Sunday Service - 11/13/11 - Barbara Brown Taylor

35:54 For if you are with us, then nothing else matters. And if you are not with us, then nothing else matters. Be with us, we pray in the name of your beloved. Amen. Please be seated. If you came here this morning in any doubt about what season it is, this morning's gospel lesson was your clue. As any longtime churchgoer can attest, when the parable of the talents shows up in church, it's stewardship season. It's time to consider how much God has given you so you can decide how much to give back. Not only so places like this will be here next time you want to come, but also because it is good for you to let go of some of what you have on a regular basis.

36:52 Now that's the kind of thing you're likely to hear at Duke Chapel, but visit a church in my part of the world and you may hear something more persuasive, persuasive, like, don't give until it hurts, give until it feels good, aim to double God's investment in you so you don't wind up like servant number three, not just wicked and lazy, but worthless, unworthy of any response from the master, save the effort it takes to order him thrown into the dark, while servants number one and two enter into the joy of their master. Dig deep. The meaning of this parable has been established in most people's minds for so long that there's hardly anything left to say about the third servant that has not already been said. Here's a brief survey.

37:47 C.H. Dodd, 1935. This is a story of a man whom over-caution and cowardice led to a breach of trust. T.W. Manson, 1949, the punishment for neglected opportunity is deprivation of opportunity. Dan Vaya, 1967, the third servant's refusal to risk led to repressed guilt, resulting in the loss of opportunity for meaningful existence. John Donahue, 1988. Out of fear of failure, he refused even to try to succeed. Any questions? The unanimous weight of these verdicts reminds me of something I heard from a man in a homeless shelter once. He had been on the receiving end of quite a great deal of good advice about how to get back on his feet.

38:51 After being coached on handling his addiction, applying for jobs, managing his finances, and qualifying for low-income housing, he finally looked at the person most invested in his rehabilitation and he said, Why you want to fix me up and feed me back into the same machine that grinded me up in the first place? How you hear a parable has a lot to do with where you're hearing it from.

39:27 Back in the 1980s, the Catholic Foreign Missionary Society of America published a four-volume commentary series on the Gospels called The Gospel in Solentonami. As some of you already know, Solentonami is a place name, a remote archipelago on Lake Nicaragua, inhabited by subsistence-level farmers and fishers. In the late 1970s, a lay monastery called Our Lady of Solentonami flourished on one of its 38 islands, the living vision of Pastor Ernesto Cardinal. On Sundays, this priest in the Black Beret invited the campesinos of Solentonami to meet with him to talk about the gospel reading of the week. Not after the sermon, but in place of the sermon.

40:25 It was such an unusual idea that people came. Those with boats rowed to meet him, and those who did not have boats stayed home. But the meetings themselves became legendary. By one account, as many as 1,000 people showed up from time to time to give voice to the gospel in Salentanami, young and old, male and female, literate and illiterate. Across all their differences, what they had in common was life below the poverty line and the revolution going on around them, a popular uprising against then-President Somoza, whose family controlled 40% of Nicaragua's economy in those days and owned 30% of the country's arable land.

41:21 You can't visit the monastery today, I'm afraid, because in 1977, Somoza's National Guard burned it down. But you can read the commentaries that were produced there including one on the parable of the talents. On the Sunday it came up, a Colombian poet named William started the discussion by saying, that's a lousy parable. Unfazed, Pastor Cardinal asked him why it was lousy, and here's an excerpt of the discussion that followed. William, because it's about speculating with money, something we all condemn, like putting money out at interest, giving the money to others so they can work and work with it and hand over the profits to the owner of the money.

42:16 Cardinal, it's really a very ugly example that Jesus gives of exploitation, of speculation with money, of pure capitalism. Aidan, well, he probably didn't say it. Who knows who said it? William, well, I don't know. Besides, the example is lousier because of what the servant says who hid the money, that he was a hard master, that he gathered where he hadn't put anything, that he harvested and didn't sow. Teresita, his wife. At that time, there were only masters and servants, right? He had to talk like that so they'd understand. At that time, all the servants had to be working with the master's talents of money. And that's why he had to give that example. Cardinal. He was seeing the exploitation that was in the society of his time, and that's going on now, much worse with the banks and finances of today.

43:17 William, there's the bank. There's a bank in there somewhere. Did you know that in the United States today, seven banks hold assets equal to 66 percent of the gross domestic product? Twenty years ago, the figure was 18 percent. Today 1 percent of Americans hold 39 percent of the nation's wealth and take 25 percent of its annual income. Twenty years ago, the figures were half that. wait, we're in church, let's stick to the Bible. In Jesus' day, by my research, a talent weighed anywhere between 80 and 130 pounds. It was worth roughly 20 years' worth of an ordinary person's labor. The only kind of people who had that money were the elite, whose households formed the basic economic units of the time. How did the elite get the money? Usual ways. Engaged in trade, got goods to market, ran import-export businesses, lent money to people at interest, especially

44:31 land-poor people who often had trouble trying to make ends meet at the end of a long drought or some catastrophic illness in the family. Wealthy householders were happy to help out in circumstances like these. There was nothing to it. If you were strapped for cash, you got the best interest rate you could get, you put up your land as collateral, and you got busy bringing in the sheaves. By the time you realized what 60% interest really meant, it was too late. Your land went into foreclosure and quicker than you could say Leviticus. It wasn't yours anymore. But that didn't always mean you had to leave. You could also stay if you were willing to work for your former lender and if you could stand to watch your family fields repurposed as olive groves or vineyards, something more easily monetized that would appeal to a more upscale market at home and abroad.

