It all seemed so unthinkable six years ago.  A jetliner crashing into the nation’s capitol during a joint session of Congress, taking out most of the nation’s top leadership including the President.  Unthinkable, right?  But, that’s the way Tom Clancy wrote it five years before 9/11 (Tom Clancy, Executive Orders, Putnam, 1996).  What’s really chilling is that, three years before that, he wrote about terrorists planting a nuclear weapon on American soil and setting it off.  Clancy has this uncanny ability to take our worst fears, the ones we keep stuffed as far away from our conscious thoughts as possible, and summing them up for us right before our very eyes.  If Clancy turns out to be the apocalyptic prophet he appears to be, especially if he does, we’ll have to turn to a real prophet to find hope on the other side of fear.  All of which brings us to Jesus.

We’re not the first ones to want to know how all of this would end.  In a place just a stone’s throw from what has become ground zero for suicide bombers, Jesus’ disciples came to him one day twenty centuries ago and point-blank asked him, “what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age (Matthew 25:3)?”  Jesus’ answer is, in some ways, more mysterious than the question.  Its plotline even includes a time when “‘the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.’”  Unthinkable, right?  All this mystery.  What’s Jesus up to?

Assuming he’s not just trying to set Clancy up for another blockbuster, we get a clue to what Jesus was really up to in the fact that he didn’t answer the disciples’ question by giving them a date for their calendars, or ours.  Instead, he offers hope for our hearts by focusing more on what the end should mean to us than when it would happen.  And, if we don’t get lost trying to decipher what we’ll never fully understand until we see it, Jesus words give us, right now, not the sum of all fears but the sum of all faith.

A faith that leads us to be focused on how we are living, right now, by being responsible with what God has given us.  A faith that defines being responsible as a willingness to risk whatever is ours by investing it in this world for his Kingdom’s sake.  That is the meaning of the parable of the talents, part of Jesus’ answer about when this would all end.  An answer that says that it is not ours to know when.  What is ours is to live so responsibly now that, if our Lord returned this very moment, he’d find us being risk-taking responsible. 

This story is easy to understand even though we don’t talk in terms of slaves and masters anymore and our monetary standard is the dollar, not the first century talent.  But, the story’s meaning is easy to miss unless we put our life’s story into it, bringing it from its first century setting into ours.  These slaves were each given talents, each talent equal to about a day’s wage.  Two invest their money, doubling its value.  One, out of fear, buries his, gaining no return.  The master returns.  The first two get a raise, the last loses his job. 

When the first two slaves returned double their master’s money, this is the blessing they received from their master, “‘Well done, you have been trustworthy.’”  One brought back more from his investment than the other; the blessing they received was the same.  That’s because the blessing based on the return on their investment but their trustworthiness to risk making it.  The blessing was measured, instead, in terms of faithfulness.  Jesus is telling us about God.  He was telling us that God wants us to be willing to invest what is ours, even at risk, in the kingdom’s work in this world.

The third slave came back and said, “‘I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground.  Here you have what is yours.’”  My paraphrase, “Here master, I took real good care of what belongs to you.  I kept it safe.”  This is the servant that received the harshest words from his master. “‘You wicked and lazy slave,’” he called him.  Wicked, lazy.  Tough words.  Remember now, Jesus is telling us about God.  And, what he is telling us is at least this much.  We have not been called to just take good care of what God has given us but to invest it in this world for the sake of his Kingdom.  If you’re looking for a better return on your investment than what two percent CD’s bring, you’ll have to look somewhere other than this text.  This is not investment advice.  This is faith advice. 

This is also a really good time to remember something fundamental to responsible living.  Our pulpits and Christian bookstores overflow with advice on how to become financially successful from a distorted biblical perspective.  The truth is, we have to twist scripture into a pretzel to get it to say that God intends us all to be materially wealthy or that material wealth is the first and foremost sign of God’s blessing in our lives.  The Bible is not a book full of stories about how God made people successful.  It is full of stories about people who failed miserably and then discovered God’s greater purpose for their lives.  A purpose they discovered on the other side of faithfulness, not success.  Which is part of what this parable is driving at.

