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Grace, Mercy, and Peace to you from the Holy Trinity. Amen.
So, this week, there is a line in the gospel text about carrying handbags that won’t wear out in order to get to heaven...or something like that. And so, I thought it might be a great object lesson to buy a selection of Italian leather purses, display them, and discuss the pros and cons of Coach vs. Louis Vuitton...all as a way to illustrate what God *really* meant by making sure your handbag won’t wear out before you get to heaven.
But last week a sage internship supervisor told me that my last few sermons have been kind of heavy on the gay themes, and so obviously the illustration I had planned wouldn’t really do.
Plus, there is a lot of tricky business that I would have run up against. Like Jesus’ words to sell your possessions. Which doesn’t work if I had just spent thousands on designer bags.
This put me back at the drawing board, with a lot of instructions from Jesus. These instructions, while good for people who need someone to lay out their lives for them and give them rules about how to live a “Godly life” like the disciples who begged Jesus to tell them how to live, well, they aren’t so good for a group of people like you all, who are trying to figure out how to live in that grey area of life where it’s okay to grow your own food and shop at goodwill *and* still carry around any number of iProducts at any given time...you all get that Biblical rules for living are great ideals, but are often strictly unattainable in our society.
But, in the middle of this list of instructions from Jesus, I was struck by one thing he said: “Where your Treasure is, there your heart will be also”. Maybe it got stuck in my head because 6 years ago my pastor spent 7 weeks preaching 7 different sermons on this story in preparation for our annual pledge drive and this was the title of each sermon...but I suspect it was something else that got me stuck on this instruction from Jesus. I got stuck on it because I was thinking about my own treasures, and where my heart was and how what I treasure, and where my values are placed are focused on God...and how they aren’t.
Believe it or not, sometimes my heart doesn’t follow Jesus as much as it should and it instead follows other things...like when I read Buzzfeed instead of the Bible...or when I spend too much money at Lush instead of giving that money to the church...or when I roll up my window at the corner of Colorado Blvd. and Colfax so that I can pretend that the guys panhandling aren’t even there instead of recognizing that they too are children of God, worthy of love. All these things are where I put my treasures...and my heart goes there too...focusing on stuff that seems easy or calming or freeing, when really it just helps me avoid the difficult, but life giving, business of following Jesus.
I don’t think that this issue with my heart actually has much to do with my salvation...I mean, I don’t think that my salvation is in jeopardy because I decided on netflix instead of volunteering...or any other thing that takes my heart away from following Jesus completely. I think instead it has everything to do with Jesus’ last words in the story today: “no one knows the day when the Son of Man will return.”
I’m not talking about how these two verses have been linked together in the past....that if my heart is focused on Jesus, then I’ll get the treasure (which is heaven) when Jesus comes unexpectedly. Growing up, I had immense fear of the message that last verse told me (according to my evangelical friends). According to them, that verse meant that I could be raptured at any time, and I needed to constantly be vigilant about not sinning. Combined with other apocalyptic verses about families getting split up in the rapture and the hype around the Left Behind series, this all added up to quite a bit of fear for a child. So much so that one day when my parents didn’t come home on time from work, I just knew that they had been raptured and I hadn’t been on my game when it came to confessing my sins and living a holy life.
Instead of that abusive use of scripture, I was thinking this week that the verse about no one knowing when the Son of Man will return might also be talking about not knowing when or how Christ will come into our lives and change our value system...focusing it on God and changing our hearts. So when Jesus talks about treasure and our hearts, and not knowing when he will return, maybe he’s talking about us and if what we put our values leave us ready for God to come and change our lives, or not.
I think that,if we put a lot of value in “our church”, we blind ourselves from seeing how God is being present to us in the strangers who come through the doors. If we value our mortgage payment above everything else, maybe we can’t see how God works in someone’s life when they receive rental assistance thanks to money that is donated to DenUM. If we value living in a superficial emotional world maybe we can’t see that God speaks to us when we are able to listen to the deep truth of our emotions. If we put our values in food to make us happy, maybe we miss out on a multitude of people who are ready to love us as we are...broken and hurting. Putting our values in places other than Christ often times serve to build up walls to protect us and keep us from experiencing those unexpected times and ways in which God changes our lives.
See, our values...the things we give our hearts away to...the places we stash our treasures...our values sometimes keep us chained to seeing the world as we want to see it, instead of how God sees it. Our values, our hearts, can prevent us from seeing God’s creative work in the world, making things new.
After all, that’s what God promises to do. God is constantly creating and recreating the world and our lives in unexpected and incredible ways. God is constantly freeing us from ourselves and from others that hold us captive to ourselves and to treasures that don’t even have the slightest ability to save us. And maybe when our treasure is placed in God...maybe when we place our value in Christ...we’ll be surprised at how God works in our life and can begin to see what God is up to in our lives.
Maybe it looks like compassion for your boss, who you’ve hated for far too long, when you have a moment of empathy for them in the office. Maybe it looks like letting yourself pray for your passive aggressive mother in law instead of just resenting her outright. Maybe it looks bigger, like taking the bread and the wine and feeling the spark of God inside you, transforming you and making you realize that you are a child of God, not a child of the academic industrial machine. Maybe it looks like making the painful decision to pack up and leave a place you call home because you have faith that you are called to be in a different place.
This new life that God creates and recreates in us happens even though we often can’t point to the day or hour when Christ comes into our lives to transform us. And even though we can’t point to the day when Christ changes us, we can see how it happens, and why it happens. In eating and drinking of Christ’s body and blood at the table, we open ourselves and our hearts to God’s presence. Being together as the body of Christ, we can place our treasures and with that, our hearts, into the promise of God in Christ to free us from the values that we so desperately try to call God...even when they are not.
