after Pentecost
| Old Testament | Judges 4:1–7 |
| Psalm | Psalm 123 |
| Epistle | 1 Thessalonians 5:1–11 |
| Gospel | Matthew 25:14–30 |
| Track Two | Zephaniah 1:7, 12–18 |
Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
You have designated us to serve as a visible city on a hill, illuminating the path as a light that is not hidden. Yet there are days we choose to maintain our faith in silence, keeping it protected. Push us out. Make us bold. Our light should shine to bring glory to you rather than to us. You have created a monumental work beyond our vision and extended an invitation for us to join it. Encourage us to pursue wholehearted faith and dedicated discipleship. Let us dedicate ourselves fully to projecting your light throughout the entire world. Amen.
▶ | Hear These Lessons Preached St. Stephen’s, Liberty · Proper 28A, November 19, 2017 |
On what the third servant actually did wrong: “You ought to have put my money to the exchangers — that is, that ought to have spoken, to have admonished, to have advised. But are they disobedient? Yet this is nought to you. … You ought to have done that which is easier, and to have left to me what is more difficult.” And the sting: “Do you see how not only the spoiler, and the covetous, nor only the doer of evil things, but also he that does not good things, is punished with extreme punishment.” And for anyone in the pews doing the arithmetic on their own gifts: “Let no man say, I have but one talent, and can do nothing; for you can even by one approve yourself. … For nothing is so pleasing to God, as to live for the common advantage.”
“Almighty God, whose loving hand hath given us all that we possess: Grant us grace that we may honor thee with our substance, and, remembering the account which we must one day give, may be faithful stewards of thy bounty, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” — The prayer book has a collect built on the reckoning in this parable, and it asks not to be spared the accounting but to be made ready for it.
“The parable of the talents is among the most abused texts in the New Testament.”
We are so fixated on money that we are always sure there is about to be a global financial crisis from which we cannot recover. Into this anxious time come Matthew and Jesus with a parable about who God is, and about the value of investing.
A master goes away, leaves funds to be managed, and returns to find one steward who has not been a steward at all, but has buried the master’s treasure. The scene is ugly, but the message is clear: risking for the kingdom of God, and being prepared for the master’s return, is a task to be embarked upon at this very moment.
In this passage Jesus is teaching about the end times. Are we waiting for the kingdom of God? If so, when is it coming? Jesus’ intent appears to be to say that the kingdom of God is now. Yes, there will come a time of judgment — but now is our time of work.
The goal is to be clear that those who follow Jesus are to see life as the place in which they are to be tillers in the garden, soil tenders for God, and harvesters. Those who recognize their value in God and choose the Way of Jesus are choosing to work now, and not to wait.
According to the scholars Allison and Davies, there could be many reasons for the importance of the story for Matthew’s community. Perhaps because rabbis at the time taught people to ensure confession just before their death; or maybe it is important because there is some waning enthusiasm in the community as years pass between Jesus’ ascension and his return. We do not know.
If we take this whole section of teaching, between 24:36 and 25:30, there is a stark contrast that emerges between the work of everyday life and the end time. We have people feasting and marrying; we have people working and serving. It is contrasted with images of fire and earthquakes, famine and disaster. (Allison & Davies, Matthew, 412)
N. T. Wright, in his inaugural address at St. Mary’s College, wrote this:
It was, as Acts 17 indicates, the royal announcement, right under Caesar’s nose, that there was “another king, namely Jesus.” And Paul believed that this royal announcement, like that of Caesar, was not a take-it-or-leave-it affair. It was a powerful summons through which the living God worked by his Spirit in hearts and minds, to transform human character and motivation, producing the tell-tale signs of faith, hope and love which Paul regarded as the biblically prophesied marks of God’s true people.
Wright’s lecture has been sticking with me, and as I think of it in connection with the everyday life Jesus speaks about in this section, I am struck by how important it was to Paul, to the early Gospel writers, to the first followers of Jesus — indeed to Jesus himself — that our work as creatures of God and followers of Jesus is to be about our master’s work, and to do so with a sense of urgency.
When we fear the end and are paralyzed into inaction, or conversely when we place the end so far in front of us that we need not pay attention to it, we are likely to be burying the possibility of living now in the reign of God.
When, however, we choose God as our master and Jesus as our Lord, we bring accountability close at hand, and in so doing may in fact be encouraged to risk for the sake of the Gospel. If we overturn the cry at the praetorium, “We have no king but Caesar,” and claim instead that Jesus is the ruler of our lives, we may indeed begin, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to live out our lives in faith, hope, and love.
What greater investment can there be? What better time to invest than now?
“These days the idols have major corporate sponsorship and represent powerful vested interests, but from much of Christianity there is little about which they need to be warned. Paul believes Christians should not be so drowsy and drunk, but should assert the radical new way of faith and love and hope. His world needed it, and so does ours.”
“Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians suggests that as much as faith, love, and hope are observable characteristics of a Christian community, so is encouragement.”
