April 2, Fifth Sunday in Lent, Communion Sunday

Lesson: Matthew 25.14-30

Sermon Title: Trading Up

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INTRODUCTION:

A thoughtful 6-year-old was quite concerned when he overheard his parents and their friends trading stories about their ailments.

One visitor finally summed up the dismal outlook by saying, Everything just seems to be going to pieces.

That night, the little boy added this line to his prayer: God, bless Daddy and Mommy and all those other people who are falling apart.

  1. We are all falling to pieces.
    1. Some of us have fallen further than others.
    2. Primarily, it is an age thing.
  2. That humor might not have had much to do with today's sermon but this one does. (1)

Tom Anderson and his bride Sabrina Root paid for their $34,000 wedding this weekend by selling advertising space at the ceremony and reception.

Everything from the wedding rings to a week at a penthouse in Cancun, Mexico, was donated after Anderson got 24 companies to sponsor the nuptials in exchange for having their names appear six times from the invitations to the thank-you cards.

Anderson, 24, a bartender, did cough up his own money for his wife's $1,400 engagement ring, while Root, 33, a hair stylist, paid $1,600 for her dress.

The groom got the idea of corporate sponsorships while working in a small, struggling animation studio that often had to barter for services.

"So I was in a sales mode, and I got to thinking," he told the Philadelphia Inquirer, which ran a photo of the couple sitting among their corporate-sponsored wedding "gifts" in its Sunday editions.

The bride drew the line at having advertising banners draped across the aisle. But her perfume came from a local distributor, and coffee was provided gratis from a neighborhood supplier.

Advertisers had their names appear on the invitations and thank-you cards, on cards at the buffet, on scrolls at the dinner table, in an ad placed in a local independent newspaper and in a verbal "thank-you" that followed the first toast.

The Inquirer said the groom had bought two addresses on the Internet's World Wide Web, namely: sponsoredwedding.com and weddingsponsors.com.

    1. Is this a "good trade"?
    2. Is the couple "trading up"?

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MAIN BODY:

  1. One of the most important facts of life that we all realize at one level or another is that we are all traders.
    1. We trade work for necessities.

Gene Edward Veith Jr., "The Christian's calling in the world," Introduction to the book God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life, observes: (2)

When we pray the Lord's Prayer, observed Luther, we ask God to give us this day our daily bread. And he does give us our daily bread. He does it by means of the farmer who planted and harvested the grain, the baker who made the flour into bread, the person who prepared our meal. We might today add the truck drivers who hauled the produce, the factory workers in the food processing plant, the warehousemen, the wholesale distributors, the stock boys, the lady at the checkout counter. Also playing their part are the bankers, futures investors, advertisers, lawyers, agricultural scientists, mechanical engineers and every other player in the nation's economic system. All of these were instrumental in enabling you to eat your morning bagel.

Before you ate, you probably gave thanks to God for your food, as is fitting. He is caring for your physical needs, as with every other kind of need you have, preserving your life through his gifts...It is still God who is responsible for giving us our daily bread. Though he could give it to us directly, by a miraculous provision, as he once did for the children of Israel when he fed them daily with manna, God has chosen to work through human beings, who, in their different capacities and according to their different talents, serve each other. This is the doctrine of vocation.

    1. We even, sometimes, trade favors for goodwill.
    2. What kinds of trades did the servants make in our lesson
    3. Perhaps a better questions would be, "What were they trading."?
  1. Are we talking about money?
    1. Some say that the talents are money.
    2. The talents are not ours.
    3. Everything belongs to God.
    4. The appeal is especially to Psalm 50.

10For every wild animal of the forest is mine,
the cattle on a thousand hills.
11I know all the birds of the air,
and all that moves in the field is mine.

      1. There is a way in which this is true.
      2. There is also a way in which it is not true.
      3. When God created humanity, God said have dominion, which means to reign.
      4. This means that God and Man are co-regnans, but it is still a regnant.
    1. If the talents are money, how much money are we talking about?

I found a illustration in a sermon by Bill Clark who was preaching, November 17, 2002 at Westminster Presbyterian Church, Austin, Texas, Mr. Clark said:

"How much is a talent worth? Is it a. $5, b. $25, c. $100 or d. none of the above? Get out your calculators for this one. In Jesus' day, one talent was equal to 15 years worth of wages. At an annual salary of $20,000 one talent would equal about $300,000. Two talents equal $600,000. Five talents equal $1,500,000! This master just turned over $2.4 million dollars in hard currency to his slaves and then leaves the country." (3)

      1. That's a lot of money.
      2. No one has offered to give me $300,000 or $600,000 or $1,500,000 dollars.
  1. There are some authorities who conceive of this passage as referring to all that one possesses: time, money, skills and abilities.
    1. Where do we get our talents?
      1. Rush Limbaugh opened his program with "Talents on loan from God."
      2. Talents are not on loan from God.
      3. Talents are acquired through our genes, we inherit them.
        1. We inherit them from our parents.
        2. We also inherit from a long line of ancestors who have had an impact on our gene pool.
      4. Andi Ashworth helps us to understand:

Martin Luther and John Calvin made enormous contributions to the concept of vocation, writes Andi Ashworth in Real Love for Real Life: The Art and Work of Caring. Luther wrote that our vocations come to us through the positions in which God has placed us, and through which we love our neighbor as ourselves. Our positions include the many ways we relate to others, inside and outside our paid occupations--as a husband or wife, a child, a parent, a church member, a citizen. Calvin added to this by saying that God has given each person specific talents and gifts that should be used for the sake of others.

