Rusty stood glowering at my brother and sister-in-law across the yard. It was a bright, sunny day in Kentucky where they had driven from Atlanta to visit a breeder of Great Danes that they had connected with online. When my brother Gill married Annie, it wasn’t in their wedding vows that he was committing to a lifetime of Great Dane ownership, but it didn’t need to be; Annie had owned Great Danes for years, and because Danes don’t live very long, she had developed the habit of owning two at any given time: an older one and a younger one. Gill, who had once tried to convince my mom that she should replace me with a dog when I went off to college, was perfectly happy to fall into this lifestyle as part of the deal.
At this point, just a year or two ago, they had lost their beloved 
George, a gangly neurotic dog who was afraid of his own shadow. After the period of mourning had subsided, they decided they were ready for a new dog, and struck up a connection with this breeder in Kentucky who said, “I think I might have the dog for you.” They were touched by Rusty’s story, who had been neglected by his previous owners to the point that the breeder took him back and was now looking for a home that would be patient and understanding of his “eccentricities.” Having lived with George for the previous eight years, Gill and Annie thought they were up to the task and decided to go check him out.
And there he was, glowering at them from the other end of the yard. He was huge, even for a Dane, solid muscle where George had been thin and spindly. He was frozen in a position of alert scrutiny, his pointed ears scanning for any threat, his eyes locked onto Gill as the biggest human in the yard at that point. Without warning, he broke towards them in what passes for a sprint with Great Danes: long legs flying, ears flapping, mouth fixed in a cold grimace as he came on. Both of them took an involuntary step backwards, despite all their years of being with Danes, at the sight of him barreling down towards them as the breeder suddenly began screaming, “Rusty!” Knowing enough to stand their ground, they waited.
Then Rusty awkwardly slammed on the brakes as he got close, skidded to a stop, and gently pushed his head down against Gill’s hip (remember, he’s a Great Dane, his head is normally above hip level!). Gill reached out and began to pet him, and Rusty stood still as a statue, silently basking in the joy of someone being kind and attentive to him and not wanting it to stop. When Gill finally did, he put his head down and gently pushed into him again to ask for more, and they’ve been like that ever since. Gill says now, despite appearances, Rusty is the sweetest dog they’ve ever had, and he is particularly attached to Gill. He lays his bulk on his side at Gill’s feet in the living room, and if Gill gets up to go anywhere, even for just a moment, he’ll reach out a long leg and place a giant paw on his foot gently but dramatically as he passes, looking for all the world like a forlorn ingenue in a 1930s film noir saying, “no, don’t go; I can’t live without you!”
The truth is, human beings are terrible at assessing risk. I mean, it’s not unreasonable to look askance at a gigantic dog running at you with an inscrutable expression, it’s just a particularly good example of how initial and surface impressions can mislead us, especially when they tap into our fears and prejudices. But then there are all the ways we dramatically miscalculate risk in our ordinary lives. People worry about their plane crashing on the day of a flight, but don’t worry about their car crashing on the way to the airport, despite the fact that there’s never been a commercial plane crash going to or from ABE, and there are so many car crashes on Route 22 that you could practically set your watch to them.
People are terrified of being attacked by sharks at the beach, when less than 10 deaths a year happened from shark attacks, yet people will complain at being forced out of the water at the beach as a thunderstorm goes by when 2000 people a year are struck dead by lightning, and many more seriously injured. More sobering: tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of people in the United States died in the COVID-19 pandemic because they were more afraid of the scientifically-proven vaccine designed to save their lives than they were of the virus that was trying to kill them. Far too often, it is fear that guides our assessment of risk, not fact.
That is what is happening in this unusual story that Jesus is telling his disciples. “For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them.” Now, he isn’t just heading to the coast for a short business trip. The word for “journey” here means to travel abroad, and in the first century that meant not days and weeks but months and even years. Nobles and wealthy landowners and merchants who undertook such journeys would have to make arrangements for their households to be managed well for an extended period of time in their absence. That’s what this wealthy man is doing.
“To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one; to each according to his ability. Then he went away.” So right there we know that the one who gets a single talent has the least ability in the eyes of the rich man. And yet let’s not get it twisted: a talent is a measure of money equivalent to 15 years of the typical working person’s wages at the time. That would be somewhere around 1 million dollars today, with the specific amount depending on which figure you used for typical income in the United States. So while this guy is not the star player here, he’s still good enough to play in the major leagues, so to speak.
The first two get right to work: the one entrusted with five talents makes five more; the one entrusted with two talents makes two more. Those are both very impressive returns on investment; I mean, if anybody here knows a financial advisor with an unblemished record of doubling your investment, let me know! Of course, as any financial advisor will be quick to tell you, at least in the fine print beneath their glossy statements of gigantic profits earned: “past performance is no guarantee of future results.” And that’s not simply a caveat, it’s a fact; there are risks we can manage if we are smart and educated and experienced in doing so, and there are risks that we have no control over whatsoever. Part of what makes a manager successful is the skillful management of risk in order to maximize profit; and part of it is just luck.
