The Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan

“To Be Human”

Text: Matthew 25:14-30

November 19, 2023

“Weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Whenever I hear that phrase in a Scripture passage, I get anxious. I imagine that when most of us hear words like this our minds make the leap to an angry God who can’t wait to smite people for every minor infraction, or perhaps a remote and distant God who condemns us to eternal damnation, casting us into outer darkness without a backward glance.

But hold on! Most of you probably know me well enough to know that that’s not remotely the god I believe in. The God we are always seeking to know and love better in this church is a God of light, not darkness; of forgiveness, not condemnation; of love, not fear.

And you don’t have to take my word for it or go searching through obscure passages of Scripture for a proof text. You only need look at the example of Jesus, of how he lived his life and met his death, to know that some other message must be intended, brewing somewhere under the surface, even in the passages that include weeping and gnashing of teeth.

As the church year draws to a close, we are also ending our long months of having our Gospel passages mostly come from the Gospel of Matthew. Reading Matthew can be tough, especially in these later chapters when Jesus is drawing near to Jerusalem and the end of his life and work is closing in around him.

Even after 2000 years, Matthew’s way of telling the Jesus story has the power to disturb. He’s intense. He wants us to get it, to get that the world is ending, that something new is crashing through into our comfortable and complacent worldview, and he really, really wants us to do something about it.

And so, naturally, he paints a portrait of Jesus that is also a little intense, a little wild-eyed, a little shout-y. If you were inviting this guy to your Thanksgiving table, you’d want to consider seating him far out of the way of anyone who doesn’t want to talk about politics, or money, or Armageddon.

Which means that when we read these end-of-the world-inspired parables, we need to be aware that they’re not coming at things in a cool or rational manner. They’re kind of like an all-caps email. One of the surest ways to understand how very hyperbolic and over-the-top this parable is (sometimes called “the parable of the talents”) is just to find out how much a “talent” was worth as a unit of value. The answer is—this parable has the master throwing around astronomical sums of money. The servant who was given a single talent was given the equivalent of twenty years of wages for the average worker. The servant who was given five talents was entrusted with something like 100 years of wages.

Clearly, this is not a simple story about an everyday occurrence in the lives of merchants and servants in first-century Palestine; we shouldn’t try to draw mundane, practical advice from it, like that even a savings account would generate more investment income than burying your money in a hole in the ground.

This hyperbole serves an important purpose. It tells us that the kingdom of heaven is somehow like being given something so enormous, so precious, that you could never repay it if you had to. You could work a dozen lifetimes and not come close to earning it yourself. It is literally priceless, invaluable. And it demands nothing less than your whole self in response.

Many preachers will say that that “something” we’ve been given is the equivalent of time, treasure, and well, talent, in the regular, vernacular use of the word. It is your special giftedness, that thing that you’re really good at and that makes you feel most you. And there is much truth in this. We are all of us given so many gifts, some of them recognized and rewarded by the world, but many of them not. And we all have choices to make about how well we use those gifts, and to what purpose.

My best guess, however, is that there is something even a little more fundamental than that at stake. The “something” we’re being given to take care of while the master is away is life itself, our own individual lives and also the life of the community to which we belong. To me one of the most striking central claims of the New Testament is that Jesus came so that we might have life and have it abundantly. To push at this connection a little more, the kingdom of God might very well be the human being fully alive, alive the way Jesus was, and the way few of us ever manage to be, without distraction or diversion or defensiveness.

The great farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry has written about why it might be harder today than it ever has been to lead fully human and abundant lives. His argument is complex and spans over decades of his work, but essentially he contends that we have lost touch with those basic givens that used to be at the heart of the human experience, things like knowing our neighborhood and our neighbors, recognizing our dependence on the natural world and one another, and accepting that limitation is a necessary and beautiful fact of life.

He worries that we either try to be too much, far exceeding the bounds that God has placed on us, or that we settle for a pale imitation of life, never living up to our God-given potential. He sums it up this way, “To be human is harder, lovelier, and for us more possible than to be an angel or an animal.”

Have you ever looked at being human that way? As hard and lovely and possible—meaning it’s not automatic, maybe not even our default setting. It’s not inevitable that everyone who is born with the DNA that makes them recognizably a member of our species will ever become a human being fully alive. Not everyone lives a truly full and abundant and meaningful human life. There is nothing inevitable about it—but it is possible! And as Christians we know that it’s possible because we have the example of at least one person who did it, who showed us how and who is still giving us so many opportunities to find that abundance and loveliness in our own lives, whatever our circumstances.

All the ways we engage in ministry as a church community, all the ways we find of caring for one another, loving our neighbors and even loving our enemies—these are all opportunities to live more fully into who God created us to be. Nowhere are you more likely to come up against both what makes life so hard andwhat makes it so lovely and so possible as you do in church. And so it is a good thing that we have the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation to nourish us, the word of God to inspire us, and one another to be companions along the way.

And, of course, thanks be to God, we have baptism. That big baptismal pool that we walk by every time we come into this church says it all. Baptism is the ultimate expression of choosing life—a life of faith, a life of fullness, a life of community. But you can’t do it if you’re not willing to take risks and get wet! There is no riskier place to be than deep in the waters of baptism, where we are are handing our lives over to God. But it is only from that place of risk, of vulnerability, of transparency, that we are likely to hear the words, “Well done, my good and faithful servant; enter into the joy of my kingdom.” Amen.