"If I Had a Million Dollars..." (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday November 19, 2026 – 25^th Sunday After Pentecost
Scripture Reading:  Matthew 25:14-30

Note:  during our Story for All Ages, I gave out chocolate coins and we played Let’s Pretend – we pretended that the chocolate coins were each worth a million dollars, and shared what we would do with them. (Then we talked about some of the gifts that God gives to us that are worth more than a million dollars.) The chocolate coins re-appear in the sermon! 

 

I confess that this parable that Jesus just told isn’t my favourite parable.  Part of it is OK – after all, this parable is where we get the phrase, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” a phrase that is often proclaimed after the death of one of God’s beloved saints.  But I have issues with it.

My first big challenge with this parable is that it seems to be promoting capitalism and unfair money lending practices.  Is Jesus really encouraging us to invest large sums of money in the stock market and reap the benefits?  Blessed are the rich etc?  Because this doesn’t fit well with so many of the other things that Jesus says elsewhere.  Jesus says, blessed are the poor.  Jesus says, the first shall be last and the last shall be first.  God spoke through Jesus’s mother who said, the powerful shall be cast down from their thrones and the rich sent away empty handed.  And these are just a couple of examples.  So why does this parable seem to promote greed and acquisition of wealth?

But my even bigger issue with this parable is the picture that it paints of God.  Remember that when we are reading Jesus’s parables, one of the rules of thumb for interpreting them is that whoever has all the power in the parable can be interpreted as God.  So in this parable, it is the rich land owner that we are supposed to understand as God, the giver of all good things.

If we can overlook the fact that God seems to have slaves – not that I want to overlook that detail, but that is a sermon for another day – we come to the stumbling block of how the slaves perceive their master.  Hear what the third slave says:  “Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid.”  And in response, the landowner says, “You wicked and lazy slave!  Take him and throw him into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”  And that is where our parable ends.

Is this really the picture of God that we want to carry with us?  Someone perceived as harsh and corrupt?  Someone prone to outbursts of abuse and violence?

Like I said, not my favourite of the parables!  In fact, this parable bothers me enough that, 10 years ago when I was taking a course on the parables of Jesus and each student had to “adopt” a parable to work on over the course of the semester, this is the parable that I chose to work with, hoping that I could get enough of an understanding of it that I would eventually be able to preach about it.

As I worked with it, the question that I kept coming back to was the question of the talents and what they might represent.  Literally, a talent was a very large sum of money.  A talent was equal to 6000 denarii, where a denarius was the daily salary of a day-labourer.  If I were to do the calculations using today’s money, the minimum wage in New Brunswick is currently $15.90 per hour.  That means for an 8-hour work day, the daily salary is $127.20.  If we were to multiply the daily salary by 6000, we come up with the current equivalent of a talent is $763,200.

Earlier, we pretended that each chocolate coin was equal to a million dollars – I wasn’t too far off in that approximation!

For a slave, being given control of $763,200 is a huge sum of money, let alone for the slave who was entrusted with 5 talents, or just over $3.8 million.

And as I puzzled my way through this parable, that was the stumbling block that I kept coming up against – what precious, multi-million-dollar, priceless treasure does God entrust to us?  Because I don’t think that this is a parable about literal money.

When we look around our church, there are a number of physical things that God has entrusted to us to care for.  The building itself and the land that it is on.  (SV – The cemetery as well.). The beautiful stained glass windows.  We might also include the people of the church in the list of things that God has entrusted to us – each one of us here, and the various stories that we bring, and the gifts that we offer to the church.

But again, I don’t think that this is a parable about capitalism.  I don’t think that God expects us to double the size of the land we sit on, double the size of our building, double the size of our congregation, or else we will be thrown into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

So what does God care about?  What does God want us to do?

As I wrestled with this parable, the answer that I finally landed on was love.  God’s extravagant gift to us is God’s love, and the thing that God expects us to do is to use the love that we have been given to grow more love.

This is the most precious, the most valuable treasure that we could ever receive.

I still don’t think that the parable is perfect.  I don’t think that God gives five times as much love to one person than they give to another.  And I also don’t think that God is a harsh and unjust master the way the third slave in the story perceives.  But if anything were to make God angry, or make God weep, I think that it might be the withholding of love, or the hoarding of love.

It reminds me of the Magic Penny song that we used to sing in Girl Guides:  Love is like a magic penny / keep it to yourself and you won’t have any / lend it, spend it, you’ll have so many / they’ll roll all over the floor.

So God entrusts us with love and asks us to use it and care for it on God’s behalf until God returns.  How do we do this? If you were to read on to the story that comes right after this one, you’ll find a pretty good answer!  The story right after this one is the parable of the sheep and the goats, and the sheep who are praised are the ones who fed hungry people, who gave something to drink to those who thirst, who welcome strangers with warm hospitality, who care for people who are sick, who visit people in prison.

To Jesus’s list, for our world as it is today, I might also add that we can grow love in the world by being an open and Affirming church; we can grow love by creating space so that the voices of people who are oppressed can be heard; we can grow love by caring for all of the world God created; we can grow love by advocating for adequate and affordable housing for everyone, for a living wage for everyone, for education and health care that meet the needs of everyone.  When you were sharing what you might do if you were given a million dollars earlier, you also came up with some good suggestions about how to use the resources we have – welcoming and supporting refugees fleeing war; making sure everyone has enough to eat; supporting people with addictions and mental health challenges.

When we grow love in the world through relationships, through caring for our neighbours, through sharing out of our abundance, then when we encounter God again, face-to-face, then we too shall hear those words, “Well done, good and faithful servant!”

And may it be so!  Amen.