Privilege and its Responsibilities

“Privilege and its Responsibilities”

Written by Dan McDonald

 

Epistle Reading:  Galatians 6:1-10

Gospel Text:  Matthew 25:14-20

Prayer:  Bless O Father, these gifts to our use and us to thy service; Give us grateful hearts, our Father, for all thy mercies, and make us mindful of the needs of others; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

            The following meditation is purposefully modeled upon the practice within the Anglican Prayer Book tradition to combine prayers with Scripture Readings including the Gospels and Epistles.  It is my opinion that the believer should learn to think of the Apostle’s writings found in the Epistles as being authoritative writings given to explain and illustrate how the Gospel of Christ’s life and ministry ought to lead us to believe and behave in accordance with that Gospel.  The four Gospels describe the life and ministry of Jesus Christ; and the Epistles are the Apostles' teachings on how Christ's life and ministry is meant to be applied in our lives.  So hopefully this meditation will serve as an example of how the Christian can learn to read the Epistles thinking of the Gospels, and how the Christian may read the Gospels and think of how the Apostles teach us to apply the Gospel.  The Gospels and the Epistles are companion volumes meant to be contemplated throughout our lives until their message is written into the very fabric of our beings.

 

            Are you part of the privileged class in our American society?  Are you part of the privileged class in our world’s global community?  In some circles the very talk of a privileged class having greater responsibility than a non-privileged class speaks of a sort of class warfare mentality that can be ignored as non-Biblical.  Some might even declare such talk of “privilege” as a code word indicating some expression of liberation theology.  So often such a word like “privilege” gets used by a progressive in trying to discuss what seems to them an important part of Gospel living and the Conservative seems to act with a knee jerk reaction and will hardly even give a nod towards the liberal’s perspective that some people with privilege need to understand they have a greater responsibility than those without privilege.

            But there is another way these same kinds of questions may be asked that should resonate very deeply with the Conservative wing of the Church.  Let me ask the same questions my last paragraph asked using what I think is a Biblical synonym to the word “privilege.”

            Are you part of the people of God who have received grace?  Are you a part of the international Christian community which has been favored with gifts of God’s grace?  Do you believe that God’s gifts of such grace bestows upon you a responsibility to make you grateful for your blessings and to remake you into a person who is increasingly mindful of the needs of others?

The simple traditional Anglican table prayer can teach us a great deal about our social responsibilities to all humanity, and especially to the household of the faith.  We pray and give God thanks for our blessings, and blessings are privileges given us, not merits earned by us.  We pray that God would give us grateful hearts.  We pray for grateful hearts that we might like the mother of our Lord ponder the treasure given to us by our Lord.  The Anglican prayer of grace before a meal finally asks God to make us mindful of the needs of others.  We have been given blessings that we might be mindful of the needs of others as well as grateful for all the blessings God has given us.  Right in our table prayer that we can teach to children we are taught in seed form the whole theology of privilege and responsibility.  We thank God for his blessings.  We ask God to strengthen in us the virtue of gratitude in regards to what God has given us.  Finally we ask that he might aid us to see (and surely also to act upon) the needs of others.  That is the beginning of a healthy perspective on thanksgiving, gratitude, and being mindful of the needs of others.  We pray in acknowledgment of our privilege and our responsibility as we give thanks as we sit down to eat.

            When we look at St. Matthew’s Gospel beginning at the fourteenth verse of the twenty-fifth chapter we receive teaching by Jesus on the gifts bestowed upon us.  God (to some degree by design, and probably to some degree by the fallen condition of mankind), has distributed his gifts of grace in varying amounts.  In the teachings found in this Gospel passage the lord has left his estate for a lengthy time.  To one man he gives five talents.  To another man he gives two talents, and to a last man the lord gives a single talent.

            In this passage, when the lord returns, the first servant returns to the lord his five talents and also five more that he had gained through his wise use of the talents the lord had left with him.  The lord then made this servant the ruler of five cities.  The second servant returns his original two with two additional talents that he has made through his use of the two talents the lord originally gave to him before his journey.  The Lord approvingly makes this second servant a ruler over two cities in his kingdom.

