2023-11-20
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
November 19, 2023 Hamilton Coe Throckmorton
Matthew 25:14-30 The Federated Church, UCC
The parables of Jesus are intended to shake us up. They’re told to wrench us out of what can too often slide into overly comfortable, domesticated ways of seeing God. It’s extremely easy for us to think we know who God is without ever being surprised. “God is love,” we say. And it’s true. “God adores us as we are,” we say, and it’s true. “God forgives every wrong,” we say, and it’s true.
And then Jesus tells us a head-scratching story like today’s, and we’re forced—or maybe we should say invited—to encounter what is perhaps a new dimension of God and human life.
When we hear today’s parable of the talents, we’re pretty sure we know what it’s about, aren’t we. Three workers are entrusted with fabulous riches from a master who then goes away and leaves them to do what they will with it. To get a sense for the size of these gifts, think about what you yourself will earn, or have earned, in your entire life. That’s what the first servant is given to hold. Five talents—and a talent is a coin—it’s the equivalent today of maybe $10 million. The second servant is given a little less than half that—two talents, or maybe $4 million. And the third servant is given half of what the second servant gets—one talent, or maybe $2 million. Then the master leaves them.
When, after a long time, the master returns, the first two servants have invested their money and doubled it. They are praised to the hilt by the master. “Good work!” says the master. “You did your job well. From now on be my partner” (Matthew 25:21, 23; The Message). Unlike the first two, though, the third servant has simply buried the money. And frankly, from our vantage point, while this servant doesn’t make any money, holding onto it and keeping it safe doesn’t sound like such an awful thing to do.
When the master turns to this third servant, we think, ‘It can’t be that bad. The master gets back everything that was his, after all.’ But when the master speaks, it’s with a blistering condemnation. “That’s a terrible way to live!” says the master. “It’s criminal to live cautiously like that! If you knew I was after the best, why did you do less than the least?” (25:26, The Message). And so we typically conclude from this parable that a healthy faith life entails taking risks. We’re not to sit on our talents—for us meaning abilities—nor on our possessions, but we’re to invest ourselves on behalf of the Dominion of God. And that’s a fine way to hear and understand this parable. It has centuries of precedent behind it. Take a risk for God and God will praise and reward you. That’s how we understood this parable sixteen years ago when we lived it out here at Federated. Take a risk—for God.
There are other ways to hear this story, though, and this morning we’re going to let another interpretation unfold. In some ways, just so you know what’s coming, this will be more like a Bible study than a sermon. And we do this because I think faith is more vital, more alive, when faith surprises us, when something happens that we may not have expected. Then at the end of the sermon, we’ll listen for some ways that this alternative take on the story might illuminate our lives and bless us in perhaps an entirely new way.
So let’s look more closely at the story through this new lens. In some ways, of course, this master is like God. He gives resources to the three servants. He trusts them with this astounding amount of money. And in this giving and this trusting, he reflects something of God.
On the other hand, the story never says the master is a God-figure. And, in truth, this master is in many ways not like God. The story says that when the master returns from his extended trip, he “settle[s] accounts” (25:19). The master also makes a big deal of rewarding the first two servants for what they do and punishing the third servant for what he does. Again, not like God, who, we imagine, bestows grace irrespective of performance. This sort of judgmental reaction from the master seems unduly conditional: approval is only given because the first two servants do what the master wants. Such baldly conditional love is not at all what we picture coming from God.
Next, when the third servant comes forward, and before he knows his fate, he says to the master, “I knew that you were a harsh person, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed” (25:24). A moment later, the master confirms this characterization, repeating the third servant’s charge virtually word-for-word, granting that this harsh judgment on his character is, in fact, accurate. The master’s response is a way of saying, ‘Yes, I am a harsh person. Yes, I do take advantage of people.’ Is this really the way we imagine God to be?
After this, the master takes back the talent he had given the third servant and gives it, not to the second servant, who had had only two talents, but to the first servant, who had had five talents and certainly didn’t need any more. Even if this redistribution of the talent were a good thing—which is arguable—wouldn’t it have been far fairer to give that talent to the second servant to even things out some between the two servants that the master approved of?
Finally, it’s worth quoting in their entirety the final two points this master makes to conclude the story: “For to all 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. Cast this worthless servant into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (25:29-30). Adding to the storehouses of those who are wealthy and taking from those who are impoverished? This is so far from the contours of God articulated elsewhere in Matthew’s gospel, and in the Bible as a whole, that it seems to undo the God we know in Jesus Christ.
So to sum up, the character of the master is so cruel, callous, and unjust in this story that perhaps this character is not a stand-in for God after all. Perhaps something else entirely is going on here. Episcopal priest and biblical scholar Dorothy Sanders Wells frames the story in a completely different way. Here’s how she puts it: “When a false master who reaps where he does not sow and gathers where he does not scatter returns after having entrusted his servants with his resources, no doubt he expects the servants to have continued his exploitative and manipulative ways of increasing his wealth at the expense of any and all others. But upon the return of the true master, there is found the one servant who instead refuses to participate in such exploitation” (“Sunday’s Coming,” lectionary column, The Christian Century email, Nov. 13, 2023).
