Proper 28, Year A: Matthew 25:14-30 (in the RCL)
Perhaps you, like me, have heard this 'parable of talents' more than a thousand times. The fact that 'talent' means an amount of money (apparently an ungodly amount of money) is usually lost on the sermon-giver, and they make the nice slide in English into making them 'talents' of a different kind, like the ability to do ballet, ride a unicycle, or burp the alphabet. I'm quite sure that I've done this in the past, so I include myself among those questionable preachers who quickly read this passage, pretend it's not about money, and jump immediately to telling people that we all ought to be using our 'talents' for the good of the church. Namely, teaching Sunday school, because there are never enough volunteers for that time-consuming and thankless job.
But in our world today, this is downright surprising lesson. "The Lord spoke once; twice have I heard it" indeed.
It's a whole story about how, when given a bunch of money, some folks go about and shrewdly invest it. When they double their money--that would be a 100% profit--they are congratulated. When the one guy who keeps his money under his mattress comes forward, he says he did it because the marketplace was scary, and he didn't want to make his even scarier master angry. The master proves that he is, therefore, the scarier of the two, and berates the the guy for not at least having kept his money in an interest-bearing account. Then, the master takes all the money from the poor guy, gives it to the rich guy, and promises the poor guy unending torture in a place outside the realms of American law and the Geneva conventions.
This story just sounds so damn poignant at the moment. Who are we talking about these days but investors trying to make money? What are we talking about but lending, interest, and savings? I mean, consider: the investors in the story are even making money on borrowed money. It's eerie.
But if this parable seems to have strange resonances with our own time, the resonances bring forward how weird this parable is. First off, it seems downright unfair to be mean to the fearful investor. After all, he had the least 'ability' of the three according to the story, so we already know he was pretty dumb. This seems to contrast with the image we usually have of Jesus defending 'the least.' Second, it's strange to see something that looks so pro-capitalism here in the gospels. After all, in traditional Jewish teachings, charging one another interest (meaning other Israelites) was forbidden, so investing would be tough, particularly as Jesus is in the midst of expanding who exactly is covered under the umbrella of 'chosen.' What a strange story.
So, let's back it up. Let's drop our preconceptions about capitalism, stock market economics, and credit default swaps. Let's try the story again. It's a story that, I think, rewards careful attention to detail.
First of all, the investors of the story are slaves--that alone runs strongly against the kind of prophet-status that investors hold in our culture. Second, they are investing someone else's money, but it's their master's, not a client's. Because of this, notice something that seems very strange from our perspective: they don't charge a broker's fee. Surely, if they master wanted them to make money, they should be granted a certain percentage of the gains, a 'broker's fee.' But they don't, mostly because that's not the kind of relationship they seem to have with their master. I'll come back to that in a moment.
And the third guy, the poor guy, the dumb guy--he's terrified. He does, after all, have a master who shows up all over the place expecting money from land he didn't even plant and hasn't cared for himself. So the third guy chickens out, hides his money in a hole, and timidly returns it.
So first of all, the story is definitely about money. On a secondary level, sure, it's about the gifts that everyone receives, but it's also about money--who has got it, what they do with it. And in the story, it's made abundantly clear that the money belongs to none of the slaves. If we are to see ourselves as the slaves in this story, we have a painful lesson to learn: our money isn't ours.
And this, of course, is why there is no broker's fee. God owes us no money for the services we render because all of our money is already God's. We can spend it however we like, horde it however much we wish, lend as we choose, but it does not make us live forever, and so it is never truly belongs to us. We have no final say in its use because our money will outlive us.
But without a broker's fee, why should the investors try to make money with what they're given? And if we are those slaves, that question belongs to us: why should we use our money for the good of others, for the good of God? After all, the money belongs to God--I won't see any profit from it.
And here is the central challenge of this parable: why exactly do those two investors choose to double their money? The story doesn't tell us, perhaps intentionally so. Why do they choose to go ahead and invest anyway, rather than sit back in fear as the third slave does? It appears that in trying to give their master back the money, they receive even more--there's that line about 'you've been faithful in a little, so now I give you much'. But this seems to be a surprise--neither seem to have worked so diligently with the money because they thought they were going to receive anything.
Perhaps because self-interested economic reasoning is not the kind that belongs to the Kingdom of God. Perhaps the two who chose to invest did so not because they would make money. Perhaps they did it because they thought it was fun.
Fun is an unusual word in talking about God, and that seems unfortunate. But for "fun" here, we could substitute fancier things like: they were thankful to receive that money, or they were participating in a gift-economy that inspires sharing. But let's drop the fancy-talk for a minute--they wanted to have more fun.
They decided not to be scared of their overbearing master--they decided instead: ah hell, I've got 5 talents. Let's see what I can do with it! Did they invest it in wind-power? Clean water wells in Africa? Their neighborhood soup kitchen? Who knows--but they must have done it with both a kind of wisdom and a kind of joy. They loved their borrowed talents so much that they jumped courageously into the world, not because the master ordered them to but because they were so excited they couldn't contain themselves. They were adventurous, courage, and fun.
Why does the third guy get in trouble? Not because he's dumb, and not because he has less money. But because of his fear, he's not willing to have fun, because having fun is always a risk, a chance to have a heart broken, a toy smashed, a leg in a cast, or to be forced into spending some time in the principal's office. Fear cripples him, and he can only whine when he hands back his cash. But the master, it turns out, is a great lover of fun, and he does not care for this fearful approach.
So, we should be honest: why should we give money to the church? To Episcopal Relief and Development? To Doctors without Borders? Because it's fun. Because giving money is exciting. I think most stewardship campaigns go sideways right at this point--the reason we give money is not for programs, or buildings, or spiritual care. We are called to invest and share our talents shrewdly and joyfully, and we spend too much time in the 'shrewd' part. Christian giving does not begin as though we were all landlords, trying to put together a social organization or a countryclub for our ongoing spiritual care. Christian giving begins in realizing that we are all slaves, that we've been given more than we can possibly know what to do with, and we've been charged to go make something. Christiangiving begins by saying: awesome, let's do something!
I firmly believe that among the two or three things that are actually damaging to the church in our time, the most subtle of these diseases is that we are afraid to be exciting. We want to bury ourselves in mattresses, or in the ground, where economies don't crash, where jobs aren't lost. We want to bury ourselves in the same hymns of our childhood, whether they were from 1940 or the happy-clappy tunes of camp, and pretend that we don't need to grow. We want to hide in the ground, the same pew of the same building, because maybe then we can appease that awful and scary God who demands so much. How much easier to hide our talents in the same Christmas service we've done every year for the last 50 than to ask myself, sitting around the vestry table: am I actually excited about what we're talking about? How much easier to join the football-crowd mentality of a fundamentalist congregation than to ask myself: do I actually like this?
But God calls us to a different kind of life. We are called to be joyful, to be actually excited about sharing the wealth that is not ours. It may sound strange, but I remain convinced that the one of the greatest challenges of our age is to re-discover the joy of giving, the joy of relationship with God. We are called not to a life in the ground, but instead to a life in the marketplace--bargaining, laughing, investing, using what we got for something far bigger than any of us.