            But you and I probably know that the third servant hid his talent in the ground and returned to the lord only that one talent, and the Lord reprimanded him and said even the one talent he had been given would now be taken from him and given to another.  I don’t think the meaning of the text is that the Lord demands us to be financially profitable.  There is another reason in the text given for the Lord’s harsh treatment of the servant who hid his treasure in the dirt rather than seeking to grow it and hand it to the lord when the lord returned.  The Lord is angry with the servant but not necessarily because he didn’t turn a profit.

The reason for the Lord’s anger with the man was the man’s attitude.  The man said, “Lord, I knew that you are a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you had not planted.  So I hid my one talent in the dirt.”  O what a picture of a greedy little sniveling rat of a human being.   The lord was not a man who repaid good labor with meager pay, but rather gave great blessing in repayment of the return he received when his good servants paid a return on the talents he had given them.  For returning five or two talents the Lord gave his stewards charge over five or two cities.  This Lord was a generous lord, but the sniveling rat never saw it, and just complained how his lord was a hard man.  What a terrible thing it is to regard a kind person without the least sense of gratitude.  This servant’s inability to handle his talent properly was rooted in his lack of gratitude.  Therefore he could not, with a true heart of grace, pray the simple table prayer asking for a grateful heart and also to be made mindful of the needs of others.  This prayer was foreign to how he viewed God, and also how he viewed his neighbor.  He viewed God as harsh and judgmental and thus he was without gratitude.  He was too busy complaining of how hard the lord was to be able to see he had blessings that could go to helping his neighbor in need.  This is the sort of serious stuff that makes it hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, or for anyone lacking gratitude to enter the kingdom of God.  He hid his blessings and privileges because he had no gratitude towards God.  Had he had gratitude to God for his blessings, he might have come to have an awareness that he had blessings that could be shared with those in need.

            The Epistle reading found in Galatians 6:1-10 seems a very good place to learn how to apply the lesson Jesus taught in Matthew 25.  There are two nearly contradictory verses in this passage, which are in the living of life not contradictory verses but the two sides of a single coin, perhaps a talent.  On the one hand St. Paul says that we are to bear one another’s burden and then he also says that each person is to bear his own burden.  Which is it St. Paul?

            I think a lesson from table manners from a German perspective might help us to think of St. Paul more clearly.  German culture has slightly different table manners than American table manners.  In the German culture, the rule is that if you wish for a helping from a dish, and if the dish is within your reach, you do not ask someone nearer the dish to hand you the dish.  It is generally considered rude at the German household table to ask someone to hand you something that is already in your arm’s reach.  A German table has hands reaching out in all directions to reach for dishes.  But if you are polite and having reached for the serving dish and having taken a bread roll, you would likely ask others, “Would anyone else care for bread?”  That is how grateful people ought to behave.  We should with gratitude seek to make use of our talents, whether money, abilities, or our preferred places in the social strata to provide for ourselves but simultaneously to look down the table, around the neighborhood, across the globe and see if there is anyone else that we can be mindful of, who might be in need.

            Isn’t this really basic Christianity?  In a traditional Anglican family prayer in the morning, we are taught to pray; “O merciful God, confirm and strengthen us; that, as we grow in age, we may grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  Amen.”  This working through our blessings of grace and privilege and our corresponding responsibility to be mindful of the needs of others; should be an area of life in which we are growing in grace as we grow in age.  Privilege should be understood as something God has given everyone.  To some God has given much, and to some little, but whatever privilege God has given us ought to be accepted with gratitude and then lifted up to God as we give thanks for those gifts he has given that we may respond with hearts filled with gratitude and minds thoughtful of the needs of others.  There is one thing for sure, we do not want to be the person who has not learned to have gratitude for the gifts God has given to us nor do we want to be the person whose lack of gratitude has kept them from seeing and being mindful of the needs of others.

            Let our table prayer be a prayer expressing our entire way of life.  “Bless O Father these gifts to our use and us to thy service.  Give us grateful hearts, our Father, for all thy mercies, and make us mindful of the needs of others; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”