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A Sermon related to the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25: 14 – 30) – Patricia Billsborrow

A Sermon related to the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25: 14 – 30) – Patricia Billsborrow – Pickmere 19^th November 2023

Last Sunday, rather than go to a local church service as I was not on the Plan, I went to have a time of peace and reflection at the Friends Meeting House at Fradely. It was something one of my church members in Birkenhead did every Remembrance Sunday and it was for her and for me a time of quiet where I could share silence with others, remembering and also praying for God’s presence in a search for peace. As I went in, with a friend from Davenham I was handed this little card which speaks of what the Quakers say: ‘There is something sacred in all people, all people are equal before God, Religion is about the whole of life, Each person is unique a precious child of God’.

As I sat in the quiet space I was facing a window which had a lovely tree outside still fully leaved with beautiful autumn colours………….I noticed something I don’t think I have ever noticed before that every leave was different, the colours, the shapes the twists and turns were all unique and yet all of those leaves were attached to the one tree, they would soon be beginning to fall but behind them would be the buds of new life………………..an image which made me think of those words I had just read, but also my own belief in the words from Scripture that all of us are made in God’s image whoever we are, and are all attached to the “one tree” so to speak and how important it is to endeavour to pray for God’s guidance as we all travel the same journey whatever colour we are, whatever language we speak, however we recognise God and all of us must seek to become the world that was envisaged at the time of Creation……………………….it was quite a lesson, I then came home and read the Gospel set for today about the talents. I don’t think we every really go into the parables seeking to look more deeply into the words but it is perhaps important to seek what those talents actually were……………according to the foot of the page in my Bible the note says that it was more than 15 years of wages for a labourer……………….an awful lot of money which was given for the workers to care for on his behalf, and I am sure many of us would sympathise with the man who buried it so that it did not lose value rather than get caught up in more risky endeavours………………however Matthew was not meaning the people listening, or indeed we in our own time to think of it in those terms, but in the terms of the many gifts we are given by the God who comes to us in the person of Jesus willing to give so much even to go to the cross for the salvation of the people………………..and how we are to react to the gifts that we ourselves have and how we should use them in accordance with the Gospel of Love………….of God, quite easy…………..of our neighbours…………………….how do we do that……………well as we ourselves would want to be loved (cared for). There is of course a temptation to feel comfortable in the faith community into which we have either been born or have come to know having met Jesus and heard him say to us, follow me, and therefore, and to some extent that has become more tempting since the pandemic, to close ourselves away within the community where we feel comfortable rather than share the gifts which come through faith with the wider community, those who have needs sometimes physical through things like the food bank and homelessness projects, those who are lonely and lost in the wider world, those who are afraid, I could site many other examples, and yet the parable is saying that is not what the Owner of the vineyard is asking them to do, he is asking his workers to use the very generous gifts he has given them to create growth and to develop the work he has entrusted to them. In more everyday terms that we, who have heard those words and heard Jesus call to us through his life and witness of which we read in the Gospels, should use the love we have for our creator to make a difference through our interaction not just with the familiar but with those people whose lives are very different from ours, whose journey has been very different from ours, to make them feel part of the world wide family, the kingdom of God, which was envisaged when God created the world, the one world, the multicoloured and experienced world, we are living in today. When I looked at that tree, and those amazing coloured leaves and reflected on them, I saw beyond the natural beauty to the world as it is today, and that whichever journey we find ourselves on, we should be aware of the journies of others and seek to build a world where instead of suspicion and hatred there is kinship and peace so that we might play our part in building that world which was intended at the beginning. All of us whoever we are of different understandings of faith, of different nationalities and understanding are on the same journey with the same end in view. Let us play our part in building that wonderful vineyard where all participants have value and are part of the one family one of the many leaves, attached to the same tree and be thankful. Amen

Reflection on reading the Bible

Reflection for Ascension Day

A dramatic reflection on Romans 5: 1 – 11 – Justified by faith?

A scribe is working on the letter to the Romans. The scribe is sitting at a table, muttering while looking over a scroll, pen in hand:

Riddles, riddles, riddles…

‘Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ…’

What on earth did he mean, that fall – oops – Paul guy? Freudian!! Sorry!

I mean, what did he mean? That’s the problem with this Greek, no punctuation. I mean you have commas and full stops and what-not. We haven’t. So what did he mean? You don’t get it?

