Reconnecting the Grace-full Body: Treasures in Heaven and T-Shirts on Earth (Matthew 6:21-34)
Ordinary Time
21 Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
22 “The eye is the lamp of the body. Therefore, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light. 23 But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how terrible that darkness will be! 24 No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be loyal to the one and have contempt for the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.
25 “Therefore, I say to you, don’t
worry about your life, what you’ll eat or what you’ll drink, or about your
body, what you’ll wear. Isn’t life more than food and the body more than
clothes? 26 Look at the birds in the sky. They
don’t sow seed or harvest grain or gather crops into barns. Yet your heavenly
Father feeds them. Aren’t you worth much more than they are? 27 Who
among you by worrying can add a single moment to your life? 28 And
why do you worry about clothes? Notice how the lilies in the field grow. They
don’t wear themselves out with work, and they don’t spin cloth. 29 But
I say to you that even Solomon in all of his splendor wasn’t dressed like one
of these. 30 If God dresses grass in the field so
beautifully, even though it’s alive today and tomorrow it’s thrown into the
furnace, won’t God do much more for you, you people of weak faith? 31 Therefore,
don’t worry and say, ‘What are we going to eat?’ or ‘What are we going to
drink?’ or ‘What are we going to wear?’ 32 Gentiles
long for all these things. Your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 Instead,
desire first and foremost God’s kingdom and God’s
righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore,
stop worrying about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each
day has enough trouble of its own. (CEB)
I
graduated college right after the 2008 financial crash, straight into the Great
Recession. Zero out of ten, do not recommend
attempting to begin adulthood in the “worst economic downturn since the Great
Depression.”[1] Through a completely ridiculous series of
relaxed oversight laws, lucrative but wildly disproportionate lending like
subprime mortgages, and sheer overconfidence, the global economy toppled. Banks in the U.S., the E.U., Australia,
Canada, and Japan began to run out of liquid assets and manufacture ways to
prop each other up until they couldn’t and had to declare bankruptcy; homeowners
defaulted on mortgage loans at startling rates, leading to the U.S. Treasury
Department having to bail out Freddie Mac and Fannie May to the tune of $1.6
trillion. By the time bailout programs
for Wall Street banks had ended in 2014, the U.S. Fed had dumped more than $4
trillion into the U.S. economy.[2]
The
thing is, a much smaller scale catastrophe with similar causes had happened in Southeast
Asia a decade prior.[3] And trends are showing that now, not quite
twenty years later, we’re maneuvering ourselves to have yet another variation
on a theme.[4]
Welcome
to church, where we absolutely talk about politics, religion, and money, and we
even do so at the dinner table.
We
finish our series today on the grace-full Body of Christ, a series in which we’ve
been using staff positions to consider where our gifts and passions might be in
our calling to make disciples of Jesus Christ to transform the world. I hope you’ve found, if not a specific place
for yourself, at least permission that not all of you have to have, say, my job
in order for your gifts to “count” in some way.
The Body of Christ is vast, and there are so many needs and hopes and
dreams within it that mesh with exactly what you can bring, which is pretty
cool. With today’s excerpt from Matthew’s
version of the Sermon on the Mount, we come to the part of the conversation almost
no one wants to have: money.
“Where
your treasure is, there your heart will be, also” is a phrase that has become a
well-known platitude in conversation, although not nearly as well-known as “money
is the root of all evil.” Funny enough,
that’s a misquote: 1 Timothy 6:10 says that the love of money is
the root of all evil, not money itself. Even
here, Jesus doesn’t say, “Have no treasures at all.” This section of the extended sermon that is
sometimes called the summary of all His teachings is about intention: what are
we doing with our treasures? Where do
they live in our hearts, and where do our hearts live? Where are our minds when it comes to
considering what we have and what we need?
At first
glance, the long part of this passage that deals with flowers and birds seems
almost insultingly flippant. Of course
we’re worried about having enough to eat or clothes to wear, especially those
of us who live in Michigan as the winter awakens. We need only look on our own doorstep to see
those who don’t have enough and are caught in the wheels of homelessness and
poverty. I am not going to tell the
people in Palestine and Israel not to worry about food, nor am I going to say to
the people of Acapulco, Mexico that the flowers are fine after Hurricane Otis.
And of course we’re worried about
tomorrow, especially when there seem to have been no lessons learned from the
2008 debacle and those of us not in charge of economic decisions are absolutely
going to be hit hardest when things fall apart.
And we’re certainly not the first to know
that kind of worry. Jesus’ original
audience was more likely poor than not. Jesus
didn’t tend to attract many economic high rollers, not least because He had the
habit of telling folks outrageous things like “sell all your possessions and
give to the poor before following Me.” Professor
Emerson Powery notes that, “the reality of life in the first century for many
people was a challenge to acquire the necessities of life—like food and clothing—through
laborious living.” For those seeking
refuge and hope under the financial and social hardship of the Roman Empire,
being told not to worry might have been laughably naïve.
