Sunday, November 19, 2017 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

A Change of Title

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 90
Matthew 25:14–30

The major themes of the Christian faith—caring, giving, witnessing, trusting, loving, hoping—cannot be understood or lived without risk.

Fred Craddock, Preaching through the Christian Year, Year B

Have you ever noticed that the titles we have for the parables tend to shape our interpretation of them? For example, when we read the title “The Parable of the Good Samaritan,” we already know who’s going to end up as the hero. And when we read the title “The Parable of the Prodigal Son,” we are clued in to focus on the wayward son and to watch his movements. The title often tells us what to look for or listen for. This is one reason I am hesitant to title my sermons before you hear them, unless we are preaching a series. I don’t like to tell you beforehand what I expect for you to hear. What you hear—or, on some Sundays, don’t hear—is between you and the work of the Spirit. I don’t ever want to get in the way of that.

Consider today’s parable as another example. In our translation it has the title “The Parable of the Talents.” Now already that suggests things we need to look for or emphasize, doesn’t it? Those preachers who are preaching on stewardship today or whose congregations are celebrating dedication Sunday might look at this parable through the lens of resources. They’ll probably highlight the master’s action of handing out the different talents to the different servants and preach that this parable illustrates how God gives different gifts based on different abilities.

Encouraged by the title “The Parable of the Talents,” the parable quickly becomes an allegory with the master standing in for God; the talents signifying our gifts and resources; the faithful Christian response looking like the actions of the first two servants; and the last servant portraying the way we don’t want to act. With this allegorical interpretation, the last servant becomes an illustration of a Christian so bound up in fear that he cannot bear to try anything new for God, that he cannot bear to take any risk, and therefore he ends up being useless and squandering all his possibilities.

I can rattle off this interpretation so quickly because this is how I have preached the parable before. Not only that, this is how I have preached it with you before. Looking back, I see how guided I was by the title “The Parable of the Talents.” My focus was on what we do with what we have been given and whether or not we are willing to invest ourselves in what God is up to in the world.

But today we are going to give this parable a different title and see what happens to our interpretation as a result. We are going to experiment to see if a different title can help open up this parable to other possibilities. After all, one reason Jesus spoke in parables was to make space for challenge. Parables are meant to provoke, confuse, disturb, entice us into imagining ourselves and our world differently. They are multivalent stories, showing us various dimensions of reality.

Also, just to make something clear: the titles were added by the editors of scripture. Jesus did not say, “And now, I am going to tell you the parable of the talents.” Jesus just told the story. Someone else, much, much later, decided on the title and inserted it, all based on his or her interpretation of what the story was supposed to mean.

Therefore, given the fact that the title really is up to us, we are going to call this parable “The Parable of the One Who Said No.” Just with the change of title we are given a clue for a different interpretation, another way to hear it, because now our eyes are drawn not to the first two servants but to the last one, the one the master calls wicked and lazy.

With our eyes on that one, we are freer to ask if it could be that the adjectives wicked and lazy actually refer more to the master than they do the servant. And with that freedom, we can also seriously question our traditional allegorical interpretation as the only way to read it, the interpretation that has master = God; talent = spiritual and financial gifts; first two servants = faithful response; last servant = what not to do.

When we hear the title “The Parable of the One Who Said No,” then we also notice even more starkly that the master and his reaction to the last servant share little resemblance to the God who is proclaimed in the rest of the Gospel. Did you wonder about that? In the rest of the Gospel—in other stories and in other parables—we have descriptions of God that consistently emphasize God as the liberator, the bringer of grace, the lover of creation, the giver of mercy, but we see none of that in this parable.

Furthermore, the master does not even challenge the last servant’s depiction of him as a harsh man who takes what is not his. Rather, after the servant speaks up, the master decides to live even more fully into that description, snatching away the one talent, throwing the servant out, and abandoning him to the space of shadows and pain. Does that sound like the God we see in Jesus?

Another reason to challenge a purely allegorical interpretation is because of what we have learned about the historical context—the social world of this time. In these ancient days, the way the wealthy landowners increased their wealth was to acquire more land, and the way they acquired more land was to offer agricultural loans with very high interest rates to farmers who had land. When the farmers could not pay off the loans, which happened all the time, the landowners would foreclose on them and take the land from them. Thus, the landowners kept getting more and more wealthy with more and more land, and the farmers became not only poorer but also landless. In that day, to be landless was dangerous and left you extremely vulnerable.

It was a way of life for those at the top—a way of life that purposefully exploited others who had little power and little public voice (Justin Upkong, “The Parable of the Talents,” Neotestamentica, 46.1, 2012, p. 200). (The more things change, the more things stay the same . . .) It was also trickle-down exploitation—something we also saw in the parable. The master would have expected for the first two servants to do whatever it took to greatly increase their master’s wealth, leading to their own exploitation of those who had even less power than they did, because they knew, as the master did, that if they increased their master’s wealth, they got a cut of it, and their own power would increase. We know from historical records this was common practice (Upkong, p. 197).

This kind of exploitation and oppression formed the world in which Jesus told this parable. Those who heard it would have known exactly what he was talking about. They would have known all too well about the immoral profit-making ventures of an absentee landlord, a landlord who even suggested the last servant should have invested the money in the bank and collected interest on it, something forbidden at that time by Jewish law! Again, does this sound like that God we see in Jesus?

