THE RISK OF THE STEWARD
Matthew 25:14–30
The hang-glider rides the tramway to the top of Sandia Peak overlooking Albuquerque. At the tip of the peak, he stretches the gossamer fabric over a lightweight metal frame and leaps off the mountain into the clear air. The person enjoys the rush that comes with the risk of hang-gliding. Yet the glider trusts that the warm thermal currents coming up from the valley floor beneath him will sustain the flight.
Twenty-five thousand people shoot the rapids of the Colorado River each summer. Rising and falling with the swirling current, they enjoy the thrill of beating the odds and taming the river.
In another kind of risk, many enjoy playing the commodities markets. Betting on the future price of certain goods, they seek to profit in the face of the unknowable future. Still others across the United States take the risk of gambling in the growing phenomenon of casino betting.
Risk is reality. Starting a business or starting a family is a risk. Life is risky.
Yet how many people identify the call of the Lord Jesus Christ with a willingness to take risks for the sake of His church and kingdom? The “Parable of the Talents” does not have so much to do with what one does with talents as with what one risks for the sake of the Kingdom.
All of us have been given by God a quantity of the “stuff of life.” That stuff is our time, talent, and resources. God has given us the same 24 hours per day. God has given every believer a talent, a capacity. God has entrusted us with resources. In reality, this parable is about our willingness to risk time, talent, and resources for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ and His church.
All too often, the last entity in the community identified with risk is the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. One prominent pastor hung this banner before the church: “The seven last words of the church: ‘We never did it that way before.’ ”
The present challenge before our church calls for a decision of risk. We will, in the days ahead, be called upon to risk time, talent, and resources. We will shortly decide to risk our very substance for the sake of the challenge before our church. We will pledge a portion of our future income for the great advance before us. The Lord Jesus Christ calls upon us to take risks for the sake of His kingdom and church.
THE Risk OF Participating in
What God Is Doing rather than Merely Observing
The well-known story of the three servants has etched itself into our memory since early childhood. A man gave part of his money to three servants. One received five bags of gold, one two, and another one bag. The Greek coin talenta represented the largest denomination commonly minted—a large sum.
In reality, the five-bag servant and the two-bag servant are window dressing; they set off in clearer relief the one-bag servant. Although he had less to lose than the others, he did nothing. He had one bag of gold and did nothing with it. He was the typical observer, benchwarmer, or non-participant. He was incarcerated in inertia, imprisoned in his own special paralysis. He could not risk even the minimum.
Reinhold Niebuhr, a famous American Protestant theologian in the 20th century, served as both a working pastor in Detroit and a respected professor at Yale University. He told the story of a flatland farm boy who, all his young life, dreamed of being a sailor on a tall-masted sailing ship. He slipped away from home, made his way to a port city, and enlisted as an apprentice sailor. The third day out to sea, the captain commanded that he assume the watch in the crow’s nest. The boy climbed halfway up the mast and then froze, going neither up nor down. He took an option that was not an option. He feared the ridicule of the seasoned sailors on the deck beneath him, so he would not go down. He feared the heights above him, so he would not go up. He froze between the options and took neither. He is the very illustration of the one-bag servant. The servant neither risked the money nor threw it away. He simply kept it and did nothing with it.
God hands us the “stuff of life.” That stuff is the mix of our influence, contacts, network, abilities, money, time, and energy that make up life—in short, our time, talent, and resources. God expects us to risk that for the sake of the church and kingdom. We have the same options as the servant: risk it or lose it. The challenge for our church in the weeks before us will call each of us to take risks for the sake of reaching others with the message of salvation in Jesus Christ. Each one of us will assess the stuff of life that God has handed us and will decide to risk some of it for God’s work or to do nothing with it.
Refusal to risk what God gives us warps our perspective on God. When confronted with his risk-less existence, the one-bag servant revealed his twisted perspective on his lord: “Lord, I knew you to be hard man, reaping where you have not sown, and gathering where you have not scattered seed” (Matthew 25:24). His lord was anything but a hard man. His lord joyfully rewarded servants who took risks for the sake of the kingdom.
Living a risk-less life will warp our perspective on God and on the church. Sitting on the sidelines of life gives us a different perspective from actually playing on the field.
