulness. In what way is the Parable of the Talents about faithfulness? Was the last slave really being unfaithful, or was the master, perhaps, expecting too much? Is it unfaithful to guard your master’s property?

We’re told that the master gave out the talents according to who was most able or most qualified. Why would there be such a huge punishment for a slave that was considered the least qualified? Why not give him a mentor, or put him in an apprenticeship program? I know, it’s a Parable, and I’m reading too much into it; but I’m not the only one. Many years ago – although not as long as you’d think – the Parable of the Talents was used by White Christians to keep their black slaves in line, and to guilt them into being productive slaves for the sake of their Christian faith. A slave-owner would tell this story, or a pastor would preach it, in order to encourage the slaves to be like the first two slaves in the story. Even worse, some slave-owners would use this passage as a justification towards violence against their slaves who wouldn’t perform as they wanted. (“at least I’m not throwing you into hell… I’m just beating you a little) This Parable has a history, and not always a good one. You may have heard a Christian employer use it as a way of putting moral pressure on employees to perform. If it has a lesson for us about faithfulness this morning, it’s only because God’s Spirit continues to speak in new ways that surprise us.

The first story that I want to contrast this with is the story of Abraham nearly sacrificing his son Isaac. We find this story in Genesis chapter twenty-two. In Paul’s pastoral letter to Timothy we read that Abraham was a man of faith. Nowhere was his faithfulness tested more sharply than when God told him to sacrifice his son on a mountain in the land of Moriah. Why was this a test of faithfulness? Because he was asked to obey God, to be loyal to God, above all other loyalties; even above his commitment to family. Abraham was deemed faithful because he was willing to sacrifice his own son Isaac in his loyalty to God. He was given clear instructions – he followed each of them right down to the last letter. He was faithful.

If you compare this story to Jesus’ parable of the master and his slaves, you quickly see a fairly important difference. The master didn’t give his slaves any instructions. The slave did not get into trouble for disobeying instructions, or for any kind of disobedience. The slave was sent to hell for not following his best guess on what his master’s expectations were. Put yourself in his shoes – you’re given money but absolutely no instructions about what to do with it. Are you going to invest it into the stock market? What if I put it this way – God gives you all the things you have – your money, your time, your strength; how much of it have you invested in growing the Kingdom? A tenth? A third? A hundredth? How much have you spent on your own wants, never mind your needs, or the needs of the poor? And yet we think the slave who hid the money is a bad guy? He gave the master 100% of what was given to him, yet he gets a bad rap. Do we even give 10%? The slave wasn’t given instructions – not like Abraham, who was told exactly what to do with his son Isaac.

The second story that I want to contrast with the Parable of the Talents is the story of King Solomon. When God approached Solomon, offering anything to him that his heart desired, what did he ask for? In 2 Chronicles chapter one, we read Solomon’s response: “Give me now wisdom and knowledge to go out and come before this people…” The bible tells us, at least fourteen times, that King Solomon was a wise man – and he was. His wisdom was tested, tried, and true. But what happened!?!?

In 1 Kings chapter eleven we can read thirteen verses about the failure of King Solomon. Although he was the wisest man of his time, King Solomon failed! He was a failure. His legacy was the dissolution of his father’s kingdom. What was his failure? In an attempt to consolidate power and to gain political alliances, and perhaps for other carnal reasons, King Solomon married hundreds of women. We read that he was married to seven hundred princesses and that he had three hundred concubines. The author of 1 Kings doesn’t really point this out as an especially bad thing – the real issue that God has with Solomon is that he began to worship other gods. Solomon’s wives slowly wore down his faithfulness/allegiance to Yahweh. Soon he was worshipping Astarte, goddess of the Sidonians and Milcom of the Ammonites; he built an altar of worship to Chemosh, god of the Moabites, and another to Molech, also of the Ammonites. He burnt incense to these foreign gods. For this reason, God promised to tear the kingdom away from Solomon and give it to someone else. In his mercy, God spared one of the tribes, for the sake of David, who was faithful.

The thing about asking God for wisdom is that God will give you ample opportunities to use it, challenges to overcome and grow in wisdom. Solomon asked for wisdom, but soon he was choosing foolishness. The very situations that God allowed him to be in, in order to sharpen his wisdom, Solomon chose to exploit these situations for his own gain. Solomon received everything he asked for from God – he wanted this treasure of wisdom; yet he completely spoiled it. You could say that he downgraded his credit with God (no longer a triple-A rating, he misused the treasure that God gave him. He devalued the spiritual inheritance that was given to him by David. He may have initially increased the financial value of the kingdom – he was unbelievably rich – but his disobedience ruined it all.

