by George Demetrion
Preached on August 5, 2007
at the New Covenant United Methodist Church, East Hartford, CT
Our passages today are taken from the Psalms and the Prophets, the Gospels and from Paul’s letters to the early church. Hundreds of years separate the earliest and latest of our four texts. They are distinguished as well by their narrative forms—a historical accounting in Psalm 107 of a people called by God out of slavery to journey through the desert toward God’s restorative land. Through the haunting beauty of Hosea’s imagery God is portrayed as a loving mother whose compassion grows warm and tender; a loving God who never gives up on her child, however seemingly lost she may be.
As presented in Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians we are called to keep our lives hidden with Christ whose power is invisible to the world, but visible everywhere to those who hear his name through the indwelling power of his Spirit which the Father of Christ bestowed upon his followers at Pentecost. Finally in Luke we are presented with a parable about a rich fool whose desire to increase his wealth without regard for anything or anyone else was exposed by Our Lord as the biggest illusion of all.
The message: those who covet wealth or anything else, however desirable or good in itself, cannot in that state enter the Kingdom of God. For the spiritual principle can not be denied: We cannot serve two masters, for we will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to one and despise the other. For where our treasure is, there our heart will be also.
No doubt, these are hard sayings which we cannot even begin to understand or appreciate their significance for our lives unless God through his Spirit opens us up to them. It is with more than a little trepidation that I proceed in laying this out, for I am unworthy of the call in my own strength with evidence too obviously clear in my own failure to embrace those teachings that God through Christ has revealed to the church for the past 2000 years. Yet it is upon this rock of God reconciling the world through Christ, that I as all of us must stand in unswerving faith, with much fear and trembling, however much common sense and others may tell us otherwise, for all other ground is sinking sand. We, therefore, press on that we may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has called us to do and to be, forgetting those many things that lay behind, reaching forward to those things which are ahead: Those things for which God has opened up for us in each of our own lives and as the body of Christ in the called community of New Covenant United Methodist Church to embrace the promises that eye has not seen nor ear has heard that yet will be opened to us if we are so willing to walk boldly in the light of the eternal truth brought home to us through the Author and Finisher of our faith, Jesus Christ.
The statement made by our gospel writer “for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” may at first glance seem to have it backwards. Shouldn’t it more properly say “for where your heart is (what you truly believe and claim) so will your treasure be? In fact, Jesus does say this, in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount where inner predispositions, anger, for example, are the interior sources of motivation that need to be addressed in order that our external behavior and actions line up with the values that we profess. In this, Christ is telling us to clean first our inner dispositions. Corresponding behavior, then, will naturally follow.
This is a profound truth which speaks to a certain understanding of what it means to be religious or moral, where great value is stressed on outward conformity whether sitting through the worship service, serving on a committee, reading the Bible on a daily basis, or working on an important social issue—all good things in themselves—yet unless they are accompanied by a corresponding inner predisposition, or at least to the desire to have one’s inner inclination transformed by the spirit of Christ, the sense that we are not getting to the heart of the matter, a problem which all of us face, is well taken.
What then of Luke’s statement “for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”? I focus here on:
To put it straight out, we are what we do. The rich man was a miser because he kept all his wealth to himself. A person is selfish when preoccupied with his or her own needs, with his or her goals regardless as to the needs of others. Such preoccupation can at times be a good thing, for example, the pursuit education when called by God to a vocation of study, teaching, or research. Yet, when turned into an absolute, what the Bible calls an idol, such gifts that we are given, even the most excellent of gifts as Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 12 and 13, can too easily become a fortress when we make these rather than God the center of our attention. Thus, with the rich ruler wealth became a security system, like any of our gifts can, which can only be an impediment, holding back God’s infused Spirit, the breath of life that gives us our true fulfillment.
How do we know? May I suggest b y the fruits of what our actions have reaped in either bringing us closer to God or pushing us farther away. In short, Luke’s passage tells us what we already know: our actions speak louder than our words in which our values come across in what we do or own, or commit our most treasured time and resources to. As all of the scriptural passages we read this morning illustrate, we are all tempted, as were the people of Israel and the early church to treasure that which does not merit our treasure, which nonetheless draws us whether through a sense of need, ambition, hope, aspiration, desire to be accepted, or to be justified, or noticed, or to achieve a sense of satisfaction, or a release of anxiety in ways that only can but fail to bring us that which we seek, however valuable or appropriate or not they may be in themselves. I do not intend to say that God does not work through our desires for that may often be the case. Even still, I believe the following is even more fundamentally true when Solomon in Proverbs encourages us to:
Trust in the Lord with all our heart, and lean not on our understanding, so that in all our ways we learn to acknowledge Him who shall direct our paths.
