Grasping and Giving

Matthew 25:14-30

November 16, 2014

There are at least two ways to read this funky little story that comes near the end of Matthew’s gospel. These readings are, quite frankly, almost completely at odds with one another, but each has something to offer. So, this morning, dueling interpretations of the gospel.

Context, as always, is key. This parable falls in the midst of Matthew’s extended critique of the Roman imperial system, and as this famous chapter plays out, Jesus will draw sharp distinctions and pronounces harsh judgments.

The most common way of reading this story is to see the wealthy landholding master as God, and to judge ourselves according to the way we use what we have been given. Such a reading has its attractions during the middle of our annual November stewardship season when we are talking about what we have been given and when many of us are making personal decisions about how much we will give to charitable causes including this congregation for the coming year.

Read this way, the parable urges us to account honestly the value of what we have been given. As one popular commentary puts it, “It is routine for Christians to excuse themselves by protesting that their gifts are too modest to be significant. This parable insists that the gifts are precious and are to be exploited to the full.”[1]

Read this way, Jesus’ parable insists that we recognize a central truth of the psalmist: “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is therein.” Put a bit differently, we belong to God, and so does all our stuff. In that light, this parable pushes us to recognize that everything we have is a gift.

That recognition is profoundly countercultural. We have, as Americans, been taught from the beginning of our lives to believe that we get what we merit in this life. We make our own way in the world. We earn our living from the sweat of our own brows, and all that we have we deserve, including absolute freedom in deciding what to do with it.

The parable says, “wait a minute; all that you have has been given to you by the one who created all that is, including you.” At best, we are tenants in this house of God caring for it for just a little while before passing it along to those who will come after us.

In this reading, we are challenged to be wise but also risky with the gift, and warned against the consequences of hoarding it or hiding it away. In other words, use the gifts you have been given. You have been given them freely, so use them expansively for the sake of the gospel.

This reading, as useful as it is, begins to break down for me right here, because, for me, responding to the invitation to use my gifts freely for the sake of the gospel depends upon faith. In other words, for me to take real risks with what has been given to me I have to trust the giver of the gifts.

If God is, as suggested by this reading of the parable, a “harsh man, reaping where he did not sow, and gathering where he did not scatter seed,” then I’m not sure I trust that there is steadfast love enduring forever and for me as I take risks for the gospel.

But, if I let go of all my 21^st century North American privileges and put myself in the place of the poor and landless peasants to whom Jesus told the story, another reading opens up new wisdom.

First, let’s clear up one common misconception about this parable: talents are not gifts or skills or things that you’re good at. Talents are money, and a lot of it.

One comment I read on this text said a talent would be worth about $6 million in our currency. We might conclude that this parable is actually about the one percent and not the 99 percent. Perhaps the target of Jesus’ anger is not a lazy servant but instead a capricious money manager.

From that point of view, reading the text from below, the slave who is cast into outer darkness looks quite different, perhaps even heroic.

Writer and activist Ched Myers, a Sojourners contributing editor, suggests an alternative reading:

“There is no theme more common to Jesus' storytelling than Sabbath economics,” Myers says. “[Jesus] promises poor sharecroppers abundance (Mark 4:3-8, 26-32), but threatens absentee landowners (Mark 12:1-12) and rich householders (Luke 16:19-31) with judgment. […]

“The notorious parable of the talents (pounds) shows how Sabbath perspective as an interpretive key can rescue us from a long tradition of both bad theology and bad economics (Matthew 25:14-30; Luke 19:11-28). This story has, in capitalist religion, been interpreted allegorically from the perspective of the cruel master (= God!), requiring spiritualizing gymnastics to rescue the story from its own depressing conclusion that haves will always triumph over the have-nots (Matthew 25:29). But it reads much more coherently when turned on its head and read as a cautionary tale of realism about the mercenary selfishness of the debt system. This reading understands the servant who refused to play the greedy master's money-market games as the hero who pays a high price for speaking truth to power (Matthew 25:24-30)—just as Jesus himself did. “[2]

Myers’ reading insists, further, that we take the parable as one part of the broader story through which Jesus paints God as the loving father welcoming home the prodigal, as the mother hen worrying over her chicks.

If we trust that God welcomes us always and holds us always in loving hands, then, though the risks of faith may entail a high price – our money most assuredly, and also perhaps our lives as well – we have already an ultimate assurance, sealed, as it were, by the unsealed tomb: God will be with us even when circumstance casts us into the outer darkness.

