Delivered on November 19, 2023.
*Bring some Gold Coins*
So it’s my tradition after the prayer of the day to bring a message to all of God’s children. And I want to talk a little bit about our reading from Jesus today. He’s going to tell a story and in the story – he’s going to talk about people who had talents.
Talents is a word we use often and we usually use it to mean some special gifts or ability that someone might have. So what might be a talent? Accept answers. A few of the gifts highlighted on our stewardship drive about the gifts we’ve noticed in others are about their talents – what they do and what skills they have. You all have talents and God gave you those talents because you are worth having those talents.
But back in Jesus’ day, a talent was like this: show a gold coin. A talent was a coin that was worth a very large amount of money. It was worth all the money you might raise while working for twenty years. It might be hard to process just how much that might be. I know, in my house, my kids like to collect Pokemon cards and we often talk about what it would be like to buy a booster box – 36 packs of pokemon cards. A booster box, depending on what cards it contains and how old it is, is roughly $110 – which is roughly how much a person might make working minimum wage here in NJ. So if you didn’t have to pay for rent or food or health care and clothes – all you needed to buy was booster boxes of Pokemon cards – one talent would allow you to buy over 6,000 of them. That’s a lot!
And so Jesus tells a story about someone who received 1 talent, 2 talents, and 5 talents. 3 different piles and so we’ll make those piles. Make the piles. If it’s helpful to think in terms of pokemon cards or whatnot – imagine 6000 and then 12000 and then 30000. So we should think about those piles as we listen to those stories and wonder what God would like us to do with all the gifts God has given us.
Hand out some coins to folks.