Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, New York
Br. Daniel Hansknecht, OHC
The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 28A, November 15, 2026
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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
If I were to put myself in the place of the slaves from this parable, I don’t think I’d be very successful. When it comes to accomplishing tasks, I’m often the kind of person who needs a deadline. If I’ve been assigned a school project that is due three months from now, then what that really means is that I’ve got two and a half months before I have to worry about it. So, when I hear that my master has given me a job to do while he is away, my first thought is “Okay. When are you coming back?”. Although I don’t consider myself to be wicked or lazy like the third slave, I’m not sure how well I’d compare with the first two either.
What’s just as stressful as the ambiguous deadline is the importance of the assignment. A talent is no small sum of money – it represents over 70 pounds of silver! Not an easy thing to handle, either in trade or in burial. Rather than a coin to be lost like in other parables, a talent is a unit of measurement, and represents an amount of silver worth a lifetime of daily wages. The master must trust his slaves a lot to leave us with such a trove of wealth. But alas, I am no merchant or trader, nor am I some suave haggler. Where does that leave yours truly in this little roleplay?
Conveniently for me, as a man of the 21st century, the word talent has evolved since Jesus last used it, beyond balancing scales and weight. In Middle English, the meaning shifted to encompass will, desire, inclination, and appetite, using the term more figuratively to describe the “weighing” of one’s mental disposition. Then later, in no small part to common interpretations of today’s parable, it came to portray one’s metaphorical gifts, their responsibilities, or a person’s capabilities, settling into the modern definition in the last 400 years. With that in mind, I’m treading no new ground when I suggest that talents mean more for us symbolically than just money.
Let’s see how things play out with some updated roles: the master is played by God and each of us take on the character of the various slaves. So, what is God entrusting to us? Something of incredible value, no doubt. But there are other conditions too; our new, make-believe talents also need to be something we can grow and cultivate; and they need to be something that we can give back to God when he returns from his parable journey. Some initial casting options for our silver talents include both our literal talents and our collective responsibility as stewards of creation.
There are elements of both I like, but also reasons to reject them. I like the sense of intimacy our literal talents offer. They can definitely be God-given, they are often quite valuable (even if just to us), and they are absolutely something we can grow and nurture. However, I’m not sure what God would gain from reclaiming them. Their value, I feel, is something contingent on our possession of them. Stewardship, by contrast, is temporary by nature and something intended to be relinquished. We’ve been blessed with this beautiful world — an object of peerless value — and certainly we have the power to preserve and cultivate it. So, what’s the catch this time? Consistency with the script, I’m afraid; the scale of the world, of the Earth, is societal and not personal. Rather than a parable about three slaves, each with their own obligations, this rendition presents a communal tale of the three characters cooperating to grow a single sum of silver. Although that sounds like the beginnings of a fine fable, it’s not the story we’ve been enacting today.
A third option, I propose, is our very lives themselves. It is something God has entrusted to us, for “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). There is nothing that can be considered more personal than that. It presents countless opportunities for us to learn and grow; nurturing not only our talents, but also our quality of character, and our sense of identity. It holds obvious value for us, even more than a lifetime of wages, but also for God who dwells in us — we are his temple. As Paul writes in First Corinthians, “…do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore, glorify God in your body.” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). Although the due date is ambiguous, “and the price of our life is so great that we cannot attain to it” (Psalm 49:8), it is by our very lives that we work to repay that debt and enter into the joy of our master.
But, I feel like I’m forgetting something… oh right, “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” It nearly slipped my mind that our little stage production is a morality play. Jesus is on a roll here, foretelling the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, giving his disciples signs of the end of the age, and offering insights into the coming of the Son of Man. Today’s reading is just one in a slew of such dramatic stories.
Even my namesake gets a shoutout: “So when you see the desolating sacrilege, spoken of by the prophet Daniel, standing in the holy place, then those in Judea must flee to the mountains…” (Matthew 24:15-16). Although Daniel is known for his apocalyptic visions, and jokes have been made about me entering the lion’s den when I became a monk, I didn’t choose the name Daniel for myself with either of those in mind. Instead, one of the core motivators was the meaning of the name: "God is my judge". A constant reminder for me to curb my self-critical tendencies. It makes for an interesting companion to my birth name, Benjamin, which means “Son of the right hand” or, perhaps, “favored son”. A reminder of the privileges in my life of which I am actively letting go or choosing to hold lightly. It also holds a special irony, because my dad is left-handed.
For me, my new name acts as a sort of line in the sand, dividing the before and after of two halves of my life. My choice to be a monk is one of aligning my life to my priorities, rather than the other way around. I’ve managed to live most of my life walking a fine line somewhere between passivity and a grand flurry of activity, as demonstrated in the school project example at the beginning of my sermon. However, when I find myself in a place to speak truth to myself, my relaxed, go with the flow approach is littered with all the attempts I’ve made to be bold, but where fear, inhibition, or lack of confidence lead me to disregard my own initiatives.
If I want to walk with endurance on this monastic journey, if I want to “finish the race” (2 Timothy 4:7), I need to proactively develop my talents and maintain myself as a fitting temple for God. For me, in this moment, at this time, that means treating myself, and my own conscious choices, with respect. When I ignore my own self-direction, I am disrespecting myself and thereby disrespecting the God who made me. Self-discipline for me is an expression of self-love. What does growing your talents look like? How are you able to make yourself a more fitting vessel for God?
I encourage you to “stay awake and sober” with this question, for, as our reading from Zephaniah says, “The great day of the Lord is near and hastening fast.” And in the Epistle, "For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.” We shouldn’t be complacent in God’s love. I, for one, want to be ready when the Lord comes, knowing that I’ve done all that I can without waiting for the deadline. Amen.
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