Bulletin for Sunday, July 19th, 2026
Cat Goodrich
Faith Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD
July 19th, 2026
Perplexing Texts: The parable of the talents
Matthew 25:13-30
The girl was young, early 20’s, with a wide smile and a nervous affect. She was thin, like she hadn’t had a good meal in a long while. She was a stranger to me, so I was surprised when she showed up at my office door last week. She quickly explained, she’d seen the bulletin board outside and was curious – what kind of programs did we have? Did we have any assistance to help people who were in need? We stood in my office, the afternoon sun slanting through the window, as she told me a little of her story: that she’d been enrolled at Morgan, taking classes and working towards a degree – but then her mother died. In the midst of her shock and grief at the loss of her mom – she realized that the loss of income meant her financial aid package was messed up, too. So she withdrew from school, and was just trying to make ends meet now. Anyway – could we help?
Though we draw from hither and yon, Faith is a neighborhood church. We don’t get a lot of people seeking assistance on a regular basis, not like a tall-steeple downtown church would. But in the past couple of weeks, in addition to that young woman, we’ve gotten calls, another drop-in, and a former colleague – all asking for help, just a little help to get by. Maybe this isn’t so surprising… the price of groceries has risen by 3-4% since last year. Gas prices are up, making it expensive to get to work if you can afford to drive a car. And the cost of electricity has increased dramatically, so much so that there were 115,000 gas and electric shutoffs in Maryland last year – 15,000 more than the previous year. As one advocate told the Baltimore Banner, “bills are becoming fundamentally unaffordable for families.” It’s easy to see, then, in this context, why this parable is perplexing.
Because Jesus, in this parable, seems to lift up the two servants who make money with what their master leaves with them. He seems to be extolling the virtues of investing, the benefit of compounding interest. And in so doing, he casts the poor, the struggling, the risk-averse – the servant who buries his cash — out into the cold where there is weeping, and gnashing of teeth. But is that really what Jesus is saying here?
This parable is perplexing because there are so many different ways to read it. It comes up often, in the lectionary, and elsewhere. The chapter in which it’s found is Matthew 25, a series of three stories that ignited the Matthew 25 movement within the PCUSA – a movement which has given energy and direction to the Presbyterian Mission Agency for the past 7-8 years. Inspired by these verses, our larger church has found congregational vitality in the work of dismantling structural racism and eradicating systemic poverty. We here, at Faith, are a Matthew 25 church. When the denomination was still in discernment about adopting Matthew 25, and debating the core pillars of dismantling racism and eradicating poverty – I remember a colleague challenging my interpretation of this text on the floor of Presbytery! He took issue with how I read this parable.
This is one of the last stories Jesus tells in the gospel of Matthew, right before the last supper and all that comes after. He is preparing his disciples for life after his death. And there were a lot of faithful people at this time who believed the end of the world was imminent. Matthew’s community thought Christ would return in their lifetimes. So many read this story as an allegory explaining how are disciples are to act in the meantime, while they await Christ’s return. Are they going to be like the first two servants, taking risks to grow what has been entrusted to them? Or will they play it safe, keep their heads down, and bury their gifts like the third guy?
This traditional interpretation focuses on the word “talents.” In biblical times, a talent was a huge amount of money, some fifteen years of income – say $3 million dollars. But its hard to not to read “talent” as we think of it today – talent, God-given gifts, and abilities! If we understand “talent” to mean giftedness, we hear Jesus urging us to use our creativity, our abilities, to share the good news.
But the next story calls us to care for the “least of these” as if we were caring for Christ himself. Again and again, Jesus talks and tells stories about caring for the poor and vulnerable, critiquing systems that exclude and oppress. He often talks about wealth as an impediment to entering the kingdom of heaven. What if we were to understand this story not as an allegory, where God is the absent landowner, but rather as a critique of an unjust economic system, that privileges those who are already wealthy and throws those who have nothing out into the cold? When we read the story in that way, we find Jesus not with the capitalists counting cash, but in the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. After all, in biblical times as it is today, it’s expensive to be poor. Those folks who have their power shut off don’t just have to pay their unpaid bills, they also have to pay also a reconnection fee to get things hooked up again.
Several years ago, a Nigerian-American author named Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote an essay describing the dangers of a single story. As a student at an American university, she realized her roommate had absorbed just one story about Africa and Africans, a story that was dehumanizing and deluded. With a single story, the richness and complexity of a culture and people get reduced to stereotypes. But many stories have power, she says. The stories we tell can empower and impart dignity. What stories do we tell about ourselves and our neighbors? About our community, our city, our region? Here at Faith, in our learning and our worship, we cultivate a spirit of openness, curiosity, and intellectual rigor that enables us to hold many stories at once. There are many churches that offer a faith filled with devastating certainty. Preachers who give sermons filled with answers about how life should be lived and what we should believe. Each Sunday, a firm declaration of faith.
That’s not us.
Here, we ask a lot of questions. Curiosity and doubt are core values, because we are committed not to all believe and think the same thing, but rather to be on the journey of discovery together.
Accordingly, we can make space for multiple ways of reading and understanding scripture. What you read depends on who you are, the interpretive lens you bring to the text.
Jesus told stories – many different stories– to be provocative, to critique injustice in the world around him, and to challenge his disciples to live faithfully together in a broken world. So maybe this parable is challenging us to use our God-given gifts for the flourishing of the community. Or maybe it’s condemning the system that would cast out the servant who refused to follow the order of his master. Something is wrong with a world that gives more to those who have the most, and takes from those who have the least. After all, the last become first in the reign of God, right?
The good news for us, is that we aren’t stuck with a single story. We get to embrace the complexity and consider many different interpretations of perplexing texts. And look around! We don’t have to figure it out alone. What a blessing that we are part of a community intent on figuring it out together! Consider this a plug for the Wednesday Bible Study – but also our Adult Forum gatherings, and our burgeoning youth group, and maybe even the older adult gathering that’s just straining to be born.
Add your voice to the story.