You are still all here?!
After our readings, and especially after the Gospel lesson, I was not so sure if you would still all be here or had not left the church by the time I raised my head after the reading. You are still here, so I can wish you grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen

A fellow church member said recently, the Gospel has often taught us more death than life, fear rather than hope. Right she is, the goods news of the Gospel often is unyielding, hard to understand and almost unwilling to make apparent the gift of grace that we know it is. Again this Sunday we have to wrench the grace we are looking for like bread for our journeys from a story that ends dark and unpromising.

It is on days like these that I am grateful for the entirety of scripture and for the ancient principle that scripture interprets itself. I am grateful to Paul for reassuring us that “God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through Jesus Christ who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him.” (1.Thessalonians 5) Paul’s reassurance does help in view of the Lord’s day of wrath in Zephaniah and in view of the outer darkness in Matthew where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. With Paul in the background we can leave our fear behind and try to take a fresh look to see if the story of the talents after all has something in store for us.

Jesus in his own time as well as Matthew and Paul were convinced that the end of the world, of time and space as we know it was close at hand. The final judgment in their view is not an end in itself but gives way to the new heaven and the new earth in which God and creation are reconciled, in which the visions of shalom, wholeness, harmony are fulfilled.

In contrast to this, most of us do not live as if the world were over tomorrow. The call not to fall asleep but stay alert, the expectation to deal with our talents as if the last day were tomorrow does not resonate much with us. There is no sense of urgency.
We have seen and read in our history books the most horrific events, we have seen the end of entire cultures and nations, things that in the eyes of the ancient were thought to be sure signs of the end, of the final judgment. War, bloodshed, genocide, permanently altered landscapes and geographical regions have brought the end to many a world, yet somehow humanity has dealt with these ends and changes, recovered from them and everything as we know it is basically still existing. There is no sense of judgment around here, of urgency - even though it would suit us well given the suffering of people, the rapid depletion of natural resources and the destruction of the natural world around us.

Questions come to mind, weighty questions that I don’t think can be answered in a sermon. If our sense of the final events is much diminished, is our hope in God’s fulfillment maybe diminished and dull as well? Do we really hold on to the possibility of a reconciled world of shalom, wholeness, justice and peace? Another question is: Are God’s judgment on the one hand and our hope in a new heaven and a new earth on the other tied together for ever? Is God’s wrath and fearful judgment the appropriate teaching tool to motivate faith and hope for a new heaven and a new earth?

Against these questions I would like to throw in the weights of those talents entrusted to us by Jesus. Let us assume that those talents are faith and love, the talents given to us in our baptisms. Faith and love the talents that we multiply and bury, nourish and allow to wither, lost and found, neglected and nurtured back to life.
For the sake of hope, of hope for this world and for the world to come, dear sisters and brothers, we all have been entrusted with talents of faith and love. God urgently wants us to deal with these talents. The degree to which we are able to deal with them varies from time to time. Many factors determine if we are the owners of five talents or two or one at a time. Faith and love are vulnerable commodities. Our readiness for risk will change depending on our experiences and win margins.
But no matter how much or little, however quick to risk or slow to risk, faith and love have been entrusted to us to increase hope. That is our obligation. Paul puts it this way: Do not sit around and wait, get sleepy, drunk and complacent. “Be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation.” (1.Thess 5:8)

Dear congregation, when we hear the story of the five and two and one talents and the fate of the last slave who gets thrown out, we have to keep in mind who tells the story. It is Jesus. The discourse on judgment is Jesus’ last one delivered privately to his disciples right before his own death on the cross to where all judgment and fear are brought. It is the same Jesus whom Matthew gives the name Immanuel, God with us, at the beginning of his gospel; the same Jesus who as risen Lord promises to be with us until the end of the age; and for whom sometimes people around here add an extra chair in a circle of prayer because he promised to be present where two or three are gathered in his name.

In baptism we have received faith and love. These are talents for us to keep and to use. We do not have them just as a loan. When the master of the slaves comes back in the end wanting to see what they have done with them, he never asks the talents back. They are meant for the slaves to keep.
And their nature is to multiply. No instructions are given by the master what to do with the talents. Instructions are not necessary because the talents have an inherent imperative to go out, become more, grow. Faith and love, those gifts of the Spirit, cannot be buried for long and denied their potential because of their inherent drive to grow and gain. The talents of faith and love are driven by the urgency of hope, not by the urgency of fear.
The gifts of faith, love and hope have an urgency to grow. They are entrusted to us to do something with them. We can proudly wear them as breastplates and helmets for the world to see.

Now see, the talents have quite some weight, but the questions about the urgency of judgment are still open. For now, I am glad to know that our preaching and teaching do not engage fear as motivation to make faith and love grow.

The congregation here in this place has made much use of those talents of faith and love in the past 60 years and brought much hope to hearts and minds here among us, in the community, and in the world. As we give thanks this week and celebrate joyfully, let us continue to use these talents and grow strong in the hope for a new heaven and a new earth. The promise is that we will enter into the joy of our master.

May the peace of God which surpasses all understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
Amen.