Matthew 25:14-30
I choose texts in advance, sometimes several months in advance, allowing Charlotte to plan music. Mostly that works out, sometimes in spooky ways that I attribute to the Holy Spirit. Then there are days like today.
At first glance, the parable of the talents looks like a perfect match for this season when we focus on stewardship. But those second and third glances are problematic.
For one thing, we lack important context. We can know intellectually that there were enslavers and the enslaved in the Roman Empire and Ancient Near East, but we have no direct experience of slavery ourselves, and I fear we err when we map the cruel slavery with which we are most familiar, that of the African captives in America, onto the Galilean, Judean, and Roman context. Slaves in the ancient Near East retained some legal rights. Debt slavery could be temporary, and while chattel slavery was often the result of war, it was not inherently racial in those times. Race, as weaponized in recent centuries, didn’t exist as a category.
The word talent leads many preachers to conflate this ancient term of weights and currency with today’s use of the word, the idea of special gifts and abilities, but the parable was likely delivered by Jesus in Aramaic, and written down in Koine Greek.
Few understand the economic scales involved. The lowest value of the monetary unit “one talent” was as much as a day laborer would make in twenty years if they found work every single day, which they often didn’t. Given the lifespans of that age, we could fairly say “one talent” amounted to several lifetimes of labor. This parable deals in extraordinary sums.
It is also all too easy to map this story of wise investment onto our own experience of late-stage neoliberal capitalism, of speculation, irrational exuberance, and corporate kleptocracy. Not only is that not the context for the ministry of Jesus, interpreting the parable through that lens flies in the face of pretty much everything else Jesus teaches, from the Sermon on the Mount in this same gospel to countless calls for sacrificial kindness.
Jesus and his disciples were Jews, with the Torah at the heart of their faith, and the Torah called for loan forgiveness, for decent wages, for economic justice. This parable is immediately followed by the parable of the sheep and the goats, when the Son of Man declares that “what you have done to the least of these, you have also done to me.” It demands that we care for the most vulnerable among us.
It isn’t even completely clear that we are supposed to side with the master in the story, though that makes the most sense. Are we supposed to accept the claim that God is the master, and therefore that God is cruel? No thanks!
The one thing I can get behind is that we should take the blessings we have received, and leave even more, more love, more justice, more joy. Which is pretty much the meaning of good stewardship, and lived in the fact that we are a thriving church in an age when so many churches are not thriving, when propaganda suggests that only heresies like Christian ethno-nationalism can thrive.
So we’re gonna switch gears mid-sermon… not at all my intention when I chose this text months ago, and talk about our contemporary non-canonical reading, an excerpt from an address delivered by the Rev. Dr. Matin Luther King Jr. during a time of war called “A Time to Break Silence,” and sometimes referred to as “the anti-Vietnam speech.”
Occasionally, members of King’s inner circle created the first draft of a speech. I was lucky enough to meet the man who wrote the first draft of “A Time to Break Silence” in 2009. The late Rev. Dr. Vincent Harding was a Mennonite pastor, respected theologian, and the first director of the King Center for Non-violent Social Change in Atlanta after MLK was martyred.
The speech was controversial. Though economic justice had always been a part of the civil rights movement, King was beginning to address inter-connected forms of injustice: racism, militarism, and economic exploitation. The editorial boards of The New York Times and The Washington Post called the speech a mistake, as did the NAACP. LBJ turned against him. So did Billy Graham. Nothing will turn off white allies faster than pointing out their economic privilege.
And it was economic privilege at the heart of the war in Vietnam, the exploitation and privilege of the French colonizers that started the insanity, the privilege of the Vietnamese Catholic minority that collaborated first with the French and then the Americans in exploiting their Buddhist neighbors. It was also economic privilege in Latin America that King named in the speech, as the United States worked to prop up the perverse remains of European colonialism in the Americas, exploitation under the banner of anti-communism that would destroy so many lives for another two decades, Archbishop Romero gunned down during mass, the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo gathered in Buenos Aires weeping for their missing children.
It was economic privilege here in these not-very United States that meant the young men waging war side-by-side in Vietnam would never be allowed to live in the same neighborhoods if they ever made it home.
When it was about bus seats and voting booths, people were angry, but progress was made. When King questioned wealth and profit, questioned the military-industrial complex, they told him to stay in his lane.
I was thinking about that, about pastors being told to stay in their lane, to focus on the stuff that doesn’t really matter, because to billionaires and their pet politicians, the life and death of poor folks don’t really matter, as I tried to figure out what to say in a time such as this.
I was thinking about the breakneck pace driving down the F.D.R. in Manhattan, how I felt safer there than I ever did driving in Boston, for while many of those taxi drivers six inches from my bumper in NYC believed in reincarnation, they knew I was there, knew that every lane was connected, and that we were all headed in the same direction. The make-up of the city’s taxi drivers has changed over the years, but like that tangle of highways, everything is still connected, and that parishioner facing a cancer diagnosis is also facing a for-profit healthcare system that will do everything in its power to extract every last dime, draining lifetimes of wages from the patient, their family, and their descendants if at all possible, all to maximize shareholder profit and CEO compensation.
And maybe in the end, it all comes back to that story of the talents. And I still don’t know what it means. And that’s okay, because any preacher that tells you they understand everything in the Bible is incredibly dangerous. Run as fast as you can for the exits.
The message of God is not line by line, but is the overstory, of people encountering holy mystery, in creation and in one another, and leaning into love. The Bible captures moments in a theological evolution that took place over more than a millennia. We will always get it wrong, blindfolds and an elephant, when we lift one piece out of context.
We could use a lot more learning and love in a time of ignorance and evil, of domestic terrorists in our own community, of a grotesque war in the very land where Jesus healed, confused us with sometimes cryptic teachings, but in the end, always called us to feed the hungry, to heal the sick, and to love our neighbor, even those so very different than us. May we do so, this day and always. Amen.