Sermons

Nov 13 - Deacon Jan Bales

We are in end times. The bright yellow cottonwoods in the bosque remind us that winter is coming to the Rio Grande Valley. Migration is over, the bird sounds overhead are from the resident Canada geese and sandhill cranes. The harvest moon is past. The perennials in the garden need pulling up. With the forecast of high fuel costs we give thanks for each unseasonably warm day, but there is a chill around the edges that is due not only to the weather. It feels as if darkness is overcoming light. Although all the merchants are already touting their Christmas wares, it feels phony, like an attempt to ward off the darkness with the promise that all will be light and wonderful if we just buy one more thing we don’t need. Just forget about those who can’t afford to buy and what does darkness have to do with us anyway?

As Christians, as children of the light, we know full well what darkness has to do with us. Our culture normally doesn’t allow us to move cautiously, anxiously and relentlessly into the darkness so that we can emerge once again into the burst of light that is the birth of Christ on Christmas Eve and the promise of our eternal life.

Today’s lessons speak of end times and getting ourselves ready. During the Feast of All Saints last Sunday Fr. Brian spoke of Dia de los Muertos and how that celebration fosters a healthy attitude toward death. But celebrating All Saints, we did not hear the appointed Gospel for the 25th Sunday after Pentecost, the story of the wise and foolish bridesmaids who were not ready when the time came. That story of end times continues today with the parable of the talents which taken as a whole suggests that we should be actively and not passively awaiting the second coming. There is nothing wrong with the admonition to be ready, to be preparing for the second coming of Christ as well as the first coming at Christmas. That is good as far as it goes. Is it far enough?

I have been living with the Episcopal Church regularly for 33 years. Our Sunday Gospel readings are on a three-year cycle. You can do the math. I have heard today’s Gospel preached at least 11 times. Probably more, because I was a Lutheran my first 30 years. I concede that I don’t remember many of those sermons. But I do know that when I hear today’s Gospel, I immediately think of that good old proverb: Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Another way of saying: Use it or lose it. (By the way I tried to find the origin of that on the Internet and had no immediate success.) In fact, my first thought after I took a look at today’s gospel was: How am I going to get beyond the thought that we need to take risks as Christians? There is nothing wrong with preaching a sermon about not wasting the talents God has given us or not being prepared for the coming Christ. Those are sermons most of us need to hear most of the time. Also, it is a handy gospel to use during the annual stewardship drives. Many of us remember the calls for a pledge of our time, talent and treasure. The vestry, of course, always hopes that you will focus on treasure instead of time and talent although the church needs all three.

That is what got me to thinking about what Jesus might have been saying to his listeners 2,000 years ago. “Talent” is one of those words that has come into English straight from the Bible and has come to mean a quality, skill or gift that you can use or lose. But in the parable it means no such thing. The Biblical talent is a weight, a measure of precious metal and a great deal at that. A talent was worth 20 years of wages. So the first slave received 100 years of wages, the second 40 years of wages and the third 20 years of wages. That is a vast amount of money for a slave or servant. Jesus’ listeners must have been shocked. But then, they also must have been shocked hearing that 10 unmarried teenage girls were out at night by themselves waiting for the bridegroom. That is another sermon.

On the Jesus level one can hear this parable as one about extortion. Writer William Herzog titles it, “The vulnerability of the Whistle-blower.” This hearing is based on the question: Is the landowner meant to represent God or the ways of an evil, uncaring and greedy world? The landowner in this parable is mean. Frankly, I do not have a God who is mean. I do have a God who can be hard, who can get angry but a God who is just, and a God who loves. That is because I am a Christian. I believe Jesus is the Son of God who reflects God, who is God incarnate. There is nothing mean about Jesus and therefore there is nothing mean about God. So what, exactly, do we do with the absentee landlord? This is a mean man, hard to get along with, one who harvests what he doesn’t plant and gathers crops where he hasn’t sown seed.

Looking at the world 2,000 years ago in Israel gives us some clues. The people of the land were subjected to two distinct systems of taxation: the Roman and the Temple. Further, “the most basic social, economic, political and cultural unit was the household (oikos), not the peasant household of the village but the great households of the elite families.” (Herzog, p. 156) These households were the source of concentrated wealth and the heads of these families needed internal organization to tend to business at home while they traveled abroad to expand their business, increase investments, tend to politics and so on. The economy exploited the poor with exorbitant interest rates and arbitrary taxes.

