It might be good to bury some things - Matthew 25:14-30

Good morning, friends, and welcome to the parable of the talents. Which, conveniently, tends to show up right in the middle of stewardship season. The dots practically connect themselves. The message seems clear: be like the two servants who double their money and enter into the joy of their master. A stewardship sermon would build on their example, and tell us to be thankful for all that God has given us, and then be generous. The parable even encourages us to dig deep, because a talent is an enormous amount of money - equivalent to about 20 years of labor. Maybe Jesus is using some hyperbole, but it sure is a good stewardship message. 

Also, when we hear this parable we assume that we should not be like the third servant, the one who buries his talent in the ground because he’s afraid. He enrages the master and gets kicked out into the outer darkness. What is his offense? Presumably it is not taking a risk. He hoards his assets instead of letting them grow for God, and lets fear get the best of him. It’s fairly common to hear a kind of “don’t hide your lamp under a bushel” sermon on this day. One can easily expand the moral of the story to include being generous not only with money but other things, too, like God’s grace or even actual talents. Perhaps you bake the best chocolate chip cookies in town. God can use that talent. Your cookies can comfort the bereaved, or be sold in a bake sale to raise money for the youth group, so it would be wrong to bury that talent and keep your cookies to yourself. 

Just about any biblical commentary or famous sermon on this text will have some version of this interpretation, calling us to be grateful and responsible stewards. This morning, however, I want to invite you into a different possibility altogether. I have to confess to you that all week, I’ve had a line from the movie "The Princess Bride” stuck in my head. Remember how at every plot turn, Vizzini considers the facts of what’s just happened and says, “Inconceivable!” To which Inigo Montoya says, “You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.” But in my head the line changed this week to: “We keep using this parable, but I do not think it means what we think it means.” Or, at least there is another possibility, and maybe one that we really need to hear right now.

Let’s start with the master in the story, the owner of all that money. What we know about his character is that he is a harsh man, reaping where he does not sow, and gathering where he does not scatter seed. He incites fear. And he lashes out at the third servant who buries the talent, casting him out for good… Isn’t it odd that we tend to read this character as God (Barbara Brown Taylor)? Sometimes people read him as Jesus. Either way, this leads to a rather shady and frankly terrifying divine figure. 

That’s not all that is weird here. We should also consider what the other two servants are praised for exactly. They oversee and double large sums of money. This is certainly an amazing achievement. Any of us - and any church - would love to have doubled talents. But we should pause here, too. Can you think of a single time anywhere else in the Gospels that Jesus praises investment capitalism or doubling your money? It’s rather odd and out of character. That is, until we let go of the master as the God figure and consider the economic system this parable is about. Who gets richer here? It’s the master, the one who reaps where he doesn’t sow. He is a member of an elite class of business owners in the first century, those with operations large enough to enlist slaves to oversee things. Scholars tell us that it was a complicated system that ran on the exploitation of slaves. The master praises the two slaves for doing well in that exploitative system, which ultimately makes him richer. Does that sound like the Jesus you know? 

Jesus is looking that economic system square in the eye, and calling it out for the way it hurt people going down the hierarchy. Far from congratulating the master on his wealth or the two slaves for their shrewd management, he’s calling out the system in which pockets get lined at the expense of others. This is where the third slave gets very interesting. In essence, by burying the talent, he refuses to make the master richer. He opts out of a rigged system entirely, burying his complicity in the ground where it couldn’t do any more harm. I’m starting to think the third slave is actually a kind of Jesus figure in the story, the one who says no to violent and exploitative systems. That’s the Jesus we know. He insisted that such systems stop with him. 

Which opens up the interesting possibility that burying some things in the ground might be a good and faithful action for us to take. We can ask what kinds of things to bury, harmful things that could stop with us. 2020 seems to be producing a challenging list of possible answers to that question. The world we live in is filling up with hatred, fear, increased reactivity, and cut off. Imagine for just a moment if, in Jesus’ name, we buried some of those things in the back yard instead of sending them back out into the world? What if we didn’t increase their value by adding interest in the form of our own complicity? The parable suggests that opting out slows down the growth of unjust systems. The parable asks us to recognize when we are caught up in such systems, and ultimately to choose something different, the way Jesus opted out, time and again. 

At the end of the day, the parable of the talents can be about many things. I’ve heard it said that parables are like rooms you can walk into and spend some time, noticing different details here and there (Pulpit Fiction). From one perspective, today’s parable can certainly encourage us to be grateful for what God has given us and generous with our resources. Concretely, pledge cards are a promise of that generosity, and together, our pledges and our ministries create something pretty wonderful. I’m so grateful for the many talents you all provide here - from financial support and serving in countless ways, to the best chocolate chip cookies. 

But this parable might not only mean what we think it means. Looking at other details in the room, we begin to see that Jesus offers much more than a stewardship sermon. He invites a deeper kind of examination and growth. He insists that it’s possible to live in such a way that opts out of the hurtful systems around us. We can bury such things and curb their growth. We do this by following in Jesus’ own footsteps. What a blessing it is to find ourselves in a room where we see that a different way to live is possible.