Aaron Tindall-Schlicht, Elder
In November, I was invited to participate in the Food for the Journey pulpit exchange, and I headed off to lead worship at North Shore Presbyterian Church. It was a great experience, and I think the message I shared was pretty well received. As I reflected afterwards, I believe this to be a message that is worth sharing widely. Our church is changing—not just Calvary, but the PCUSA as a whole—and we need to be prepared to look towards the future as people of faith. To that end, this morning I am sharing the message I wrote for the Food for the Journey pulpit exchange. I hope you find it as meaningful as I do.
The scripture we read this morning were the selections from the PCUSA lectionary for November 19, and you can imagine how thrilled I was that week to see that I was lobbed such nice, softball scripture passages. Destruction coming on people suddenly, with no escape. Worthless servants being thrown. Any time there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, it usually isn’t a happy verse.
This scripture from Matthew is part of a series of parables in which Jesus describes to his disciples the end times after his death and the eventual return of the Messiah. He speaks in a variety of metaphors, painting a sort of bleak picture of the suffering and exclusion that some will face before his eventual return. (That’s that weeping and gnashing of teeth.) And if you want a reflection of how these concepts were perceived by first-century Christians, this morning we also heard Paul in his letter to the Thessalonians say that Messiah’s return—what he calls the “day of the Lord”—will come “like a thief in the night.” Destruction will come on the complacent suddenly and they will not escape—so we must fight complacency. We must stay awake.
Now, for Christians like me, who struggle to understand a God who might punish people for ignorance or fear or unbelief—for falling asleep, for burying their gold in the ground—these are hard passages to read. But this parable is Jesus talking! It can’t be all doom and gloom, can it? Let’s talk it through.
The wealthy man is going on a journey, and wants his servants to safeguard his fortune while he is traveling. (I’m sure we can all relate.) I think it’s pretty widely accepted that in the parable, the traveling man is standing in for God. He is spreading his gifts throughout his people, and though he does not state explicit instructions (at least not in this parable), from the way he praises and rewards the first two servants, he does apparently expect to get some sort of return on these gifts. One thing that caught me here is that the servant who receives one bag of gold refers to God as a “hard man.” What a way to describe God! Our God saves! Our God is love! But then I remember the Old Testament. The God who turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt for daring to seek a moment of closure. The God who drowned the entire world, saving only a few on a single ark. This is a God who might truly be described as a hard man. Not an unjust man, to be clear. But …hard.
And so the servant who buries the gold, does so out of fear. And his fear proves to be legitimate! If the punishment of preserving the gifts given is that they are taken away and he is banished to the darkness, what sort of punishment might happen if the gifts had been squandered? He protects what has been entrusted to him, and somehow that is not seen as enough.
But how many of us do that in our everyday life? This parable seems to imply that it is not enough to hold on to the gifts that we are given—gifts of the spirit, gifts of treasure, gifts of ourselves. We are to grow the gifts that are given to us.
A member of Calvary recently approached me about a change that she has been noticing in our presbytery. She is an incredibly mission-focused person, and when she became a Presbyterian maybe 5 or 10 years ago, she saw many programs and missions at different churches in the Milwaukee Presbytery that she liked and saw value in. And she asked around, saying why don’t we all as members of different congregations get involved in these programs and missions? And she says she was basically told that that just wasn’t done. A pastor in our presbytery confirmed this attitude. She says that it’s not that there was ever a rule against churches working together. It’s just that most people thought, “Well, why should we help out some other church?” People’s focus was on their congregation and their congregation alone. There was competition for members, for mission, for youth, for vitality.
And that makes sense when most churches are as I remember them growing up in the 90s. Grand sanctuaries full of hundreds of people every Sunday morning, staffs of multiple pastors, multiple services each week, choirs with over 40 members, youth groups who took over 30 kids on mission trips… You know, the good old days. I remember being a member of the “cool” youth group—so much so that kids in our town who weren’t even Presbyterian would come to our youth nights and go on our mission trips—like, the cool kids. We were growing, we were winning the competition, we were wide awake!
Look around you. These days Calvary averages fewer than 20 people in worship each Sunday morning, including our Zoom members. We don’t have a pastor, and we’re not looking for one. We have no youth, unless you count my infant daughter, Camille. And during Advent we had our small but mighty choir—all five of us. And to be clear, I am not complaining. I love our worship services. I wouldn’t spend so much of my time making sure they happen if I didn’t. This is just a very different picture than the “good old days.” Now we are maybe struggling a bit more. Church membership is down, tithing is down. It’s hard to find pulpit supply.
And at North Shore, and other churches in the area, this sounds like a very familiar story.
I’ve been talking a lot about growth this morning, and I want to make something clear: when I talk about growing our gifts, I am not necessarily talking about growing the size of our congregations. Which is counter-intuitive, right? Because everyone is focused on church growth. Everyone wants to get us back to the good old days! We want to show the world how cool we are, how we’re doing all the right things, that we’re hip with the times, and then more people will join our churches, and we will all be full of energy and financial stability and young families! But what if instead of being focused on getting butts in the seats—what if we focused on what we have? What if we nourished our own vitality as it has been given to us by God? What if that is our way to stay awake for the day of the Lord?
