October 24, 2007 - Use your gifts or lose them - Hayward Fong

Matthew 25: 14-30

A talent as read in this parable is not a coin, but a measure of weight, which if it is silver would be worth over a thousand dollars. The master, planning on being away for some time, and not wanting his estate to lie fallow, divided it among his three servants in proportion to their abilities. The first two doubled their share, but the third being afraid to take the risk of trading with it, merely buried it in the ground. He didn’t even invest it in a FDIC insured interest bearing Certificate of Deposit. The first two were praised and given promise of greater things to come, but the third man was condemned and shut out in the outer darkness.

What was Jesus aiming at with this story? Most commentators suggest that the third servant stood for the Scribes and Pharisees and the Orthodox Jews. Their singular aim in life was to keep things as they were….build a fence around the law. Jesus was a threat because He came up with new ideas about God, about life and about man’s duty in life.

This is a challenge to adventurous religion. In the Christian faith there must be steady development. God is infinite; no one can ever get to the end of God. The riches of Christ are immeasurable; no one can exhaust them. And therefore, every generation should be penetrating deeper and deeper into the truth of God. Throughout every person’s life, learning more and more about God should be a priority.

Yet the whole tendency of orthodox religion is the exact opposite. It is so easy to worship the past, to look back on the “good old days of the golden age” instead of looking forward to greater things. One of our religious hang-ups is first asking where our decisions are going to take us. Our guide should be to follow truth, wherever the truth may lead.

Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick draws this analogy. “What would happen to medicine if doctors were not allowed to take cognizance of any discovery made later than the seventeenth century? In the life of the church there is something far wrong if in three hundred years men have not learned more about the meaning of their religion. In the individual life there is something wrong if a person’s faith remains exactly the same at twenty as it was at ten, or at forty as it was at twenty.” This parable is a challenge to be adventurous enough to follow our thoughts and the guidance of the Holy Spirit wherever they may lead.

This parable teaches another lesson. The man who already has will receive still more, while the man who has not will lose what he has. This is an old Jewish idea. “God gives wisdom only to him who possesses wisdom. He who increases not, decreases.”

As strange as this may sound and unfair as it may seem, this is a universal law of life. The more knowledge a person has, the more that person is able to receive. One who does not read beyond the comic book cannot appreciate the wealth of the classics. One who knows only a little about science cannot understand the vast things of the scientific world. But the more one learns, the greater the wonders one is capable of understanding. And the reverse is true. If we have a little knowledge and make no effort to develop it, we end up losing what we have. Each of us knows this to be true; whether it is our childhood piano lesson long neglected or the high school foreign language we failed to use and now find it left in the classroom.

This is a great and important truth – in life we can never stand still; if we are not going forward, we will end up going backwards, relative to those who are moving ahead. Thus, we must see to it that every day we are advancing, learning something new, doing something a little better.

Besides what we have noted, another lesson stands out. The servants were given differing amounts, according to their individual abilities. The master did not expect them to do what they could not do. Jesus never held that all people were equal in ability. We are all born with different abilities and the test in life is how we use what we are given. It becomes clear that the duty is not to envy someone else his skill but to make the best of our own. The United States Army’ recruiting slogan for many years was, “Be the best you can be.” Though we cannot be equal in achievement we can be equal in effort. The ultimate aim should be to say at the finish, “I have done my best.”

The condemnation of the third servant is that he didn’t try. He didn’t feel like it was worth trying. The world is not made of geniuses. For the most part it is composed of ordinary people doing ordinary jobs, but these ordinary jobs must be done if the world is to go on and God’s plan carried out. It has been said with great wisdom, “God does not want extraordinary people doing extraordinary things nearly so much as He wants ordinary people who do ordinary things well.” Abraham Lincoln probably said it best, “God must love the common people because he made so many of them.” The world depends on people with one talent.

What we do not use we are bound in the end to lose. We may have certain skills and abilities, but if we do not use them we will soon lose them. Whether it is Tiger Woods of golfing fame or Yo-Yo Ma at the cello, if they didn’t practice they would lose their abilities. It is so with knowledge; if we do not keep our knowledge honed, we lose it. The Africans have a proverb “You cannot cut today’s meat with yesterday’s knife.”

If we honestly examine our lives we will see that there is some talent which God has given each of us. It is death to hide that talent; it is life to use it in the service of God and humankind