Late this week ABC TV news carried a 24-second story that caught my attention.  Louise Hauser recently won $50,000 on the game show, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” Even though her own home sustained significant damage in Hurricane “Ike” months ago, Hauser gave $10,000 of her prize winnings – that’s 20% or two “tithes” – to the West Houston Assistance Ministries, a food pantry where she works.  She plans to give to her church as well.  By way of explaining her generosity to an astonished reporter, Hauser said, “My husband Nick and I have a very simple life and we don’t require much in the way of ‘stuff’ to be happy.  I’m very blessed.” (See www.abcnews.com and www.khouo.com.)

 Such stories tend to trigger our fantasies, inviting us to ponder what we might do with a $50,000 windfall.  Blow it on an extravagant indulgence?  Travel to a remote hideaway? Pay for a year of college?  Make a down payment on weekend cottage?  Replace a part of what my retirement plan lost in the last six months?  It’s harder to imagine ourselves doing what Louise Hauser did, if we are honest.  Her story made news precisely because it was unusual.  Maybe Jesus was using such a fantasy to engage his first hearers, and us, to ponder the worth of God’s new realm.

 The parable that Jesus tells in today’s lesson might have triggered such fantasies in his first hearers.  The kingdom of God, says Jesus to whoever will listen, “is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them; to one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one, to each according to his ability.”  (Matthew 25:14, New Revised Standard Version)  The trouble is, two thousand years’ worth of preaching has made translating Jesus’ intent more difficult, because the modern word “talent” didn’t mean “talent” in first-century Palestine.  To Jesus and his listeners, this word, “talent,” the English transliteration of the Greek word “talanton” simply meant a unit of measurement, the highest amount imaginable.  In our world that might mean something like “billion.”

James Howell, pastor of the largest United Methodist church in Charlotte, NC, the Southeast’s banking capitol, describes a talent by paraphrasing for his specific setting.  He says:  “We should translate talent as ‘a huge bucket full of solid gold’ or ‘a bank CEO megabonus’ or ‘winning the Ohio lottery.’”  Howell then continues, “Only the muscular could even pick up a talanton that might weigh 50 or 75 pounds.  Each [talanton] was worth … more than I’ve earned in my 20 years in the ministry….”  (Quoted in Will Willimon, “Whose Talent?  What Master?”, Pulpit Resource, Vol. 36, number 4, page 30.)   Howell here offers us the same reminder that biblical scholars have been making for years.  A “talent” is an extravagant sum, more than a lifetime in salary, dividends, and capital gains combined.

Scholars also say that Jesus uses parables to make one point.  That being true of our lesson for today, here the point is profound, though simple:  God gives to us extravagantly, and we who receive such generosity are called to give with similar generosity. Remember Louise Hauser’s remark to reporters who asked about her generosity with her game show winnings?  “I’m very blessed,” she explained.  And, through her community’s food pantry, her blessing was multiplied.

It’s legitimate to see the parable as a call to responsible stewardship – that is, as instruction in sharing of the blessings God gives us so abundantly.  Since next week is our Consecration Sunday, I’m glad that this parable reminds us all that our giving is, first and foremost, derived from all that God has given us.  We are a talented congregation, in the normal, English-language understanding of talents as those God-given abilities that we both develop and share with neighbors needing our particular strengths.  We are talented.  We are gifted by our abilities.

 We are a talented congregation in the older, more literal sense of the word, too:  God has generously bestowed on us the large treasure of a lifetime’s earning capacity. Yes, times are difficult.  Still, God is good to us, and God has invested in each of us a vast wealth, by the world’s standards.  To use Louise Hauser’s phrase, “We are blessed.”  And God then invites us to use part of that blessing for supporting God’s work, God’s justice, and God’s generosity for our neighbors.  The parable asks us to consider, prayerfully, honestly, and joyfully, “What part of the extravagant treasure that God has given me will I return to God?”

All the goodness of our lives, Jesus seems to be saying here, is a great gift from God, an immense treasure chest.  Our challenge then is using, spending, investing God’s great treasure wisely and well, and for the benefit of others as well as for ourselves.  That’s one interpretation:  God gives us material blessings so that we may share them.

But there’s another even larger way to see the parable.  Maybe Jesus intends to remind us that the kingdom itself is the treasure.  It is a pearl of great price, as he says himself, elsewhere.  And those who participate in this kingdom do so only by making ironic choices:  the first are last, and the last first; those who seek life lose it, and those who lose their lives for Christ’s sake find true life.

 When we are baptized, we think, we give God a great treasure:  ourselves.  When we bring a child for baptism, we think the same:  this is our best gift for God.  Here God, we are.  Here are our children.  Our very best.  We proudly ask:  “Aren’t you impressed, now, God?”

What if that’s not the way it is at all?  What if, in fact, just the opposite is true?  What if our baptism is, in fact, a talent, a great treasure, given to us?  Then the rest of our Christian life becomes a both process of letting that treasure grow in us and in our families, and a process of giving that very treasure away.

 In the first sermon he gave to the Riverside Church after they called him to be their pastor in 1977, Bill Coffin hinted at the depth of his understanding of God’s priceless grace:  “God’s love does not seek value; it creates it,” said Coffin.  Then he went on:  “Our value is a gift, not an achievement.  It is not because we have value that we are loved, it is because we are loved that we have value.”  (The Collected Sermons of William Sloane Coffin: The Riverside Years, Volume I, page 4.)

When we are baptized into God’s realm, into what our Bibles call “the kingdom of heaven,” it is as if God has brought in another slave, and invested another treasure.  And, of course, it is so.  Christ’s life in us is both immeasurable and priceless.  This kingdom, this new realm, is the great gift that makes sense of our lives; and it is the talent that we are called to invest for our own sake and for the sake the world we inhabit with our neighbors.

 This treasure is, in a word, our faith in Christ as savior and Lord.  And when we give this faith to others, maybe inviting them to share this journey of faith here at our church, our treasure is invested, its value multiplied miraculously.  Another sojourner follows Christ; our talent is increased 100%.  The parable comes true in our own lives.

With Louise Hauser, we may say, “I’m very blessed.”  May we, with her, also have the grace and the wisdom to understand our blessing; and may we have the courage freely to share the blessings we’ve been so freely given.

Amen.