Be with us, O Lord: for if
you are with us, nothing else matters. And if you are not with us, nothing else
matters. Amen.
To be perfectly honest with you, I’ve never liked this
passage from the Gospel that was read this morning. I find it to be disturbing
and problematic. Part of the reason why I don’t like is that I identify with
the servant who buries the coin and is subsequently cast into the outer
darkness. I am a classic first child and growing up, my worst fear was
disappointing my teachers. If I were a character in this parable, I’m not so
sure that I wouldn’t have also hid the coin to not risk losing it. And because
of the punishment given out for his practicality, I’ve never liked this
passage.
Now, ordinarily, you’d think that I’d be rather excited
about having this passage read in the middle of Stewardship season, after all,
the message is rather clear: use your resources or face the consequences. And
often, that is how this passage is interpreted. I have heard many a sermon that
talk about the third servant- calling him everything from lazy to disobedient. And
that is the way that I’ve always understood and explained this parable. The
scholars are quick to remind us that a talent is an unfortunate translation. A
talent was a measure of weight and has nothing to do with our skills or
capabilities. A talent weighed about 75 pounds and was worth roughly 15 year’s
salary. But even better for stewardship, as it points to the lesson that we are
to give our money, no wiggling out of stewardship with volunteer hours- or so
the traditional reading goes.
But this just doesn’t sit right with me. This parable
doesn’t sound like Jesus to me. First of all, the master expects his servants
to engage in usury, which was clearly forbidden under Jewish law. The idea of
playing fast and loose with money in a speculative manner doesn’t strike me as
a Gospel message. It seems that this parable is praising the top execs at
Goldman Sachs. Not that they are evil people, but they’re not the sort of
person that Jesus typically lifts up as examples.
This parable also portrays the master as absent, off in a
distant land doing some more business deals, leaving these servants to
themselves. But Jesus told us that he would not leave us orphaned and would
send the Holy Spirit to be with us. Our God is not an absent God, but this
parable seems to suggest so. But the hardest part of this parable to reconcile
with the Gospel is when the master says “For to all those who have, more will
be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing,
even what they have will be taken away.” That’s the straw that breaks the
camel’s back for me. What happened to “blessed are the poor” and the great
words from the Magnificat- “God has filled the hungry with good things, and the
rich he has sent away empty.” I mean, Jesus said “the last will be first and
the first will be last,” how then, can he also say “the rich are going to get
richer.” Like I said, I don’t like this passage.
How we understand the parables depends greatly where we
read them from. An annual salary in the United States of just $25,000 puts you
in the top 2% of the global economy. I think it’s safe to say that most of us
earn more than that. We hear this parable from a place of privilege, and most
of our wealth is gained in the fashion suggested by this parable- hard work and
the stock market. So, of course, when we hear a parable, we want to come out
looking good. So we rejoice when the master says to the first two servants
“well done, good and faithful servant.” In preparing for this sermon, one
scholar noted that she talked to some villagers in Nicaragua who lived in
abject poverty. And they had trouble with this parable as well- noting that for
the third servant, there was no hope or liberation in the parable.
And I’m wondering if maybe we’ve been reading this
parable wrong all of these years? When did we decide that the master in this
parable had a capital “M”? When did the absent and rugged capitalist master,
with a lower case “m,” become the Master of Creation? When Jesus told this
parable, his audience was under the oppression the Emperor, not a master they
were happy with. If we interpret this parable in the traditional way, there is
nothing surprising. We say “yup, that’s how the world works. The rich get
richer, the middle class gets squeezed, and the poor are forgotten.” It has
been said that if you want to know the deepest meaning of a parable, look for
something that surprises you. Jesus wasn’t telling these stories to entertain
people, but rather to proclaim the counter-cultural Kingdom of God; and there
is nothing counter-cultural about the message that the rich get richer. Again,
I don’t see Jesus taking money from the poor and giving it to rich, but that is
exactly what is going on.
I’m starting to think that I’ve had it all wrong. The
context of this passage is helpful. Right before this parable begins, we have the
parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids, which we heard last Sunday. That
was a parable of who is in and who is out. And then we have this parable about doubling
the return on your investment. Next Sunday, we’ll read the final portion of
Matthew 25, which is the parable of the sheep and the goats in which Jesus says
“truly I tell you, just as you have done to the least of these, you have done
to me.” And what follows that is the Passion of Jesus.