In the challenge before our church, we will all have a point of view. Those who sit it out on the sidelines will find themselves with a warped perspective, a skewered view of the challenge immediately before us. Those who become risk-taking participants will have a healthy perspective; they will risk the stuff of life for the sake of reaching our community for Christ.
Every field moves forward at the point of those willing to take risks. Early in the 19th century, Dr. David Kane O’Neill had a hunch that surgery performed under local anesthesia might be safer and the recovery from it quicker than surgery performed under general anesthesia. The problem was only monkeys wanted to help him prove his point. Then he did a risky thing. He administered to himself a local anesthesia and removed his own appendix to prove his point. Medicine moved forward at the point of risk.
The kingdom of God and the church do the same. We move forward at the point of risk. The days ahead will cause each of us to face a crossroads in life, the intersection of risk and safety. Which we choose will determine our destinies.
The challenge before us these days will call upon many in our congregation to risk the use of time. To many today, time is more precious than money. Surely these days will call us to risk our talents in the proper sense of the word. Whether we can make phone calls, arrange materials, speak, make home visits or exercise the gift of prayer, we can all and each one of us risk the talent that God has given us. And certainly these days call for the risk of resources. The major decision of the days ahead will be a decision about risking the resources of life for the sake of God’s kingdom.
THE Risk OF Doing Something for God rather than DOING Nothing
It is said that contemporaries of Jesus also told a parable. In their parable, the master of the house divided up his goods between two servants and took a long journey. One of them risked it and lost it; the other played it safe and did nothing with it. When the master returned, he visited the risk-taking servant with punishment, but the risk-less servant was promoted to be the head of his house.
No wonder it was said that no one had ever spoken stories like those of Jesus. He made their villains heroes and their heroes villains. To be prudent but useless was as far down as one could go on His scale of values. Jesus never said that the kingdom of God was like a man reclining in his easy chair. Rather, Jesus compared the kingdom to one willing to take risks in the marketplace of life. In the twin parables of the buried treasure and the perfect pearl, Jesus urged the necessity of risk-taking for the sake of the church and the kingdom.
Living under God’s rule is like finding a treasure hidden in a field (Matthew 13:44). A simple plowman risked everything he had in order to buy the field and thus possess the treasure. It was no sad decision. He did it “for the joy.” A pearl merchant may spend a lifetime building a pearl empire. Yet suddenly he finds one pearl of perfect proportion. In that moment, he risks everything in order to have that one perfect pearl (vv. 45–46). Following Jesus is the willingness to risk time, talent and resources in a moment of critical decision.
There existed a 13th century Cistercian abbey called “Our Lady of the Risk.” That abbey rested on the Brittany coast of France. Why would an early religious order call its residence “Our Lady of the Risk”? When the messenger angel appeared to the Virgin Mary with the incredible pronouncement that she would be with child but without a husband, the Hebrew teenage girl took an incredible risk. In a society that at worst would stone her and at best would shun her, she agreed to take the risk of being the human instrument of the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ. Those who named the community “Our Lady of the Risk” recognized the fundamental reality that the Gospel began with an incredible human risk on the part of Mary, the mother of Jesus. That risk continued when her Son died on the cross—really died—with nothing but the promise of God that He would be raised from the dead on the third day.
Søren Kierkegaard, a famous 19th century philosopher and theologian in Denmark, was a radical critic of the Danish church. He related that God had intended the church to be like an actor on the stage. The church would be the actor, the preacher the prompter, and God the observer of the church’s actions. Kierkegaard observed that, in the modern church, these roles had been changed. The preacher had become the actor, the congregation the passive observer, and God the prompter in case the show slowed down. Such an arrangement left the congregation as only a passive observer of the show—rather than a risk-taking participant.
For the sake of our church and its future, these days ahead must be days when the church risks time, talent, and resources. We dare not be mere spectators. We must be eager, risk-taking achievers.
THE Risk OF Accepting Responsibility rather than Placing Blame
The final scene in this three-act drama is a scene of judgment in which the risk-takers are rewarded and the risk-less servant is nailed to his irresponsibility. “After a long time the lord of those servants came and settled accounts with them” (Matthew 25:19). Jesus teaches that one aspect of God’s judgment will be a judgment of our willingness to take risks for the sake of the church and the kingdom.
