The McDonalds Gospel
In 2016, Michael Keaton starred in a movie based on the true story of how Ray Kroc “became” the founder of McDonalds. The movie was called “The Founder,” and the story is one that I have used in sermons before.
In the movie, Ray Kroc (played by Keaton) is a struggling traveling salesman who stumbles upon the McDonalds restaurant, which was started by Dick and Mac McDonald. At the time (the early 1950s), "fast food” didn’t exist—at least, not until the McDonald brothers created it. Typically, after ordering a burger and fries, one had to wait 5-10 minutes for that food to be cooked and served. Dick and Mac were able to accomplish this feat in just thirty seconds.
Kroc saw this operation and immediately decided to go into business with the brothers to expand and franchise their restaurant. The brothers resisted because they wanted their restaurant done their way—the “right way.” They were highly concerned about quality control, and they had given up on the franchising idea a few years earlier after a few failed attempts. After much coercion and a few tweaks to his own approach, Kroc was able to get the McDonald brothers to sign some papers, and off they went.
Long story short: Kroc put McDonald’s and “fast food” into motion, and it became the largest fast-food chain in the world, feeding one percent of the global population daily. In 2002, the Kroc estate was valued at $2.3 billion, and you can imagine that this estate has only grown since then. Because of how the deal worked out, though, the McDonald brothers received a check for $2.7 million and a handshake deal on receiving a one-percent annual royalty, but this has never been paid out even to this day. Had it happened, they would receive over $100 million annually. Instead, they receive nothing. Had the McDonald brothers not tried so hard to keep McDonald’s so small, then they and their families would have generational wealth in billions.
In some ways, this is kind of a sad story. In other ways, I see a lot of the parable of the talents that Jesus tells in Matthew 25. If you’re reading an article on Mosaic, then you’re probably familiar with this parable. When I think of the McDonald brothers and their story, I also think about the servant who buried his one coin.
The servant was afraid of what the master might do, so he fixed it (or so he thought) to ensure that nothing bad could happen. The irony is that, in doing so, something bad happened anyway: his lone coin was given to the servant who had turned five coins into ten. The master had rewarded the other two servants who doubled their investment, and he then ripped into the servant who buried his coin, calling him “wicked and lazy.” While describing this servant as lazy makes sense, calling him wicked always stood out to me. I get that what he did was done in fear, but there’s also a question that has haunted me:
What if the servant had taken the money to market to try and make more… but then lost it?
It is here that I must remind myself of what this money actually is. Kroc understood what the McDonald’s restaurant was better than what the McDonald brothers, the true founders, did. McDonald’s as an entity invented and branded a concept that changed the food industry forever. You might have to travel for quite some time to find someone who has never heard of Mickey D’s.
Kroc saw this and knew that little could stop this growth. In the Scripture narrative, the servant didn’t fully understand this idea. When thinking about the servant hiding the money, I realize that the servant didn’t just hide the money from others—he hid it from himself, even if only for a season.
There is actually one other parable that Jesus told where someone did go out and blow his master’s money. It’s the prodigal son in Luke 15. While this lost son didn’t exactly “invest” this money at the bank (the text just describes it as “wild living,” but I think we can use our imaginations), he squandered the money nonetheless. Maybe he wanted to “live wildly,” or maybe he thought this would actually bring him more money, but the point is that he lost it.
After a pretty low point in this son’s life (living with pigs), he decided to go back and try to convince his father to let him be a servant. While still rehearsing this pitch, his father saw him way off in the distance and sprinted to him. The father threw his arms around him, kissed him, refused to even bother hearing the son’s servant pitch, and planned an impromptu coming-home party.
When I look at these two parables side by side, I think I begin to notice something about God’s invitation to me in growing His Kingdom. If I go out with my money/talents and lose some, I don’t think that God will punish me or describe me as “wicked” if I come back to Him and tell Him I failed. I actually think that we serve a God who takes us back to the market Himself to show us how it’s done, and who walks alongside us as we figure it all out. What’s important is that we choose to go to market.
We never really grow the Kingdom of God. God does that. However, burying the Kingdom not only hides it from others, but from ourselves. Consequently, we stunt our own spiritual formation out of fear of not growing the Kingdom, but when we boldly go into our world with the good news of a Kingdom built on love and grace with Jesus Christ as the cornerstone, growth will take place. Perhaps the best part of this growth is that we will experience it in the deepest way ourselves as we watch this fruit multiply before our very eyes.
