SERMONS

The Sermon of the Week is from Rev'd Brian Dawson (or at least it's the one he wrote, which may or may not resemble the sermon actually preached!)

SERMON OF THE WEEK

November 16th 2008 – Three Principles of Christian Stewardship

Reading : Matthew 25: 14-30

“Well done you good and faithful servant.”

Clarence Jordan, New Testament scholar and co-founder of Habitat for Humanity, once described Christ's parables as a Trojan Horse – they seem harmless enough, so you let ‘em in and bam! they've got you. I think he was probably right, but the “let ‘em in” part is crucial.

Today we come to the third and final of our stewardship Sundays for the year and I promise you that I did not choose the gospel to match the theme, and nor did we time the stewardship campaign to conclude on this parable, sometimes things just come together.

Actually, if I had been choosing a gospel reading especially for today there's a good chance I would have deliberately avoided this parable of the talents, not because it isn't appropriate but in a way because it's to appropriate, to the point that if we really take what it says seriously we might find ourselves carried several very large strides beyond where we're comfortable in going, but then who said Christian stewardship was meant to be comfortable?

And that's what we're talking about – Christian stewardship. One of the issues I have with so much that's been said and written about stewardship over recent decades is that it really isn't all that Christian, and we shouldn't be surprised about that. We start talking about money and resources and immediately people look to businessmen and women, people who work with money for a living, people with backgrounds in fundraising and marketing, because after all if we want people to give us more money, or give us some other stuff, surely the people who can help us do that are those who specialise in this kind of work?

Well, that would be fine if all we were talking about was raising money and if the values of business matched the values of the Gospel but we're not and most often they don't. That, I believe, is one of the reasons why a number of commentators have argued strongly that this parable we've heard today isn't about stewardship at all – it's not about tithing or giving your time, it's not even really about money or resources, so it can't be about stewardship, and they're right, it's not.

Let's be very clear here; when Jesus told this parable of the talents he wasn't thinking about stewardship campaigns. This wasn't about teaching the disciples the value of tithing or encouraging more money out of his followers. What this parable represents is just one part of a much wider conversation which includes last week's story of the foolish bridesmaids and, most importantly, next week's prophecy of the sheep and the goats which concludes with those famous and essential words, ‘when you did it for the least of these, you did it for me'. So it's vital that we don't read or hear the Parable of the Talents in isolation because we can really only begin to grasp what's being said here when we look at it all as a whole. But even then, when it comes right down to it, if we continue to hold on to this narrow, business focused understanding of stewardship, even if we look at this whole chapter of Matthew and beyond it's not about stewardship, unless, as I believe we must, we radically change our understanding of what stewardship is.

This is, as I said, our third week on stewardship and I could so easily do another three weeks, but don't panic because I won't. What I do want to do though is wind up this campaign with a look at what I believe Christian stewardship is all about, and I want to do that through today's Gospel reading with an exploration of three principles of Christian stewardship.

“For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them”.

Right here, in the very first verse of today's reading, right at the start of this famous parable is the first and foremost principle of Christian stewardship and why it is that the word ‘Christian' is paramount here.

So much of what I hear and read is about asking us to give our money to God, or our time, or our resources. This is especially true for most of us who have been born and raised in a white, Euro-centric society and culture. I once shared a pastoral class with a man from Samoa who had spent his whole life in a village environment, and when we started to talk about the psychological theories of individuation and finding the true self he found himself completely bewildered. ‘Never in my life has been just me and mine,' he said, ‘it's always been us and ours.' For someone who has spent their entire life in a communal culture thinking about things like individualism is hard, just as it is for we who have been brought up to believe that once we earn it and pay for it and have it, it's ours to get our heads around the idea that maybe it isn't. Principle number one: it's not ours.

Matthew really takes this parable of the talents and supersizes it. While Luke has the three servants receiving a few mina, or ten pounds as the NRSV translates it, Matthew has five talents. A talent was a huge sum of money, around twenty years worth of the average wage, so five talents was just unimaginable. We're talking millions of today's dollars entrusted to the servant's care, but note, never actually made theirs.

