Rat's Savings Plan

Proper 28 A 2008
(Judges 4: 1-7; Ps 123; 1 Thess 5: 1-11; Mt 25: 14-30)


I turned to the Truth section of the Oregonian yesterday for some financial news.

The Truth section is commonly called the comics. In one of my favorite strips, “Pearls Before Swine”, the Goat character, a bit of a yuppie who keeps his affairs neat and tidy, looks distressed. The Goat says to cynical Rat, “I put all my retirement money into an IRA five years ago and today I have less money than I started with.” Rat tells him he should have put his cash into a UTM like him. “A UTM?” “Yes, Under The Mattress” Goat looks even worse while Rat shouts, “I’m a financial guru!”

Rat’s UTM plan looks pretty smart these days. But the UTM plan doesn’t sit well with today’s Gospel. Or does it?

“A man” entrusts his property to his servants and leaves town. The story does not say that he left any instruction. Two of the servants do some trading, and when the man comes back they give him what they’ve managed to make. The third uses Rat’s UTM scheme and buries the cash. Maybe olive oil markets were tanking that year, who knows? The servant gives all the money back, no skimming off the top. This is another story that always struck me as uncomfortable and unfair. The guy didn’t LOSE anything, so why is he so upset? And I wonder what the owner would have said if the servants had made some bad investments, put the money in the sub-prime mortgage market, and lost it all? The story doesn’t say.

But I suggest that this story is about God’s economy. In times of fear and stress is makes more clear who different the economy of the reign of God is from the beast that the news and our hopes and fears call “the economy.”

In the world’s eyes, “the economy” is a faceless force that we may manipulate to our personal good like the “indolent rich” of today’s Psalm. O it is a force before which we feel powerless, as if it were a train coming down a tunnel. It may make us feel secure and powerful, perhaps even Godlike, or it scares us no end. In hard times it makes the Rat’s savings plan of UTM look wise.

But here, I suggest, is the economy of God according to this tale.

In the realm of God, nothing is impersonal. Anything we are given, money as well as our very lives and the time in which to live them, is given not by a What but by a Whom. All that we think of as “ours” is given in trust, without step-by-step instructions, by the owner.

We may do what we will. But fear and anxiety is not a good game plan. The UTM plan imprints our own fear and perhaps our own anger upon the good world and the good God who gives it. We may even find ourselves telling God by our actions who we think God is—“a hard man.”

Everything we have been given expresses who the owner is and who we are as a result. Our money as well as our very lives is meant to express the growth and increase, what one saint called the “greening power of God.” I don’t think she meant the green of a $20 dollar bill. I think she meant the green of new life for the world, for the community of God, for the poor, and for the greening power of God in our own souls.

Who gives us all that we have? What is that person like? Who do we wish to be in this world that is given in generous trust? The owner, after all, does come back to ask us how things have gone.

Maybe Rat and his UTM plan are not so wise after all.