    1. It is what we do with our potential talent that is important.
    2. I once knew a person who had an incredible talent for playing the piano.
      1. This individual would not play in public.
      2. The pianists talent was only for the benefit of the pianist.
    3. Another person went through a litany of opportunities.
      1. Decided to paint, so went a bought art supplies.
      2. Worked at it for a few hours and then gave it up.
      3. The same thing happened with a number of desires that were never realized.

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  1. How d you trade up?
    1. How do you develop?
      1. We are not blue chip traders on the New York Stock Exchange.
      2. We are not commodity traders on the Chicago Board of Trade.
    2. We are trading certain intangibles (incapable of being perceived by the senses.).
      1. We cannot see them, but we can personally know the results of them.
      2. Who are we trading with?
        1. We are trading with one another.
        2. But, ultimately, we are trading with God.
      3. Trading involves risk.

Edward H. Schroeder once saw a man on a tightrope between the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York. (4)

No parachute, no net, just 1,000 feet of nothing between him and the ground.

"That was really risky!" he asserts. "I get vertigo just thinking about it. You'll never catch me risking my life like that!"

But then he asks, "Really? Reflect for a moment. Just how risky is the business of being a Christ-truster? We talk about the 'venture of faith.' When you get down to brass tacks, Christian faith is a daring venture--a high-risk profession. Pun intended."

"Profession" is not only a lifelong calling, but also something you profess, a statement made public in specific words and actions out in the open of real-life experience for all to see: "Come weal or woe, Christ is Lord. He's the one I'm trusting."

      1. I like the poem that is titled: To Risk (5)

To laugh is to risk appearing the fool.
 To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.
To reach for another is to risk involvement.
To expose your feelings is to risk exposing your true self
To place your ideas, your dreams before a crowd is to risk their loss.
To love is to risk not being loved in return.
To live is to risk dying.
To believe is to risk despair.
To try is to risk failure.
But risks must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.
The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing.
They may avoid suffering and sorrow, but they cannot learn, feel, change, grow, love, live.
Chained by their attitudes they are slaves; they have forfeited their freedom.
Only a person who risks is free.

        1. Does this describe the beliefs and attitudes of the one talent person?
        2. We must be willing to take acceptable risks.
        3. It is the only way to find out what are talents, skills, abilities we possess.

"Your calling isn't something you inherently 'know,' some kind of destiny," writes Po Bronson in Fast Company magazine (January 2003). "Far from it. Almost all of the people I interviewed found their calling after great difficulty. They had made mistakes before getting it right. For instance, the catfish farmer used to be an investment banker, the truck driver had been an entertainment lawyer, a chef had been an academic, and the police officer was a Harvard MBA. Everyone discovered latent talents that weren't in their skill sets at age 25.

"Most of us don't get epiphanies. We only get a whisper--a faint urge. That's it. That's the call. It's up to you to do the work of discovery, to connect it to an answer."

      1. Sometimes discoveries come later in life.

Helga and I were traveling in Vermont and stopped in Bennington at the Bennington Museum.

We were intrigued with the Grandma Moses exhibit.

Grandma Moses (September 7, 1860 -- December 13, 1961) was a renowned American folk artist.

She was born Anna Mary Robertson in Greenwich, New York. She spent most of her life as a farmer's wife and the mother of five children. She married Thomas Salmon Moses in 1887. They lived in the Shenandoah Valley, then later settling at Eagle Bridge.

She began painting in her seventies after abandoning a career in embroidery because of arthritis.

Her artwork was discovered by Louis J. Caldor, a collector who noticed her paintings in a Hoosick Falls, New York drugstore window in 1938. In 1939 an art dealer named Otto Kallir exhibited some of her work at his Galerie Saint-Etienne in New York City. This brought her to the attention of art collectors all over the world, and her paintings were highly sought after. She went on to have exhibitions of her work throughout Europe and even in Japan, where her work was particularly well received. She continued her prolific output of paintings, the demand for which never diminished during her lifetime.

  1. Trading up is improving.
    1. What, as a Christian, are you trading for?
      1. Joy for sorrow.
      2. Life for death.
      3. Future for the past.
    2. This earth for heaven.

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CONCLUSION

  1. Cal Thomas observed: (6)

C. S. Lewis had it right: If you read history you will find that the Christians who did the most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English evangelicals who abolished the slave trade, all left their mark on earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this one. Aim at heaven and you will get earth 'thrown in.' Aim at earth and you will get neither.

  1. It does not make any difference whether you have 10 talents, 5 talents or 1 talent.
    1. What make a difference is what you do with them.
    2. You can grow them or bury them.
    3. That is up to you.

Amen!

1. "Couple sells ads to pay for wedding," August 16, 1999, Excite.com.

2. Gene Edward Veith Jr., "The Christian's calling in the world," Introduction to the book God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life, cited on Good News Publishers Web site, gnpcb.org. Retrieved July 24, 2002.

3. Bill Clark preaching on November 17, 2002. Westminster Presbyterian Church. Retrieved from http://www.wpcaustin.org/sermons/ser11-17-2002.htm

4. Edward H. Schroeder, "Now about the risks involved," Thursday Theology #216, August 1, 2002, crossings.org.

5. Anonymous Chicago Teacher: From Treasury of Women's Quotations, by Carolyn Warner (Prentice Hall, 1992); pages 78-79.

6. Cal Thomas, Not of this world, Newsweek, March 29, 1999, 60.

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