My pastor friend told me that in the last few years, in contrast to the good old days, the higher ups in most mainstream denominations have been talking about the importance of being ‘Connectional,’ that is building meaningful, lasting, mutually beneficial relationships with other organizations in order to do ministry. And this makes sense, right? We heard it from Paul this morning: we are to “encourage one another and build each other up.”
In his article “Our radically connectional church” in Presbyterians Today, theologian and academic Michael Jinkins writes about this concept of conectionalism, saying, “The relationship between Jesus and his disciples is not just that between a charismatic leader and his followers or a gifted teacher and his students, but is (according to John’s Gospel) like that between a vine and its branches and (according to Paul) like that between a human body and its head. [In John 15:5, Jesus says,] ‘I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.’ …What the Bible says, then, about the connectional church is radical in the best sense of that word: it is at the root of the very meaning of the word church. …[It] is shorthand for saying that we are one body… Our unity is Jesus Christ.”
Our legacy traces back up the vine all the way to Jesus, and therefore to God. How amazing! But the truth is that this new embracing of connectionism, to me, seems rather top heavy. The thicker parts of the vine, the higher ups, seem to have a lot more connectionalism than those of us near the end of the vine tendrils, like myself. Let me explain what I mean.
Last November, the Milwaukee Presbytery threw an event called the Vitality Fair. Many members of many churches gathered at Wauwatosa Presbyterian Church basically to learn about each other. Several churches, including Calvary, had tables at which they talked about their mission, philosophy, and other programs. What makes them unique. It was illuminating. But I will say, I am a life-long Presbyterian, and I think the only other presbytery-wide event I’ve ever been invited to was my dad’s ordination in 2007. High up on the vine, everyone seems to know what is going on at each other’s churches. But what about us end tendril folks?
Time for a show of hands. How many of you can name a program that is run by another church in Milwaukee? Until that Vitality Fair, I couldn’t.
But now I know that Sun Valley in Beloit did a ton of work to turn an old school into a new facility for Family Promise, and hosts an annual strawberry festival that benefits local charities; Forest Park in New Berlin is starting to foster a program of community conversations; Wauwatosa Pres is starting a program of impact investing; Tippecanoe hosts an arts and science literacy camp for kids, has a community garden to feed their food-insecure neighbors, and has a warming room for people who are housing insecure and need a place to stay warm in the winter.
It’s amazing work! But it’s all individual. We are fragmenting ourselves, because this is the way it’s always been done. Out of a desire to return to the good old days, when we could focus only on ourselves: our own church, our own congregation. But when we fracture ourselves in this way—isn’t it just another way of hiding our gold? And what does that do to the vine? What does it do to our body, to our community?
At the end of our parable today, the master “take[s] the bag of gold from [the servant who hid the gold] and give[s] it to the [servant] who has ten bags.” And this is where the parable really loses me. Anybody else feel that way? What on earth could this possibly mean to us today beyond punishment from God for our legitimate fears and shortcomings? Obviously spiritual gifts cannot be transferred like money from one bank account to another. So what does this mean?
Some theologians posit that Jesus is talking about opportunities here, rather than gifts themselves. But what if, instead, he is talking about the way that when our gifts come together, they can combine in ways that we truly cannot conceive of individually? Together we are greater than the sum of our parts. We are one vine, whether we are end tendril people, or higher up on the vine, going all the way up to Jesus himself. It’s all one vine.
So we must not hide our gold, keeping it all to ourselves. We are to share our gifts! We are to pool our resources! That is what it means to be connectional. To be connected. To be one body, one vine. I mean, look at Food for the Journey! Eight congregations have come together to create this program. Together. And these eight churches—all of us— are together literally feeding the hungry!
What if we did that all the time? What if we worshipped at our home churches, yes, but our mission, our outreach was city-wide? Presbytery-wide? What if we made Food for the Journey not just a one-off, but the standard of all that we do? We would know each other, we would be able to share ideas, prayer requests, and worship. We could all take part in all of those missions and programs that I mentioned before: Forest Park’s community conversations, and Tippe’s warming room, and Sun Valley’s strawberry festival. We would each turn our one gold piece into two, into five, into ten. Our vine would flourish and we would be wide awake!
And if we don’t? If we miss this opportunity? If we leave our gold buried in the ground, out of fear, out of a misplaced sense of “this is how it’s always been done”? Out of a misplaced belief that the good old days are right around the corner again?
Well, maybe that is where the weeping and gnashing of teeth comes in.
But even in that, God gives us hope. God is not playing the “hard man” here. He doesn’t do that anymore. With these scriptures, God is setting expectations: that God wants us to share our gifts, not hoard them. God wants us to stay awake, to be deliberate. But at the end of our passage from Thessalonians, Paul speaks to the hope of salvation. He reiterates that regardless of our fear, our complacency, and the ways that we fall short and the times that we fall asleep—we are, after all, only human—he reminds us that “God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation… whether we are awake or asleep.” Perfection is not required. Our willingness to do the work is what is being asked of us. And even if that fails, and we still fall short, Jesus has already given us his infinite grace.
So with that worry out of the way, let us, therefore, encourage one another and build each other up. Let’s pool our gifts. Let’s dig up that gold. The return, together, will be greater than we can imagine.
Amen.
Calvary Presbyterian Church 