Pentecost 27, Proper 28A – November 16, 2008
Matthew 25:14-30
Stewardship Ingathering Sunday
St. Giles Church, Northbrook IL – The Rev. Cynthia J. Hallas
One of the great temptations in the life of faith is to see scripture the way we want to see it; to interpret it the way we want it to speak to us, in ways that are convenient and comfortable, rather than challenging; not necessarily the way it was meant or the way was understood by its initial audience.
To be fair, it’s hard for us to put ourselves in the place of first-century Jewish peasants or members of a persecuted religious minority. And sometimes when the lectionary lines itself up very nicely with the programmed activities of the church as, for example, when a parable about invested vs. buried talents just happens to land in our laps on Stewardship Ingathering Sunday – well, that’s a great temptation for a preacher! After all, like that one talent buried in the ground, a parable is a terrible thing to waste!
So here’s a story Jesus told, conveniently placed in the lectionary. A wealthy man goes off on a journey, leaving one slave a great deal of money, a second slave a respectable amount of money, and a third slave a smaller amount but certainly much more than that slave would ever have seen in his life. The first two slaves double their master’s investments – to our collective capitalist mindset, there’s nothing that’s not admirable about that. The third and ‘worthless’ slave, for reasons tough to understand, just goes out, digs a hole, and buries the money. What a fool! How irresponsible! No wonder his master takes him to task. (At this point, given today’s economic climate, some of us may be thinking that perhaps the third slave did make the smartest choice: burying his master’s money in the ground, hiding it under the mattress, etc. But let’s not go there.)
Back to the parable: the third slave is cast into the outer darkness with its requisite weeping and gnashing of teeth. Might not God do the same to us if we waste what’s been given us (especially if we don’t use it in service to God through the Church)? Haven’t we been taught that everything we have is a gift from God: material, financial, personal? Isn’t that what good stewardship is about: using a selected portion of our gifts – material, financial, personal - for God’s purposes, and not just “burying” them as if we’d never had them in the first place? God is the master, we decide; the first two slaves are Christians who use what God has given them to further God’s work, and the third is at best a lukewarm disciple, a slacker who finds it easier to ‘just say no’ than to do what’s expected of him or her to advance the Kingdom, a lazy coward who succumbs to fear. And the moral of the story, of course: “If you don’t use it, you lose it!” And everybody scrambles for pencils and pens to fill out the pledge card or the time and talent sheet.
That’s the interpretation we so often hear. And the message itself is credible – at least, the part about using what God gives you for God’s glory. That’s the context in which most modern ears hear that parable. But it’s not the context in which the parable was told. We all need to keep in mind that when Jesus spoke this parable, no one was thinking about the Church – that concept was unheard of. And even when the author of Matthew’s gospel put stories of Jesus’ life and teachings together for a fledgling faith community, one that would eventually lead to the formation of the church, no one was thinking about a fall stewardship campaign.
Those who made up Jesus’ original audience would have known that a ‘talent’ (or talenta) was a very large, very heavy coin, perhaps weighing as much as 75 pounds (can you imagine carrying around five of those?) that’s worth not many days’, but many years’, wages. Most of these folks would only have heard about such wealth. To be given one talent would be hard to imagine. To be given five, or even two, would be nearly impossible to imagine. Not only did the poor in Jesus’ time have very little; they had been conditioned to believe that whenever one person gained something, that person did so at someone else’s expense, which made profit wrong. That’s called a ‘limited good’ economy: there’s only so much to go around; if you gain, I lose, and vice versa. Like the lives they led generally, their economic philosophy smacked of scarcity, not abundance. I suppose it’s kind of like believing the world is flat. Nowadays we know better. But to those first century middle-eastern peasants who heard Jesus firsthand, the one character in this parable who does the right thing is the third slave, who buries the talent. In doing so, he not only protects the master’s wealth, he protects himself from being liable for it. He didn’t put the wealth at risk by seeking to invest it, and he didn’t take anything from anyone else should such a hypothetical investment have yielded some return. The sympathy and understanding of the audience would have been with this third and ‘worthless’ slave.
But the message of Jesus, of the gospel, is something else entirely – in God’s economy, there is no such thing as ‘limited good’; that’s the very antithesis of the Good News. This would have been a whole new way of thinking, one that not everyone who heard it would be ready to believe in and embrace.
The question for us is, are we ready to believe in and embrace this way of thinking? Who do we identify with in the parable? I think we all feel some admiration for those first two slaves, shrewd investors that they are. But what about that third slave? Do we feel sorry for him? After all, the poor guy was just operating according the accepted norms of his time and culture. How tempted are we to do the same? Jesus spoke a ‘word of contradiction’ to those accepted norms; how does the gospel speak a similar ‘word of contradiction’ to the accepted norms of our time and culture, norms that so often speak of scarcity and ‘limited good’?
In God’s economy, there is absolutely no such thing as ‘limited good’ – that’s a human construct. If we’re going to look at this parable in light of Christian stewardship, then we have to regard stewardship as more than a decision made annually by individuals and families as to how much or how many of our gifts – material, financial, personal – we can safely give to God through the church. We may set goals for our giving – perhaps some of us tithe or are working toward tithing, and that’s wonderful – but it goes beyond mathematical formulae and percentages. All those things are certainly very important, but stewardship isn’t only about them.
Stewardship is about taking risks for the kingdom. It’s about stretching ourselves beyond the places where we feel safe – materially, financially, personally. It’s about a willingness to be liable for how we live out the gospel; otherwise we’re liable for not doing so and that’s a liability none of us can afford.