by Rev. Kevin J. McLemore

Matthew 25:14-30

“For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them; ¹⁵to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. ¹⁶The one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded with them, and made five more talents. ¹⁷In the same way, the one who had the two talents made two more talents. ¹⁸But the one who had received the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money. ¹⁹After a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them. ²⁰Then the one who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five more talents, saying, ‘Master, you handed over to me five talents; see, I have made five more talents.’ ²¹His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.’ ²²And the one with the two talents also came forward, saying, ‘Master, you handed over to me two talents; see, I have made two more talents.’ ²³His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.’ ²⁴Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, ‘Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; ²⁵so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.’ ²⁶But his master replied, ‘You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? ²⁷Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest. ²⁸So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. ²⁹For 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. ³⁰As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

We actually bring two things to a close today, the first being one that is particular to our church, and that is the Experiencing Epiphany Stewardship Campaign, which has been done pretty well considering the short time given to plan and implement it. Thanks to all of you who responded by pledging for 2012 or who have given to match the $25,000 dollars generously given by some anonymous members of this congregation. The other ending, the other closing is to our church year, to the end of the church’s calendar, on this day, the Reign of Christ Sunday, or Christ the King Sunday. Today is our New Year’s Eve, of sorts, in the Christian church, and so I wanted to tie up the end of the year by looking at one of the most well-known parables Jesus taught, and one that we all think know, we understand, and maybe do, maybe we do. And the reason why I think this parable is appropriate is because it reminds us of the good gifts we are given by this First Giver, this Christ, this God we meet in this one from Nazareth, this one who is the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega. But I want to do that by offering two possibilities for understanding this parable, both of which are valid interpretations, I think, but only one, a more nuanced, subversive understanding, might actually speak to where we are at this moment in our country, especially with recent Occupy movements around the country and what they are trying to say, whatever our agreements or disagreements with their means or methods.

Before I go there, let me give you the way that most people have interpreted this parable—and, again, it’s a very valid way of understanding the text, to be frank and honest, and I’m not so much arguing against it as perhaps muddling up the picture and offering a different way of looking at Jesus’ parable. The typical way of handling this text as a preacher would be to say that this parable is about how God has given to each of us a set of gifts, talents, capabilities, that we are entrusted with, and for which we are responsible for, much as these servants are responsible for these talents, or large amounts of money, during the time when the master of this house is gone off for a long trip. These servants are to invest that money, to nurture, to make it grow, during the time he is away, much as we are to invest our talents, and to nurture, and use them to be about the kingdom’s business until the master arrives back home—until Jesus comes back again. You see, this understanding fits into the overall theme of Matthew 24 & 25 which has been called the “little apocalypse”, the texts where Jesus talks about the end of all things, and so this interpretation fits in nicely with the context. But there are words of warning as well—if we do not nurture the gifts God has given us, if we don’t use them and invest them into the work of the realm of God, as the third servant did not, then what little we would have been given will actually be taken from us, and there will be a punishment, a gnashing of teeth and weeping—a very vivid picture being sketched out by Jesus. The point of this parable, as interpreted by most, is that this is about being good stewards of the gifts we are given, and you can see why this text seems like the perfect one for a day like today, when the whole issue of stewardship is right there, right before us. But there are problems with understanding it in this particular way, problems that become apparent if we did a little deeper here, and put this parable into a historical context. The first thing to notice is that unlike almost all the other parables in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus does not say the words that he always uses to indicate that he is about to tell a parable, a parable being a clue about what the kingdom is like. In this parable, he never says the magic words, “the kingdom of heaven is like this.” No, instead, he simply starts it off with, “for it is as if a man...,” and so on. Maybe that ought to clue us in on the fact that this isn’t your typical parable, that maybe Jesus isn’t necessarily trying to advocate for the world view expressed here, but is, in fact, trying to point us away from understanding the world as the characters in the story seem to understand it. And the reason why I say that is because some of the values expressed in the story seem to be in direct contradiction to the values that Jesus was teaching his disciples only chapters earlier, in this very Gospel, especially in the Beatitudes, which we heard last week. For example, if you think about it, this story seems to say exactly what we’ve all come to believe about this world, especially in the last few years, this cynical idea that the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer in this world. I mean, isn’t that the way the world works? Recent studies have shown that “Nationwide, the average income rose 9.0 percent for the top fifth of families, edged up 1.3 percent for those in the middle fifth, and fell 2.5 percent for those in the bottom fifth of the income scale.” (http://www.pbn.com/stories/30659.html)

