Hilton Head Island, SC – April 24, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 25:14-23; Mt. 25:24-30
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” – Matthew 25:29
The content of this sermon is going to be very different from what I originally thought it would be. It was going to be like countless other sermons on Jesus’ parable of the talents that have been preached for at least sixteen centuries. I shall explain what I mean by that after I briefly present the background of this well-known Gospel story, at least as I perceive its background. But I shall later tell you why and how I decided to make a major shift in how this parable seems directly to apply to us in 2022. Therefore we shall consider the meaning of this parable at the time Jesus first told it, how it was preached, more or less, for nineteen hundred years, and how American Christians might see it in a new light now.
The English word “talents” comes from Old English, which means English from a thousand to thirteen hundred years ago. It doesn’t mean what we mean when we use that word. Originally a talent was a measure of weight. In Luke’s version of this parable, incidentally, the translators did not say “talent;” they said “pound,” as, for example, in the British pound sterling.
In the parable, Jesus said that a master was going to be away for an extended period of time. In order to maintain what we now would call a “cash flow.” he gave talents of silver (in other words, many valuable coins) to three of his servants. They were to loan his money with interest to someone who needed to borrow it. This was proto-capitalism seventeen hundred years before Adam Smith. Presumably the master distributed the talents on the basis of their ability to invest his money wisely. To the most able servant he gave five talents, to the second he gave two talents, and to the man with the least fiscal shrewdness, he gave just one talent. The master’s expectation was that each servant would invest the money wisely so as to give him interest on his investments when he returned home.
As we heard, the five-talent man made five more talents with the money the master entrusted to him. The two-talent man also doubled his talents, so that four talents were waiting for the master when he returned. The one-talent man didn’t do anything with the talent given to him. He buried it until the master returned. Toward the end of the parable, Jesus said, “For to everyone who has more will be given, and he will have abundance; but to him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” (When this sermon is finished, think about that. Think hard about that. But I’m not going to address its meaning.)
It is at that point where, initially, I was going to give a conventional sermon on the parable of the talents. We all have talents, meaning the power to think and to exercise influence, and we should use them to their – and thus to our – greatest ability. Then, last Monday evening, I watched a 2014 movie with a one-word title: Selma.
Selma is an outstanding Hollywood version of the background to the famous March to Montgomery of many hundreds of Southern and Northern blacks, plus a few hundred whites, all of whom were motivated to bring public awareness to the issue of voting rights suppression in the South. Several students from our seminary went to Selma, but not I. When the march across the Edmund Pettis Bridge took place on March 7, 1965, I had already voted once for Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater, and I would vote twice more for Nixon and once for Gerald Ford. People who voted like that didn’t go to Selma.
The script in the movie takes license with certain scenes, making them look and sound historical, but some of those scenes did not and could not have happened. Nevertheless the movie, which I wanted to see when it first came out but didn’t, is both moving and magnificent. The events it depicts accurately illustrated the violent aftermath of the abortive attempted first march that caused Lyndon Johnson to change his mind about voter suppression. Reluctantly and then enthusiastically he supported the Voting Rights Act of 1965, raising himself to the role of the third-most courageous Democratic president in American history, after FDR (No. 1) and Harry Truman (No. 2). Johnson told a trusted Democratic adviser that his actions would lose the South to the Democrats for a generation. He was right in theory, but wrong in reality. He lost the South to the Republicans - - - period. But he did the right thing.
Midway through the movie, Coretta Scott King, the wife of Martin Luther King, Jr., expresses an idea which the real Mrs. King may have thought and may or may not have voiced. She was complaining to Martin about her fears regarding the march. “What I can’t get used to is death,” she said, “the closeness of death.” That presumably referred to the many people who had already been killed in the civil rights struggles of the Sixties, and it hinted at what we, the viewers, knew was coming, that Martin Luther King himself was going to get killed three years after Selma.
Jesus said, “Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” That verse is in all three Synoptic Gospels (Mk. 8:35, Mt. 16:25, Lk. 17:33).If it is in all three Gospels, almost verbatim, it’s very likely Jesus actually said that. It is time for all Americans with enlightened political understanding to begin losing our lives. If we have the sufficient talent and courage to lose our lives for the sake of God and Jesus, we can do it, and Selma shows us how to do it. Watch Selma. Potentially it might be a life-changing movie for you, as it was a sermon-changing movie for me.
The United States of America is facing the greatest challenge to its democracy since World War II began. Nothing else has threatened us as dangerously as what the Republican Party has allowed itself to evolve into by 2022. Korea, Viet Nam, Afghanistan and Iraq were major conflicts, but none of those wars represented the threat of the Cold War. Nevertheless, the Cold War never got hot, and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Now, when there is no Soviet Union, Russia has invaded Ukraine, and a few notable Republicans, especially Tucker Carlson, have expressed support for that invasion. Donald Trump called Putin’s gigantic war crime “brilliant.” That was brilliant!
