Bishop Yvette Flunder is a pastor in San Francisco, whose parish – City of Refuge - Chris and I plan to attend next Sunday. I remember hearing her describe once how, as a child, there was “The Bible Answer Man” on the radio, who would answer all of one’s questions about the Bible. If you weren’t sure what the Bible said about this issue or that issue, just call in to “The Bible Answer Man” and he would give you a list of Bible verses to clear it up. Or, if you wondered what a Bible verse or a Bible story meant, “The Bible Answer Man” would explain it to you in clear and simply language. Bishop Flunder said that it was everybody’s ‘go to’ alternative whenever they had questions, just to tune into “The Bible Answer Man” for answers.

Sometimes I feel like the act of preaching in general has become something like a weekly version of “The Bible Answer Man.” (I recognize that some of the better preachers now and historically have been women, it’s just a little more fun to use the phrase “The Bible Answer Man” because of the winsome way that Bishop Flunder says it. So, I ask you to indulge my lack of inclusivity in using this phrase.) Week after week, the congregation is supposed to do its part – stand, sing, read litany, sing, contribute, sing, and sing some more – but, at a certain moment, everyone else sits quietly and listens as “The Bible Answer Man” opens the Bible, reads a text, then proceeds to tell us what it means. It’s a time of the week that can mean anything from “absolute boredom” to “wonderfully fascinating,” over a period that can be from what seems like a flash to what seems like an eternity. And, particularly in uppity Protestant churches, it is often a time when everyone’s primary responsibility is to keep themselves and their children quiet.

Of course, there is some fine meaning behind this moment. We believe that some folks have a call to study and proclaim the Scriptures as gifted and trained preachers among us. And, in a world that has no lack of talking heads spouting their opinions or spinning their paid points of view, we like to think that the sermon is a time when we are listening for a different kind of word. Specifically, a word that has been disciplined by a study of the Scriptures, in order to listen to what God’s Spirit is saying to us today. That disposition is powerful, but it often does reduce our roles in worship to “The Bible Answer Man” and “The Quiet, Passive Congregation.”

This morning I invite you to be actively engaged in our process of listening and proclaiming God’s Word. There are two, very different ways to hear today’s Scripture reading from Matthew’s gospel, a parable about Slaves and the Money that is left to their care. I want to present them to you, and in doing so, to invite you to consider how you hear the Word of the Lord in this story.

The first way to hear this story is what I would call a “prescriptive” reading of the parable. It is a popular way of reading this parable and probably the way that most of us have read it through the years. The Master in this story is Jesus, the one who has ascended into heaven – or who has gone away on a journey – and who will be returning one day to see what his servants have done with what was left in their care. Each servant has been left with a different amount, depending on their abilities. And while a “talent” is literally a Greek term for a large sum of money, we tend to read the word “talent” as metaphorical for any number of things or responsibilities that God has left in our care. So, the Master is Jesus, we are the servants responsible to make good use of the Master’s possessions that are left under our care, and there will be a day of reckoning one day when the Master returns to see what we have done with what was left with us.

The first servant, then, is the one who has the most innate ability, was left with the greatest amount of talents, and who has doubled that value of those talents for his Master. As such, he is welcomed into “the joy of his Master” as a reward. The second servant has less ability from the outset, and therefore is given charge of less talents, but has performed just as admirably with what he was given and also has doubled his Master’s goods. He, too, is welcomed into the Master’s joy. The third servant, then, is the one who is at fault in this story. He is only entrusted with one talent – a lesser sum, but still quite an enormous sum of money – and he took that talent and buried it in the ground, which was a common way of storing money safely. As such he is a “wicked and lazy servant,” according to Jesus, the Master, because he did not even have the sense to invest the money in a bank, where it would at least have gained some interest. This servant’s talent is taken from him and given to the more worthy servants, while he is thrown into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

The meaning of this parable, in this prescriptive reading, is that Christ has given to each of us responsibilities, for which we are to be good stewards until Christ comes again. Therefore, none of us is passive – whether we are the extremely talented or the slightly talented, the “Bible Answer Man” or the one who cooks behind the scenes. Each of us should be found taking risks and working hard when the Master comes – not out of fear, but as a way of participating in the joy of the Master.

The second way to hear this story is what I would call a “descriptive” reading of the parable. For some literary reasons that we will not go into here, it is possible that this parable and the one before it are not intended to be what Jesus is proclaiming as truth, but a description by Jesus of what some others wrongly proclaim to be true. That is to say, the Master in this story is not intended to be a figure for Jesus, but a much more familiar figure to first century peasants. The wealthy taskmaster, who is indeed as harsh and demanding as the third servant fears. In this reading, the whole parable is descriptive of a troubling way that the system works.

This reading of the parable also draws analogies. The Master is a wealthy, slave-owning profiteer, who makes his wealth by exploiting others. The assumptions behind this reading are a little unfamiliar to us, because this is all “pre-capitalism,” in a Jewish culture where it was considered unseemly to be enormously wealthy while others struggled to get by, where charging interest to a fellow Israelite was prohibited in the Law, and where the only reasonable way for the first two servants to double the enormous amounts of money that they were given would be to use that money to exploit others. For example, a farmer with a bad year might go into debt to one of these servants. If he should happen to suffer another bad year – for reasons beyond his control – the most common way of paying the debt would be to forfeit the land, which the servant would then sell at a great profit, recouping the original investment and making an enormous profit.

The Jewish folk of the 1^st century knew this debt crisis well, since many of them were landless. Of course, they had in their history and Scriptures the practice of the year of Jubilee, where on occasion every debt was forgiven and forfeited lands were returned to their original owners. The whole purpose of this practice of “Sabbath Economics” was to ensure that nobody would be perpetually landless and subject to the exploitation of the landed wealthy. Yet, under the Roman Empire and its way of doing commerce, landlessness was increasingly common, driving many people to the cities to hire themselves out as either slaves or as day-laborers. That is the historical situation that most of Jesus’ listeners experienced, so the moment he launches into a parable about a Master who is able to leave crazy amounts of money with his slaves and expects them to make effective use of it, they knew exactly what kind of beast Jesus is describing. He’s the one they despise, the one in cahoots with their oppressors, the one who had flipped their own family’s land on his way to his wealth. The first and second servants, then, are those turncoats, the folks who know better, but who are willing to crush their own people in order to curry favor with their Master. The third one – rightly fearful for his life – is the faithful rebel, who refuses to participate in the exploitation. And he pays the price for it, but that’s what happens to faithful people.

In this reading of the parable, the story is not prescriptive of how we ought to make the most of what Jesus gives us, but a descriptive story of how the system works. And, if there is any “ought” to this story, then we ought to resist the system, even at the expense of paying an awful price

So, now the question for an active listener: How do you hear this story? How is it “the Word of God” for you? How does it call you to live? How does it call us to live as a church that is faithful to the Lordship of Jesus Christ?