That old saying, that the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer, seems to be true, at least from the perspective of many of us, but what’s so striking and maybe troublesome about it for us here is that it seems to be a truism that works in the spiritual world as well. It almost seems as if Jesus is saying here that the more spiritually gifted you are, the more likely you’ll be even more blessed, and the less gifted you are, the less likely you’ll be blessed. So, is it spiritually true that the spiritually rich get even richer, while those of us blessed with less patience for prayer, less kindness towards the other, less authentic goodness to enrich the world, are going to even lose what little of those gifts we have? I mean, let me frank here: that’s not good news for me! And it also doesn’t seem to fit in with what Jesus seems to say on the Sermon on the Mount, in the Beatitudes, where Jesus seems to turn the world’s ways of doing things on its head: Bless are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven—in the Gospel of Luke, the “in spirit” is cut out. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek the nobodies, for they will inherit the earth (Matthew 5:1-3). In contrast to the old saying that “the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer,” the spiritual values of Jesus seem to say that the “rich get poorer, and poor get richer, at least spiritually, and in the Gospel of Luke, it gets more literal, because writer of Luke is obsessed with material possessions, and what to do with things, stuff. This particular parable doesn’t seem to fit with what Jesus seems to be teaching in his other sayings, at least if we interpret this parable the way it has been traditionally interpreted.

And another thing that has caused a lot of people to wonder is that image of the master in the parable, the one people assume is representative of God in the story. The problem is that isn’t really a pretty picture of who God is, if you think about it. First, the master never questions his servants on how they made their money…and believe me, even in the first century, getting a 100% return on an investment would raise as many eyebrows then as it would now—usually the only thing that get you that kind of return is something under the table, something illegal—that’s Ponzi level type of returns—I mean, something’s not quite right here. I certainly think that it could be exaggeration for the story’s sake, but would those ancient listeners have heard it that way? Or would that have also been a little puzzled by those who seem to be awfully successful investors, perhaps too successful? And there is the issue of the master, and what kind of man he is: did the third, unsuccessful investor have real reason to fear for his life, if he didn’t produce 100% returns on the money entrusted to him? Remember in the parable where that third servant says the master was harsh, and that he sowed where he did not reap, and gathered where he did not reap? Think about it for a second—he’s essentially accused his master of being unethical, of being a thief, of taking what is not his, going into other people’s fields and stealing their grain? And what’s even odder is that master never actually refutes him—he simply repeats back what the other guy said, as if to say, “oh really.” And it gets even stranger, especially if we make the mistake of thinking that master is meant to be God in this story, because this same guy then tells the third servant to violate one of the long held tenets of Jewish law, which was to lend money for interest—it was considered to be terribly unethical for a Jewish person to charge interest, because it was truly seen as the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer.

So, if there are all these problems here with this text, or at least problems with interpreting this as a kingdom parable, interpreting it as a way of seeing how the kingdom of God really works, what the kingdom of heaven is like, then what in the world is Jesus trying to tell us here? And how would those earliest listeners have heard this parable—and keep in mind his earliest listeners were overwhelming poor, not part of the elite class, not the wealthiest and the brightest of his generation? How would they have heard these words? Well, Douglas Adams in his book The Prostitute In The Family Tree says that they would have probably heard it as satire, as Jesus making fun of the powers that be that think that they stand on no one’s shoulders, that they are self-made men and women, that have gotten what they deserved in this life by pluck and grit, as they used to say in the South. In antiquity, the rich and powerful believed that as well, but they believed that there was also a divine element to it, that you could see who God favored by how much stuff they had in this life, that these were the good people, the righteous people, that God had blessed them with lots of stuff because they were, in fact, good honorable people—that was the conventional wisdom of the day, much like it is in some quarters today in this world, and in the church—the prosperity Gospel proponents talk in this way.

