Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Sermon preached at Holy Trinity Parish, Decatur, Ga. (my sponsoring parish) for their Stewardship Kick-Off Sunday, October 30, 2011.

You knew it was coming. Fall is here, with all of its traditional trappings: football season, pumpkin carving, trick-or-treating, and, of course, the annual stewardship campaign.

Your stewardship committee, chaired by Steve and Ellen Bishop, have chosen Matthew 6:19-21 as the scriptural theme for this year’s canvass. Since we didn’t hear that passage in the lectionary this morning, let me refresh your memory.

In the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus admonishes his hearers against storing up worldly possessions for themselves, advocating instead that they should set their minds and resources on things heavenly. Jesus says,

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Until very recently, I thought this passage was about what you treasure in the sense of what you hold dear. I thought that Jesus was asking us to examine what it is that we treasure, because those things that we most value will be where our heart is. But that’s really a rather redundant observation, isn’t it? “Your heart will be with the things you care about?” By definition, the things you care about are the things that engage and move your heart!

Upon closer examination, it became clear to me that this passage is actually a lot more “in your face” than that. The Greek word for “treasure,” thesauros, means “what is deposited” or “a store of valuable things.” The word was used in other Greek texts from the biblical era to refer to state warehouses used to store government goods and for temple treasuries where offerings would be collected, in the Temple at Jerusalem and also in the temples of other religions. These religious “treasuries,” or “treasure chests,” if you will, provided a model for the development of private money boxes, places where people could store their personal finances.

In other words, the “treasure” Jesus is referring to here is not “those things you most value,” but your money! In Jesus’s world, it was storehouses of grain or flocks of sheep that people put away to “plan for the future,” but in 21^st century America, it’s often cold, hard cash that people “store up” for themselves on earth. That nest egg saved up for a rainy day, or the pile of bills you have stuffed under the mattress or collecting interest in the bank. That’s what Jesus is talking about when he says, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” You become emotionally attached to the things you spend your money on.

I saw this verse illustrated powerfully by a pastor at a mega-church in South Carolina that I attended while I was visiting a friend. Allow me to share this very high-tech mega-church sermon illustration with you:

In this hand I have a nice pink heart. And in this hand I have a wad of cash. Jesus is telling us in this passage that where this (money) goes, this (heart) will follow. Not that if this (heart) is engaged with something, this (money) will follow, but the other way around. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Think about the ways you’ve seen this play out in the world. If your money goes toward an expensive new computer, your heart breaks when the computer breaks. If you invest your money in stocks and the market falls, your heart falls with it. If you give lots of money to your alma mater, your heart is suddenly a lot more affected by changes made to the campus or the curriculum, or the success of the football team.

When you invest your money in something, you become emotionally attached to it. We even use the financial word “investment” to describe our emotional attachments: “I’m invested in my child’s education” or  “I’m invested in the success of this new community initiative.” We may or may not be contributing financially towards these things, but we’re using a financial term to describe our emotional attachment. Perhaps this is due to this inherent link that Jesus points out between our financial investments and our emotional attachments.

If this is true, what does that say about how our financial giving to the church – or to other organizations that work to bring about the kingdom of God – affects our relationship with God? The mega-church pastor told his congregation that he was certain some members of his church had not fully given this (heart) to Jesus because they’d never given him this (money).

Now, when I first heard that, I recoiled. “What? You can’t love Jesus if you haven’t given him your money?” I scoffed to myself. “But surely ‘treasure’ in this passage means much more than just financial wealth. It sounds so crude to say that we have to give God a wad of cash to really give our hearts to God.”

But that statement stuck with me, and the more I investigated this passage, the more I’m convinced that that pastor was right. Because God demands all of our lives, not just some parts of them, and that includes even the areas of our lives we don’t like to talk about, like money.

We can’t compartmentalize which aspects of our lives we’re willing to give to God and which aspects we’re not. As the mega-church pastor put it, “If there’s anything in your life that if God said ‘give it to me,’ you’d say ‘no,’ that’s an idol.” And isn’t that so often our attitude towards our money when we feel that God is asking us to give it away? We’ll give our time and our talent all day long, but our money? Like the “rich fool” in the parable who builds bigger barns to be able to store more grain for himself for the future, we think that we can – and even that we must – store up treasures on earth so that we can provide for our futures.

