Sermon: 27th Sunday After Pentecost (Proper 28, Year A)

The Rev. Robyn Neville, guest preacher

For the Third Servant

I think many of us have heard this Gospel before, the Gospel of the “talents.” A man leaves on a journey, and puts three servants in charge of his property. In the master’s absence, two of the servants increase the master’s property by doubling it; and then there’s that other poor servant – the third one - the one who buries his master’s property in the ground, for safe keeping. When the master returns, the master praises the first two servants, but he condemns this third servant, and orders him to be thrown into the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

I really feel for that third servant. I wonder what made him bury his portion in the ground. Perhaps he was just being cautious; perhaps he was simply being ultra-conservative with his master’s money, and instead of investing in markets that he could neither trust nor predict, he simply kept the property safe. Or perhaps he was a fearful man, and perhaps he had had run-ins with robbers before – thieves, after all, were common in Jesus’ day; that’s one of the reasons the Roman army was stationed in Palestine to begin with. Maybe this servant buried the talents because he didn’t want anyone to steal them.

Or perhaps he was just not a very imaginative person, or he wasn’t a very motivated person; maybe he was a dark-hearted man who was jealous of his master’s wealth and refused to invest it out of his own self-loathing. The master calls him “lazy” and “wicked.” Was he? Was he truly a bad servant?

Some of you may already know that in the Ancient Middle East, a talent was an enormous amount of money. It was the equivalent of about 3,000 shekels, approximately 40 kilograms of silver. That’s 88 pounds of silver. Can you imagine burying that much silver in the ground? It would have been quite a job; it would have taken at least a day of digging. This servant, this third of the three, must have been very good at burying things.

The readings from today all seem to agree that God does not take bad servants lightly. In our first reading from the Book of Judges, we read that the Lord lets the Israelites fall into slavery to a foreign king, in a foreign land, a land filled with unclean gods. The Lord allows the Israelites to be taken captive, to be carried off to an unclean place. Now God doesn’t abandon the Israelites altogether; he gives them Dvorah or Deborah to lead them, a woman of great strength, and intelligence, and wisdom and fairness, a woman who eventually redeemed Israel in the sight of God. But still – our reading from the Hebrew Bible this morning reminds us that there is a price to be paid for being a bad servant.

The Israelites were being bad servants. We hear in the Judges lesson that the Israelites were, and I quote, “again doing evil in the sight of the Lord” - and here the key word is “again” – meaning, they were at it again, the Lord had already warned them to stop what they were doing and start doing what was right, and yet, they were at it again. If we were to read back into the Book of Judges, we would see that the Israelites were up to worshipping false idols again. They had forgotten their master. They had forgotten Adonai. They had buried their memories of all the good that God had done for them, they had buried their love for the living God, and they had started sacrificing once again to the fertility gods and the thunder gods of their neighbors. That’s a pretty clear case of being a bad servant of God, right?

But what about our bad servant in the Gospel reading? What did he do that was so wrong? After all, at a time when our own global economy has been through some dramatic changes, and our own markets have been so unpredictable, burying a monetary windfall in the ground may not seem like such a bad idea.

But the Gospel lesson today isn’t about the economy. It is all about the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus tells this story of the master and the three servants to help us understand what the kingdom of heaven is all about. The kingdom of heaven, it would appear, has everything to do with being a good servant.

The problem with the bad servant is that he was afraid. The Gospel reading tells us that he was afraid of the master. Now, I don’t think that’s the lesson of the story; I don’t think the Bible instructs us to be terrorized by God – at least, not to be afraid of God’s wrath in that old timey religion kind of way. Jonathan Edwards, the great eighteenth century preacher, once preached a sermon that he entitled, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and he tried to convince his congregation that God was to be feared because God would dangle recalcitrant souls over the flames of hell the way a child dangles a spider over the open flame of a candle. I think that’s a pathological reading of Scripture, and I don’t think that either God or children should be that cruel. That’s not the image of God that Jesus proclaimed.