By either reading, then, Jesus invites us to lives of risky faith, of giving instead of grasping; or, of giving in response to being grasped by the gospel.

When I read this parable of Jesus from below I also imagine a more personal parable that is all about being grasped by good news.

Once upon a time there was a young man who thought that God was calling him to use his life in a particular way, for particular service. The young man, though, had his doubts. He wasn’t sure about God, and sometimes wondered if the still, small voice he heard in his heart late at night wasn’t just his own projection, or maybe indigestion. But sometimes other people would say to him, “you have real gifts; have you ever thought about using them for the sake of the gospel?”

And then the young man would wonder. He would wonder about the voice, and he would wonder about the gospel. Just what was that gospel? What did it mean? What was this good news?

He’d seen it in action since he was a child: how people who believed that they were really, truly loved could do remarkable things for others. He’d seen his own mother give her life to the families of school children who showed up at school in mid-winter without a coat, sometimes without shoes to cover their feet even though it was snowing outside. He knew she did this because she believed that God loved her, and that God loved those kids, too.

He’d seen his own father working with homeless men in the city’s streets. He’d seen his father brokenhearted when one of the men died on a cold January night and there was no family even to claim the body. And he knew that his father did this because he believed that God loved him, and that God loved those men who lived under the bridge, too.

But the young man had a good job. He had young children, too, and a wife with her own career and her own goals. What would it mean to them to quit his job, and to take a huge detour on their fairly clear path to the American Dream of hard-earned upward mobility? What would it mean for buying a house? What would it mean for the minivan?

But, after the family had already traded in about half its income in exchange for more time to raise young children, the young man began to hear that still, small voice speaking with more urgency. “Now is the time,” it seemed to say, “come, and follow me.”

So in the next year’s Christmas letter, the young man chose this way to tell their friends that he was going to follow the call he had discerned: “last year we cut our income in half and enjoyed it so much we decided to do it again.”

The young man had been given so much, but if he believed for a minute in a wrathful God that was about to throw him into outer darkness because he’d hoarded those gifts and used them mostly for the good of his own family and his own career and his own wants for a long time … well, if he believed that God was like that there was no way in the world that he would risk the radical changes required to respond to that still, small voice.

What is the still, small voice saying to you these days? Can you hear it? Do you trust God’s love enough to follow where it leads?

My little parable does not negate the traditional reading of the parable of the talents, but I hope I’ve complicated it a bit because our faith is a complicated and challenging journey. It cannot stand still, for, a faith that changes nothing is worth nothing. What are you willing to risk from what you have been given for the sake of the changes that the gospel demands?

Let us pray.

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[1] Douglas R. A. Hare, Interpretation: Matthew (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1993) 288.

[2] Jesus' New Economy of Grace. by Ched Myers. Sojourners Magazine, July-August 1999.

What’s Next

Amos 5:18-24; Matthew 25:1-13

November 9, 2014

One of my friends and colleagues in ministry is fond of posting to Facebook clips from the old West Wing series in response to most any political event of any given day. Clearly, she had a lot to work with last week, and posted a string of election-related clips. That was all good fun, but just now the one West Wing bit speaking most to me is President Bartlett’s habit of ending discussions with an abrupt, “what’s next?”

Not only does that strike me as appropriate to this moment in our broad national history, but it also seems to fit our own small part of it. Perhaps it also resonates in your personal life. Moreover, I think it’s what Jesus is primarily concerned with in our gospel reading today, and, in that concern, he echoes the prophetic agitation of Amos.

What’s next?

In the political sphere, some folks’ in these parts are unhappy with Tuesday’s results, while others are quite pleased. Personally, I’m more interested in what’s next. What’s next for the 840 million people around the world who do not have enough to eat to be healthy? What’s next for the nearly 16 million children in the United States who live in families that struggle to put food on the table? What’s next for the hundreds of species of animals and plants facing extinction due to climate change? What’s next for the more than 2 million Americans in prison? What’s next for thousands of civilians caught in the cross-fires in dozens of war zones? What’s next?

Amos’ words agitate me always: “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.”

Jesus’ words echo hauntingly for me: “when I was hungry, you fed me; when I was in prison, you visited me; blessed are the peacemakers; love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

This morning’s passage from Matthew comes in the midst of a series of lessons about the nature of the kingdom of heaven. Matthew collects them, and presents them with an air of urgency. “The time is coming soon,” these stories tell us. “Are you ready?”