Sanders Wells’ read on the parable is that the true hero of the story isn’t either of the first two servants, and certainly not the master, but rather the third servant, the one who buries the money and gives it back when the master returns. Her point is that the first two servants have been out for profit on behalf of a self-serving and abusive master, and have made their money on the backs of those who could least afford it. The story then, in this way of looking at it, is an indictment of greed. It’s a condemnation of any economic system that simply builds up wealth for some at the expense of others who have little.
This, of course, is an astonishingly different take on the parable from the one we’re used to. Far from praising the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the first two servants, the story rails against any taking of profit that isn’t mindful of those from whom the profit is taken. The parable, in this way of seeing things, becomes a warning to us to be extremely alert to the ways in which we might be living life graspingly, self-centeredly, heedless of the effects on others.
The story then suggests a variety of economic implications. Crucially, we are beckoned to be aware of how our monies are spent and invested. On a micro level, this is not unlike buying Fair Trade products. When products are Fair Traded, they provide a just and living wage to those who have fashioned the products. Is our coffee or our clothing provided by people who are compensated fairly? In a different arena, are those who produce our vehicles compensated appropriately when compared to the titans of the auto industry, which is what the recent strike has been a bout? Or, on a personal level, are our financial investments making money by exploiting people, or do they instead comply with guidelines that promote racial, gender, and climate justice? Do our investment vehicles attend to the good of all and to the health of the earth itself, rather than just our personal profit? The shorthand way to put it in our era is: do our investments promote diversity, equity, and inclusion? If not, perhaps they are falling victim to the mentality of those first two servants: the taking of profits that is oblivious to the effects on people.
I suspect that this parable, when interpreted this way, has larger implications than simply economic. The first two servants in our story essentially neglect anyone’s good but their own. And don’t we, too, fall into this trap all-too-regularly, focusing too intently our own happiness and desires and ignoring the health and well-being of others?
The National Book Award for nonfiction was given this week to Yale University historian Ned Blackhawk. The book he wrote is called The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. In it, Blackhawk “recognizes the centrality of Native Americans in U.S. history.” The book is “an ambitious and sweeping volume that documents the central role of Native Americans in the political and cultural life of the country.” One review says that Blackhawk “rejects the myth that Native Americans fell quick and easy victims to European invaders” and instead “asserts that they were central to every century of U.S. historical development.” Blackhawk says “it is . . . difficult to convey how astute, capable, and, at times, successful Native nations and their citizens have been in achieving secured protections of their lands, resources, and sovereign authority” (Ned Blackhawk’s ‘Rediscovery of America’ wins National Book Award | YaleNews).
True confessions from this preacher? I so often wrongly dismiss the influence of Native peoples on the culture of this country. My thoughtless perspective, shaped by the education I and so many of us have received, as well as a bias toward people I perceive to be “like me,” has been to focus on, and celebrate, European influence and culture and customs. When I’m honest, I recognize that I have relegated Native peoples to some margin where I can’t really see them. They have been incidental in my account of history. So when I read of the award bestowed on Blackhawk, I’m called up short and reminded of my myopia. Like those first two servants, I have been trapped in a short-sighted and self-centered view of the world. This bracing parable of Jesus opens my mind and heart to a far wider horizon.
How easily we are often unwittingly trapped in ways of seeing that are perhaps narrow and demeaning and not expansive. On another front, tomorrow is Transgender Day of Remembrance and Resilience. We still live in a world in which transgender people take their own lives far more often than the general populace. So often they live in fear, wondering when the next slight or violence will slash at them. Children are bullied in school. Adults face discrimination in housing and employment, as well as social shunning. So with tomorrow’s celebration of transgender people, we are invited, we are urged, to question our own assumptions and to make ourselves, and this church, a welcoming place for any who are so rejected and abused. The first two servants go on their merry way, oblivious to the ways they may have hurt others in their self-aggrandizement. The third servant, on the other hand, refuses to participate in such exploitative behavior. The third servant is where we’re to find our bearings—the one who refuses to exploit or abuse.
The heart of Jesus’ parable, in this way of reading it, is that you and I so easily fall into habits that benefit and enrich ourselves, while too often failing to note the ways those habits and perspectives harm others and rule them out. The parable, in its strange way, then asks us to refuse to take advantage of any social, political, and economic order that squashes others, and to devote ourselves instead to the richness of a God-infused attention to, and love of, all people.
As we come to this Thanksgiving week, one of the many things for which I’m grateful is the sometimes-unsettling but often startling fullness of God. We’re reminded today that the God we know in Jesus Christ invites us to take stock of the ways in which we may unwittingly be perpetuating unjust habits of thinking and acting, and to commit ourselves instead to acting justly and mercifully. May God continue to surprise us and open us to vast expanses of grace that over and over again make us new.