How did Sidney Weinberg, offspring of Polish immigrants from Brooklyn, rise to the top of Wall Street? Well, read the article. But what I took away from it was this – he was determined to do something with himself and with what he had and he just did it. Weinberg didn’t let his circumstances, whether personal or societal, distract him from the goal he had to grow as a person and do well for his family.

When Paul wrote the church at Thessalonica he was reminding them too the same thing and not to get distracted. People were allowing what they perceived to be the "signs" of the Lord's coming and the end of time to pull them off task. Speculation became more important than actually accomplishing anything. After all, why start anything? Jesus is on the way back. You have doubts that this attitude is still around? Go to any Christian bookstore (one with a bit more conservative stripe, to be sure) and you will find a shelf of books that will tell you how to read the signs of the times for yourself. If you take the time to do the research what you will discover along the way, however, is that people have been trying to read the signs of the times about the Lord’s return with not a great deal of success from, well, almost from the beginning – think when Paul was writing, all of his letters were written by 64.

Take a careful look at millenarian movements in church history and what you’ll discover is that they tend to be escapist in nature. They also tend to be lazy, taking a wait-and-see attitude, all in the hope of the Lord’s imminent return. Paul tells the Thessalonians, and us, not to wait for the day but to pray and work. The day of the Lord is not an excuse for inaction. We're not to be like William Miller and his followers – who eventually would become the group that we call Seventh Day Adventists -- who spent days wearing white robes waiting for Jesus in the hills of upstate New York. Guess what? He didn’t come. So then they had to find something else to do and they ended up keeping the seventh day. They ended up influencing other people, like a doctor named Kellogg who introduced corn flakes, because by keeping the Jewish law they wouldn’t eat pork. So your breakfast is a direct result of a religious movement – don’t forget it! Rather, we are to work and to grow as a community of faith. Part of that task -- and a central one -- is to become "children of the light and children of the day." By our prayer, our study, and our practice of good works we become more and more transparent, so that the Light of God can shine through us as it shone in Jesus Christ.

Our concern for the future, for the “great gettin’ up morning,” leads us to the present. We pray and work not only because the Lord is coming, but also because he is already here ( and here we’re back to that eschatological tension concept of “already, but not yet”). Our faith thus prompts us to lead ethical lives because orthodoxy (right belief) MUST lead to orthopraxy (right action). God extends grace to us. The gift of faith is given to each of us proportionate to our abilities, so that as children of the Light we can obtain salvation. In faith through grace we work out our salvation in the midst of God's gathered people. Thus, Paul tells the Thessalonians, and us, "encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing."

We encourage each other because we've got something to be encouraged about: faith. That's what Jesus was trying to get across in the parable of the talents. The situation was common to the people of that time. Stewards were left in charge of someone else's assets. We'd call that individual a broker or an investment counselor today. Can you imagine the implications of this . . . all of the various commercials come racing back into my head!

A talent was a huge sum of money to have put into one’s charge. Scholars tell us that it was the equivalent of twelve thousand days of full-time wages. That's thirty-eight years of working! One of the other ways that we can look at this is to think in terms of the life that God gives each one of us. To make the story interesting we’re told that one steward was given five talents, another two, and the final one received just one. Even the one who had the smallest amount has quite a sum to work with. So, what happened?

Well, two were obviously market savvy and made the whole sum again, maybe they were trading and reading the market just right, saw the predicted bursting of the housing bubble and sold at peak? The other one didn't buy into a mutual fund or even put it in a certificate of deposit, a T-bill, or a savings account. He buried it! In Luke’s version of this story the steward wraps it up in a napkin and puts it away. Matthew’s steward remembered the Jewish law that said if you put money into the ground, it didn't carry responsibility. Now, while some of us have wondered a bit if this might not have been the better way to go with our 401ks, this isn’t what the wisest, most market-savvy folk are doing (I would wager that Warren Buffet is buying a whole lot more than he’s selling, wouldn’t you?). God takes the risk of giving us this lifetime acting in faith that we’ll actually do something with it. Moreover, Jesus also makes it clear in this parable that opting out of action, giving into our fears and shortsightedness is not the way to obtain blessing!

