Proper 28A
November 15, 2020

O God of our learning, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Our Collect for today is one of my favorites and maybe yours too – a prayer in which we assert that all holy scriptures were caused to be written for our learning – the ones we love and the ones, well, not so much. We pray that we not just hear them, but that we read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them – for the purpose of holding fast to hope of union with the Holy One, which is another way of saying everlasting life. With some readings from scripture, I think, we need digestive aids – some spiritual bi-carb perhaps while we are learning.

Learning is such hard work. When infants and toddlers are going through growth spurts of learning, they are both ravenously hungry and need extra sleep, and they’re often inconsolable for a day or so before arriving at a new developmental stage. When I was a new mother, some of the best advice I ever got to get through a day when a child just cried all day, was to know that some big skill or ability was about to appear. Adults are the same way, but we don’t usually get the extra sleep that would help us integrate learning without being extremely irritable for extended periods of time. When we’re learning things we are excited about, it’s easier, of course, but still exhausting. When we’re learning what we don’t want to learn, it’s just excruciating. As individuals and as a society, 2020 has been a year of learning things that many of us really didn’t want to learn.

Listen to the beginning of a prayer by The Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen called, “For When I Really Don’t Want to Learn This,” sent to me earlier this week by another colleague. It’s addressed to the Holy One.

Spirit, I would really rather not learn this.
Didn’t think I needed to.
I thought someone else could do it.
Thought the young people could do it.
Or the elders could do it.
Or the professionals.

That’s how I feel about cloud-based storage and video technologies, about learning to communicate when I can’t be in the same room with people, about sound systems, about ventilation systems, about epidemiology, about civic and ecclesiastical governance, about my part in dismantling white supremacy, about reparations, about abolishing prisons and demilitarizing the police, about curbing rapacious capitalism, and the list goes on. I’m sure some of those things are on your lists and you have your own things to add.

It’s also how I feel about learning what our Gospel reading for today is teaching. The story follows last week’s parable of the wise and foolish virgins without so much as a break to get a sip of water. There’s no pause in the story about how some of the virgins had brought enough oil with them while they waited for the bridegroom, and others did not. The ones who had oil didn’t share. The ones who lacked enough oil got locked out of the banquet hall. Jesus says, “keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour. For it is as if a man, going on a journey summoned his slaves. . .” This story about a man going on a journey is the bridging narrative between the wise and foolish virgins, and the great sorting of the sheep and the goats.

The parable Jesus tells in Matthew’s gospel is about unimaginable wealth. Five talents, two talents, one talent. A talent was the largest standardized stone weight in Jesus’ time. A talent weighed about 70 pounds and it was put on a scale and balanced with silver or gold pieces. Some scholars estimate that in the first century Roman empire, one talent worth of silver or gold was 6,000 times a daily wage needed for a laborer to feed himself and his family, so one talent equaled a lifetime of productive work – about 15-20 years. Some scholars are more conservative in their estimations, but it’s a LOT of money, no matter what. The median household wage in the world today is less than $10,000. So whether a laborer given a talent would never have to work again, or wouldn’t have to work for a few years, we have a story of millions of dollars in our context. And there are eight talents, not just one – maybe enough for 120 wage years.

Coinciding, as it does, with pledge stewardship season in many churches, this parable is often interpreted as a lesson about taking the gifts God gives you and risking them all; a lesson about use it or lose it. But I want to offer you a different interpretation that takes into account the social situation of Jesus’ followers and the rest of the Gospel of Matthew narrative, what comes before and after it. It’s an interpretation that understands Jesus as a teacher of those who were oppressed. It takes this parable which, at face value, looks like it teaches a simple moral lesson about using what you have, and turns it into a complex scenario that provokes deep questions and encourages spiritual learning and growth for the community that listens, to build one another up, as 1 Thessalonians says. In this interpretation, the man who goes on a journey is a man and not God. In Matthew, God does not go away. Jesus does not go away – his final words are: “and remember, I am with you always to the end of the age.”

This parable has three parts. The first part is about the distribution of wealth. A man is about to go on a journey and he entrusts some of his money to three of his slaves. The story goes that he apportions the money according to their ability – but the word here is literally translated as “power” — each according to their power. Our modern ears hear talent as skill or aptitude or gift. Here, a talent is just a weight on a scale – and each of the slaves is given an amount in accordance with his power. Power is unevenly distributed.