Since 1980, the Republican Party has slowly but increasingly become a party unlike the Party of Lincoln, which, fifty or sixty years ago the Nelson Rockefeller Republican Party called itself with justifiable pride. For many decades it was the party of Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, and John McCain. Now it has become the party of Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Lindsey Graham, Tim Scott, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and maybe Nancy Grace. Neither the majority of Republicans in Congress, nor in the country at large, nor the Democrats in Congress or in the rest of the country, seem alarmed enough to prevent a Trump Congressional takeover in 2022 and the re-election of Trump in 2024.
The Democrats are afraid publicly and clearly to express the danger that Mr. Trump represents to democracy. To do so, they think, it may lose them the votes of waverers. Over the past five years, Mr. Trump has met with and expressed strong admiration for several autocratic heads of state whom he claimed to be close friends of his, including Victor Orban of Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Kim Jong Il of Korea (with whom he “fell in love,”), Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Xi Jingping of China (although his chumhood for Mr. Xi has happily diminished in the last couple of years). During all that time he never once expressed admiration for the head of state of any western nation: not one. But autocrats he “loves.”
If the 2022 Republican Party takes control of the US House and Senate, the presidency of Joe Biden will effectively end. That in itself would not be a true catastrophe. However, the death of the Biden presidency would give birth to the resurrection of another Trumpist presidency, because either Mr. Trump or Ron DeSantis will be the 2024 Republican candidate if the 2022 Republican Party takes control of Congress.
Democratic pundits are warning Americans of the appalling danger we face, but elected Democratic federal officials are not. If they do that, they all fear they may lose their next personal election. But what difference does it make if they lose their elections and the American people also lose their democracy? It will all be over anyway. What is the good of playing it safe when, since 2016, we have been anything but safe?
In four years Donald Trump named and the Senate elected three very conservative Republican jurists to the Supreme Court. They have joined three other very conservative justices, all six of whom are making noises about overturning Roe vs. Wade, a decision which allowed women, rather than courts, to have control over their own bodies. They have started to approve voter suppression laws passed in Republican-dominated states, and they have severely weakened some of the civil rights that the movie Selma brought back to our consciousness, and about which we are still not sufficiently concerned.
Republican – or Democratic – citizens who refuse to vote in 2022 or 2024, because they disapprove of all the candidates, in effect will be voting for Republicans and for Donald Trump. The only way to defeat the 2022 Republicans is for a hefty majority of our people to vote against all Trump-endorsed candidates. American democracy will not disappear because American voters actively supported the 2022 Republican Party, which is a pale shadow of what Republicans were up until the Reagan victory. It will disappear because the American people were too focused on their own personal lives, attending to other matters, while a well-organized group of obscenely wealthy, autocrat-loving white males have been orchestrating the electoral overthrow of constitutional government.
Whether we are five- or two- or one-talent people, do we have the courage to begin asking friends and acquaintances the questions they need to hear: “Can you, in good conscience, vote for people who continue publicly to support Donald Trump? Can you confidently vote for candidates who refuse to condemn his past and present behavior? Do you fully realize how much of a national menace the contemporary Republican Party leadership has become?” You don’t need to cast aside your sophisticated, middle class manners; just ask Republican-leaners these questions. Don’t tell them anything (in the manner I have been trying to tell you!); just ask them if they really think they know what they are doing. Pique their curiosity about why on earth they might still vote Republican, when to do so is clearly a vote for “illiberal democracy,” and really for “strongman rule.”
Each of us has the ability to do what we can to thwart a Republican victory this coming November, and, God forbid, another one in 2024. Are we willing to do the most we can with what we have? Every one of us has talents. They must be employed, now, to stave off the political collapse which awaits us if “we the people” do not use our talents to act. We don’t need to march, either to Montgomery or to Washington. But we do need to march to the polls and to get millions of others to march to the polls (which the Republicans are trying to prevent many of us from doing). We need to start speaking up about the disaster facing us before it is too late to squelch it. If ordinary sensible citizens do not speak out to their Republican friends and acquaintances, and Democrats do not maintain control of the House and regain at least a 52-48-majority control of the Senate this year, we WILL have an autocratic president in 2024, either Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis, and we WILL have one-party rule for the foreseeable future.
The 2022 GOP leaders are the real RINOs, Republicans-In-Name-Only. They are the white racist-classist-sexists, spewing putrid populism, fake news, with no policies, no shame, and minimal ethics. If Republicans win our next election, injustice, inequity, racial disharmony, deeper poverty, and far greater political polarization will ensue.
Respectable white preachers don’t preach this kind of a sermon. They’d better start right now while they still have time. Black preachers have been preaching sermons like this for six generations. And in more than 150 years, their sermons have not yet come to fruition. In the next five months white Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim religious leaders need to start beating the drums for justice and equity, or else injustice and well-masked perfidy will surely triumph. If the Old Testament prophets had been born in the twentieth century, I am certain they would all be raising a raucous righteous ruckus.
I know this kind of sermon stokes anger or rage in the minds and hearts of many of the people who might hear or read it. But God must not be mocked. The 2022 Republican Party must be thwarted in its attempt to turn America into a Trump-led autocracy and a mean-spirited, narrow evangelical bastion of hatred. Use your talent while you can. Speak up, now, to everyone you are able to influence. If all of us remain too quiescent, the principles upon which this nation was founded will perish.
John Miller is pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his sermons and writings can be found at wwwchapelwithoutwallshhi.org.