This fellow received the equivalent of a lifetime of work and did nothing. Why? Because he was afraid – “I knew you were a hard man,” (the Greek here is scleros) he said to his Master. Fear paralyzed him and led to inaction. I know that we each know people who lead their whole lives in this way. Jesus tells us this story not to threaten us, but to remind us that we're gifted, that life is a grace and as a consequence we should ACT. Our faith, the talent of our lives, is to be invested in the way we live and is to bring a return. To pray and work is to know the love of God. To know the love of God is to understand that perfect love casts out fear and allows us to get on with the business of living.

Robert Farrar Capon, a wonderful contemporary writer, has a delightful take on this parable, at least I think he does. He gives the steward who buries his talent a name, Arthur. And this is what he has the returning Lord saying to him. “Look, Arthur, I invited you into a fiduciary relationship with me. That’s fiduciary, f-i-d: as in fides in Latin – and as pistis in Greek, which is the language this story will end up in – and as in faith in plain English. I didn’t ask you to make money, I asked you to do business – that’s pragmateusasthai, remember? – to exercise a little pragmatic trust that I meant you well and that I wouldn’t mind if you took some risks with my gift of a lifetime. But what did you do? You decided you had to be more afraid of me than of the risks. You decided. You played it safe because of some imaginary fear . . .” Why do I find this delightful? Because it reminds us that God takes a risk on us, a risk that God takes out of love; God invests in us out of love; God identifies with us out of love and what does God expect us to do? The same thing – take a risk, invest in others, identify with others – all out of love, which has been demonstrated by that ultimate risk-taker: Jesus the Christ. Our faith isn’t a memento to be looked at for an hour or so a week, or when it’s convenient. No, our faith – our investing of time and talent -- is the currency with which we do the business of living.

I think this is a lesson that needs to be relearned by the Christian church. We've allowed ourselves to get distracted. We've become fearful and overcautious. We look at demographics, reports, and sociological studies, forgetting the real reason we're here -- to make the light of God present in people's lives. The goal isn’t to keep an institution running for the sake of the institution, but to be the children of light, to be the return on God’s risky investment in creation, in making us in God’s own image and likeness.

Each of us has been graced, given a talent, given the gift of time and now through prayer and work we're to invest it, to do something with it. One thing all of these studies do say that I do agree with is that 86 percent of people who come to church do so because someone took the time to invite them. If we believe that God is doing something good here, why aren't we telling people about it? If this is the warm, loving, caring fellowship we want it to be, living and growing together in community, we should be excited to tell people about it. Moreover, if we're allowing God's love to make a difference in our lives people will accept our invitations. They'll want to be a part of a place where the "children of light" are together and where you know it by the way they gather, the way they treat each other (from worship service to hallway to coffee hour to parking lot and out on to the street) and the way they live out their faith life at home, at work and at school.

To have this happen, to have our church, our fellowship in faith grow is going to take prayer and work. It will happen because you and I agree before God to make it happen and invest time and talent to do something about it. So, today I challenge you, my sisters and brothers in the covenant, loved of God and loved by me, to invest time and talent to make a difference. Pray and work to give God the glory in every aspect of daily life -- at home, in the workplace, at school. Take the talent that is you, take this treasure that you are in earthen vessels, the very image of God empowered by the Spirit, and make a difference right where you are.

We opened this morning with me telling you about Sidney Weinberg. When the stock market crashed in 1929 Goldman Sachs took a beating. (Eddie Cantor, one of the most popular comedians of the time and an investor in Goldman Sachs, turned the firm’s name into a punch line: “They told me to buy the stock for my old age . . . and it worked perfectly. Within six months I felt like a very old man!”) The managing partners called on Weinberg to take over and he did from a Harvard classmate of one of the managing partners and he guided them successfully for thirty-nine years. The article I read said that today’s Wall Street needs more Sidney Weinbergs, people who have a vision and a willingness to work, even through times of crisis. I would say that the Christian Churches need the same thing. God has invested in us, taken a risk on us, and now it’s our turn to invest in the same way. So I invite you to join me this week -- take the risk, be generous with your time and your talent – invest in this community of faith, in your family, in your community. If you do, you’ll make a difference and as you invest that time and talent, you’ll be called a child of the light and you’ll hear those words Arthur longed to hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the Master's joy.”