The one-bag, riskless servant sounds as if he is a thoroughly modern person. He blames his environment and his own emotions for his unwillingness to take a risk: “I was afraid, and went and hid your money in the ground” (v. 25). He blames his own fears, his lord, and even the ground itself (v. 24). He excuses himself with much of the same kind of determinism redolent of modern humans. We blame environment, family, education, politics, economics and—now more than ever—genetics for every irresponsibility in life. This umbrella of fatalism is used to explain away everything from violent crime to personal laziness. We can always shift blame. It is as old as the Garden of Eden. Adam blamed Eve. Eve blamed the snake. The snake blamed the apple on the tree. The problem was not with the apple on the tree; it was with the pair on the ground!
We should hear the words of Jesus in that regard. We will be fastened by God’s judgment to whether we were willing to take risks for the sake of God’s work. All those who are willing to take risks belong to the same order of heroes in the eyes of God. The loving master gives the same words of commendation to the two-bag servant who gained two more as he did to the five-bag servant who gained five more: “Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a few things, I will make you ruler over many things. Enter into the joy of your lord” (vv. 21, 23). He did not deprecate the two-bag servant whose capacity for risk was less than the five-bag servant. Indeed both had risked to the limit of their capacity. One may presume that even if the one-bag servant risked the money and lost it, the lord would have known that he had it in his heart to assume a risk for the sake of his master.
God does not expect us to go beyond our capacity for risk. Some have a five-bag capacity, some a two-bag capacity, and others a one-bag capacity. If God has given us pebbles, God does not expect us to build a pyramid, but God does expect us to build. If God has given us burlap thread, God does not expect us to weave golden garments, but God expects us to weave something. In light of the challenge before our church, God does not expect every member to risk the same thing. God does not expect equal gifts, but expects equal sacrifice. We do not have equal potential to give, but we do have equal opportunity to cross the line of risk in our lives.
Let no one think that we cast ourselves into the abyss of blind fate when we risk something for the sake of God’s kingdom. The universe is not a cybernetic computer spewing out impersonal fate for those who accept risks in the name of Christ. The game has been tilted by the nail-scarred hand of One who took the ultimate risk for the sake of God’s work and overcame death, hell, and the grave! When we risk something for God, we have the assurance of the Great Risk-Taker who went before us in the realm of risk.
William Borden of Yale, class of 1909, reminds us of that point. From the famous Borden family, the young man responded to John R. Mott’s turn-of-the-century call to take the Gospel to all the world. He surprised his Ivy League contemporaries by surrendering to God’s call to foreign missions in the wilds of western China. The whole nation watched as the young “millionaire missionary” raised his own support to go to China. Turning his back on affluence and comfort in America, he set sail amidst great fanfare to travel to the Chinese mission field. He disembarked in Cairo, Egypt, for a time of preparation. While in Cairo, he contracted spinal meningitis and died in a lonely hospital room. Before his death, however, he left a famous six-word message.
Scrawled on a pad of paper, he wrote these words in pencil: “No reserve, no retreat, no regrets.”
William Borden had risked everything for the sake of the Gospel. It would appear to many secular observers that he had risked everything for nothing—he died in a lonely room having never reached his goal. Yet William Borden knew better. In his heart, he knew that he had taken the ultimate risk for the Lord Jesus Christ. Whether he reached his earthly destination was beside the point. He had taken the risk God wanted him to take.
CONCLUSION
We all have the stuff of life—time, talent, and resources. In the aftermath of our church’s immediate challenge, we will all have years ahead to reflect on whether we took the risk. In a few short weeks, we will one by one take that risk, or we will slink off into the sloth of mere personal safety. We will take our time, talent, and resources and act as God’s risk-takers, or we will not. Those who refuse to take that risk will have to reflect on the day of destiny when they refused to do so. Those who do take that risk can live with the satisfaction for a lifetime that they had no reserve, no retreat, no regrets. God help us to take the risk.
This is an adapted sermon from the stewarship material provided by RSI. I cannot find copyright limitations, so please feel free to use the information. I have adapted if from its original format.
