Series: What He Said
Title: What He Said About Our Spiritual Trust
Text: Luke 19:11-27
Thesis: We have all been entrusted with time and the ability to serve God!
Introduction
Last night I watched two episodes of Father Brown on PBS that I have previously watched. Granted I enjoyed them the first two or three times I watched them and I enjoyed watching them again. I also watched a rerun of Bob Hearts Abashola that was as sweet the second time I saw it as it was the first time I saw it.
I have to confess I waste several hours every week watching television and the pathetic thing about my wastefulness is that much of that time is spent watching reruns… I wonder how many times I have watched MASH 4077 or Seinfeld or the Big Bang Theory or Life Below Zero or Mountain Men.
Then there’s money? Have you ever wondered how much money you would have if you had actually managed your pennies? What if I had actually skipped the breakfast drive-thru? What if I had not ordered that book on Amazon that came next day on Prime that turned out to be a total waste of $9 even if it was free delivery? And do you know how many hammers I have? Over the years I’ve acquired several and it seems I acquired them when I couldn’t find the ones I had and then when I had a new one I eventually found the old ones so now I am money poor and hammer rich. What a waste!
We’ve all heard the time is money thing. What does time is money mean?
The adage “time is money” means that “time is equivalent to money”. It highlights the value of time. Time should be used in doing productive works. A person makes use of his time by working hard to earn money. On the contrary, if the time is wasted, then it is equivalent to losing money. So when we do not use our time well we are not making money so we are essentially losing money.
While I know most of us in the room manage our time pretty well, I suspect some of us waste some here and there or at least on occasion mutter, “That’s ten minutes of my life I’ll never get back.”
And while I know most of us in the room manage our money pretty well, I suspect some of us waste some money here or there or at least on occasion mutter, “That’s a dollar that could have been better spent else- where.”
It seems Time and Money are the two things Jesus entrusted to the three men in our story today.
Jesus told this same parable in Matthew 25:14-30 but the context was different so the emphasis in Luke takes a bit of a different twist. In Luke Jesus speaks of the man going away as a nobleman who is going away to be crowned king, so he entrusted his business concerns to ten servants to manage until his return as the newly crowned king.
Jesus is obviously looking forward to his own crucifixion, resurrection, ascension and second coming and urging his followers to remain faithful until his return.
“Before he left he called together ten of his servants and divided among them ten pounds of silver, saying, ‘Invest this for me while I am gone.’ Luke 18:13-14
Eventually the newly crowned nobleman/king returned and called his servants in for an accounting.
“After he was crowned king, he returned and called in the servants to whom he had given the money. He wanted to find out what their profits were.” Luke 19:15
Though he had divided ten pounds of silver between ten servants, Jesus only tells us about his accounting with three of the servants who are apparently representative of the ten. I like to think of the first servant as the “Go-to Guy” Servant.
I. The “Go-To Guy” Servant
“The first servant reported, ‘Master, I invested your money and made ten times the original amount.’
‘Well done!’ the king exclaimed. ‘You are a good servant. You have been faithful with the little I entrusted to you, so you will be governor of ten cities as your reward.’ Luke 19: 16-17
When I read this parable I see that all three of these servants were entrusted with the same amount of silver. All three of the servants were entrusted with the same amount of time to invest that silver. So what was the difference between the three servants?
Why was the first servant able to invest his pound of silver and get a ten-fold return on his investment? Was he lucky? Did he have a better stock broker? Did he bet on better horses? Was he one of those high-risk guys who take big chances and either win big or lose big and just happened to hit it big at the right time? Or was he simply more capable than the other servants?
It would seem that in the end he proved himself to be more capable than the other servants and as such was rewarded with considerable responsibility… governing ten cities requires considerably more capability than governing five cities or one city.
There is an old adage, “To whom much is given, much is required.” I believe that to be a truism that is a transferable concept. It is transferable in terms of our innate abilities or talents, our roles in life, our resources, the opportunities afforded us and so on. That’s why we say things like. “A mind is a terrible thing to waste!” That may be said of any and every art. That may be said of any and every pursuit.
That is why it is such a tragedy when we witness a person in a position of power abusing that power or a person of great wealth squandering that wealth or a person with a great mind frittering that mind away with mindless pursuits or a person with great potential failing for lack of vision or a person capable of great good succumbing to scandalous ways.
I’ve always been in awe of those who seem to have it, so to speak. They have the brains or the skills or the looks or the personalities or the wherewithal and whatever. They are winners. They design cathedrals. They lead armies. They are quarterbacks. They discover cures for diseases. The get elected. They are class valedictorians and salutatorians. They are architects. They are surgeons. They are artists. They are composers. They perform. They explore and discover things. They are so imaginative. They can and they do. They are leaders.
They are “Go-To Guy” People in life and they are the “Go-To Guy” People in Christianity and the Church.
Then there is the second servant is the “Man in the Middle.”
II. The “Man in the Middle” Servant
“The second servant reported, ‘Master, I invested your money and made five times the original amount.’
