"HOARDING AND SHARING"
Mt. 25:14-30
Jim from B.C.

Not long ago I saw my wife trying to jam more clothing into one of our closets, and I joked, "We'll just going to have to sell our house and move into a bigger one, so that we'll have room for all our possessions!"

I wonder how many of us are inclined to HOARD things. Now that Y2K is coming soon, people who normally like to stock up on things have an excuse to do so even more, to pack their larders and freezers in case of emergency.

When I asked myself if I'm a hoarder, my first thought is, "No", but then I realize that I tend to hoard old things, like machine parts and scrap, just in case I have some future use for it. I don't know if that's hoarding, or just conservation!

The parable in today's Gospel Lesson is about three servants, but it presents us, really, with two choices regarding what we might do with all that God has given us. And those two choices are: to hoard or to share.

The three slaves in today's Gospel Lesson were entrusted with a tremendous amount of wealth. A talent was a very large sum of money, equal to 15 or 20 years wages for a labourer. Given the shorter life-span in those days, a talent would be worth a lifetime of earnings.

Nowadays, we use the word talent means a gift for playing music or sports, or the ability to speak or write or fix cars. Some of us have a talent for putting our foot in our mouth. Interestingly, this modern meaning of the word "talent" developed out of this very parable of Jesus that we have as our text for today. Originally, a talent was simply a measure of weight, the weight of silver or gold or some precious metal. Then later it came to denote a fixed amount that metal. More recently it has come to mean a fixed amount of skill or ability.

Anyway, one talent, in those days, was a huge amount of money for a slave to have entrusted to him. How did these slaves manage this wealth? What kind of stewards were they? The question of stewardship is the question of how we use our talents, and our money, and our possessions. Stewardship is the management of ALL that God has given us, from the earth we walk on, to the brain we think with, to the money we spend. It's all God's, and we are all stewards, caretakers of creation.

Two of the stewards in the parable invested their money, but one hoarded his. And notice how Jesus roundly condemns this hoarding. "Throw that slave into outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." It sounds rather harsh, but when you think about it, hoarding, in the sense of just SITTING on God's gifts, is one of the most ungodly things we can do.

Because the opposite of hoarding is sharing, and people who don't share have denied their faith; they've shown themselves as thankless and cold.

The metaphor in this parable is that of doing business, trading and investing. It's a metaphor for risk-taking, but I believe it's also a metaphor for sharing. When you invest, you are giving money others so that they can make of use of it. Later, they give it back to you again, with interest. And the cycle continues.

This is precisely what happens when we share anything with others. We get back more than we give. I came across a wonderful little poem in the Penticton Hospice Society Autumn newsletter: "The more you give, the more you get; The more you laugh, the less you fret. The more you do unselfishly, The more you live abundantly. The more of everything you share, The more you'll always have to spare. The more you love, the more you'll find That life is good and friends are kind. For only what we give away Enriches us us from day to day."

This is the kind of stewardship that our parable is about. Are we going to use OUR things, the things God has entrusted to us, not just to benefit ourselves, but to benefit others and the world around us? If we use what God has given us just for ourselves, then we are hoarding, aren't we?

Abundance must be shared, must be spread around, must be used. There are some incredibly wealthy people in the world today, who doing just that. Unfortunately, there are many, like the third slave, who are not.

But no matter how many or how few gifts God has given to us, they were never to just sit there, or be tucked away for a rainy day.

Around the turn of the century, many Christians looked upon buying life insurance as sinful. In the Missouri Synod at least, it was seen as a sign of un-faith— that you lacked faith that God would take care of you in the future. Nowadays, insurance is accepted as one of the normal ways of taking care your family. We even have our own insurance company, Lutheran Life, which I heartily recommend to people. But sometimes I think the pendulum has swung too to far to the opposite extreme, and that nowadays we're putting too much away for a rainy day, saving too much, when we should be investing our money, in the sense of using it RIGHT NOW, in ways that please God and benefit others.

Think of all the Scripture passages that extol the virtues of sharing— so many that I could preach on stewardship on half the Sundays of the year! Rather than quote you a lot of those passages, I'll just tell you a story.

