A Reflection On The Parable of the Talents

Originally printed in our monthly EYC newsletter:

One of my favorite Bible stories is Jesus’ Parable of the Talents. This parable has come up many times in our youth group, because I think it is an important reflection on what faith itself IS. In some ways, for me, it all starts with this parable. We are told over and over again that Christianity is first and foremost about faith, but until we get a clear view on what faith even is we cannot begin to really struggle with what follows from our having it. Recently, while reading the Gospel of Matthew, a new dimension of the parable became clear to me, and because it brings up some interesting issues in contemporary Christian life, I thought I’d share it with all of you.

Mainstream Biblical scholars generally agree that the Gospels were written long after Jesus died, and are at least in part reconstructed from an oral tradition. Snippets and stories from Jesus life were floating around within the early Christian community. These snippets are called pericopes, and likely when the gospel writers received them, they came in no particular order, and so it was on the writer himself to try to put the various snippets together into a coherent whole. The writers of Matthew and Luke put the Parable of the Talents in very different contexts. Because of that, I’d long read the Parable as a stand-alone, as a complete idea all its own. The other day, when I read the Matthean version in its broader context, something powerful struck me. Now I think that it must be looked at as part of a larger pericope, one that runs from Matthew 24:1 through Matthew 25:30, and that changes things significantly.

That larger pericope is concerned with how Christians will behave if Jesus doesn’t return very quickly. Jesus warns that people will return to their normal patterns of behavior, and quit living out the Christian life passionately and faithfully. I’ve long known that the Parable of the Talents is about a contrast between a life of risk and venture on the one hand and a life of security on the other. But now I realize that Jesus is directing this to future Christians and not simply His immediate followers. Jesus is telling us in essence that to turn religion into another kind of safety and security, into something that makes life easier and more comfortable, is to lack faith. Christianity, Jesus is saying, is about living outside of safety and security, and living a life of real risk. We are being warned that doing just enough to get by because we fear God is to live without faith. Going to church once in a while, and saying the right prayers, and believing the right things, is not enough. It’s not faith. The life of faith is one where we push our religion as far as it can go, where we take real risks with ourselves, and explore life in all its depth and breadth.

This is so hard for people nowadays, especially young people. They have so many things that they are committed to doing and being a part of, and much of it is such an important part of them making the kind of future for themselves they want. But for all of us, a sacrifice must be made somewhere, life must look different because we are Christians, and not just on Sundays. In the Parable of the Talents we have been warned, that it is so easy to get trapped by the structures, and to start living a life geared to making things as comfortable for ourselves as we can, and that’s not what Jesus intended. I am guilty of it, we all are, but that is just death in tiny steps. We must discover in ourselves the real adventure of following Jesus. Such an adventure can only come with sacrifice and risk. But the rewards for us, as it is for the faithful servants in the story, are boundless.

A Homily About Music

I gave this homily at the Winter 2011 "Jam Out" Lock-In:

I love music. I love all kinds of music. I love to talk music, ya know? To critique songs and artists. I LOVE live music. I'll attend almost any live show you invite me to. The process of making music fascinates me. Probably has something to do with the fact that I have NO musical talent whatsoever. But for whatever reason, making music might as well be doing magic, to me. Or its like when your favorite song comes on the radio, and you have the urge to push your ear against the speaker because it sounds like right on the other side of it is another world, and you are listening, into it. And then that moment comes with that certain line or note and you're lifted outside of yourself. Its almost like music itself is trying to tell us something. There's a film called THE SOLOIST and its about this schizophrenic homeless man who is also a virtuoso cellist and violinist. Its a true story, I've seen interviews with the real guy. Most of what he says is incoherent, because that is what happens when schizophrenia gets real bad and goes untreated, it becomes hard even to string words together. But when he taks about music, he says some beautiful and profound things. He talks about it like its alive, like its a person. One of things he says that I love is "Music is trying to tell us that life isn't that bad". I think thats pretty close to the truth. You see, musicians communicate the content of experience, what its like to experience something. I'd have a hard time writing a formula which would let you understand 'what its like' for me to see a beautiful sunset or what its like when I fall in love, but a musician using sound and word can communicate these things. Throughout human history the fullest range of human experience has been explored in song. And the amazing thing is, over and over again, at the foundation of almost every human encounter of the world is found something profound, or true, or fun, or funny, and almost always beautiful. In short, something good. And if the human encounters with the world can all be reduced to something good, then in a very real sense music is telling us that life is good, and can be embraced.