45:40 Since abroad was where first century financiers often had to be, they employed household retainers to look after things while they were gone. Slaves, maybe, as Matthew says, but well-placed ones. Domestic bureaucrats in charge of managing workers and keeping books, collecting debts. who were also free to make a little something for themselves on the side once they had seen to their master's interests. Their share in such honest graft reflected their own standing in the household. The higher-ups were entrusted with more than the lower downs, But as far as the master was concerned, the more the merrier, since that meant more servants could keep a better eye on one another. Whatever their standing, their dependence on the master was built into the financial system.

46:41 They lived on his excess. The better he did, the better they did. Their wealth was derived from his. If he wanted to spend his profits on expensive comforts and conspicuous status symbols, there was no public shame in that. It helped, actually. It was like good advertisement. It let clients know how capable the master really was. Wealth was its own justification. Wealth brought honor. Its value was redundant. A master who shared a little venture capital with his retainers when he went out of town was not only increasing his potential joy, he was inviting them into that joy as well. Well done, good and trustworthy slave.

47:38 You've been trustworthy in a few things. I will put you in charge of many things. Enter into the joy of your master. But here's what I want to know. When did we decide that the man going on a journey in the parable of the talents was God? I know Jesus told the parable as a parable of the kingdom, but how does that turn the little M master in the story into the capital M master of the universe? Haven't there always been a lot of little m masters applying for God's job and some of them just plain lousy? Read the parable like someone living on Lake Nicaragua, or one of the little ones who followed Jesus around, maybe even like someone camping out in Zuccotti Park, and it's hard to see the master as anything but one more tycoon sitting on a pile of money so high that he cannot see the bottom of it, which is why he has to hire people to keep it flowing up from wherever it comes from without troubling him with too many details.

48:58 As long as they can double his money, they are free to make it however they like. As long as they can give him back twice as much as he gave them, they may deduct their expenses to the full extent of the law, which has been generously amended so that people like the master can go on stimulating the economy for the good of all.

49:25 Seriously? We are seriously supposed to believe that the first two servants in this parable are the praiseworthy ones, both in this world and the next? For making a wealthy man wealthier? For keeping an absentee landlord in business? for scoring a 100% rate of return for him in exchange for their own slices of his pie? These are the guys who are doing it right, while the third one, the only one who buries the talent where it can't do any more harm, the only one who tells the truth about the master, not behind his back but to his face, the only one who refuses to play the game any longer, even if that means being banished from his master's expensive joy, he is the one whose overcaution and cowardice have cost him the opportunity for meaningful existence?

50:29 Seriously? I can only imagine what William, the Colombian poet, would say about that. Of course the master threw that slave out. He could not have someone in his household exposing the truth that he had gathered where he hadn't put anything, that he harvested where he didn't sow. It was past time to show that slave the door into the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. Matthew loves that phrase. I'm pretty sure William would want to know if you really believe that darkness is God's own hell, Or is it simply the truth about where whistleblowers really go, once they've decided they can't go on the way they've been going anymore, that they would rather join the 99 percent in the dark than stay with the 1 percent who burn through all the brightness without ever seeing those who foot the bill?

51:32 I just read an article, some of you probably did too, called Too Small to Fail about Mosier, Oregon, population 430, smallest town in the United States to join the Occupy Wall Street movement. Mosier doesn't have a stoplight, the only gas station closed years ago, the nearest multinational corporations at least five miles away. But a handful of people are planning to set up about a dozen tents where they can camp together and talk about things that matter. Their short list includes reducing the influence of corporations on little tiny rural communities like theirs, supporting credit unions, spending more money on health and education than on war. One resident said, people have asked us if we're getting a permit.

52:33 We had to laugh because we don't have sidewalks, let alone a city park where people could gather on city property for a protest. After the camp is set up, she said, members of the Occupy movement want to invite members of the Tea Party for tea. Really come for tea, really come to sit around a round table for give and take discussion, hoping the two groups can find places where their visions overlap, their visions about the kind of world they want for their children. The whole time I was working on this sermon, I kept trying to imagine Jesus dropping by Mosher, Going up to the people sitting in their camp chairs in front of their tents, eating food out of plastic coolers on paper plates, all of them forgetting about beds and showers and flat-screen televisions for a while, so they can talk about how more people might share the wealth of this nation they love.

53:39 If they have any 80-pound talents, they're sitting on them. There's no one selling anything in this camp. There's no one buying. I've been trying to imagine Jesus walking up to one of them and saying, I've come for my profit. What? No profit? 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. Somebody take away the little bit they have in Mosier and give it to those with ten times as much. For to all those who have, more will be given, but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. And you know what? I can't imagine it. I can't imagine it at all. So maybe this is not a sermon about the parable of the talents at all. Maybe it's a sermon about how we read scripture, about why we are so reluctant to challenge established meanings, about what is at risk if we do, about what would happen if we stopped thinking of the truth of Scripture as something already embedded in it, set down in a book, and instead reconceived the truth of Scripture as something that happens when people of faith get together and let the sharp edges of our real lives poke at that Scripture until it yields new and living truth by the power of the Holy Spirit.

55:25 Maybe even something that would upset the Master. Little M. Wouldn't that be something?