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When I was a schoolboy, back in the 1950’s and early 60’s, we began each school day with a morning assembly.  Everybody in the school had to attend:  little kids, big kids, all the teachers.  The headmaster read a passage from the Bible (they did that, back in the 50’s), made school announcements, we sang a hymn, and we went off to our school day.

I went to that assembly every day from 5^th grade through the end of high school.  I heard lots of Bible passages.  It didn’t take long to find out that the headmaster’s favorite (he was a white-haired English gentleman named Mr. Everett, a fine man) was the one we just read:  the parable of the talents.  He read it at least a couple of times every years.  It wasn’t hard to figure out what he was up to with this parable:  it was after all a school, and his purpose was to educate us, and to prepare us for the world – for life.

I liked this parable too.  It was pretty easy to understand on at least two levels.  First, we know that a talent was a Roman unit of money.  So at one level, you could say that Jesus was giving financial advice:  don’t hide your money under the mattress – invest it so it earns a return:  interest on a savings certificate, or buy a good stock with a dividend.

But the use of the word talent meant more than that, even to a kid.  We all know what a talent is.  It’s something God gives us, that makes us good at something  By reading us this parable, Mr. Everett wanted us to discover, and nurture, our talents, so one day we could go out in the world, earn a living, provide for our families.  In telling the parable, Jesus was acting as the ultimate personal coach!

Well, we all grew up, made our choices, or had them made for us, and embarked on life.  We took what note we could of our God-given talents, hoped they would help us; then we put our heads down and got on with it.  We stopped thinking of worrying about talents, and instead thought and worried about jobs, money, children, homes and so on.

But is that all there is to this parable?  To help youngsters make choices?  I don’t think so.

          The talents that God gives us take many forms.  Some of us have a gift for making music – my two brothers are musicians; our choir, Paul, Chapter 2, - Bach, whose talent not only sustained him and his family, but to this day brings pleasure to humanity, and not doubt to God, almost 300 years after his death.  Dwyane Land can paint – Susan and I have one of his paintings, and we love to look at it.  Susan has a talent for making us laugh.  Melvin Bell has a talent for making beautiful jewelry.  We have some very talented dancers in this congregation – of all ages.

Some talents are more modest.  Some of us have a talent for wiggling our scalps.   There are some talents that we all have:  our very humanity is a multi-faceted talent.

And we don’t just get one.  We are all bundles of talents.  Talents are an important ingredient in the very miracle of life.

It’s easy to see the commercial application of some of these talents.  But after all, it’s Jesus who was telling this story, and we’ve moved on this morning from the investment advice: is there a spiritual application for our talents?

You may remember a movie from 1981 called Chariots of Fire.  It was about two young men in England in the 1920’s, both of them champion runners who were training for the Olympics.  One was a Scottish missionary named Eric Liddell.  He took time off from preparing for his church mission to China, in order to train.  His sister, also involved in the mission, complained:  you’re neglecting the mission which God wants you to do, just to run.  She didn’t understand; what’s up with that?  Liddell told her, yes, God put me here for a purpose, the mission to China and I’m going to do it.  But when He made me, He also made me fast – and when I run, I feel His pleasure.

God takes pleasure in the use of the talents He gave us.  It makes sense:  we’re His children.  Those of us who are parents take pleasure in watching our children discover and use their talents.  We’re proud.  It makes us smile.  So maybe when we make use of our talents, God is proud; God smiles.

And maybe it’s not just the use of our talents to benefit and nourish ourselves that makes God smile.  Maybe it’s the use of our talents to benefit others.  Our fellow humans.

There’s a charitable organization called the Make-a-Wish Foundation.  Maybe you’ve heard of it.  They go to grievously, often fatally ill children; ask what their dearest wish is (sort of a cure, which they can’t do); and try to make it happen.  I first heard of it when the teenage daughter of a cousin of mine in California was diagnosed with leukemia.  There’s something about a child with a dread disease that touches all of us – a child who just hasn’t had a chance at life yet.  The Make-a-Wish Foundation learned about Johanna – that’s her name – and found out that she loved to play the oboe, and that she’d always dreamed of someday playing her oboe with the NY Philharmonic.  The Make-a-Wish Foundation made it happen.  Johanna’s dream came true.  She was flown to NY; she sat next to the principal oboist of the NY Philharmonic in rehearsal, and then in a concert.  The other members of the Philharmonic crowded around, shook her hand, wished her well.  They all chipped in and bought Johanna a brand new, beautiful oboe, and sent her back to California with photographs, autographs, and some wonderful new friends and wonderful memories. 

The members of the NY Philharmonic have a wonderful, God-given talent for making music.  They bring that pleasure to others.  But they went further, and used their talents, and the fame it brought them, to reach out and touch a terribly ill teenager.  Don’t you think that made God smile?  Today, by the way, Johanna’s leukemia is in remission, and she’s studying for the ministry. 

