November 16, 2008
(Twenty-seventh Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 28)

The Right Thing to Do

by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18  •  Psalm 90:1-8, 12  •  1 Thessalonians 5:1-11  •  Matthew 25:14-30
(From The Lectionary Page)

I was working the serving line at the Kansas City Community Kitchen last Monday. My job was to serve up a portion of chicken and a spoonful of black eyed peas, then nudge the tray to the volunteer next to me who served up fruit and salad. Serve, spoon, nudge, repeat. And all the while a line of hungry men, women, and yes, children snaked around the perimeter of the room. In 2 hours time that day, we fed nearly 600 people. That’s a lot of trays of food speeding down the line and handed off and since I am not particularly blessed with manual dexterity, I usually keep my eyes on my work when I’m serving. But on Monday, I looked up at one point and happened to meet the eyes of one of the guests. “How you doin’?” he asked. “Great,” I replied. “You?” He shrugged, glanced away, then gave me the once-over and asked without belligerence, “Why you doin’ this?”

“It’s the right thing to do,” I answered.

He nodded and as he moved down the line he said, “Thanks for doin’ it.”

We are nearing the end of the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus has been teaching his way toward Jerusalem and the parables that have been about grace and about the kingdom of God, have begun to shift in focus. We begin to encounter the parables of Judgment. The one we heard last week, the parable of the insufficient oil, was the first in a Matthean series of three such parables. (We’ll hear the final Judgment parable next week, the parable of the sheep and the goats.) Judgment parables are recognizable by their cosmic, larger-than-life imagery. There often is a sense of an absent master whose return heralds action – usually reward for the blessed and punishment for the cursed.

Depending on how active the guilt receptors are within our various psyches, the word Judgment can easily carry overtones of doom. Fail in your assigned duties and it’s Outer Darkness for you for all eternity. Understandably worrisome, not to mention seemingly at odds with the divine graciousness that Jesus taught at the outset of his ministry. But mostly what the notion of Judgment does for many of us is fill us with a sense of dread that somehow we won’t measure up, that the horrible things we have done or the important things that we have left undone will be tallied up by God on the day of reckoning, and that all that we have cherished about a loving forgiving God who longs to draw the whole world to himself will be overturned in the wink of God’s wrathful eye.

Let me propose a different way of understanding judgment, and by extension, the Parables of Judgment. I don’t think that the three Matthean parables of Judgment are the equivalent of the three ghosts who visit Ebeneezer Scrooge. I don’t think they’re there to scare us into righteous behavior. I think, rather, that they serve as an important reminder to Matthew’s original audience, and no less to us, that who we are and what we do matter. Who we are and what we do matter.

One slave is entrusted with five talents or talenta, one slave receives two and one slave receives one. A talentum was the largest denomination of money in the Greco-Roman world. Each talentum weighed, literally, seventy pounds and was equal to between 16 and 20 years’ worth of wages. An astonishing sum to be left in the hands of slaves. And so the slave with the one talentum does what seems entirely believable to me when one is handed a responsibility for which one feels ill equipped to carry out. He buries the money. It's risk free solution for him, or so he thinks. When the master returns, he'll give back to him what was given in the first place, safe and sound. The master won't have lost anything and the slave won't have been in danger of going down in flames. (It was probably a bear market then too.) What's not to love about simply burying the cash?

Well, plenty, as far as the master is concerned. Seems that when we're given a commission, the one thing we don't get to do is nothing. The red herring in this parable for us dyed-in-the-wool capitalists is that the master is angry with the slave solely because of the money. But this is a Judgment parable and as I said, Judgment in this context should be interpreted not as an indictment, but as an affirmation that who we are and what we do matter. What separated the first two slaves from the third is not how talented (heehee) they were or how hard they worked or how prudent their investment skills were. What separated the first two slaves from the third was that they chose to trust the one who trusted them first, and then let that trust guide their subsequent actions. The point of the parable is not that the first two slaves doubled their masters' money. It's that they took seriously what they had been given and engaged it faithfully.

Jesus told this parable in the waning days of his earthly ministry. His arrest, crucifixion, and death were just around the corner. Soon he would be going away. It would be up to his disciples in that age and in every age, to continue in his teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers. It would be up to his disciples in that age and in every age to proclaim by word and example the good news of Jesus Christ. It would be up to his disciples in that age and in every age to seek and to serve him in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves. That is the one talentum given into our hands. And the one thing we don’t get to do with that treasure is nothing.

We are in the waning days of our liturgical year. Advent soon draws near – a season in which we prepare ourselves not only for the birth of the Babe in Bethlehem, but for the second coming of Christ, the second coming that Matthew foreshadows in our gospel passage today. By the time that Matthew’s gospel was written, the Church had begun to understand that the Parousia – the Second Coming – would not happen in their lifetime. The Church lives in the meantime, between Resurrection and Second Coming. It is for this mean time that the talenta – the treasure, the Good News of God in Christ – is given to us. We’ve been given the business plan. It’s called Baptism. There are hungry people to be fed, in the Community Kitchen and throughout the world. There are people without shelter, without warm clothing. There are wounds to be healed. There is justice to be done. There is mercy to be shown. There is God’s salvific promise to be preached in word and especially in action in a world that hungers for Good News.

In short, putting the treasure, the talentum, to work is the right thing to do.

Not because we fear the outer darkness, but rather, because who we are and what we do matter.