The first two servants or retainers are alike and use the “exploitive economy” to increase the plunder that constitutes their master’s wealth. Jesus’ hearers would have had no difficulty identifying the type of figure represented by the servants in the parable; they had to contend with them daily, and they understood their role as exploiters.” (p.161, Herzog) Because of excessive interest rates to farmers for loans, in times of poor harvests the land passed to the already rich landowners. The peasants lost their patrimonial plots of land. The rich became richer and the poor became poorer, existing in a place of howling and gnashing of teeth.

To make a long economic explanation short, in this ancient system, the two retainers or slaves or servants were first responsible to double their master’s money. “A minimum profit under the laws of Hammurabi was 100%.” (p. 160) The profit of the first two obviously pleased the master. These two retainers, once they made a handsome return for their owner, could continue to work to ensure their own financial future. It was a system that worked for this elite master. The retainers did his dirty work and deflected from him the anger of those who were being exploited. Jesus’ hearers could understand the story perfectly up to this point.

At the time of reckoning the action of the third servant is puzzling. The first two are rewarded as expected since they produced a 100% profit. They are promised bigger and better responsibilities in the future. This suits both the aristocrat and the retainers. Remember, the top 2% had the vast majority of the wealth, so although two and five talents represented a tremendous amount of money, to the aristocrat they were but a few things, a few talents, amid such colossal wealth. Thus, the two servants knew their place: just enough trickle down to keep them happy and doing their work.

The third servant is the focus of the parable. He buries the talent. This was considered a very safe thing to do with money 2000 years ago. And although he doesn’t produce the expected 100% profit, Jesus’ hearers are not prepared for what follows. The third servant is defiant and identifies the aristocrat for what he is: strict, cruel, harsh, and merciless. He describes him as an exploiter, one who takes what others have sown and gathers what others have winnowed. (p.162) Viewed through this economic lens, the third servant is a whistleblower and he is punished for being one. It is interesting that the aristocrat never denies the truth of what the servant says. Exploitation is his way of life. But the servant must be “vilified, shamed, and humiliated so that his words will carry no weight.” Following this line of thought, “the servant unmasks the ‘joy of the master’ for what it is, the profits of exploitation squandered in wasteful excess, and he has demystified ‘good’ and ‘trustworthy’ by exposing the merciless oppression they define.” (p.165, Herzog) The third servant is thrown out of his comfortable world into “one where sounds of grief and anguish were facts of everyday life.”_

I believe there is a strong argument for this understanding of the parable whereby the hero is the third servant who refuses to continue the system of extortion and exploitation. He knows he will have to pay the price for describing his master for who he is. For some reason, he can do no less. He has drawn a line that he can no longer cross.

Heard this way, the parable is not as easy to apply to our daily lives. I would rather be challenged to use the gifts God gave me and not relentlessly observe my comfortable middle-class American life in order to realize how much I own is due to the cheap labor of others.

I need not belabor here the economic status of our world and the gap between the haves and the have nots. Nor do I have to spell out or try to figure out who is to blame for this and that.

What we are here to do as a community is discover how to live out the life we have been given by God in the most loving and responsible way possible. It is not always easy, especially when you don’t even like some of the people sitting next to you in the pew! My guess is most of us do not have the heart to become a whistle blower. We do know there is a great deal of inequity, intolerance and extortion in the world. We may not know much about economy, but we sense there is enough on this planet for everybody to live a decent life. Most of us are unwilling to participate in the abuse of power that money brings, but we do it unwittingly all the same.

Let’s put this parable back into the context of the Gospel of Matthew. Next week we hear the final parable in the Gospel, the parable of the last judgment. It is the summary, if you will, of how Jesus would like us to live as servants to each other and to the homeless, sick, imprisoned, naked, and alien in our midst. Coming back around, today’s parable is about taking risks, after all. Perhaps the best lesson of the whistleblower, the third servant in today’s parable, is the fact that we cannot live our lives as if it does not matter what we do – to God, to each other, or to ourselves. Amen

Quotes and ideas come from: Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed, chapter 9: “The Vulnerability of the Whistle-blower” by William Herzog III, pp. 150