In this “Parable of the One Who Said No,” the master does nothing but reflect the exploitive ways of the world rather than challenge its oppressive nature, something Jesus did consistently throughout Matthew’s Gospel (Warren Carter, Matthew and the Margins). This is why we might have trouble imagining the master as a stand-in for God. But perhaps we might have spotted this trouble even in the very beginning, in the very first sentence, when Jesus chooses to introduce the parable by saying “It is as if a man . . . ” “It is.” Not “The kingdom of heaven will be like this,” as Jesus introduced the parable before this one, the one with the bridesmaids. Nor “When the Son of Man comes . . . ,” as Jesus introduces the parable that follows with the sheep and the goats. No, Jesus just states, “It is.”

It might be that in this parable Jesus is choosing to describe what is, rather than what should be or will be. What if, in this particular parable, one he told right before he entered Jerusalem for the last time, right before he came face-to-face with those who would put him to death, Jesus is actually following up on his earlier teachings about the cost of faithfulness and discipleship?

Perhaps he was using the parable to illustrate the danger that will often come whenever one speaks out against oppression and exploitation; whenever one chooses to not participate in the continuing cycle of those with more getting more and those with less getting less; whenever one chooses to stand up, speak out, and say “No” against anything and anyone that dehumanizes or harms another beloved one of God.

What did that last servant get in return for taking a stand against what he saw as exploitive behavior, injustice, and oppressive actions he knew were contrary to God’s hope for God’s world? In response to his “No,” he was stripped of all that he had, thrown out of the place he had known, and abandoned to a space of shadows and pain. Perhaps Jesus was using this parable as a way of giving more depth to what he meant when he said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me.” The One who said “No,” the last servant, could be an example of the risks we are called to take as followers on Jesus’ Way. “The Parable of the One Who Said No.”

Have you said “No” to something lately? Have you said “No” to participating in a behavior or in a system or in a joke or in a slur that you knew would be experienced by another as oppressive or exploitive? Have you said “No” to doing something or making a decision that you knew, in your gut, reflected more the way our world is rather than the way God means it to be? Has that “No” been costly? Did it feel risky? Leave you vulnerable?

I ask those questions realizing that in the parable the last servant says a powerful “No” to the huge system of oppressive economics, a “No” that ends up with him seemingly losing everything. It is a dramatic “No,” a world-changing “No,” a life-shifting “No.” And sometimes we are indeed called to take those kind of dramatic stands.

I am thinking of my clergy friends and others who gathered in that church the night before the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. I told you about them. They gathered as counter-protestors. And on the eve of that rally, they came to worship, joined their voices in protest songs and in prayer, and said a loud “No” to all the hate that was beginning to swarm around them. Just outside the church, the protestors arrived carrying lit torches in their hands and rage on their faces. It took incredible courage for all of those counter-protestors to be in Charlottesville that night and the next day, placing their bodies in harm’s way as an embodiment of God’s own “No” to violence and to the evils and lie of white supremacy and anti-Semitism.

I am also thinking of the beautiful “No” said and lived by one of my heroes, Janie Spahr. Janie is a retired Presbyterian minister who refused to let our denomination kick her out or turn our back on her because she is gay. For decades, after she came out, we tried to deny her ordination and said God could not call her to preach as who she was. Her personhood was not enough, we said. We looked her in the eyes and said “No” time and time again. And for years, Janie, in her beautiful, gentle, strong, and courageous way refused to let us go. She refused to give into the hate so often directed at her. She refused to mirror it back, displaying a strength and a kindness rarely seen. Like with the Charlottesville counter-protestors, her “No” was an embodied “No.” She kept after us, kept loving us, kept asking for us to look at scripture again, kept praying that we would be open to the fresh winds of the Spirit, kept talking with us and teaching us, kept imploring us to keep voting on it again, year after year.

Because of Janie and others, even though our denomination had tried to cast them out like that last servant year after year, we finally, as a church system, discerned that God was actually calling us to say “Yes” to Janie, “Yes” to all people whom God has gifted for ministry, regardless of who they love. But were it not for Janie and for countless others who continually said “No” to our attempts at silencing them, I’m not sure our “Yes” would have come. But now, because of their faithful, risk-taking “No’s,” we have generations counting on our “Yes” to stay.

Those are examples of big “No’s.” Dramatic, world-changing, life-shifting No’s.” And there are moments, times, occasions when, like that last servant, we must join in that kind of risky, faithful embodied “No.” But I also believe we face these kinds of decisions every day, in small ways, too. Every day we have to say “No” to giving into the power of greed that tells us those with more deserve more and those with less are out of luck. Every day we have to say “No” to the power of cynicism and apathy. Every day we have to say “No” to the forces of polarization and divisiveness. Every day we have to say “No” to the voices in our heads that tell us to be scared of each other because of one stereotype or another. Every day we are called to look at that last servant and to say “No” to so much of the way our world functions, because unless we are saying “No” to processes and people and systems and decisions that oppress or exploit, we are not fully being who God has created us to be in the very image of the One known as liberator, bringer of grace, lover of creation, giver of mercy.

Finally, I noted earlier in the sermon that Jesus told this “Parable of the One Who Said No” right before he headed into Jerusalem, right before he, himself, would have to say “No” again and again and again. “No” to the temptation of violence. “No” to the lure of self-protection. “No” to the danger of returning evil for evil. “No” to the powers of empire and fear. And that “No” resulted in Jesus being tossed out, everything taken away from him, nailed to a cross, abandoned to the space of shadows and pain. Yet just at the point when Jesus’ “No” looked permanently snuffed out, God’s own “No” went to work. And our world, our lives, were dramatically changed forever.

The Parable of the One Who Said No. Perhaps our new title might stick. Amen.