When I worked as a pastor in New York City, I used to say that there are really only two groups of people in the United States today who understand all the imagery of farming in the Bible in terms of their daily life. One group, of course, is farmers, or at least people who’ve spent enough time or a farm, or gardening, or whatever. And the other group is people who are involved in finance. Now, finance seems as removed from agriculture as one can get. But the truth is that both understand that there is risk you can control, and risk you can’t; that there are decisions you can make as a manager that reduce the chances of a loss and maximize the chances of a rich harvest. But floods and droughts and plagues come without warning, as do bear markets and recessions and depressions, and there’s only so much you can to do protect against them.
That is what is on the mind of the third manager. As he himself declares later in the parable, he believes the rich man is both harsh and ruthless to the point of being predatory, taking the produce and earnings of others for himself. And he admits that made him afraid, and it is on the basis of that fear that he makes his decision. I need to protect myself, he thinks; what can I do that will make absolutely sure that I will keep this harsh man’s resources safe so he won’t be able to punish me when he returns? Well, he digs a hole and buries the money in secret to do exactly that.
First-century law literally said that if you do that with someone else’s money, you could not be held liable for it if it ends up getting stolen anyway, because in a day before insured banks, there was nowhere safer to keep something than that. So that’s what he does, confident that he has done the safest thing you can do with the man’s money. So when the man finally returns, the first two managers give him their earnings report, and he’s so delighted with them that he says, “if you’ve done that well with these things, then come, I’m going to really give you something to work with!”
And then he comes to the third one. He explains that he kept the rich man’s money safe because he knows how harsh he is, so here it is, every cent. At that, the rich man explodes with indignation, orders the talent being returned to be given to the man who has ten talents, and then says provocatively: “to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”
We’re so used to hearing Jesus say things like, “the last shall be first,” and “blessed are the poor,” and so on that this sounds like fingernails on the Scriptural chalkboard. Wait, to all those who have, MORE will be given? From those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away? I don’t know about you, but when I first read that, I sort of want to ask, are you ok, Jesus? Do you need, like, a protein bar or something? Because you’re not normally like this.
But Jesus is OK, and he knows what he is saying. This isn’t capricious; if we think that, then we’re starting to fall into the same mindset as the third manager, who characterized the rich man as harsh and exploitative when there’s absolutely no evidence for that. On the contrary, the other two servants have it right: they saw being entrusted with these kinds of resources by this rich man not as something to fear, but something to embrace. They see a master who doesn’t prey on others by taking from them oppressively, but rather one who empowers his people by giving to them a staggering abundance of resources, trust, discretion, and time to accomplish something truly extraordinary on his behalf.
And most of all, they see this lord as not only allowing them to take risks in order to do that, but expecting them do to so. They understand that their mandate is not to protect what they have been given, but to use it wisely and faithfully and creatively and boldy to accomplish the lord’s purposes, which is to put them to use in the world to achieve something. And if that is your mandate, then the riskiest thing you can do is to focus on preserving what you have, because by keeping it absolutely safe, you also keep it absolutely useless.
That’s why the rich man takes away the one talent from the third man and gives it to the one with ten talents: because he understands the rich man expects him to use what he’s been given to generate something positive, not simply keep what he has safe, and he acts accordingly. As St. Thomas Aquinas would say over a thousand years after Jesus: “if the highest aim of a captain was to preserve their ship, they would never take it out of port.”
We, the congregation of First Presbyterian Church of Bethlehem, have been entrusted with an extraordinary wealth of talents. Talents in the metaphorical sense, of course: a group of individuals with amazing gifts and skills and experiences to use in service to God and our neighbors, as we have been called and charged to do. And talents in the literal sense: the financial gifts that people make to support our congregational mission right now; the gifts made in the past to create lasting resources, especially these facilities, to sustain that mission throughout the years, present, past, and future. But our mission, our purpose, is not to preserve those things. It is not to keep them safe.
It is to use them, to use them wisely and faithfully and creatively and boldly to accomplish the Lord’s purposes, to put them to use in the world to accomplish something on Christ’s behalf: to welcome “an inclusive and joyful community of Christ’s followers into actively exploring how God’s gracious love gives meaning to our lives and faith, and inspires us to address the needs of our changing world. Through our learning, service, and grateful worship, God fills us with purpose, compassion, courage, and love,” as our congregational mission statement puts it. And to do that, we will definitely need to take the ship out of port: to cast off the lines holding us safely in place and risk going out of the familiar port and sailing into uncharted waters. Which makes a certain amount of hesitation, and trepidation, and even fear understandable; by definition, this is sailing into the unknown, and the unknown is always at least partly scary.
We’re going to talk more about how to acknowledge and manage that dynamic in the coming weeks in this sermon series, because it is real. But what’s also real is that we have both the calling and the opportunity to not simply follow the routes established long before our time, but to be the ones who are charting new paths and pursuing new possibilities, not abandoning what has been known and cherished but connecting the two together as chapters in a much larger story. That is what Jesus is calling his disciples to do, to risk, to follow, to receive in this parable.
That is what Jesus is calling us to do, now and in the season to come. There is much that we still don’t know about what is ahead of us; that is, after all, the nature of exploration. But what is certain is that, if we are faithful to that calling, faithful in these things that Jesus has entrusted into our hands, and we put them to use on Christ’s behalf for Christ’s purposes, we too will be greeted with a smile and an embrace, with praise and with a promise: “well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful in a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Enter into the joy of your Lord.”