If you think of the slave from Jesus’ parable of the talents, this man didn’t ask for anything. He didn’t ask for that talent; not like Solomon, who asked for wisdom and then spoiled it. The slave was given a talent to work with. It wasn’t requested. He kept that talent and gave it back to his master – and for this he was punished. King Solomon, on the other hand, asked God for wisdom, then spoiled it – yet he is still called the wisest King of all Israel. How do you figure? Solomon downgraded the value of the kingdom, and it fell to pieces after him, yet people still cheer him on as a wise king. This lowly unqualified slave gives his master exactly what was given to him, and yet he gets thrown into hell. Who’s faithful? Who is the wise one? Isn’t faithfulness precisely when we are consistent? Isn’t it precisely when we act justly? Wasn’t the slave giving back precisely what he was given? Doesn’t that count as justice in our society, when you receive what is owed to you? Is this parable really promoting usury, or the practice of charging interest – where a person gets back more than they deserve?

As our capitalist systems and global economic partnerships continue to groan and creak, I hear heated words about where things are going. There are a lot of fears about what will happen if our economies crumble – and that’s understandable. Believe it or not, but this Parable of the Talents has been used by Christians to say that capitalism is God’s preferred economic policy – because of the way it glorifies profit. Or does it?

What if this parable can only make real sense if it’s read in its biblical context. Immediately preceding this parable we read the Parable of the Ten Bridesmaids. This parable is about always being ready for the coming of Jesus. It provokes us to live of life that always pays attention to God’s mission that we’ve been invited into; to always tend to our lamps and keep them brightly lit. Following the parable of the talents, Jesus speaks to his listeners about the final day of judgement. (read Matthew 25:31-46)

With these two pieces surrounding the Parable of the Talents, it should be clear that its real message could not possibly support black slavery, a story to keep your employees subservient/in-line, or a passage to ideologically support capitalism. In fact, in the judgment that will come, the Son of Man will ask how the poor have been treated, how the hungry have been fed, the homeless sheltered, the naked clothed, and the imprisoned visited. In God’s economic policy, justice & peace are the bottom line – not profit. This parable of the talents is a message about being faithful while we wait for our Master to return. It’s not about supporting the worship of profit – it’s about being faithful to God whose heart is for the poor and the outcast. The King that we are waiting for, like the 10 Bridesmaids, is a King who commanded a man to sell all his possessions and give it to the poor. He is a King who proclaimed the Year of Jubilee, the forgiveness of financial debts, and his earliest followers were convinced that to follow him meant that you had to share your stuff so that no-one lived in need.

What does faithfulness mean in all of this? If we ask God to increase our faithfulness, what will he do? What situations will God allow us to find ourselves in? What about situations where our faith will be increased? Do you want to face those situations? Would we be better off just praying for what we want, rather than what we should want? To be sure, God welcomes all of our prayers – even the prayer of that pastor who prayed at a Nascar race, thanking God for racing cars and his ‘smoking hot wife’. But I would argue that the language of our prayers displays what’s going on in our hearts. Do we long for more patience? Do we pray for more joy and faith? Or do we just pray for an easy life? Perhaps God allows us to experience difficulty for a very specific reason? Perhaps it’s an opportunity for us to prayerfully grow in the fruit of the Spirit.

In 2 Corinthians chapter twelve we read Paul speaking about his ‘thorn in the flesh’ a ‘messenger from Satan sent to torment him’. Nowhere does Paul explain in detail what he’s talking about. He experienced some kind of affliction or trial and it bothered him. The way Paul interpreted it was that God let this happen for two reasons: to keep him from being too self-focused or full-of-himself; secondly, it was given to him in order to show that God’s grace was enough, that weakness in God is actually more powerful than anything else.

In the parable of the talents, faithful servants are rewarded and unfaithful servants are cast into the outer darkness. Is that how things really go? Do good things happen to good people and bad things to bad people? Or is life more complex than that? Is life not often a bit more like Paul’s situation, where decent people experience great difficulty?

What does it mean to be faithful in situations of difficulty? Can we see, in them, an opportunity to grow? Are we willing to face the tests that will grow these fruits in us, tests like those faced by Abraham, Solomon, the master’s slaves & Paul? While Abraham and Paul remained faithful during their tests, Solomon and the slave buckled under their test. In the Lord’s Prayer we ask God to not lead us into the time of trial? And, to be sure, God does not tempt us – but He does let us encounter challenging situations. And is it not exactly in some of these moments of trial that we grow in some of the most profound ways? Is it not when our patience is tested to the extreme that we actually learn true patience? Is it not when our kindness is pushed to its limits that we finally understand the real kindness of God’s heart towards us? Is it not when your own children rebel in uncontrollable ways that you finally understand the heart of God towards us, His rebellious children?

As we pray for God to bless us, to heal us, to comfort us – let us also risk another prayer: that God would grow in us the fruit of the Spirit; in other words, let us pray that we will not forsake God in times of difficulty.Let us pray that we will be victorious in these moments and be strengthened in love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, patience, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. Let us be victorious, like Abraham and Paul, who remained faithful, as we wait for our master to return. Amen.