I have another story to tell you, involving the same foundation.  But, I have to preface it with a disclosure:  my family comes from the great state of Wisconsin.  And to paraphrase a popular novel, there’s no clear line in Wisconsin between religion and the Green Bay Packers.  So, I’m a Packer fan.  My daughter Nancy, whom many of you have met, is a fanatic.  And our favorite Packer is the quarterback, Brett Favre, who’s famous even outside the state of Wisconsin.

He’s so famous that the dearest wish of thousands, tens of thousands, of children is to meet Brett Favre.  So the Make-a-Wish Foundation asked – and Brett Favre agreed – that every Friday that the Packers were in Green Bay, he would meet one of their children.  Every Friday.  And Favre says, it isn’t easy – it’s very emotional, and you get caught up in the lives of these sick children -- but he’s kept his promise.  One Friday he met a little girl named Anna, age 6, from Neenah, WI.  Anna had a rare degenerative brain disorder, for which there is no known cure.  She was so sick her parents didn’t think she’d be able to get to Green Bay to meet her hero; she was on a feeding tube 20 hours a day, and breathing was very hard for her.  But she rallied for the big day.  They spent the day together; he played catch with her with a Nerf football; he helped her in and out of her stroller (Favre has two daughters of his own); Anna met the rest of the Packers, and had lunch with the team.  She went home armed with pictures, autographs, footballs, T-shirts, and wonderful memories:  all thanks to the God-given talents of Brett Favre and his teammates, and their use of those talents to reach out to someone who needed them.  When she left, Anna gave Favre a prayer-card with her picture on it.  Favure went home and taped it to his refrigerator; he and his wife prayed daily for Anna.  And since that day?  Anna is still hanging in there, still fighting, with some improvement; certainly thanks in large part to medical advances relating to her disease – but her parents say that her day with her hero has also played a large part.

What do we take from this?  What truly exalts us above our imperfect origins – is not what we can do for ourselves, but what we can do for others.  What makes God smile is not just Brett Favre playing football (although there are those in WI who think God just has to be a Packer fan), but what he does with his talent, and the celebrity that goes with it, to the benefit of others.

Not all of the talents God gives us, by the way, are good ones.  To be human is to be imperfect – that’s the way God made us.  We have some truly terrible talents:  we’re very good at killing each other.  Our history is full of warfare, much of it waged in God’s name.  That can’t please God.  Short of killing each other, we’re also very good at making each other miserable. We’re full of hatreds and prejudices that hurt each other deeply. We even hurt the people we love the most.  Another of the teachers at my school used to repeat themes that he saw in our history and our literature; one that came up again and again was “man’s inhumanity to man.”

We all know about God’s proclivity for testing us.  Maybe in giving us these awful talents, God is testing us, hoping we will exercise other talents:  judgment, restraint, wisdom – to keep the baser parts of our talents at bay.

We are both divided by our talents – the baser ones – and united by them.  I heard a speech by Bill Clinton, delivered at my son’s college graduation last June.  Clinton said that the most important scientific event of his lifetime was the discovery and the mapping of the human gene: the very place where God imprints us with our talents and characteristics.  And what did the scientists find after they’d studied the human gene?  We’re all 99.9% the same.  Doesn’t matter what our religion is; what color our skin is; what our ethnic origin is – we’re 99.9% the same.  All that warfare, that killing, that cruelty, our inhumanity to each other – is over the .01% that differentiates us, one from another.  You can’t help but ask, as Clinton did, why can’t we focus our talents on the 99.9% that ties us together, and ignore the .01% that makes us different? 

What can each of us take from all of this?  We’re not all Brett Favre, or J.S. Bach.  We can’t all individually change the world for the better.  But we have all been given talents that taken together, can change the world for the better; we all have the talent to touch each other – to reach out – to make each other smile.  How many times have you been walking down the street, you catch a stranger’s eye, you exchange a smile, just a little one, even a sympathetic look - and you both walk away feeling just a little bit better?  How many times have you bought your morning coffee from a street vendor, or a guy in a deli; you share a few words, a joke, a little byplay, maybe commiserate about the weather, and you both move on with your day – with a little smile?

Another thing Bill Clinton said was that in South Africa – he said he got this story from Nelson Mandela – when two people of Mandela’s tribe encounter each other, they greet each other with a word in their language that translates literally not as “hello,” or “have a nice day” – but as “I see you.”  We all have the talent to see each other, to recognize our common humanity, to make each other feel better.  It applies, of course, not just to our encounters with strangers, but to our relations with our families, our friends, our co-workers.

After all, we have to get along.  It’s a crowded world.  When Jesus told this parable, the population of Jerusalem was 25,000.  Today there are more people that that in some buildings.  The world population is 6.2 billion.  We have to use our God-given talents to see each other; to touch each other, in a positive way; to improve each other’s lives.  And if we do, the world will be a better place, and God will assuredly smile.

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