‘Well done!’ the king said, ‘You will be governor over five cities.’ Luke 19:18-19
We can’t all be “Go-To Guy” people. Sure… there are those ten pounds of silver people and there are those one pound of silver people but there are a whole lot of 5 pounds of silver people in the middle. I think most people are “Man in the Middle” servant people. We are neither “Go-To Guy” people nor are we “Putz” people… we are “Man in the Middle” people.
In the story the king is every bit as pleased with the performance of the “Man in the Middle” as he was with the “Go-To Guy.” After hearing the report of each he said to both, “Well done!” And he rewarded each according to his abilities.
It’s okay to be in the middle. It seems to me that in the life and ministry of the church, most, if not all of the work is done by those of us who are in the middle.
The king expected the “Go-To Guy” to do his best and the king expected the “Man in the Middle” to do his best and the king expected the “Putz” to do his best. That’s all God expects of any of us… that we do our best. God expects that we use who we are and what he have to serve him as best we can.
We are not the most brilliant or the richest or whatever, but we know that God has entrusted to us a great deal and we are not going to waste what has been entrusted to us. In my reading I was looking for the name of the architect who designed the Sagrada Famila Cathedral in Barcelona, Spain as an example of “Go-To Guys” in that we can’t all be Antoni Gaudis who are capable of designing cathedrals and I ran across this poem about the men who build cathedrals by John Ormond.
They climbed on sketchy ladders towards God,
with winch and pulley hoisted hewn rock into heaven,
inhabited the sky with hammers,
defied gravity,
deified stone,
took up God's house to meet him,
and came down to their suppers
and small beer,
every night slept, lay with their smelly wives,
quarreled and cuffed the children,
lied, spat, sang, were happy, or unhappy,
and every day took to the ladders again,
impeded the rights of way of another summer's swallows,
grew greyer, shakier,
became less inclined to fix a neighbor's roof of a fine evening,
saw naves sprout arches, clerestories soar,
cursed the loud fancy glaziers for their luck,
somehow escaped the plague,
got rheumatism,
decided it was time to give it up,
to leave the spire to others,
stood in the crowd, well back from the vestments at the consecration,
envied the fat bishop his warm boots,
cocked a squint eye aloft,
and said, 'I bloody did that.'
Those guys who did the work were the “Men in the Middle” People. They were the people who went to work every day and did their jobs… like most of us who serve Jesus and his church every day, every week, every month, every year until we have to give it up but we can say, “I
I like to think of the third servant as the “Putz.” When I worked construction the “Putz” was the lazy lout on the crew who was pretty much good for nothing…
III. The “Putz”
“But the third servant brought back only the original amount of money and said, ‘Master, I hid your money and kept it safe. I was afraid because you are a hard man to deal with, taking what isn’t yours and harvesting crops you didn’t plant.’
‘You wicked servant!’ the king roared. ‘Your own words condemn you. If you knew I’m a hard man who takes what isn’t mine and harvests crops I didn’t plant, why didn’t you deposit my money in the bank? At least I could have gotten some interest on it.’
“Then turning to the others standing nearby, the king ordered, ‘Take the money from this servant, and give it to the one who has ten pounds.’ Luke 19:20-24
In one sense the third servant didn’t do anything wrong. Had it been October 24, 1929, i.e., Black Thursday when the Stock Market Crashed and the banks failed and Great Depression set in, had the king’s silver been in the bank he might well have lost it, so in biblical times the safest way to save your money was to dig a hole and bury it… which is what the servant did.
He cited “fear” as his reason for hiding the money in the ground which did not cut it with the king who likely would have cut him slack had he at least done something. It was the doing nothing that bothered the king. It is the waste of time and personal initiative that infuriated the king. What a waste of potential. The one pound of silver guy had a chance to try to make a difference but instead he did nothing. He was afraid.
He did not have Alektoraphobia – fear of chickens. He did not have Arachnophobia – fear of spiders. He did not have obesophobia – of gaining weight. He did not have Podophobia – fear of feet. He was just a putz!
I don’t know why some people don’t serve Jesus and his Church but whatever the reason the consequences are frightening and are understood to be the result of an unwillingness to risk anything at all in serving the king.
Conclusion
This week we will sit down and enjoy Thanksgiving. The next day we will kick-off the Christmas holiday season with Black Friday. It will be game on for gift giving and many of us will be giving gift cards because they are convenient and most people love receiving them.
39.2 percent of shoppers will purchase a department store gift card for friends and family, followed by 33.4 percent of shoppers opting for a restaurant gift card. But according to estimates reported in the Journal of State Taxation, the typical American home has an average of $300 in unused or "unredeemed" gift cards. These cards are often misplaced, accidentally thrown out, or only partially redeemed. Between 2005 and 2011, $41 billion in gift cards went unused. (Harvard Business Review, Stats & Curiosities (Harvard Business Review, 2013), page 104)
I am making something of a leap here but I want us to think of our lives as gift cards today… we have been entrusted with value and it is expected that we will be redeemed in full. It is a waste when a gift card remains unredeemed or unused and it is a waste when any person… a “Go-To” Person or a “Man in the Middle” Person or a “One Pound of Silver “Putz” Person wastes his or her potential as a servant of the king.
We have all been entrusted with time and the ability to serve God!
We are accountable to God for our time and our capabilities and this text is a call to renewed faithfulness as servants of our King.
