What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, November 13, 2011

Twenty-Second Sunday After Pentecost
(Lectionary 33A)
Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18 • Psalm 90:1-8, (9-11), 12 • 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11 • Matthew 25:14-30

"[Jesus said to the disciples:] For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them; to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. The one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded with them, and made five more talents. In the same way, the one who had the two talents made two more talents. But the one who had received the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master's money. After a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them. Then the one who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five more talents, saying, 'Master, you handed over to me five talents; see, I have made five more talents.' His master said to him, 'Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.' And the one with the two talents also came forward, saying, 'Master, you handed over to me two talents; see, I have made two more talents.' His master said to him, 'Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.' Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, 'Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.' But his master replied, 'You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.'"

A few weeks ago I saw in the news that a site where several of us went after the Cedar Rapids, IA service trip last year, the iconic Field of Dreams movie baseball field in Iowa, was recently purchased by a couple from Chicago. It made me think about one of the things that happens throughout this film is that the main character hears voices telling him things. Ray Kinsella walks along his Iowa corn fields and hears a voice saying, “If you build it, he will come.” He talks to other farmers, wondering if this is commonplace for people who spend lots of time out caring for their fields--to hear other people speaking to you when no one else is around.

With the birth of Liv two and a half weeks ago, these past several weeks I’ve been hearing a new voice in my head, often in the middle of the night, saying things like, “Is that a cry for a changed diaper I hear, or just a moaning yawn?”, and “Wow, she’s amazing...but what have I gotten myself into?!”, and “Treasure these precious moments now. She’s going to change so fast.”

Part of us says that these voices aren’t something to listen to. But even those of us with good mental health are going to hear a voice in our head of someone who isn’t there speaking to us. That voice can even sometimes be God’s way of speaking to us.

Once a woman who came back to the church after many years astray told me that she had started hearing voices. “Is that normal?” she asked me, as if she were unsure if this was something that was “supposed” to be happening to people of faith or not. She said, “God is saying things to me, trying to affirm me, or lead me to talk to or help other people. I’m hearing my dead grandparents saying wise things to me too, and this is all since I recently started to pay attention to God’s presence.” I reassured her she is not alone, but also shared that the challenge for us is to discern between what voices bring us closer to God’s fullness and consolation, and what leads us to places of desolation and God’s absence.

With today’s Gospel text, a voice may try and tell us that Jesus’ story about the master giving funds to slaves to invest can only be heard and interpreted in one particular way. But there are at least two very compelling and yet very different interpretations--both of which are valid, but both of which lead us to wonder how it is we reconcile God’s voice when we hear two different voices speaking to us.

One interpretation prompts the following voice to speak to us: “Work hard, invest your resources, don’t bury your treasure like the slave who did nothing with his master’s money.” This is the voice that the third slave did not hear. He chose instead to live in fear, to seek the safety of security, to never take risks and to care for his own self-protection. The other two slaves did follow that voice, of taking the risk, and they returned double to their master what they had received by buying and selling it, by investing it, and by allowing it to grow in the marketplace. The voice that God wants us to hear from this story would seem simple if this were all.

But another voice speaks loud and clear, one that needs a little help from the cultural context of that day. In the ancient near east, it turns out that they had a very different view of the rich and poor than we have today. The rich, it was always assumed, had come to their wealth unjustly or were heirs of unjust persons. This was because they did not believe such thing as an “honest” rich person was possible--it was widely held that being rich meant that somehow their wealth had been been taken away and come at the expense from the socially vulnerable. Also, in that day, burying one’s treasure in the ground was actually seen as a sound financial strategy in those days because it guaranteed a return. This has profound implications then for the other interpretation of this parable of the talents.

With this perspective, the master and the two slaves who accumulate the wealth now become the extortioners who illegally come into wealth by means of greed that takes away from others. The voice that then comes out of this story comes from the third slave, whose voice says, “I refuse to invest this master’s attempts to make wealth at my expense. I will name the abusive of power for what it is, regardless of the price I will have to pay when the master returns.” This interpretation completely turns the voice of the other two slaves on its head, as they become part of a practice of bowing to harsh demands for economic growth at any cost, even to the lowliest. Both interpretations can be valid, and both can be true, even when the voices emanating from them are different.

They can be true together because they both speak with the unified voice of Jesus. His voice is always one that speaks in the midst of brokenness, and it speaks in unison here--because both interpretations –both voices--show our profound estrangement from God and each other that’s at the core of us all. But Jesus has a voice that despite all the other voices that try and separate us from him, it cannot be declared dead or irrelevant. His voice still does matter, and it still does speak to us. His voice matters because his voice silences the powers that keep an abundant life from us. We, whether we are like the servant who is scared to risk, or like the one who is threatened by greed, are in need of a voice that will both heal what is broken at our core and stand up for those at the margins. Jesus’ voice is the one that connects us back to God and each other.

Jesus’ voice is one that will come into our heads...will hear his voice speaking...in the need to risk using what we've been given, and in our need to challenge greed. His voice will come to us, and invite us as a community into the promise of a fruit-bearing life, because while his voice invites us to risk loss, is a voice that leads us to a shared life. His voice will say to us that he loves us so much that he wants to share our hopes and dreams, our fears and our failures...his voice wants us to know of God’s love enough that he dies on the cross so that we might be joined across differences to have life and have it abundantly. Jesus‘ voice invites us to the abundant life of the two slaves who enter into the joy of their master because they didn’t sit on their hands--they get in the game. And Jesus’ voice is also that same voice that stands up for us in the way the third slave stands up to the master’s tyranny by not cowering but by boldly naming unjust greed, in order to take its power away.

In what ways is Jesus’ voice speaking through his story to your life, and to us as a community? To what greater abundance is Jesus inviting us? It’s waiting there for us to receive, but we have to get up and use our voices to sieze it.

As we stand in the midst of times when the gap between the rich and poor in our country now stands at an all time high...as protests continue to rage on Wall Street and around the world decrying the injustice of economic inequality...and millions of unemployed continue to bear the brunt of a recession that will not seem to quit lingering...what do we hear the voice of Jesus saying? Where are the places of deepest economic brokenness where we are no longer listening for him? Where have we tuned out and stopped demanding that the biblical value of care for the poor be of major concern to our congregation and to our elected officials?

We all will hear voices, but Jesus’ voice is the one that speaks clearly to us in our brokenness and in the world’s injustice. The question is what our response will be. Can we hear the vocie of Jesus speaking through these servants? As hockey Hall of Famer Wayne Gretzsky once said, “We miss 100 percent of the shots we never take.” And as many celebrities are saying about the continuing famine in the horn of eastern Africa are saying, man-made “famine” is the real “f-word” obscenity we’re not willing to hear being spoken, because it calls us to accountability for the 30,000 children who have died there in the last three months.

We can trust that like Ray who heeded the voice in his head in Field of Dreams, that following Jesus’ voice of compassion and justice will lead not to desolation or to God’s absence--it will lead us to a communal life of abundance.

Amen.