Matthew 25:12-30
I was speaking with another preacher this week and he mentioned that this week’s parable is the perfect opportunity for a stewardship sermon. I think most lifelong churchgoers will know what he meant by that, a sermon specifically reflecting on financial stewardship, even more specifically the money we share with our worshipping community. You may have heard that sermon before- the talents are our worldly treasures, our financial wealth, and God wants us to find ways to multiply that wealth for the good of the kingdom. If we hoard our wealth like the third person in the story, we deprive the church of ministry opportunities and ultimately we fail God. In terms of stewardship, we are encouraged to steward our money and our other God-given gifts like the first two people- find ways to increase it and offer the profits up to God in the form of a tithe, donations, and charitable good works. Most of us have heard that sermon before, so I hope to offer you a slightly different one now.
There’s nothing wrong with preaching about money- Jesus talked about money more than almost any other aspect of human life, alongside food and agriculture. Just like Jesus’s first audience, money is a big character in all our lives in different ways. Money determines where we live, what we eat, how we dress, maybe even where we worship and how much we can be involved at church. For better or worse, to be a human in this world is to need money, and to care about how much of it we have and where it comes from. Since we Christians are also humans, we need to talk about it and pray about it and study scripture about it. I preach about stewardship, including money, more often than you probably realize, because I don’t usually end those sermons by handing out envelopes or pledge cards. Being a good steward means thinking about how every single aspect of your life is a gift freely given to you by God, and being intentional about the use of those abundant gifts. That does include our money, no matter how we make it or how much of it we have. But being a good steward in the biblical sense requires understanding who we work for, and how they would want us to care for what ultimately belongs to them. In order to be faithful stewards of God’s bounty, we need to understand God.
So where do we see God in this parable? In an allegorical interpretation, we would probably assume that the wealthy landowner is meant to represent God. After all, ultimately everything belongs to God, so we as stewards are entrusted with God’s property for the time being, holding all of creation in escrow for God’s return. But let’s look closer at this person, this master who owns so much property that he is able to leave behind a total of over 8 years wages while he’s away for a long time on a journey. In Jesus’s day, the way someone became that wealthy was almost always by hiring desperate people and paying them just enough to survive until the next day’s work. Most laborers did not make enough to save, or to own their own land or their own home, and often families that did own these things would eventually be taxed to the point of giving them up as collateral, losing what little wealth they had and consolidating land and resources in the hands of a few exploitative landlords. The third slave in the parable calls out their landlord for being a harsh man, benefiting from the fruits of others’ labor, and the landlord’s reaction makes this reputation seem justified. That doesn’t sound like our God to me, and I don’t think it is supposed to.
I wonder if Jesus is showing us an image of the world as it is now, a fallen economy that operates on exploitation and scarcity. If the master’s wealth first came at the expense of those who had little, what did the first and second slaves do in order to multiply it as they did? Who did they cheat, exploit, undersell in order to get these profits for their wealthy master? We see this in our world today, those who benefit from the wealth of others and in turn multiply that wealth in exchange for power and influence. Those who have little are forced to rely on debt and with each passing month own less and less of what they need to survive, and thriving hardly feels like an option, meanwhile the wealthy just get wealthier and find more and more ludicrous ways to spend the money someone else generated for them. As much as some of these billionaires might like to think of themselves as gods, I don’t see the wealthy masters and absentee landlords of Jesus’s parables as having much in common with the God who gave up all divine and worldly comforts to bring good news to the poor.
If this parable offers us a mirror through which to see our own broken and exploitative economy of haves and have-nots, where is the hope? Where is the Good News? Well, it might come as a shock, but I think the hope in this parable can be found in the outer darkness.
There is one person in this broken system who chooses not to perpetuate the harm that has put him where he is today. The third slave does not steal the master’s wealth, what little has been entrusted to his care. He does not destroy it or keep it for himself or use it to settle his own debts. He buries it someplace safe, removing it from circulation in the cycle of economic violence and abuse. When the master returns, he gives it back, along with a little bit of truth-telling, even as he knows it is not what the harsh man wants to hear. The conscientious objector is punished by the cruel master for his defiance, his small act of protest, by being thrown out. But in being cast out, where does the protester land? In the dark, with the rest of the suffering world being kept in scarcity by those who want for nothing. In the margins, with the poor and the meek and the peacemakers, where Jesus has told us he will always be found.
Money is unavoidable. Even those in this world who have taken vows of poverty must hold some degree of wealth in common to survive and continue their work. This has long been a criticism of the Church as an institution, and often rightly. We collect money, we spend money, we do not pay taxes and we do not always make holy choices with the wealth of this world. But when we do it right, when we are good and faithful stewards, sometimes it makes the wealthy of this world a little uncomfortable, maybe even angry. Sometimes it means foregoing the finer things in life, in order to stand in solidarity with those trapped in the outer darkness. Sometimes it means taking what worldly wealth we find ourselves responsible for, and burying it like a seed instead of investing it like a talent. Whatever we treasure, whatever the world deems to be our talents, whether it be time or money or actual talent, we have two choices. We can keep putting it back into circulation in a violent system, or we can choose a different way. We can keep serving masters who care only for their own gain, or we can withhold something from them. We can bury some part of ourselves out of their reach, and trust that God will multiply us. Our shared life is a field of rich soil, and in tending it together we so often see incredible growth and seemingly impossible fruits. Every time we give some part of our lives to one another, we are sowing the seeds of crops that will feed us and of trees that will long outlive us. I hope you’ll consider what kind of steward you’d like to be, and join me in the field.
Mother A Writes 