Sermon — November 19, 2023
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Like many of you, I sometimes wake up at night, troubled by important questions. Did I remember to reply to that email, or did I leave it as a draft? Should I buy a copy of Britney Spears’s new memoir, or should I just my name on the library waiting list? Is it possible that that the Revised Common Lectionary is past its prime? (You know. The big questions in life.)
For anyone who doesn’t know, the Revised Common Lectionary or RCL is the three-year cycle of readings that we follow on Sunday mornings. The lectionary was first created in the 1970s and 1980s and revised in the 1990s as a kind of inter-denominational project bringing together Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal, Anglican, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches to settle on a common way of reading the Bible. We believe different things and pray in different ways, but on Sunday mornings, you can walk into any church of any one of these denominations, and you’ll probably hear the same readings from this shared sacred text that you’d hear down the street.
And this is great! Not only is it a nice form of ecumenical cooperation between churches, but it prevents preachers from inflicting the same small set of favorite readings on their churches over and over, and exposes us all, over the course of three years, to a wide breadth of selections from the Bible.
Sometimes too wide a breadth. I worry sometimes that the lectionary assumes that we’re living in a very different era of the church: an era when weekly church attendance was much higher, and most people who were in church on any given Sunday are there four Sundays a month. And it sometimes selects readings that make sense if you already have a developed faith and understanding of Christian theology and the narrative arc of the Bible, but otherwise just seem weird. Let’s be honest: Many of you here are regulars. But if you just walked in off the street, hoping for a little spiritual uplift on a sunny fall morning, hoping to hear some compassion and love in an often unkind word, and you heard that reading from Zephaniah about the coming day of wrath, would you not simply write off Christianity as a lost cause?
So I sometimes worry that the RCL is past its prime.
But then, of course, the lectionary providentially assigns the Parable of the Talents on the day that turns out to be our Stewardship Ingathering Sunday, when people will make their annual pledges of financial support to the church, and pairs it with the fearsome prophet Zephaniah, and you all hear that “neither [your] silver nor [your] gold will be able to save you!” (Zeph. 1:18) So hand in your pledge cards, for “in the fire of his passion the whole earth shall be consumed!”
Let’s see the NPR Pledge Drive top that.
Seriously, though, this Parable of the Talents has often been read as a parable of stewardship, and it is. Not in the narrow sense of “stewardship” as in “annual church fundraising campaign,” but in the broader, theological sense of stewardship. Stewards, after all, are people who care for property that is not their own, people who are entrusted with something that they will ultimately give back.
Each of the three slaves in the parable is entrusted with a vast sum of money. A “talent” is a unit of measurement, of weight; one talent is a quantity of silver worth about 20 years’ wages for a laborer, something like $600,000 at today’s minimum wage. One enslaved steward is given $3 million by the enslaver before he heads off on a journey; he invests it for a 100% return. The second is given about a million, invests it, and doubles it as well. But the third is either very wise or very foolish: this one, fearing the wrath of the master, doesn’t risk losing the one talent he’s given by putting it into a high-risk, high-reward business venture. He buries it in the dirt, and when his enslaver returns, he gives it back: Here. This was your property. You entrusted it to me. Take what’s yours.
The returning master is not impressed. These other two had great success, he says. Maybe you don’t have their business acumen—he had given to each one of them, after all, according to each one’s ability—but couldn’t you at least have put it in the bank to keep it safe, and earned a bit of interest on top? And the third slave is cast out into the outer darkness, to weep and gnash his teeth, without a dental plan.
In the traditional reading, this preaches well. Each one of us has been given many gifts by God. We live by grace alone; we haven’t earned our lives, and we could never pay God back for the price of every day we’ve woken up and drawn a breath. We’ve been given a certain of time, and a certain amount of money. And we’ve been given certain talents; and the modern English sense of the word “talent” as a natural or God-given ability comes directly from this metaphorical reading of the parable. Our “talents” are the things God has entrusted to us, and we ought to use them, and use them well, in the service of God and our neighbors.
Put a bow on it and send it to the printers, Amen.
But I have a problem with that. Because while that sermon might preach well, on this Stewardship Sunday, I think it skips over of the most troubling parts of this morning’s texts, as if the preacher could simply razzle-dazzle you into forgetting how you felt after that reading from Zephaniah.
The third steward is right. The master is a “harsh man.” He reaps where his slaves sowed, and gathers where they scattered seed. He punishes him in a way that’s way out of proportion to the loss he suffered, which was exactly nothing, or an “opportunity cost” at most. And he’s not just a harsh man; he’s a bad manager. He failed to communicate to this third steward that he cared more about the upside than the down; that he’d be angrier at him for doing nothing with the talent than he would for losing it.
The lectionary committee, in their great wisdom, assigned this reading from Zephaniah to be paired with the reading from the gospel, because the day of the Lord described in Zephaniah is like the day on which these three men’s enslaver returned: “a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom,” a day on which God will make “a terrible end…of all the inhabitants of the earth.” (Zeph. 1:15)
And here’s my problem: This doesn’t sound very much like the God I know. Or, to put it a different way: this doesn’t sound very much like the God who reveals himself in the life and death of Jesus Christ; a God who comes to earth, not to destroy us, but to be destroyed by us, and somehow, through that self-sacrifice, to save us.
The traditional reading assumes that the slaveowner is God, and the slaves are us, and there’s a whole other sermon in that. But Jesus doesn’t say that that’s how it is. Jesus sandwiches this parable between two others, without any explanation or interpretation, just the segue: “Likewise: a man was going on a journey…” We’re left wondering: is this a parable of how God behaves or a parable of how we behave? Is it God who punishes people for not making a sufficient profit, or is that us? I wonder how much the master in the story really tells us not about God, but about how we behave at our worst.
Jesus doesn’t answer: he just tells another parable, which is next week’s Gospel reading about how when you feed the hungry, and clothe the naked, and visit those who are in prison, you’re feeding, and clothing, and caring for him; and how it’s our stewardship of the poor, and the naked, and the hungry that determines whether we’re exalted in the kingdom of heaven or not.
The day of the Lord may be a day of darkness for Zephaniah’s listeners, seven hundred years before Christ. But “you, beloved, are not in darkness,” Paul says. (1 Thess. 5:4) Because between that prophesied day and you, Jesus came, and the story didn’t unfold the way we expected. Jesus came, not with a sword in his hand, but with love in his heart. And he gave us spiritual armor, a “breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation.” (1 Thess. 5:8) He gave us the assurance that we are loved and that we are being saved, whether we use our talents well or not; because when Jesus came, he died for us, he died in our place, “so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him.” (5:10)
So use your talents well! Be good stewards of what you have! Not because you’re afraid of being punished by God if you don’t. But because you aren’t afraid of anything. Because there is no risk. Because everything you have has been given to you by God, not as an investment, and not as a reward, but as a gift of love, given to you so that you might love as well. And when we our “seventy years” are passed—“perhaps in strength even eighty”—and we “fade away like the grass” (Ps. 90:10, 5), God will welcome us in, and say to us, talented and talentless alike, “come into the joy of your master.”