There is a tradition in Christianity of self-denial, of...puritanism, of removing oneself from the world. Now, I think this tradition is important, I think it has something to teach us, I don't want to give up on it fully. But there is another tradition, exemplified by the John passage, that tells us that Jesus came to give us life abundantly. It tells us that in Christ's death God is telling us that we can step out onto the adventure of life with reckless abandon, knowing that indeed we will make mistakes, and that horrors will even be produced by those mistakes, but that God has taken those horrors into Himself and overcome them, and so we can see life as good, and worth living. I think that is what we can learn from music. And the thing I like about it, is given THAT definition of music, it means that all music, sacred or secular, can get us closer to God. Because if the message is that life is good, then over life there can only be...love. Amen.

A Cosmic Incarnation

Of all the advancements made in the 20th and 21st centuries…the technological and scientific achievements, the expansion of rights and international awareness, the maturing of our understanding of the human mind…few are as unnoticed, nor as monumental in scope, as the advancements that were made in the field of theology. Many intelligent men and women of the last century and current century put their minds to the great theological questions of the ages.
They came up with some amazing, creative answers to these questions, and posed questions of their own at least as interesting. Expressing these insights to the general religious populace, finding ways to explain their relevance, is one of the major jobs of modern ministry. And nowhere can one find a more interesting line of discussion than on the issue of the incarnation.

Much of the significant theologizing on this subject has been a corollary of some deeper project, and no greater ‘discovery’ was stumbled upon than the image of incarnation that took place among theologians whose main focus was not Christology, but cosmology. I’m talking about those men in women who sought to grapple with the rising scientific consciousness of mankind and what our expanded understanding of the universe might mean for the Christian worldview.

The most striking thing that came out of these musings was that modern science has forced us to see the universe itself as undergoing a kind of evolutionary process. The universe, these people suggested, is not a finished project, but a work in progress. We have to stop thinking about God as having ‘created’ the universe and instead realize that God ‘is creating’ the universe. The implications for incarnation have been this: God’s incarnation is not something that happened at one particular point in time, but rather is also a part of this cosmic process. Science, seen through the eyes of faith, is not only a journey of discovery, but a journey of self-discovery. Who we are is in part inclusive of the whole cosmic evolutionary history, and so from a Christian’s point of view, that means that Jesus Christ also, being fully man AND fully God, did not ‘begin’ at Bethlehem, but rather the whole of natural and human history is the story of Him becoming incarnate. Nor did that story end with His death. The Church is Christ existing still, and that story of incarnation continues with us. We, too, are a part of that cosmic and divine story.

This realization has had grand results in my own life. I have learned to see the entire cosmic process as a system of divine promise. No longer is Christ some far-flung deity in another world. Rather I have learned to truly see Christ within the dance of nature and my own life. The little things I do become filled with significance even as my own self-centered way of looking at the world shrinks, as it is no longer simply me, or mankind, but the entire cosmos that is the arena of divine grace and salvation. The incarnation from this view has clear relevance to every human life, because every human life is a part of the process of incarnation, and every action becomes a part of the Christian message, because as Alfred North Whitehead said, "Every act leaves the world with a deeper or a fainter impress of God." However, since this God is a truly cosmic Divinity, no act is the final word in the story, and there is always a larger context in which one is acting. The relationship between grace and responsibility is clearly enlightened.

I don’t know about you, but I feel constantly bombarded by two worldviews: one the dualistic other-worldliness of much of modern Christianity, the other the materialistic monism of scientism. In both cases, one gets the feeling that the true meaningfulness of life in this world is lost, the complexities of human experience ignored, and the full breadth of the Biblical message is forgotten. The more nuanced, cosmic view of many modern theologians is the Christianity I was, thankfully, introduced to when I finally sought a religious faith as an adult, but I’ve been saddened to find that among most people it is unknown or ignored. In my experience, no worldview has more to offer us in the way of enlightening our world, and making the Bible something that is truly relevant to the life we live today.