It’s only responsible financial management to have a savings account, an IRA, an emergency fund, we say to ourselves, and to a certain extent this is true. But the problem comes when we think we are providing for ourselves, that we are ensuring our future financial success, forgetting that we are utterly dependent on the mercy and grace of God for our very being as well as all the material goods we have around us. We think that our money is ours to spend as we please, rather than a gift from God given to us to use for the service of God’s kingdom. Our hearts are focused on ourselves and our abilities rather than on God.

Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Where is your treasure? Where do invest your money? In paying the rent or mortgage? In fun outings with the kids or grandkids? In fast food? In attending theater or music concerts? In car payments? What does your bank or credit card statement tell you about where your heart is? Are you happy with what you find there?

Are there things that you want to value more, but you realize that other things have your heart? Maybe you wish you were more passionate about your faith or about church attendance. Maybe you wish you cared more about social injustices like discrimination or poverty. Maybe you wish you were more worried about the effects of warfare on children in other countries. Perhaps we should not just “put our money where our mouth is,” but put our money where we WANT our hearts to be.

In the same way that the Anglican tradition teaches that “praying shapes believing,” that through participating in worship and church life even when you don’t feel like it, you will live your way into the faith you hope to have, it is also true that “giving shapes caring.” What if instead of trying to will yourself to want to give or waiting until you felt called to give, you just gave? What if Jesus is right and your heart will follow your treasure? You might begin to care more about church, about God, and about working for the kingdom, because you would be invested – financially and thus emotionally – in those things.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

*The "mega-church" referred to in this sermon is NewSpring Church, founded in Anderson, S.C. but now with campuses in Greenville, Columbia, Florence, and Charleston, and with campuses "coming soon" in Spartanburg, Greenwood, Myrtle Beach. I attended the Charleston campus, and since the pastor, Perry Noble, is based at the Anderson campus, he was not even at the service, and the sermon was piped in on a live video feed. It's interesting how much of an impact his sermon illustration still made on me, even though I wasn't seeing it "in person." To watch the entire sermon, which was a "Frequently Asked Questions" about the church (the money/heart illustration was prompted by the question, "Why do you always teach on money?"), click here and choose "Frequently Asked Questions" (June 26, 2011).

The choice is ours

Sermon preached at the Thursday evening community Eucharist at the School of Theology, Sewanee: The University of the South, on the feast day of William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale.

Today we commemorate William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale, both priests in England in the sixteenth century. They are included among those we call “saints” for their work in translating the Bible into English. In a time when the Scriptures were only available in Latin and the reading and interpretation of them was reserved to church authorities, Tyndale and Coverdale worked to make the Scriptures available to the people in a language they understood and spoke in their daily lives.

Although their work was controversial in its time, having the Bible available to us in a language that we understand has become such a “given” to us today that sometimes people forget the Scriptures were not actually written in English! We take it for granted that anyone who picks up the Bible in a church or a bookstore will be able to read and understand it.

But those of us who have been in seminary for any length of time begin to notice, as we delve into our Old Testament and New Testament classes, the ways in which we have not truly understood the Scriptures, however much we’ve been able to read them ever since we were a child. The ability to read the words of the Bible in our native language has not prevented us from being ignorant about the nature and history of the texts. Some of our interpretations of certain passages turn out to be not only unsupported by the way church tradition has read them historically, but also based on inaccurate translations that change the entire meaning of the text. What we thought we knew and understood we do not understand at all!

It’s not a very politically correct thing to say in our culture because of the value we place on individualism self-discovery, but some of us begin to wonder whether it was such a good idea to put the Scriptures into the hands of the “common people” after all, when there is so much potential for misunderstanding and even harmful interpretations of the texts. As Alexander Pope once wrote, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” People gain a small amount of knowledge about something and suddenly think they know everything about it. Biblical interpretation has been no exception. People sometimes think that because they are able to read the Bible for themselves, they have the authority to teach and interpret the Scriptures for whole groups of people. Since the Reformation, we’ve seen the formation of sectarian groups who believe they are able to predict the exact date of the end of the world through their interpretation of the Book of Revelation, or groups that justify hatred and violence toward gay people or Jews or Muslims or any other group that they perceive to be outside of the “righteous” people of God that the Bible describes. We begin to understand why the Church had guarded the texts so carefully for so long. In the wrong hands, they can do great harm!

