Talents

Readings for the 22nd Sunday after Pentecost, Year A

Almighty God, whose loving hand has given us all that we possess: Grant us grace that we may honor you with our substance, and, remembering the account which we must one day give, may be faithful stewards of your bounty, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

So the kingdom of heaven will be like this:

a master goes on a journey and entrusts his property to his slaves - he gives the first guy five talents, he gives the second guy two talents, and he gives the third guy one talent... to each according to his abilities

Now, when we say a talent, we mean something you're good at, like singing or playing basketball, or learning other languages, but that's not what it meant back then. Originally, a talent was an amount of money. So the master gave his slaves different amounts of money, based on what he felt they could handle, and then left to go on a trip. Two of them traded the talents and made twice as much; one of them buried the talent, so that the amount was the same when he gave it back. If you want to know basically how much he gave them (and how much they gave back), a talent is roughly 15 years’ wages for a day laborer. You can get a pencil or pull up the calculator on your phone and figure out what that might roughly be.

Assuming current minimum wage, one talent = (approximately)

$7.25/hour x 40 hours/week x 52 weeks/year x 15 years

Write it down; we’ll come back to it later.

So, in the story, the guy with the five talents and the guy with the two talents are smart - they trade for twice as much. It reminds me of this poem by Shel Silverstein...


Another story of trading up, which you may have heard about, involves a guy from Canada named Kyle MacDonald, who wanted to move into a house and started trading up towards that goal by offering one red paperclip on Craigslist. He writes

On July 12, 2005 I posted a picture of a red paperclip on my blog and in the barter section of craigslist and asked if anyone wanted to make a trade for something bigger or better. A few days later I traded the paperclip for a pen shaped like a fish. Then I traded the pen for a doorknob. And so on, each time trading for something bigger or better. Once all the dust settled, I'd made 14 trades and wound up with a house located at 503 Main Street in Kipling Saskatchewan.

 And that's starting with a paperclip.

What if you started with...  a talent?
Remember how much one talent is?

($7.25  x  40  x  52  x  15...)

So the guy with one talent had something like a quarter of a million dollars, and the guy with two had almost half a million, and the guy with five had over a million! That's a lot of somebody else's money to be responsible for; I sure wouldn't want to lose it.
That was the third guy's approach; he played it safe, not wanting to risk losing any of the money. But the first two guys were responsible for handling even more of their master's money, and they weren't scared at all - immediately went out and risked it in trading.

FEAR is one difference between the first two guys and the third guy. As he says when the Master returns,

Master, I knew 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 have what is yours.

Another difference between the guy who buried his master's money and the other two who risked it is TRUST.

The first two guys viewed the money their master gave them as an opportunity because they trusted his confidence in their ability to handle it. In taking the money and trading with it, they accepted the responsibility of sharing with their master in the household's business. And when he returned, he invited them to share in his joy.

The third guy feared and distrusted the master. When the master gave him more money than he felt qualified to manage, this guy viewed it as a setup - a test designed to trap him - so he buried the quarter million dollars in the ground. Burying the talent was not to keep the money safe for his master so much as to keep himself safe from the master's invitation into shared responsibility. As he says on returning the money "Here you have what is yours." He never accepted the master's trust in him in the first place. "Here's your stuff - I didn't mess with any of it. I don't even know why you gave it to me in the first place. It's none of my business. I just work here."

The master gets really angry with him. His no-risk = no-failure strategy misses the whole point of the exercise. And he doesn’t account for opportunity loss. It's like taking only classes that are way easy for you so your GPA doesn't go down. Or like going up to bat and never swinging at a pitch because you don't want to run the bases and maybe have to slide...and get dirty, or possibly even hurt.

From this parable, I'm beginning to get the feeling that the point of the life we've been given is to get in the game, not to finish with a clean uniform. While we're here, we should play hard, go all out, even if we get grass-stained and dirty in the process. Even if we get hurt; even if we fail. And EVEN - though this is the scariest of all I think - EVEN if we succeed... and God gives us more responsibility to share with him in the work of his kingdom.

The kingdom of heaven will be like this: a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them...

Don't be scared of how much God has entrusted you with.
Ask yourself (like Kyle MacDonald's dad asked him when he thought of giving up the red paperclip idea)...

What would you do if you weren't afraid?

As those famous theologians, The Goo Goo Dolls, wrote:

The end of fear is where we begin.

Amen