|
Pastor Johns Sermons |
|
Look at the Master in Jesus' story. Who is he? What kind of person is the Master? The first thing that is immediately obvious about the master is that he entrusts the servants with responsibility. Each of the servants is given a responsibility--to one is given 5 talents, to another 2 talents and to another 1 talent.
This means that each of us here today is given a responsibility, a job, a task, a burden to carry. That job is given to us by the Master.
The second thing we can say about the master is that he leaves. No sooner do we get our job from the master, when-- what happens? He leaves. Gone. Away. We are given a job and then left alone to work at it, to complete it, to spend our time on it, to use our talents.
It can be a shock when the master leaves us. The parable doesn't mention that shock directly. But life can be thought of as an ongoing attempt to recover from the shock of having the master leave us.
We experience that shock in the parents that have left us, the friends that leave us, the loved ones that leave us, the children that leave us. Some Emmanuel folks felt or are feeling the shock of Pastor Bill leaving. Some people even feel that God has left them.
But there is no doubt that in Jesus’ parable the master leaves us on our own. Jesus seems to be saying that unless the master leaves, we will not have the opportunity to use our gift. It is only in the Master's absence that we come to maturity and are tested. It is only in the master's absence that we can really blend our talents with others.
So the master gives us a gift, and then leaves. And thirdly, the master expects a return on his investment. The parable doesn't say this explicitly. It simply says that the master entrusted talents to the servants according to their ability. But there can be little doubt that the master wants a return from us.
And this leads us to the master’s 4th characteristic- he returns to judge. The master will not stay away for ever. The master will return, and when he does, he will judge us, and what we have done, and how we have used the talents he has entrusted to us.
Now this idea of settlement of accounts, or of judgment, is a scary idea. It is not an idea that is warm and fuzzy. It is a challenging idea for many. We want to escape judgment.
In fact to the extent that we want to escape judgment, and escape responsibility, to that same degree we move into the worthless servant category. One of the hallmarks of worthless servants is their attempt to offer excuses. It's not my job. Some one mistreated me. I didn't get the breaks. We had a personality conflict. It wasn't my fault.
I think one of the best visual pictures of this mentality, (the excuse mentality) came to me from my brother in law Dan. Dan sent me an E-mail, with a photo of a highway painting crew. You see these guys on the road, with their barrels and markers, painting the lines on the highways.
Well, in this particular photo, you could see the paint machine on the road, and the newly painted stripes, but then, you also saw a dead opossum lying right in the middle of the road. (Or at least it looked like dead opossum, it might have been a muskrat, or a woodchuck).
Whatever it was, it was lying right in the middle of the highway, and had two freshly painted yellow stripes sprayed on its dead body. The crew had painted over the road kill! Instead of removing the road kill and then painting!
How does this kind of stuff happen? My guess is that the guy running the paint truck would have said: Hey it's not my job to prepare the surface, I just paint! And I would guess that everybody on that paint crew would have offered similar excuses. The story is funny, but the implications are not so funny. |