“‘I was afraid, and I went and hid . . .,’”  the third slave said.  He wasn’t the first to say those words.  They’re a verbatim quote.  Adam said them to God, in the Garden.  “‘I was afraid . . . and I hid . . .. (Genesis 3:10).’”  There’s never a good ending to the sentence that starts with, “I was afraid so I hid.”  In a job, a bad relationship, a bottle, religion.  Any place to hide will do when fear is our master.  Even a religion that, like this slave did his master, remakes God in the image of our fear.  Jesus keeps calling us to faithfulness so that we won’t remake God in the image of our fears. 

A faithfulness that risks whatever is ours for the sake of his kingdom.  Which means that, for this story to become ours, we have to put our story into it.  Whether rich or poor, healthy or sick, strong or weak, whatever is ours, God expects us to be responsible stewards of it by investing it, even at risk, in this world for his kingdom’s sake.  Taking out the word, “talent,” and replacing it with whatever is ours, what is it that God expects us to invest?  By the way, it is true that how we ultimately define risk is one of the greatest tasks of living.  Cameron wants to take up skydiving.  A man died last week snowboarding down Mt. Rainier.  Risk just for the sake of the next highest buzz is one thing.  Risking whatever is ours in a way that honors God is part of what makes our story God’s story. 

There are two women in our church on waiting lists for kidney transplants, Darla Waters and Norma Greathouse.  Darla recently left her Sunday School class speechless with this testimony.  “I have come to the place where no matter what happens I know I will be o.k.  I want God to take and use what has happened to me for his glory.”  Norma recently left me all but speechless with these words.  “Waiting for a transplant is totally dealing with the unknown.  This is definitely NOT the life I had planned, but God seems to be making the most of it.”  Despite the fact that their lives completely cut against the grain of the success theology of health and wealth, look what they have done.  By investing their lives in us with their faith and their story, they have become God’s story to us.  They have said, “We will not be slaves to fear.  We are servants of the living God.  In our suffering, in uncertainty, in all this mystery, we will be God’s story.  We are God’s story.” 

Very few of us in this place are living the life we planned.  When we tell the story of how God took the life we’re living that we didn’t plan and made it part of his plan, we are God’s story to people looking for hope.  Kenny Wood takes a risk every time he tells his story.  He tells of how, in his fear, he went and hid.  Not everyone likes his story.  As a minister, he fell into alcoholism and drug addiction nearly losing his family, even his life before entering recovery.  He’s taken some real hits for telling it.  At great risk, he keeps telling it.  Because it’s the only way he can tell about how faithful God was to him, even so much as to come looking for him, like Adam, when he was hiding out in fear.  And, people who are still in hiding are finding hope they wouldn’t have otherwise.  Kenny has a congregation now that will never darken the door of a church.  What’s your story?  Would you risk investing it in this world by telling it?

This parable is Jesus’ story about God to us.  When we take what God has given us, or even allowed us to have, whether good or bad, and invest it back into this world as an act of faith we are God’s story all over again to this world.  A story that teaches what it is like to find meaning and purpose on the other side of faith, whether it leads to success or not.  We don’t know what is going to come of our life’s work.  We don’t know what is ultimately going to come of this wonderful church.  “What will the end be like, Jesus?”  I’ve asked him more than once.  Haven’t you?  And, we still don’t know because it is not ours to know.  All that is ours is the opportunity to be faithful.

I talked to Doug Waterson this week.  He was the pastor here during some of this church’s most difficult days when the courts ordered school busing.  He’d come here from Tallahassee, Florida, where his views on race relations during the ‘60s literally put his life at risk.  He was telling me the story of his life, a story of God’s faithfulness to him through much adversity.  With deep emotion in his voice, even tears that I could hear over the miles, this was his advice.  “Do your thing and trust God.  Stay true to the message he has given you.  Take care of God’s business and he will take care of yours.” 

That’s what Jesus was saying.  Our only responsibility is to stay true.  God will take care of what we cannot.  And, the rest really won’t matter. 

Is there much anything else we really need to know?