Buried

 The parable of the talents, as I may have mentioned before, is so deeply ingrained into our collective psyche, that the use of the word 'talent' to mean skill or ability came directly from this parable. Before this, talent referred to a weight. 

A talent weighs 129 pounds,14 ounces. Pretty heavy if you think about it. And that's a weight of a precious metal. Imagine the level of trust you would have to have in someone to give them 5 talents of almost anything. In Canadian dollars, a talent of copper is valued at $655.90 . 5 talents of copper is worth $3,279.50. That's a lot of money, and that's not a particularly valuable metal. Silver will clock you at almost $62 thousand dollars per talent, gold at $3.7 million. Per talent. This is a lot to invest, no matter how you slice it. The man going on a journey is entrusting his servants with a lot. An awful lot. 

The expectation from the master is that the servants would, you know, do something with the resources with which they were entrusted. The idea is not that they should sit around and be idle with it, but rather that there is work to be done and that the talents they were given should be put to good use. 

But that's a lot of money to be playing around with, especially when it isn't yours. Investing always carries risk. I know you have to have money to make money, economics 101, but truly investing in a proposition that can go down is risky. And if you're playing with money you can't afford to lose, can you afford to risk it? That's the question that all the servants had to ask themselves, and 2 out of 3 decided to take the chance. They rolled the dice, made investments, and not just recouped the money, but essentially doubled it. That's what the master had in mind. But when he comes to the third one, the one who was given the least, that third one took the resources and buried them. That way, when the master comes back, he'll get back exactly what he put in.

Now, here's the issue. It is the temptation in the heart of us all to take the talent and bury it. And I'm not talking about money anymore. I'm talking about the things God has entrusted you with. Believe it or not, and I hope you do, you are made completely unique. That is, there has never been another you, nor will there be another one. You are one of a kind. And just like a talent is a weight measurement without any clear composition of material, so too could a talent that you have be anything. But God has entrusted everyone with a talent, you know. Absolutely everyone. All of us have at least one talent that God, in his ineffable wisdom, has entrusted us. He has given you and only you the makeup that forms you into who you are, and he has given that to you for a reason. 

Think about the nature of humanity according to Scripture - You are God's workmanship, created by him to do good works, which he has prepared in advance for you to do. You have been put into this world with the talents that you've got in order that you might do something with them. But the thing is, by and large, we don't think about our talents as being worth very much, or being very useful. There are people all around you who have skills, talents, abilities far more than you could ever possibly hope to keep up with, and they're real useful. The five talents, the two talents, they have a lot they can do, and are doing. And then there's you. One talent. It's not worth much. What are you supposed to do with that? Just take it and bury it? Probably. 

But the thing is that that talent has been entrusted to you for a reason. Because you are the only one who can do anything with it. Nobody else can use your skills or talents, nobody else can do anything with what has been entrusted to you. It's been entrusted to you, you know. Something amazing that happens with us as Christians, is that we have been uniquely equipped and placed to minister to and to work with matters of eternity. The people who you deal with on a regular basis are eternal, they are people for whom Christ died. Therefore, by definition, what you do with them matters. It's of eternal consequence. And what that means is that you have been given time and space in which to operate and to engage in matters that are of crucial importance to you and to them.