Again we return to a conversation with Paul about the end time, and when we might expect the coming of the Lord. Paul is clear: we do not know when. We might remember Matthew’s teaching that we won’t know when it will happen. We do not know when the thief will come, or when the householder returns, or upon what hour the bridegroom will arrive. Paul then says that if we are working out God’s purposes in our life, and trying to live a goodly and godly life, we will not be surprised, but will always be ready. We may not know; but when we are living as followers of God in Christ Jesus, then we are always ready for the master’s return.
Why is that? Because we know that we are saved by God, and not by our own attempts at trying to work the kingdom of God into some kind of economic relationship that always benefits us. No: failure, sin, and brokenness are always and everywhere overcome by the grace of God.
But living a willful and intentionally sinful life isn’t good for me — so I respond to God’s grace by trying to do my best. Paul encourages me to do my best. Be attentive, he says. Rest in God. Don’t get drunk. Live a sober and loving life. Have hope, he says. And encourage one another and build each other up — because when we do that, we build up the kingdom of God.
How often do we get encouragement mixed up with “helpful criticism,” which is never really helpful. There is a significant difference between encouraging one another to be the people God intends, and discouraging one another with criticism and being in one another’s business. These are two significantly different things.
We are encouraged by Paul: live hopefully, live lovingly, live faithfully, and live soberly. This should and must be our message to our neighbors too. So we might offer to them: have hope, for God is a forgiving, loving, and gracious God who wants to be in relationship with you. There is nothing you can do to separate yourself from God. In response to this grace, live a life of thanksgiving, which is a life of hope, love, and faith. Let us do that together. That is a Gospel worth extending into the world around us.
“One of the slogans floating about our churches these days is “God’s work, our hands.” These stories remind us that those hands carrying out the work of a mighty and merciful God are women’s hands, too.”
“The gospel lesson for today is the parable of the talents, in Matthew, where Jesus warns against burying a gift that God has given. Deborah is an example of someone who seems to put her gifts to work in surprising, creative, and inspiring ways.”
Deborah clearly speaks for God, as is indicated by the direct quotation in verses 6–7. She is one of the seven great female prophets of Israel, and one of the twenty-three great women of Israel. Her words on living a life worthy of the blessed community of shalom would influence Torah scholars even to this day. She is seen as a model of faithfulness, and part of her influence lies in her call to worship regularly. (Tamar Kadari, “Deborah: Midrash and Aggadah,” Jewish Women’s Archive.) Like other great prophets before her, including Moses, one midrashic tradition — probably written by men — says she was guilty of the sin of pride, and that her gifts were removed from her. (Midrash Tadshe, Ozar ha-Midrashim [ed. Eisenstein], 474.)
Deborah was a gift to Israel, whom God had not saved but had allowed to fall into the hands of Sisera because of their worship of idols. The story is also entwined with the story of Ruth and the famine. (See Judges 4:3; Tanhuma [ed. Buber], Behar 7; and Ruth Rabbah 1:1.)
The Jewish tradition is that Deborah sat under a palm tree and taught the Torah. She is responsible for uniting Israel in faith and turning them from idols through her teaching. (See Seder Eliyahu Rabbah, ch. 10, 50.)
Our passage reveals the story in pretty blunt terms, unlike the poetry of chapter 5. Note that the working of God comes through Deborah, Barak, and Jael. It takes a group to deliver God’s people out of their trial.
What stands out is how Deborah, the main character, puts her gifts to work. Sara Koenig writes, “Deborah is the only female judge, and she is also a prophet. She hears and speaks for God … Deborah is an example of someone who seems to put her gifts to work in surprising, creative, and inspiring ways.”
Deborah as a woman stands out as part of the community of leadership. She shares in an equal way with the men of her time. With others, she gives shape to life with God. She is a guardian of Israel’s highest values, and offers them over and against corrupt living oriented around idols. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes of this type of leadership:
The essential lesson of the Torah is that leadership can never be confined to one class or role. It must always be distributed and divided. In ancient Israel, kings dealt with power, priests with holiness, and prophets with the integrity and faithfulness of society as a whole. In Judaism, leadership is less a function than a field of tensions between different roles, each with its own perspective and voice … Leadership in Judaism is counterpoint, a musical form defined as “the technique of combining two or more melodic lines in such a way that they establish a harmonic relationship while retaining their linear individuality.”
The Song of Deborah is one of ten songs: the song of Israel in Egypt, the Song at the Sea, the song at the well, the song of Moses, the song of Joshua, the Song of Deborah, the Song of David, the Song of Solomon, the song of Jehoshaphat, and a new song for the future. (Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, Masekhta de-Shirah, Beshalah 1; this list varies in different sources.)
I will leave you with Frederick Buechner’s take, which I find a bit cheeky. It is worth a read, though, and it reminds us both of the power of Deborah’s witness and of the reality that God calls real people.
