Buried Talents: A Word on Complacent Christianity

There is a servant in this Sunday’s Gospel who does nothing wrong, and that is the whole problem. He does not steal his master’s money. He does not waste it. He does not spend it on himself. He digs a hole, puts the money in the ground, and waits. When the master comes back, the servant hands it over, spotless and untouched: “Behold, you have what is yours.” And Jesus calls him an “evil and lazy servant,” a “useless servant.” I have been thinking about that man all week, because I believe he is the patron saint of a great deal of modern Christianity.

The third servant is the only one who explains himself. “Lord, I know that you are a hard man. You reap where you have not sown, and gather where you have not scattered. And so, being afraid, I went out and hid your talent in the earth” (Matthew 25:24-25, CPDV). Notice the order. He had a small, frightened picture of his master, and a small picture of the master made for a small life. Fear did not make him obedient. It made him idle. I think this is where complacency starts. Many of us were handed a faith about staying safe: stay clean, stay quiet, stay out of trouble, and hand it back at the end unchanged.

A talent buried in the ground is perfectly safe. It is also perfectly useless. The first two servants took a risk, put what they were given to work, and it grew. And in Matthew’s Gospel we are never left guessing what the Master’s money is for. The same chapter tells us: feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, visit the sick and the prisoner. Faith is not given to us to protect. It is given to us to spend on love.

I want to be careful here, because it is easy to preach this sermon at someone else. But the pattern is hard to miss. There are people who fill the pews on Sunday and spend the rest of the week standing for the very things Jesus stood against: contempt for the poor, hostility toward the stranger, the worship of money and power, cruelty dressed up as righteousness, and silence when the vulnerable are hurt. They sing the hymns. They say the creed. And then they go out and live exactly like the world, embracing its ways instead of loving their neighbor.

Jesus saw it coming. “Not all who say to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter into the kingdom of heaven. But whoever does the will of my Father, who is in heaven, the same shall enter” (Matthew 7:21, CPDV). Of the religious leaders of his day he said, “they say, but they do not do” (Matthew 23:3, CPDV). And the letter of James is blunter still: “if a brother or sister is naked and daily in need of food, and if anyone of you were to say to them: ‘Go in peace, keep warm and nourished,’ and yet not give them the things that are necessary for the body, of what benefit is this? Thus even faith, if it does not have works, is dead, in and of itself” (James 2:15-17, CPDV).

So before we point at anyone, let us each ask what we would hear if this blog were about us. I include myself. Complacency is not a sin that belongs to other churches. It is the natural drift of every church, including ours, and every one of us, because pretending to be holy is so much easier than being kind.

This Sunday’s second reading speaks directly to this. Saint Paul tells the Thessalonians, “you, brothers, are not in darkness, so that you would be overtaken by that day as by a thief. For all of you are sons of light and sons of daytime.” And then he says, “Therefore, let us not sleep, as the rest do. Instead, we should be vigilant and sober” (1 Thessalonians 5:4-6, CPDV). Not as the rest do. To be children of the light is to live differently from the world around us, not to match it with a cross hanging from our necks.

The ways of the world are easy to recognize. Take what you can. Protect your own. Look away from the hungry, and keep the stranger out. Win. And the way of Jesus is always the same quiet, costly alternative. Give what you have. Welcome whoever is pushed out. Tell the truth. Lose, if you have to, rather than harm someone else. That is what Paul means when he says, “do not allow evil to prevail, instead prevail over evil by means of goodness” (Romans 12:21, CPDV).

Look at how the Master judges in this chapter. He does not ask the servants what they believed about him. He asks what they did with what he gave them. And in the very next scene, the same question is put to all of us in different words: “For I was hungry, and you gave me to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me to drink; I was a stranger, and you took me in; naked, and you covered me; sick, and you visited me; I was in prison, and you came to me” (Matthew 25:35-36, CPDV).

And its hard mirror: “whenever you did not do it to one of these least, neither did you do it to me” (Matthew 25:45, CPDV). Not whenever you disagreed with it. Not whenever you meant well. Whenever you did not do it. I am not the judge of anyone’s soul, and I will not pretend to be. But I can read the parable, and the parable says that doing nothing is not neutral. A buried talent is a decision.

So here is what I am asking of you, this week and every week after:

Dig it up. Name one gift you have been given, whether your time, your money, your voice, your skill, your home, or your attention, and put it to work for someone this week. Feed someone. Our Blessing Bags and the Amazon Wishlist on our website are an easy place to start. Welcome someone: the immigrant, the neighbor who has been told they do not belong, the person who has been pushed out of other churches. Speak up when someone is being treated as less than human, kindly and without fear. And ask yourself honestly where your faith is safe, and then take one risk.

You cannot do this alone, and you were never meant to. Come to Mass with us this Sunday, November 15, at 3:00 PM at 557 Greene Street, or join us online, and come every Sunday after that. We need you, and you need us. We pray together, we are fed together, and we sharpen one another for the work. Bring a friend, a neighbor, or a family member who has not been in a long time.

And if you are able, please help us put our talent to work. We are coming toward the end of the year, and our giving is down. Saint Francis Parish and Outreach exists to do exactly this work, and it depends on the generosity of its people.

The Master is coming back. When he does, let us not hand him a hole in the ground. Dig it up. Put it to work. And let love be the thing we have to show for it.

Pax et Bonum,

Bishop Greer