“You ought to have invested my money … and on my return I would have received what was my own”.

We've all heard discussions about how much it's appropriate to give to the church – 10% gross or net – but I believe this first principle of Christian stewardship challenges the attitudes behind those conversations. The question isn't so much ‘how much should I give to God' as ‘how much is God's in the first place?' and the challenge of this parable is that the answer is, the lot. It's not ours to start with so it all belongs to God, that's the first principle of Christian stewardship.

“The one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded with them, and made five more talents.”

I have a sneaking suspicion that there are elements of this parable that have a whole new layer of meaning in a time of financial crisis. Here we have three servants, each entrusted with a huge amount of money by their master, one goes a buries it, a common and quite prudent method of protecting ones money in first century Palestine, the others go out and trade with the money and make a profit. Who does the master approve of?

I think we need to be careful here that we don't draw allusions where there are none or push a point too far. Yes, the first two servants take risks with their master's money, and I can't help but wonder how the story would have gone if those risks hadn't worked out. But taking risks and being foolish isn't necessarily the same thing. Take those US banks and kiwi lending companies for example that having got caught up in the whole high risk/high profit sub-prime mortgage scene, and all that followed on from it, were ultimately risking other people's money on risks that were almost guarantied not to pay off, somehow I don't think those are people whom anyone would call good and faithful servants. But the point remains, principle number two; progress is almost always more important than protection.

I'm often involved in conversations about what's best for the church's resources. Someone wants money for this, or there's an idea for a ministry focused on that, and all of them have some pros and cons about them. Some of them seem like safe bets or maybe they're cheap or perhaps they're even both. Some of them look completely insane and almost assured to cost a fortune with little to show for it. Which are the ones we should invest in? The ones that will progress the coming of God's kingdom.

I talked about this a couple of weeks ago and it's a vital concept here – the first priority for any Christian is to make God's kingdom a reality. ‘Go and tell them the kingdom of God has come near.' That was the mission of the first disciples and it's still our mission today. If what we're doing isn't progressing that kingdom, if our stewardship isn't focused on making it a reality, then it isn't Christian.

So what does that actually mean? Well, many of you have seen a good example right here when the parish was faced with the choice of keeping or demolishing the old hall. I wasn't here in those days, praise God! But from what I've heard and seen and from what I experience working in this building on a daily basis, the right decision was made, not just because it means I've got a comfortable office and a toilet, but because it was the best decision for progressing the mission of the church.

Where protecting the past means impeding the progress of that mission, then our choice becomes clearer, whether it's should we demolish a hall, or give money to a food bank or commit time and energy to some well intentioned talkfest, the same principle applies: Progress is almost always more important than protection.

“You have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things”.

There are those who will tell you that the reward for serving God is heaven. Others will tell you that for every dollar you give, God will return it ten-fold. Some believe that Christianity works like compound interest, producing bigger returns every year. I'm here to tell you they're all wrong.

The third principle of Christian stewardship is simply this; the reward for faithful service is more service.

How fair is that? How about if I said to you, ‘come and work for me, cleaning my house, doing my ironing, and at the end of the day I'll reward you by letting you do the gardening too'? I can see you queuing to help. But the key here once again is to not look at this through the eyes of an employment arrangement or basic, commercial commonsense. That's not what this is about. Our reward for serving God is more opportunities to serve God because it is in serving God that we “enter into the joy of [our] master.”

Serving God is not drudgery or a burden. Serving God is a privilege because it is through that service that we enter into God's joy, and to understand that fully, to really comprehend what that means, we need to remember that this passage doesn't end with the completion of this parable and next week's reading is crucial. But you'll need to come back next week to hear more about that.

Number one, it's not ours, number two, progress is almost always more important than protection, and number three, the reward for faithful service is more service. Three principles of Christian stewardship as we conclude this stewardship campaign, and three principles that if we take them seriously will suddenly go from being somewhat intriguing if perhaps a little discomforting, to radically changing the way we live and give. That's the Trojan Horse this parable represents, it's up to each of us whether we let it in.