A Lectionary Reflection for the people of Thankful Memorial Episcopal Church for worship from home, November 15, 2020, Year A, 23 Pentecost, Proper 28

Judges 4:1-7
Psalm 123
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Matthew 25:14-30

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

“But since we belong to the day,” Paul tells the Christ-followers in Thessalonica, “let us be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love and for a helmet the hope of salvation.”  The hope of salvation.  Hope is a funny thing.  We can probably all agree it’s a good thing, a nice thing to have around, but it tends to be rather toned-down.  We seem to always imagine hope as “that thing with feathers,” as the poet Emily Dickinson calls it – something intangible, helpful and sweet, but as unassuming and easily forgotten as a sparrow.  But I think the hope Dickinson describes is very different from Paul’s Christian hope that is like a helmet. 

Perhaps you have seen suits of armor in a museum.  I saw displays of them in the royal armory museum in Leeds, England years ago.  There were some interactive exhibits there where you could pick up a piece of chain-link mail or look through the eye-slits of an ancient steel helmet.  These pieces of armor are heavy.  In order to wear a breastplate and helmet like that and move and fight in them, you had to be strong, clever, quick, skillful.  Hope like that kind of helmet is no “thing with feathers.”  No, it is a necessarily hard and sturdy piece of armor designed to protect the one who is already strong and brave enough to wear it.  This image of hope is a little scary.  We might even wonder if this Christian hope is one we want to own. 

In the portion of Matthew’s gospel this Sunday, Jesus tells his disciples a parable about what the coming of God’s kingdom will be like.  It’s a problematic story, for in it Jesus seems to be encouraging risky investments.  The coming of the kingdom, he says, will be like a master who has entrusted each of his slaves with a very large sum of money.  It is estimated that one talent was worth about 15 years of labor for an average worker.  But these are not workers.  This is not their money.  The master leaves and when he comes back he looks to see what each of his slaves has done with his talents.  Those who have made gains, who have risked investing what they have been given, are rewarded and asked “to enter into the joy of [their] master.”  The one who has done nothing, who has risked nothing and so gained nothing, is thrown “into the outer darkness.”

What are we to make of this disturbing parable?  Are we to believe that God is like a master who reaps where he did not sow and gathers where he did not scatter?  I think we must answer that question with a resounding “yes!”  Not because God is a harsh master, expecting more of us than we are able to give, but rather because God entrusts to us the work of God’s ongoing creation and salvation.  Just as the master in the story entrusts each slave with an amount “according to his ability,” so, too, God entrusts to each of us the work that God knows we are capable of accomplishing.  And this is not just any work.  This is God’s work in the world.  God trusts us, loves us enough to believe us when we say we are Christians, when, at our baptisms, we “sign up” for God’s mission in the world. 

In and through our baptisms, we have committed our whole selves – all that we have been given by God – to that mission.  That means filling out a pledge card in a grateful response to the love of God in our lives and with the faith that God will continue to provide for us.  It means contributing the time we have as a gift of God to do the work of God’s Church in our communities.  It means prayerfully considering how our God-given skills are best suited to do necessary work in the world and then going and doing it – with passion and vigor and joy.  We must invest God’s love, God’s justice, God’s grace – God’s talents which have been entrusted to us – in the world around us.  And in doing so, through the power of the Holy Spirit, we create even more of these things: love upon love, justice upon justice, grace upon grace. 

And if you are thinking that this idea of the role we have to play in God’s work in the world seems awfully familiar, it’s because you’ve heard me preach it before – just last week.  After all, this parable of the talents comes immediately on the heels of the bridesmaids parable we read last Sunday.  Both of these stories are part of a string of parables Jesus tells his disciples about the coming of God’s kingdom and I think they both carry the same message: the kingdom is coming and we are called to help make it real on earth. 

Of course, our decision to answer the call, to participate in God’s mission is a pretty risky venture.  It sounds like a difficult journey, one in which we might utterly fail.  But we are not alone.  Christians throughout the centuries have felt that same kind of anxiety, that these tasks with which God entrusts us might be too hard for us.  But, if we let that fear take hold of us, then we will become like the foolish bridesmaids who don’t bring enough oil, like the unfaithful servant who gives up without even trying.  Instead, we are asked to be like the faithful and wise ones, the good stewards who go off “at once” to invest what the master has given them. 

How can we overcome that fear of failure, the fear of risking something of ourselves for God?  Perhaps now that breastplate of faith and love, that helmet of hope that Paul describes are looking pretty necessary.  And all that armor is provided by the Lord who loves us. 

Like the Thessalonians to whom Paul writes, we are living in an in-between time, the moments between the death and resurrection of Christ and his coming again in glory.  2,000-plus years might seem a long time, but it is still an in-between time, the only time we are given by God to participate in God’s work, to help bring about God’s kingdom on this earth, to spread the good news of God’s love and mercy to the world, even in these dark moments, especially in these tense times.  And if we do this work, we do it because we have faith in God and love for one another, because we have the hope of salvation, because we believe the promise of Christ, that the joy of God’s kingdom is already coming.    

The unfaithful servant, the one whose fear makes him lazy, refuses to be the steward of God’s goodness and becomes ultimately separated from God.  But the faithful slaves “enter into the joy” of the master, or, to put it another way, “delight in his will” because they take the opportunity to participate in his work.  God invites us, too, to take part in God’s work and to participate in God’s joy.  God asks us to take up the trust we have been given, to arm ourselves with the faith, love and hope we have in Christ Jesus, and to invest God’s love and God’s grace in all those around us, that we may discover God’s joy dwelling within us already.  Amen.