But in our parable today, the ethically challenged, the unscrupulous, seemed to be the ones who are benefiting the most from the system, the ones who are on top, and the one who is cautious, who wants to avoid doing anything illegal, who knows that if he doesn’t produce the results his master wants, illegally or not, he is going to be the one who pays the steep price for doing the cautious thing and ethical thing. For those ancient and poor listeners, they might have heard this parable as reflecting their reality, their reality of being exploited by those in power, reflecting their own reality that the rich get richer and the poor, well, they get poorer, even to the point of being kicked out of the kingdom, ironically, for doing the more ethical thing—not getting that money unethically—maybe not lending out that money for an enormous profit, at payday lender types of interest rates. I think what these early listeners of Jesus’ might have heard thousands of years ago is someone saying that in fact, they are loved by God, and this God is for them, even if they have nothing, even if they are told by others that the fact that they have nothing shows that God is not on their side, that this God cannot possibly be for them. In next parable Jesus tells after this one in chapter 25, we find out the goats in the parable of the goats and the sheep, the goats are surprised that they find themselves on wrong side of God’s judgment, and I think this parable before us today is hinting at that truth, that we will be surprised at how dependent we really have been on the mercy of others, the goodness of others, and the mercy and grace of God.

n our culture, we struggle with the idea of the self-made man, the self-made woman, the one who pulls himself up by his own bootstraps, who with enough hard work has made his way in this world on will and pluck alone. And those, those who haven’t achieved, well, they haven’t tried enough, haven’t worked hard enough, and all those things we hear in certain circles, political and television circles. Well, sometimes of that may be true, but sometimes the system makes sure that some people don’t have the bootstraps, and don’t have the hope needed to get up and do. And over the last couple of years, I’ve also made peace with the idea that some people will never have the emotional or intellectual skill set to make it this increasingly complex world, especially with no manufacturing base with which to employ them. But even that is beside the point if we don’t recognize the deeper reality that there are no self-made men, there are no self-made women—there are only people who have climbed on the shoulders of mothers, fathers, friends, teachers, strangers, who helped them to get there. Look at your own belly buttons, and you and I will quickly realize that no one is self-made—we’ve all been given gifts on the journey to get us where we are at.

In fact, in reality, all of it was a gift, right, one way or another? I mean, think about it—think of all those who we need to thank for getting us to this point in our lives—our parents, grandparents, friends, teachers—especially our teachers—who gave us gifts along the way so that we could achieve what we have achieved in this life, whatever those achievements are, even if the achievement was just surviving, just keeping our heads above waters, which describes a lot of us nowadays. And, of course, it goes even back to those who nurtured our faith—we believe in God, because others believed before us, and we are the recipients of God’s grace through this particular church and all the other churches we’ve ever attended because others believed that God’s grace still seem to flow through the church, flawed and all-to-human as the church might be. Those ancient listeners, they knew the game was fixed, they knew that it wasn’t likely they were ever going to achieve the wealth and status of those that Jesus is making fun here, but, unlike the king and the two of the three servants in this parable, they didn’t fool themselves into thinking that they could go on this journey of life alone, and they didn’t fool themselves into thinking that they had done it all by themselves, even if it was just surviving from day to day. Unlike the wealthy of Jesus’ day, and even our day—and that may include all of us, in comparison to others around the world—those ancient listeners knew they were dependent on God, and each other in order to get through this good but difficult world sometimes.

And maybe that is what we do at this church as well, when we show up every Sunday: we acknowledge how connected we remain to the First Giver, and we acknowledge how connected we are to each other—and how really dependent we are on God and each other. You know, God has been so good to me—and yet I’ve been given less than I wanted, but I’ve probably been given more than I ever deserved in this life, and on Stewardship Sundays, I am always reminded of that truth—that it was all a gift from God and from the people that loved me, raised me, taught me, stood beside me, nurtured me, corrected me, and accepted me for who I am, imperfections and all. In reading texts like the Parable of the Talents, we remember how dependent we are and how much there is to be thankful for, how much the goodness of our lives is a gift from God and from each other, and how much God’s grace has played a part in the journey we’ve been on, and how much God’s mercy will be what brings us home. We mustn’t lie to ourselves, thinking that all that we have achieved was only, only due to our hands, rather also remembering that the hands of God, of family, of friends, even strangers, helped us along the way. In a village in Denmark, there is a beautifully landscaped cemetery next to the community church. It is reported that at least a third of the gravestones there have the inscription "TAK." That's Danish for "Thanks." All is gift, all is grace, all is mercy…God is so good, so generous and I am thankful, so thankful, and over the next couple of days, I hope you’ll join me in thanking God over and over again, muttering or whispering if you must, those words of gratitude, words of thanks. Amen.