Fearless & Faithful ~ Matthew 25:14-30 ~ Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost

I began contemplating today’s Gospel at about the same time Elizabeth was watching one of her favorite TV shows, Hell’s Kitchen.

If you’re not familiar, this is a cooking competition of hot-headed, seemingly amateurish chefs.  The host is the mean-tempered, fowl-mouthed British chef Gordon Ramsay.  The grand prize is a coveted executive chef position in one of Ramsay’s famed restaurants.

I can’t help but shake my head of the image of Gordon Ramsay as the wealthy man in Jesus’ parable. 

The story reads like a bad dream: Someone gives me a huge sum of money with the expectation that I make it grow.  Trouble is, I don’t know the first thing about investing.  I don’t have that killer instinct of entrepreneurs like Warren Buffet or Donald Trump.  With no financial expertise and a volatile economy, the easiest and most common-sense thing to do would be to stash it away for safe-keeping.  At least then, you don’t lose.  Or do you…

Trouble was, the wealthy man was not tasking his three slaves to do something they couldn’t do.  Jesus tells us quite plainly that the master entrusted his property to his slaves, each according to their ability.  All three were worthy of their master’s trust.  It’d be the same thing as Gordon Ramsay asking his chefs to cook. 

So the third slave does a very foolish thing by burying his master’s money.  When he’s called to account for his stewardship, he says that he was afraid!  He, in essence, blames his master for his fear!! 

Whether this slave was truly afraid or just making excuses, we’ll never know.  But the thing about fear is that it is the most irrational of human emotions.  Fear distorts reality.  In this case, fear blinded the slave to the fact that he had the ability to put his master’s talents to work in a positive way.  His fear colored his perception of his master!  Perhaps the master wouldn’t have been so angry, if the slave had truly given it his best, but failed…

I remember something my boss told me years ago when I first went to work at the bookstore: he said, “no one gets fired for making mistakes—even really big ones.  But you do need to have a good attitude—and give it your best.”

You see, this isn’t a parable about success.  It’s a parable about faithfulness.  We, of course, are servants of God, entrusted with God’s property.  Our time, our selves, our possessions: these are God’s property that we hold in trust.  Being a disciple of Jesus is all about taking God’s gifts and putting them to work according to God’s purposes.

Each and every one of us has been reborn into the Body of Christ through baptism.  God is so invested in our lives as to give us the Holy Spirit, who equips and empowers us to live as God’s people in the world.  You can be faithful to God because God is faithful to you.  We have nothing to fear because we are God’s.

The challenge, then, is for the power of fear to be broken in our lives.  I don’t think we ever fully realize just how powerful fear is, because it exercises so much power in our lives.  Fear co-exists with the want of things other than God.  Most of the time, we reject Jesus out of fear of not getting what we want!  We’re afraid of not being successful; afraid of what people may say or do…   It’s easy to be the unfaithful slave—taking the love and grace of God, and then stashing it away—because we don’t have time…  We’re too tired…  We’re afraid of missing out…  Because we always do it this way…  Because we can’t let go. 

Jesus is a terrible gift to waste—because we really won’t know Jesus if we only give him a small piece of our lives, and keep the rest to ourselves.  To know Jesus is to go and do his work,  according to your ability.  To say yes, take risks, be vulnerable, to stake everything of value and put it where our faith is.  Jesus calls us as disciples to liberate us from the fears that tear us apart, and the worldly treasures that only leave us empty.  Trust God to meet your needs, serving God gracefully by serving God’s people graciously.  Let’s be one Body in Christ, bringing all our talents and treasures together to be a light in this dark world. 

God is faithful so that we can be faithful.  We may not always be successful, but God’s work is done in faithfulness.