Except,
as is usually the case with Jesus, the surface cannot be where we stop when we’re
looking for meaning. John Wesley has a
sermon on the beginning of this passage and writes that this is entirely about intention: “What the eye is to the body, the intention is
to the soul…if we seek or desire anything else than God, how soon is our
foolish heart darkened!...as long as [we are] steadily fixed thereon, on God in
Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, we are more and more filled with
the love of God”.[5]
Jesus
is never callous—often direct and sometimes snappish, but never cruel. He is not saying that need isn’t real; He is
saying that we are going to warp ourselves if the need becomes our entire
heart. What god are we serving if our
whole being is anxiety? What god is our
master if everything we do is about shoring up our position here? What god drives us if all of our interactions
are about having more, or even about having enough, and none of them are about seeking
to love God, ourselves, and our neighbors?
Part
of how we know that Jesus isn’t being flippant is when we read beyond these
verses, yet another moment when it matters so much for we people of faith to
put Scripture back into its context rather than scooping out verses like fish
from a stream. Just before this piece on
what gods we serve and how we are not to be worried, Jesus discussed prayer and
how prayer, just like our money and our treasures, is a thing to be given to
God and not to be performed or lauded.
And as part of the teaching on prayer, we get Matthew’s version of what
we’ve come to call the Lord’s Prayer.
We
say this every Sunday, and for many of us—myself included—it’s become so familiar
that we stumble if we actually have to consider the words while saying it. But it matters that we do, because the concept
that we could ever stop worrying about food and clothing is buried right in the
middle: “Bring in your kingdom / so that your will is done on earth as it’s
done in heaven. / Give us the bread we need for today.”[6] Or, for those of us who memorized it in the
King James, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in
heaven. Give us this day our daily bread.”
Professor
Emerson Powery puts it like this: “Do not worry about what you will eat in 6:25
does not mean that food is unimportant; followers of Jesus should pray for
‘daily bread’ (6:11), but then trust God to provide it.”[7] It’s absolutely true that we are more
complicated than sparrows or lilies; for one thing, neither of them has to do
taxes. But it’s also absolutely true
that we cannot anticipate all the ways things will go wrong. The average person didn’t see the 2008 crash
coming; the people listening to Jesus’ sermon could not truly envision that Rome
would fall, or that the Man talking to them would change the world. If we borrow tomorrow’s worries, if we allow
ourselves to get so caught up in the maintenance of our treasures or the ways
in which we can shore up what we feel we need, we stop paying attention to God—we
cannot serve two masters. Either we bind
ourselves to anxiety and ignore God, or we trust that God is with us even when
bread is scarce and our clothes are ragged.
Or, as Bob Deffinbaugh puts it, “Every one of us is actively pursuing
some goal in life. We are all devoted to one thing or another. If we have made
our goal the quest for material prosperity then we must redirect our efforts.
The Christian life is not a matter of passivity—not at all. We are to be active
in the carrying out of God’s will. So when it comes to the matter of worry we
must deliberately and purposefully determine that we shall not waste our
energies on worry, but that we shall lay our hands on the task immediately
before us. It is not wrong to be ambitious and aggressive. It is only wrong to
pursue the wrong goals.”[8]
“Where
your treasure is, there your heart will be, also…therefore, stop worrying about
tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself.” Here at First, we have folks who help us do
both the planning so that we are good stewards of our treasures and the reorientation
to our mission so that we are good followers of the Christ Who gave us
everything, anyway. Marty and Jenn guide
our bookkeeping and accounts, and the finance committee helps keep an eye on
how we’re doing so that we can care for the treasures we have. You may have noticed some communication from
them lately, and we’ll be talking more about how we are trusting God with our
daily bread while also working to bring the kingdom here, to do God’s will on earth
as it is in heaven as we move into our stewardship campaign over the next few
weeks. Maybe chatting through faithful finances
is your deep desire; if so, let us know and we will gladly help you find your place.
Maybe
you have enough of talking about treasures in your beyond-church life, and that’s
fine. In church or outside of it, we are
still called to recognize that all of what we have and all of who we are cannot
become the focus of our hearts, our minds, our souls. That’s God’s spot; that’s Christ’s hope, that
we will give our very real worries and uncertainties to the One Who can carry
them for us, with us, so that we are freed to appreciate that there are
beautiful birds chirping away at us even while the lilies rest for the winter. “Desire first and foremost God’s kingdom and
God’s righteousness,” and then work on the desire of the rest of
it. Let us serve first the God Who calls
us by name, and let all else flow from that.
Amen.
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