For what would have happened had the rich ruler made this rather than the need to hoard his possessions his underlying passion? It was not his wealth in itself that was the problem, but his turning his wealth into an idol. Consider Zacchaeus, a head tax collector of the region around Jericho who Luke tells us was “very rich,” and also deemed a despicable person by the religious leaders and the poor alike. Yet, when he was encountered by Jesus he readily shared his wealth with the poor, whom Christ honored by dining in his home—this man whom the society at the time labeled as a chief sinner.
What would happen if we like Zacchaeus made this trusting with all our heart, with all our mind, and all our strength, and all our soul the ultimate reality underlying our daily lives and our work together as the called community of faith at New Covenant United Methodist Church? What new doors would be open to us? What new life would be open to us? May I suggest that God through Christ offers us a great, yet risky freedom in relinquishing control of the many things that hold us back which we can all too readily name. In its stead he offers us a more abundant way of living through the gentle and sometimes not-so-gentle persistently persuasive power of the indwelling spirit of God, and the embrace of a great community of fellowship, the hidden manna of our brothers and sisters in Christ that gives us new life, including, if we are faithful and persevering, the prospect of God shaping New Covenant United Methodist Church into the particular body of Christ with its unique set of gifts and opportunities for ministry that God so much desires us to enact. May we be ever open to these gentle and not-so gentle breezes of God’s love and power in our daily lives, including openness to a bold vision of what it means to be the body of Christ at New Covenant United Methodist Church right here in East Hartford, right here today and every day.
In terms of where our treasure is, and I’m preaching to myself here as well, to what extent do the actions and behavior that define our lives contribute, however small or large as it may seem to us, to the Kingdom of God as preached by Jesus the Christ? For where our treasure is there our heart will be also. Let us pray for and support each other as we seek to be so bold as to take on this awesome challenge of embracing the Kingdom of God right here, right now as our foremost treasure, knowing so well that we have feet of clay and can do nothing unless Christ strengthens us for the purposes for which we he has called us, first and foremost in service to his realm.
In the first and final analysis Christ calls us to a life of integrity. When all of his teaching is placed into juxtaposition to the totality of our lives, our calling is to cleanse the inside and outside of the cup, that is our lives, for the purpose of ushering in the Kingdom of God in all of the places and in all of the ways that have become opened to us. For God seeks nothing less than the restoration of the world and has called us to his service in bringing this about in whatever ways that we can, based on where and how we are called by the persuasive power of God’s Holy Spirit and sanctified Word. For his kingdom, it makes no difference where the specific locations of our calling may be, whether at church, home, community, or the workplace, but that wherever and everywhere we are called that we with God’s leading walk worthily of the call which we have received. The inner and outer cleansing of our cup, a continuous process given a natural bent to go in another direction, is for nothing less than to make us fitting for this task. This requires nothing less than seeking to make every thought and every action captive to Christ, even with the many roadblocks of our own making and of much else, the stumbling blocks that so often get in the way; for this worthy and honored service to the realm of the King of Glory in his church and in his world is the ultimate purpose of the gradual cleansing of our inner dispositions and outward actions. The treasure that we seek in turn is nothing less than access to the inner throne of God through Christ whose blood has torn apart the veil and to whom we have been granted in faith through grace privileged acceptance not only as servants, but as friends of Christ.
To conclude, it is for the cleansing of our inner and outer cup; our inner dispositions and our outward actions and behaviors which reflect on our true beliefs often more than we know, wherein God seeks to remove the things in our lives that do get in the way, however right and good, or not, they may be in themselves. Through such cleansing from all that impedes the things that cannot be shaken, our faith, and God’s ever present reality, remain. Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us be receptive to and act upon the grace that we have been given by which we may serve God acceptably with reverence and awesome respect for the majesty of His Presence. It is this very purpose which gives our lives its ultimate significance to which we have been called, a great treasure hidden in a field for which a person sells all that she has and buys that field. Let us seek our Lord’s guidance and the steadfast support of each other, the body of Christ at New Covenant United Methodist Church, and pursue this worthy calling with all our heart, mind, strength and soul and in the most radical sense to give all for this treasure from God through Christ “where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.” For where our treasure is, there our heart will be also.
