Invest

If you go to the Black Dog Café on Allegheny St. in Hollidaysburg you will meet a waitress that works there. There is more than one waitress there but the one I’m talking about, well, you’ll know her when you hear her. She is constantly talking to the customers, asking “How ya doin’ honey?” and laughing at small jokes. You might say she is joyous. When I go in she always looks to see what I am reading and sometimes she has read it too and we talk about it. The other day she asked what I was doing there and I told her I was thinking about my message for this Sunday.

I asked her, “What do you invest your life in?”

She told me about a cancer diagnosis some years ago. She said after that her life changed. She found a church where she could grow. She quit a better paying job to work more at the Café for less money. The other job, she didn’t like how they treated people. She likes it at the Black Dog because she works with other Christians and she gets to do what she likes best. What does she like best? Talking to people. She loves to talk. She also brings you your order once in awhile too. She is investing her life into people who walk in the café.

Here’s another coffee shop story: In San Francisco there is a place called Bake Sale Betty’s. The food is very good and the service is friendly. But what makes it really special goes beyond friendly service. Say you order their delicious chicken pot pie. You finish your meal. You’re stuffed and satisfied. You go to pay and the clerk steps to another part of the bakery and hands you a fresh apple pie and says, “That will go great with your chicken pot pie.” You start to object but by the look in the clerk’s eyes you realize that he is giving you the apple pie. This kind of thing happens all the time at Bake Sale Betty’s. People line up around the block to get in. Though the neighborhood is nothing special and the building itself has been the site of many failed businesses, Betty’s is thriving. It’s not just the free apple pies, its something else. It’s the care that goes into the food and the service. It’s the magnanimity of the place.

Bake Sale Betty’s raises some interesting questions for the church. Is such magnanimity the spirit and reputation of our church? I heaped up, open-handed goodness without strings the love we share with people who come to our doors, whether they are regulars or not? Why do so many of us who claim to be ambassadors for abundant grace live lives of stingy scarcity?

The Parable of the Talents tells us that each one of us is given time and a certain amount of resources. What we do with our time and resources really makes all the difference. The word, “talent”, in this parable comes from a Greek word, talanton, that literally means “weight.” A talent is something of substance. It has economic value. So in this sense we are not talking about whether you can play the piano or not – Jesus is talking about money.

Not every servant receives the same amount, but every servant is expected to be good stewards what is given to them. And lest we miss the point, the parable makes it clear that a good steward does something positive with the money on behalf of the master.

The master returns and judges each servant for the kind of steward they have been. Who is the only one that receives a negative review? The one who did nothing with their money for the master.

The servant who received the smallest amount, who could have risked more and lost the least, instead played it safe and just hid the money. The master not only has a negative opinion of this servant, but stings with biting criticism – “You are wicked and lazy.”

Ouch.

If Jesus took a tour of garages and basements and attics and saw all the stuff we have bought with our talents only to throw it away in the corner never to be used again, I wonder what he would say to us? I wince when I think about just how many bobbleheads we have around house, yes, that’s right, bobbleheads.

Newsweek did an interview with Woody Allen recently. They talked about the great filmmaker’s work and the undercurrent of despair that runs through even his comedies.

One of my favorite Woody Allen lines:

Interviewer: Would you like to live in the memories of your fans?

Allen: I would rather live on in my apartment.

Allen admits to lying awake at night terrified at what happens after death. He’s terrified because he believes nothing happens. He looks at life as “a meaningless little flicker.”

“You have a meal, or you listen to a piece of music, and it’s a pleasurable thing,” Allen says. “But it doesn’t accrue to anything.”

That’s a depressing view of life. It doesn’t get much bleaker than that. But Woody’s right about that last part – the pleasures we accumulate do not accrue to anything.

It’s only what we give to others for the sake of the Kingdom that has any lasting significance. The Cross says “Give it away.”

St. Paul writes to the church at Corinth, a city known for its high pleasure quotient, about the meaning of our giving:

“The point is this: the one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.” 2 Corinthians 9.6


Will we fritter away the money, time, and resources that God has richly blessed us with or will we invest our best selves and resources into a life serving the Kingdom that will have no end?