Well let me read it to you. ‘Therefore since we are justified by faith (exaggerated pause) we have peace with God’. Did he mean that, or did he mean, ‘‘Therefore since we are justified (exaggerated pause) by faith we have peace with God’. See what I mean?

No? Ok, let me spell it out to you. You all seem to think that Paul meant to say that we are justified, made right with God if you like, by faith. No problem with that. Consequence, ‘we have peace with God’.

But I just got to wondering. What if Paul reckoned that we are justified. Accept it! Just trust it is so and that’s the way to peace with God? See what I mean? No?

Riddles, riddles, riddles…that old scribe playing with words again? I know what you’re thinking. But words are my stock in trade. I do think about them, not just write parrot fashion – if you’ll pardon me mixing my metaphors?

But perhaps you’re right. I make too much of these details sometimes. I’m a right pedant!

Ok. I’ll get to the point, whatever Paul thinks.

At the end of the day, We have peace with God – don’t we? No beating about the burning bush then?

Wonder what’s next? Think I’ll just make a cuppa (gets up and strolls off).

I looked out on the sunset – personal thoughts on doing theology

This brief essay began its formation when preparing a lecture delivered to Unitarians at Harris Manchester College, Oxford. It has bee recently published on Theology Everywhere blog

I looked out on the sunset. The sky, deep red, but fading, could not be captured by a camera’s lens, held for eternity. I mused. Different wavelengths of light refracted by the atmosphere, received by a retina, passing through a tangle of neurones, conducted by chemical and physiological interactions, perceived by something we might label consciousness. And is this all? Later I played with water colours, fluid, wet on wet, running into one another out of control, unpredictable. This was nearer to what I believed I saw. But this did not explain or make sense of it. And a realisation rose rather than forced itself on me of something ‘other’. Call that conversion if you will. It was a glimpse of the ‘other’, I will go on calling it that for want of anything better, that changed the direction of my life. Marcus Borg spoke of the light that glances into our lives rendering significance which, he felt, was something of the shared experience of the mystics. And it began an exploration that could never be complete, a pilgrimage that could never achieve its destination. I was seeking understanding of experience, trying to make sense of all that life opened up to me of joy and elation, of pain and sorrow, of love and anger, of all that is. This would encompass all of existence, birth and death and all that lay between, but also beyond, before and after. This was immanence and yet transcendence. If anything this was love.

The problem, the danger of such exploration, is that we categorise and constrain. We seek to fit into boxes an understanding greater than our human capacity can grasp. We organise it, then call it faith. And when it breaks the bounds we have set for it we say that we have lost it. Really all that has happened is that we have discovered the truth that you cannot hold or constrain that which is boundless. Neither do we have language to express the inexpressible. Yet that is what theology is often reduced to.

My early theological training was dominated by systems in which concepts and doctrines were organised. Any challenge to that organisation was viewed as dangerous, even heresy. But you can only organise things you understand and understanding suggests power, control and knowledge. By definition a total understanding and knowledge of God is a contradiction in terms. In the book Thirteen Moons, the author, a native American, ponders:

Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin stripped from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless. Bear recognized that all writing memorializes a momentary line of thought as if it were final.[1]

I have pondered on this. So often this is what our systems of theology have done. Poetic imagination fired the prophets to enable change, to allow the understanding of God to develop, evolve. Poetry has more freedom than prose. Hymns have so often reversed that process, pinned down our theology, closed it to speculation or changing context. Sydney Carter saw folk music as owned by the singers, generation to generation – a sort of sung liberation theology, always changing.

But I return to art. A few years ago the, then, youngest member of our family was taken to Tate Modern. She reported back on the experience, ‘It was weird!’ So called modern art isn’t always easy ‘to get’. And that’s it, I think. Theology is trying ‘to get’ what is beyond our human capacity to understand, or express. Mark Rothko painted massive, single colour panels. To many they mean nothing. Others report a profound sense of the other when they view them. If ‘the other’ is such as I have suggested, perhaps these are honest admissions and, as such offer that glimpse that mystics seek, and a representation beyond words or understanding of that which we seek.

This is not to deny the validity of theology, but to recognise that theologians need to draw on the widest possible range of disciplines. These should include, but not be limited to, scriptures, languages, art, science, poetry, philosophy, music. Even then we need the honesty to admit that any theology that we elaborate can never, ever be more than a very crude approximation of the subject we are seeking to address. The quest must be open ended, never closed down, never dogmatic.

[1] Frazier, C., Thirteen Moons, Hodder & Stoughton, 2006, p 21

Andrew Pratt 20/2/2023