A treasure indeed

Last week I had one of those enthusiastic financial planner-type persons send me a very long email with citations from 15 different magazine and newspaper articles with key sentences highlighted in yellow.

You should do this, and avoid that.

Quick, make your money now before the next crash which is going to be a bad one.

Put your money here or there, and it will be safe.

All of that may, or may not, be true, but it is still not the full measure of what constitutes an ultimate treasure.

One could have piles of money, and an empty life.

And conversely, one might have little money, but a very full life.

It depends what we count as “treasure.”

(A.) There have been times when I have used the parables of the buried treasure and the pearl as the Gospel text at a funeral.

Especially in that context, we can hear them as referring to Last Things, about what is ultimately important.

The pearl purchased

the treasure found

the assortment of drag-netted fish,

the treasure purged of junk --

are all about the joy of hearing the promise of God's kingdom and its final success despite all of the foes we face, including death,

when we are ready to enter the fullness of the kingdom.

All of our other worries are not of ultimate importance.

In contemplating death,

hang onto this one thing of surpassing value, the promise of the Lord Jesus Christ made to each of us in Holy Baptism,

to name us as his fellow heirs of the blessings of the Father.

What wonderful Good News!

That is a good word, a gospel word, a word of encouragement which we need to hear...

but it is not the only word which can spring from these stories.

(B.) The stories may also serve as a warning to us.

Listen again: The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys the field.

So, he was not the owner of the land, but instead was a hired hand who finds treasure in the field as he works.

Jewish law states that the one who finds treasure without identifying marks may keep it, but if the owner is clear, it must be given to that person.

The finder does not publicly claim it but re-hides it in the field...

so he must know to whom it belongs!

Rather than giving it up, he rashly sells all that he has to buy the field.

But what will happen next?

He is holding the treasure, but he does not truly own it.

If he publicly claims it, then questions will be raised as to how he got it.

He has no way to live, because he has sold all that he has in order to get the field.

He is stuck, cornered by the temptation to corruption.

He is at a point of crisis.

The only way in which he can live justly is to acknowledge the one to whom the treasure truly belongs, and to wait upon the generosity of the true owner.

The kingdom of God is like that moment of crisis and that specific resolution to the crisis, Jesus seems to be saying.

Are there corrupting possibilities in the treasures we receive from God,

whether we stumble across them, as in the buried treasure story, or diligently work and search for them, as in the pearl story?

Do we try to own them, control them, claim them as our rights and possessions?

That is a dead end, and not the truth.

All that we have are gifts to us.

All we can do is to acknowledge to whom they belong,

in confidence that the Lord God will continue to be generous to us and invite us to use all these things which are properly his.

Instead of saying “mine, all mine,” he wants us to acknowledge that it is “thine, all thine.”

Are any of God's gifts of lesser value if we do not own or control them?

Of course not!

Their value come from how they connect us with the Lord Jesus Christ, and thereby also connect us with each other.

That is true whether we are talking about financial resources, or the promise of Jesus in Holy Baptism.

Either of them will ultimately turn into bitterness if we try to hoard it.

The extreme example of financial bitterness I remember is Howard Hughes, who despite all of his great wealth, died alone and miserable in a hermetically sealed hotel room in Mexico, desperately trying to keep out germs and death.

An example on the religious side is the attitude that if we follow the proper form for worship and the legal minimum for membership in the church and don't get too excited about anything, that is sufficient.

Both of those examples are deadly, if the standard of measurement is how they fail to connect us with the Lord Jesus and thereby fail to connect us with each other.

(C.) One of the gifts that we give to persons on The Way is a copy of Luther's Small Catechism, the classic that has stood the test of time.

In its brief sentences, it distills so much wisdom.

About daily life, it reminds us that repentance is not a once-and-done event; every day we need to recall our Baptism and by daily repentance drown our attempts to boss Jesus, to own him, or to manipulate him to our own ends.

Treasures, what are the real treasures?

A came across a sad story by a pastor visiting a friend in England, who had made a outdoor BBQ with a brass plate as the cooking surface.

When he turned it over, he saw there was an inscription “Sacred to the memory of faithful Methodist John Smith, twice chair of the property committee.”

Whence came this?

“Someone bought an old church and tore it down for the land, and this was among the rubble left.

It does a wonderful job on hamburgers.”

Here is the writer's summary:

“I wondered whether this congregation had chosen to invest in memorials instead of ministry to the lost souls in their neighborhood;

if their treasure was their favorable location rather than desiring a better country, that is, a heavenly one (Hebrews 11:16)

They sold the field with the hidden treasure, and so their legacy to the world was a hamburger grill.”

Ouch! That stings!

We do have to remember that the Great Commission does not say

Go make disciples as long as it is easy, doesn't cost much, or require our lives to be changed.

It is simply Go, make disciples...

There is much that we will need to be exploring along this line in the coming months.

So, these little parables of Jesus have dealt with us in several ways:

--they are words of comfort in our sorrows

--they are words of admonition when we think too highly of ourselves,

--they are words of challenge as we plan what next to do.

They point to Jesus as the treasure, indeed.

Amen.

Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.