Some time ago, an American woman was invited to the White House for a conference on small business. She had started with a few dollars and multiplied that into one of the most successful businesses in the U.S. Of course, everybody was waiting to hear how she had done it, what her "secret" was. She said, "I just tried to give away more than my competitors." She didn't give away prizes or lottery tickets; she gave away service. After every snowstorm she would make sure that her employees plowed out hundreds of driveways free of charge. Her employees would babysit, pick up grocery orders, meet unexpected guests at the airport, or turn off house lights that were left on accidentally, and never charge a dime for their services. When someone asked her where she got the idea, she pointed to a dog-eared, scotch-taped Bible on the podium. "It belonged to my Mother," she said, "and I try to run my business by this passage from St. Luke: ‘Give and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, will be poured into your lap. For the measure you give will be the measure you get back'."

Sharing works, because God is generous. It's the resurrection principle that I never tire of speaking of, the Biblical principle that God always restores to you more that you lose, and resupplies much more than you give away.

This is true of ANY kind of sharing, sharing thoughts, for instance. St. Paul said, "Speak the truth in love." I take that to mean: "Don't hoard your thoughts, don't keep them to yourself, if sharing them will be beneficial to others." And when you risk sharing your thoughts, in spite of your fears of doing so, great benefits will return on your investment. Others share with you in return, and deeper communication will occur, and often deeper friendships. And if it creates a distance, well, you've cleared the air at least, and made peace with what's inside you, so it won't fester.

Sharing is how the Gospel was originally spread, the good news about Jesus' dying and rising and all that he did for us. I won't go into that (I'll save it for an evangelism sermon).

Unfortunately, some people do have BAD experiences with sharing. For instance, I've known people who have helped finance the start-up of a friend's or family member's business, and lost the money they invested. Sometimes they lost the friendship of that person as well.

Some people have tried to help their parents to get into a home where some nursing and meals would be provided, because they were getting too old to live by themselves. Instead of receiving thanks in return, they received only their parents' anger.

Some people have given a lot of time and energy and money to a church congregation, only to have fellow members bad-mouth them and criticize their efforts. Some people have had pastors refuse a legitimate request for a Baptism or a funeral. Some people have given money to a charity, only to find out later that the administrators of that charity were skimming money into their own pockets.

People who have been burned like that, by bad experiences in sharing and in giving to others, may not only shy away from giving, but may stop altogether.

But the saddest thing is that these people no longer operate out of an abundance mentality. They no longer feel free to risk. They lose faith in God's promise, that he will reward them eventually on their investments, on their sharing and giving. Like the third person in Jesus' parable, they fear losing, so they bury their talents, bury their love, bury their compassion, bury their heart, in a vain attempt to preserve the little they have left. But Jesus says, even the little they have will be taken away; and to those who have, will more be given.

Trust is the key. Faith. And when you break someone's trust, they have difficulty trusting in the generosity of God, difficulty trusting the promise of God to resurrect and to return to a hundred-fold for whatever is lost.

I'm sure all of us have had our trust broken, at times. I'm sure all of us have had grave doubts about God's goodness, when things were going really badly. Whenever that happens, we must go back to the Bible, back to the glorious vision of our future in the book of Revelation, back to the words of the prophets that the Day of the Lord is surely coming, when all wrongs will be righted, all investments rewarded, all losses returned with manifold abundance, and all deaths resurrected.

Whenever we fear investing ourselves, and sharing ourselves; whenever we doubt that sharing works, whenever we hesitate to "cast our bread upon the waters" (to use a Biblical metaphor), we must go back to God's promise of resurrection: that full compensation, full restoration, and full rewards will surely come to us in God's good time, which means, if not in this life, then certainly in the next one.

Last Sunday I spoke of God's promise of heaven, that, because of Christ's work on our behalf, we will, as the song says, "be in that number when the saints go marching in". There's a freedom of heart that comes out of knowing that, a freedom for sharing. There's a thanksgiving mentality that comes from it, that needs to guide all our present plans and decisions.

Today's Gospel Lesson adds to that theme. God has entrusted to us enormous abundance, and asks us to share it; nay, DEMANDS that we share it, because that Day of Reckoning is going to come sooner than we think. It might be TONIGHT, as happened with the rich farmer in Jesus' parable who was merrily going about building bigger storehouses for his grain instead of sharing.

So don't delay! Share yourself, your time, your talents, your strength, your gifts, your words, whatever God has given you. To Him be glory, forever and ever. Amen.