The third servant from our Gospel reading today is afraid – but in the sense that he is immobilized by his fear to somehow step out and do something great. I wonder about the natural greatness that lies dormant in each of us. Do we ever really know that the God who made us, the God who loves us with that beautiful, eternal love, made us for something great? Do we ever really accept that, or believe that? We might say, “well, God doesn’t make junk,” but do we take it further, do we ever really trust the fact that God made us to be a great people, a community of believers who shine a kind of light and a kind of beauty and a kind of honor that will startle and inspire people when they see it? Can you accept that God entrusted greatness to you?

This, I think, is what our Gospel is preaching to us today. The kingdom of heaven, as far as Jesus was concerned, is something that we’re supposed to create here, now, on this earth, in our lifetimes. The kingdom is supposed to be a place in our hearts, and a place in our world, where fairness and justice reigns. Where love is the great investment. Where peace and kindness and compassion rule our thoughts and our motivations. This is the kingdom of heaven, and in order to be brought to life in this world, the kingdom needs great people. The kingdom needs great servants. Do you know that you have that greatness living within you now? I promise you, if you have the Spirit of God dwelling within you – and if you’ve been baptized, then you do have the Spirit, whether you feel it or know it or not – then you can be great. The lesson today is simply that we can’t bury that Spirit-given greatness deep down and allow it to remain hidden.

But that’s what we do, isn’t it? We bury the kingdom deep down, we bury our own greatness deep down, and we try to ignore it. Instead, we often listen to those little, shadowy, desiccated, raspy voices that whisper to us, “You can never be great. You can never do anything meaningful. All that you do is worthless. If you try to do something great, you will fail. Everyone will see. If you do succeed, no one will notice, and in this day of global media, if no one notices your greatness, then it doesn’t count. You will suffer. You will despair. You will be led to destruction.” This is what those little voices say to us.

I say, shut off those voices. I say to those voices, if they are speaking to you today, be gone. I say to those voices of destruction, you do not belong among God’s people. I say, this is sacred ground, right here, where we are gathered, where we are sitting, and I say to those life-taking voices, you have no place here. You have no power here. These are God’s people, and they were made to be great. They were made to shine. I say to you, Holy Trinity Parish, you were made to be great, and you were made to shine. You were made to be a beacon here in Decatur, and in Haiti, and in Honduras, and in Ireland, and to the ends of the earth. You were made not to bury that shining kingdom within you – no, you were made to make it great in Christ’s name.

Now, I know that this life is difficult. I know that many of us are carrying burdens that are too much. I know that many of us are fearful about what’s next, what else could go wrong. I know that some of us are really struggling.

But today I want to encourage you to take a spiritual shovel, whatever that means to you, and to dig up the great things that you’ve hidden within you. Maybe suffering has caused you to put aside your talents. Maybe you’ve taken the spiritual equivalent of 80 pounds of silver, and you’ve hidden it so well inside of your soul that you don’t even see it anymore. Not today!

Today, I want you to reach into the loamy, rich, good earth of your spirits and find those great things that you buried deep down. Unearth them. Bring them back into the light. Offer them back up to the God who gave them to you. Know that you were made to bring forth greatness. Know that those great things that you’ve hidden within you are worthy gifts, and that it’s time to give those gifts back to God. Know that the living God who loves you doesn’t want you to be wasteful – not even of your own being. God doesn’t want you to waste your self. Know that hope lives in you, dwells in you like the wind of the Spirit dwells in you. If only you would be a good servant, and bring that hope forth, to share with the world.

We can’t build the kingdom if our tools are buried in the ground. We can’t honor God fully if we’ve somehow obscured part of our own being.

We can work together, to bring out each other’s great gifts, and we can offer all that we have – all that we are – to God’s glory.

May God give us the vision and the courage to dig up the hidden talents, those buried treasures of our souls, and to offer our own greatness to God on behalf of the kingdom. The God of eternity deserves our very best, and we deserve to remember that our very best is there because of God, because of God’s extravagant generosity with us. May the living God give us the grace to be good stewards of our souls, to be good stewards of our greatness, so that we may build up the kingdom, and be a shining example of hope for the world.

Amen.


The Rev. Robyn Neville, an Episcopal priest, holds a Th.M. from Harvard Divinity School and an M.Div. from Virginia Theological Seminary and is working on her Ph.D. in church history at The Candler School of Theology at Emory, focusing on women and gender in the early medieval period. She and her husband are regular worshipers at Holy Trinity.