What’s next, you ask. Here’s what’s next: the kingdom of God, or, less patriarchal, the kindom of God, or if you’d rather, the commonwealth of heaven, or, my favorite, by way of Dr. King, the beloved community.

Throughout the gospels, this kindom, has a temporal aspect of being always already and not yet fully realized. In other words, the kindom is yet to come and thus, Jesus taught, we prayerfully demand of God, “thy kingdom come on earth – right now.” May that be what’s next!

At the same time, this kindom is, Jesus tells his followers, already among you, as close as the air you breathe. Its ultimate triumph is assured by the covenant God has made to be steadfast and loving; a covenant sealed in the story of Jesus.

Yet, as this weird wedding parable suggests, it’s pretty easy to miss it.

This strange little story, oddly enough, reminds me of my own wedding. Through my growing up years on into college, I had three extremely close friends, one of whom is my younger brother, so, obviously, he was going to be best man at the wedding. The other two were both somewhat musically inclined, and one of them did some writing. So I asked him to write a song for us, and for the two of them to perform it. They got it ready, but on the afternoon of the wedding, one of them took a nap, got confused about the time, and walked into the outdoor chapel – through a season’s worth of dead leaves – when the service was mostly completed. When he sat down, my other friend leaned over and said, simply, “you missed it.”

Sometimes, if we’re not careful, we sleep right through the moment that we’ve been looking forward to and preparing for. What’s next arrives, and we miss it altogether.

It’s also easy, I’ll confess, to miss the points in this parable because it is strange and archaic. For example, we have no tradition of virgins parading into a wedding feast with the bridegroom, as was one custom of Matthew’s time. So, there’s that bit of oddness with which our desire to make meaning must contend.

Further, Matthew was writing to a community that had struggled to survive as faithful followers of Christ a full generation beyond when their first members fully expected Jesus to return. “Come thou long-expected Jesus,” indeed. So waiting, trying to keep awake – trying to keep the faith alive and awake – had a particular resonance for them that’s pretty much lost on us 2,000 years further on.

Moreover, that the women in this tale all carry the label “virgin,” a state of idealized purity, would have suggested to Matthew’s readers that Jesus was talking about religious insiders. Insiders they may have been, yet they all fall asleep even though they know the bridegroom is coming. In other words, even those who expect to be fully received into the great banquet could miss the whole she-bang if they’re not careful.

They are much more likely to miss it if they stop asking about what’s next. In other words, and I think this is particularly important for religious insiders to understand, when we get comfortable and complacent with the way things are we are no longer attuned to what’s next. That’s particularly important for insiders, because we are comfortable. It’s easy to feel like we’ve already got a seat at the banquet, and to stop thinking about folks who might not have ever even heard that there is a banquet in the first place.

It’s so easy to get bound up in the way things are, and miss out entirely on what’s next. Consider your own life – whether vocationally, personally, spiritually. It’s easy to feel either completely comfortable – or, perhaps, completely trapped – in the patterns of this moment, and miss out on the invitation to make changes that draw you deeper into the kindom of God that is among us.

Let me turn that into a couple of direct questions:

·      Are you spending your time on what really matters?

·      Are you spending your money on what really matters?

·      Are you using your gifts for what really matters?

This is the “oil in the lamps” of Jesus’ parable. Spending our time, treasure, and talent on the things that draw us closer to the way of Jesus is the way we keep our lamps full and shining – shining a light in the darkness as a beacon to what’s next.

This is a parable about the between times, about waiting with expectation for the coming again of Christ into our lives. It’s almost Advent – that season of hope, expectation, preparation and also of longing and waiting.

Waiting is hard, but we all do a great deal of it in life. This particular waiting – for the presence of Christ – has a different nature than most of our waiting. We are invited into an active waiting, a waiting that is not merely preparation. We don’t just talk about the need for oil in the lamps, we find the oil and fill the lamps.

How? By tending to what’s next that’s in our midst right now we make tangible the presence of Christ in the world.

As one commentator on this week’s lectionary texts noted:

Each time we work for justice (as Amos invites in the first reading), we testify to the presence of Jesus. Each time we bear each other’s burdens, we testify to Jesus’ presence. Each time we advocate for the poor, or reach out to the friendless, or work to make this world God loves a better place, we testify to the presence of the Risen Christ.[1]

That testimony, embodied and lived out in this world, is what’s next. May it be so; right here, right now, among this people.

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[1] http://www.davidlose.net/2014/11/pentecost-22-a/