It is a wonderful song, full of blood and thunder, with a lot of hair-raisingly bitter jibes at the end of it about how Sisera’s old mother sits waiting at the window for her son to come home, not knowing that Jael has already made mincemeat of him. Deborah composed it, but she got Barak to sing it with her. … Everything was going to pot, the lyrics say, “until you arose, Deborah, arose as a mother in Israel” (5:7), and you can’t help feeling that Deborah’s basic message was that Mother was the one who really saved the day. And of course, with Yahweh’s help, she was. It’s hard not to bridle a little at the idea of her standing under the palm tree belting out her own praises like that, but after all, she had a country to run and a war to fight.
“Zephaniah’s text is much like the judgment language we hear from Jesus in the gospels.”
“The poetic response to the elimination of God as a real player in the world is that God will have “a day.” God will have a time of intrusive self-assertion.”
“If we can move beyond our initial anxiety at Zephaniah’s rhetoric of judgment, this passage offers marvelous opportunities for pedagogical, liturgical, and pastoral engagement.”
I do not know this passage well. We only read it a few times in the three-year cycle. So I will lean on Walter Brueggemann’s excellent essay.
Zephaniah’s prophecy is one of doom and despair. It is, in Brueggemann’s words, “extravagant” and “hyperbolic.” Brueggemann points out that the gift of the prophets was the foresight of seeing the road being taken by the people. Meanwhile the people live either with their eyes below the horizon or in denial, seeking to avoid the unavoidable accountability of how their actions are affecting their very own future. Like other prophets, Zephaniah’s prophecy attempts to bring this future judgment to the attention of the people.
Brueggemann points out that the prophet is seeking a response from the people. Zephaniah is not predicting the future, but rather using extreme language to get the people’s attention. Zephaniah’s desire is to return the people to the “holy purposes of God.”
Countries get into trouble, Zephaniah points out, when the people forget God and forget the least among them. The least and the lost are never far from God’s heart. Societies reveal where their true heart lies, Zephaniah suggests, when one follows how the people seek wealth and forget the widows, orphans, and strangers in the land. When a society forgets God’s beloved, who are given special attention in the Torah, then that society is doomed. Brueggemann writes:
Rather they have decided, in quite practical ways, that God is no real agent in the life of the world. The old superstitions about God have been rejected and God, while worshipped, is seen as an irrelevance. God cannot do good and cannot do evil, does not punish and does not reward, and so can be safely disregarded. … In our time we, like those ancients, have found God to be an irrelevance to the life of the world. The so-called “new atheists” only bring to speech what is commonly unspoken but tacitly accepted.
The prophet answers this by suggesting that God will eventually have “a day of intrusive assertion.”
We are generally uncomfortable with such prophecies. We don’t like the idea of accountability, or of particular kinds of responsibility. We like to believe we are free of responsibility for the actions of others, or for consequences we could not have imagined. But Zephaniah reminds us that God watches over the poor, the widow, and the orphan. God intends to be part of the world. God is a part of the world. God does not withhold destruction, especially when people’s own sinfulness and self-absorption rule. There are very real-world consequences to a society like Zephaniah’s, when people forget to serve the good and the One who is good.
The Scripture is not about the people of Israel. The Scripture is about God; it is God’s narrative, and it is about how people have responded, or not responded, to God’s invitation to walk with God. Zephaniah is pointing this out, calling our attention to the work that is in front of us.
Zephaniah is hoping to move our hearts, so as to remind us and call us to action. Zephaniah desires that people see that we don’t control the future at all — such control is merely a fiction. Instead, what lies before us is the accountability of lives led. Again Brueggemann:
The Mystery will — soon or late — envelop our self-confident control that has been greedy and self-serving. And comes then the uneasy, unsettling awareness that our tools for control are futile in the big picture: no help from money, no help from knowledge, and no help from arms. No help at all. … Of course such hyperbolic rhetoric might be wrong. Maybe our control will prevail. Maybe our mastery will continue in perpetuity. Maybe all will be well and all manner of things will be well. … But we may doubt that, as the poet doubts that. We do not know the day or the hour; of course not. We only know that we are called to sober awareness.
I am curious what it means for preachers to preach in such a way as to manifest the poetic imagination, and to use the story of Zephaniah as an awakening. Sometimes we think we must be the prophet, when the reality is that telling the prophet’s story, and the history that follows, may be a way into the prophetic imagination — such that people awaken to the reality of their own situations. Zephaniah’s time then becomes linked, attached, to our own. In so doing the preacher makes the past present. It becomes possible for people to see and hear that God will not, has never, and will never abandon creation. Instead we may gain insight into the holy ways of God, and God’s purpose for us in our context — which, it turns out, is not that much different from Zephaniah’s.
Chrysostom says the third servant was asked for the easier half — not to trade, only to hand the money to someone who would. What have you buried because you were afraid of the one who gave it to you?
Deborah sat under a palm tree and taught, and Israel was delivered by her, by Barak, and by Jael together. Whose gifts in your congregation are buried simply because no one has asked them to use them?