What if, instead of Jesus telling this parable as an
instructive on how to manage our finances, he is giving it as the antithesis of
how the Kingdom of God works? What happens when we read parables in isolation
is that we lose their narrative value. Matthew constructs his telling of the
Good News in the way that he does for a purpose. So after asking “who is and
who is out” through the parable of the ten bridesmaids, Jesus gives us a
parable of what the kingdoms of the world do, namely usury and trampling the
poor. He then contrasts this with a parable of God’s Kingdom, of helping the
least of these. And I can’t help but think that these three parables being told
right before the Crucifixion of Jesus isn’t accidental. The Cross is the
ultimate reversal of logic. The instrument of death and humiliation becomes the
throne of glory and eternal life. As St. Paul wrote “We proclaim Christ
crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.”
The ways of the world punish the third servant. He knows
that his ruler is a harsh man, who takes what is not his. The Emperor dominates
and oppresses people like the third servant. It is complete foolishness to
think that anything other than being cast out into the darkness that would
happen to him. But the Gospel lifts up the lowly and gives hope to the
oppressed. While the world makes the rich richer and they receive rewards for
doing so, the Kingdom of God rewards people to minister to the least of these.
And the Cross will become the ultimate symbol of the weak being lifted up and
made strong. And that is something I can grasp.
Being that we are in week three of our Stewardship
efforts, I do want to speak to that topic in light of this different understanding
of the Parable of the Talents. If this parable is to be understood as a
counter-example of what the Kingdom of God looks like, then the message is that
you will not be rewarded based on how much money you make. You are not defined
by your income. That is the Good News of the Gospel and it is liberation from
ills of money. But this isn’t how the world works. When meeting someone new,
one of the first questions that we ask is “what do you do?,” which really is a
way of asking “how do you earn a living?” I once knew someone that always
responded to the question “what do you do?” by asking in reply “about what?”
You are not defined by how you earn income.
Our culture measures time in terms of “billable hours”
and we often compare people by their net worth. When we were applying for the
loan on our home, I was surprised when I read through our credit report that
absolutely every financial transaction that I’ve ever been a part of was
accounted for in a nearly 20 page report. Now I understand why banks want that
sort of information before making a loan, but if I died today, my credit report
would be longer than my obituary, and there is something disturbing about that.
In Stewardship, we talk about money and using our
resources. But what needs to be said about Stewardship and money is that it is
not about the amounts. Some of you may struggle to give $20 a month, and others
could easily give $2,000 a month. The way I see it, and the way that I think
God sees it, both will be told “well done, good and faithful servant.” This is
not a parable about earning more money so that you can then give more money, it
is a parable that shows us that God’s economy works different than the world’s.
It is a counter-parable that proclaims the Gospel message that you are not
defined by your money. Your worth is not tied to your bank account. Your net
worth is not measured in dollars, but by the fact that you are a unit of God’s
grace- unrepeatable, unprecedented, and irreplaceable. As St. Paul writes in
the passage from Thessalonians, “God has destined us not for wrath but for
obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.” We are not called to the
wrath of this world that defines you based on your wealth and judges you
according to your clothing or the square footage of your house. Instead, we are
invited to participate in the salvation of God’s Kingdom.
A quick word on pledging. A pledge is not a promise, it
is declaration of intent. Life happens, and I understand that. And I trust that
God does as well. If you cannot meet your pledge, there is no shame in that,
because you are not defined by the number that comes after the dollar sign. But
you also are not bound by your pledge, should extra income come your way, there
is no penalty for overpaying your pledge. Stewardship is not about weeping and
gnashing of teeth. That’s for the stock market, but stewardship is about grace.
In making pledge, you help St. Luke’s to plan. There is tremendous energy at
St. Luke’s right now- I hope you can feel it. And I think we are on the cusp on
being the best that we can be. But we have to plan for that, and we can only
plan for growth if we know what resources we will have available. So making a
pledge, sharing your intention for giving, is a very practical help for us.
But perhaps more importantly, making a pledge is a sign
of commitment to St. Luke’s and a gesture of trust in God’s blessing. Again,
the amount doesn’t matter, but the act of faith of filling out a pledge card
and offering before the altar does matter. In declaring your intention, you
will find the liberation and joys of practicing Stewardship.
We’ve always heard this as a parable about being rewarded
for wise investing and growing wealth. But, speaking for myself, I incorrectly
identified the master in the parable as the Master of the Universe. The trouble
with reading the parable at face value is that it seems to counter the message
of hope for the oppressed with its own message of the rich getting richer and
the poor getting poorer. If we instead read this as a parable about how the
world works, contrasting it to the Cross as a symbol of how the Kingdom of God
works, we find a message of liberation. You are not defined by your money.
May God
grant us the grace to know that our true value is not found on a bank
statement, but instead was given to us at our Baptisms. Give to us, O Lord, the
courage to follow the way of your Kingdom. And bless us in our practice of
Stewardship, through actions of love and by committing ourselves to you in
faith we might hear the words “well done, good and faithful servants.” Amen.