The second part is about the economy. Jesus’ hearers knew how rich people doubled their money and so do we – through a systematized exploitation of people. The first two slaves went to work ‘at once’ and doubled their investment. The slaves in this story would have used their wealth to make loans to peasant farmers so that the farmers could plant the crops. Roman interest rates were extremely high; estimates range from 60 percent to perhaps as high as 200 percent for loans on crops. William Herzog explains that “The purpose of making such loans was not so much to make a large profit, at least by the standards of the ancient world, but to accept land as collateral so that the elites could foreclose on their loans in years when the crops could not cover the incurred indebtedness.” [1] This is what slaves of the wealthy elites did – everyone knew it.

But the third slave did something drastically different. The third slave buried the master’s money, the twenty years’ worth of wages, effectively taking that wealth out of the market, saying no to the exploitation of laborers, saying no to the economics of oppression. He did not spend the money on himself or anyone else. He was faithful to the Torah which prohibits profiting from the suffering or misfortune of others. He protected the people in the area in the best possible way, by burying it, taking the instrument of oppression out of circulation.
The third part of the parable, then, is the reckoning. The man returned and found that the first two slaves had done very well according to the wealthy man’s values. They had been effective exploiters. The man told them that they had been trustworthy with a few things (the understatement of the first century). Since they had been trustworthy with a few things, they would enter into the joy of their master and they would be given more opportunities to exploit others with even larger amounts. But it was never going to be their money. It belonged to the man.

Then the third slave came forward and said the boldest and stupidest thing: he exposed the master as being harsh, taking unfair advantage, living off of the productive labor of others who were suffering and struggling to get by. His speech shamed the master – he basically called him a thief. He unmasked the master but covered himself by returning the talent. Returning the talent, of course, wasn’t good enough for the rich man. The man called the slave wicked and lazy and pronounced the proverb of the wealthy – the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, or you have to have money to make money. Jesus is telling a story about what happens to a slave who refused to cooperate with exploitation. The rich man ordered the “worthless slave” be thrown into the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. That is, after all, where people who are destitute dwell.

Now we have a pretty good idea about what Jesus thought about wealth from other stories that he told, warning about the accumulation of wealth – and so it’s unlikely that Jesus was really talking about the importance of investing wealth wisely and doubling the money. The Torah mandate to not reap to the edges of the field, and to leave grain and fruit for the gleaners comes to mind. The prophet Amos warned against those who accumulate fields but fail to care for those who are poor. But why does Jesus’ story have such an unhappy ending for the slave who refused to participate in exploitation? Well, I think it’s not the ending any more than the crucifixion of one who refused to keep silent about exploitation was the ending. The ending of Jesus’ long teaching in this part of the Gospel of Matthew will come in the portion of the Gospel we hear next week. It will have to do with a caring and careful response to hunger thirst, shelter, clothing, illness and imprisonment.

What was Matthew’s Jesus getting his listeners to learn with this story? Most likely very few of them had ever been near the inner circle of the very wealthy. How would they have reacted to someone cast out of that inner circle into their midst? How would someone who had fallen from the inner circle — near greatness be received among those who were destitute or near-destitute? Could they welcome someone like this into the community? Would they trust someone like this? Could peasants and rural poor folks see how their interests were integrated and entwined with people they despised? Hard questions.

The questions this story raises for me are: What about us? Most of us are in the middle between those who are most wealthy and those who are most destitute. How do power or class and races differences among us perpetuate themselves? How do we get in the way of the wider community’s best interests when it comes to distribution of wealth? How do we collude with the forces that keep predatory investment and lending and labor practices unexposed or justified? How do we benefit from white supremacy and other unjust systems of exploitation? What are the implications for our ministry together? I don’t imagine that any one of us has the answers, but I do know that all of us together have tremendous wisdom and we’re still learning. I believe that Jesus knew there was collective wisdom in the community of people who heard and learned his provocative parables. Again, listen to Elizabeth Nguyen. Here’s the whole prayer.

Spirit, I would really rather not learn this.
Didn’t think I needed to.
I thought someone else could do it.
Thought the young people could do it.
Or the elders could do it.
Or the professionals.
Or I don’t want to learn it ‘cause it means letting go of something I hold dear.
Letting go of being someone who knows the answers.
Letting go of being someone who doesn’t know.
Letting go of the way I see the world.
Letting go of how I might have to change.
Letting go of certainty, of logic, of facts, of control.
Of the myth that you can live on this earth and not harm.
Or the myth that I can’t learn anything new.
Help me to learn it. Please.
And then help me to live what I have learned.
And do right by the gift of being taught.

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