We could say that the anecdote to the problems of the destructive interpretation of Scripture by “the masses” is a healthy dose of good instruction from the priest, or maybe from a lay person who is educated in the Scriptures. But those of us who are “educated” in biblical studies are just as susceptible to destructive uses of Scripture for our own gain as anyone else. It’s not entirely clear that “the Church” itself did only good with the Scriptures when they were read and understood only by the learned clergy. The pre-Reformation era Church, immune from those pesky lay people’s misinterpretations of Scripture, was the force behind the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the anti-Jewish pogroms. Clearly, it is not only the laity or the “uneducated” who have problems with using Scripture to justify destructive behavior.

Although one caricature of church history suggests that the people who pushed for the translation of the Bible into the language of the people “saved the church” from its disregard of the “plain sense” of the Scripture and restored the true Gospel message to the people, it was not quite as simple as that. The problems of destructive interpretations of Scripture lay not in the lack of availability of the “true message” of the Bible in a language people could understand, but in the tensions inherent in the Scriptures themselves, no matter who was reading and interpreting them.

The fact of the matter is, there is not one clear, uncontested or unchallenged message in the Bible, however much the Church has been reluctant to admit it. There are actually two main motifs that are in tension with one another throughout the Bible. One asserts that we are the chosen people, that those who are not part of the people of Israel and do not worship the God of Israel will be destroyed, that ultimately we are the only ones who will see salvation, and that we are justified in celebrating over the death and destruction of our enemies. The other motif asserts that God has created and cares for all people, that God in Christ has redeemed not just those who believe, but the whole creation, and that “God does not rejoice in the death of a sinner” (Ezekiel 18:32).

Both themes are there. We can’t make a respectable case that the Bible only proclaims one of them. And thus simply making the text available to the whole church in a language they can read does not solve the problem. The problem lies with us – in which motif we choose to privilege over the other in our interpretation of the text.

The gift that Tyndale and Coverdale have given us is a larger “us” who gets to make those choices. Now that the Scriptures are able to be read and understood by the entire Church, and even those outside the Church, our decisions around interpretation are more obvious and transparent. Those who are on the receiving end of destructive interpretations of the Bible can read it for themselves and find the liberating message there as well.

So the burden of responsibility for productive, healthy use of Scripture in our lives rests with us – each one of us, individually, and also collectively, as a community. And perhaps this is not an accident.

Perhaps this unavoidable choice embedded in the heart of our sacred Scriptures was given to us intentionally by the same God who created us with free will. Perhaps God is giving us a choice, much as he gave the Israelites at Sinai when Moses presented them with the Ten Commandments. “I have set before you today life and death, blessings and curses,” God says to the people. “Choose life so that you and your descendents may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).

We have a very real choice about how we will approach Scripture. We can choose to emphasize the Scriptural passages that claim that God cares for Israel – and by extension, the Church – more than God cares for other people. We can choose to allow this motif to guide our lives and our approaches to people outside the Church. There certainly is support for it from both Scripture and from the Church’s tradition. But what are we really choosing if we privilege this motif? Although theological exclusivity may not always lead to a crusade mentality, I worry about the tendencies for it to move in that direction. If those “other people” are the “wicked,” and we are “the righteous,” why should we care if they are mistreated or even killed? In fact, maybe it’s our responsibility to take on their destruction ourselves. What are we choosing if we choose this motif?

There is equal support available in Scripture and in tradition – both Christian and Jewish tradition – for a much more generous interpretation of Scripture, one that sees all people as part of the “people of God” and rejects a triumphalist attitude that leads to the dehumanizing of the “other,” even if that “other” is our “enemy.”

There is a passage in the Talmud, the main collection of rabbinical teaching on Jewish scripture and ethics, in which the rabbis assert that when the angels began to rejoice at the death of the Egyptians in the Red Sea, God rebuked them. The Israelites, the “good guys” in our story, were finally free from those “bad guys” who had been oppressing them for so long. Isn’t this a story that calls for rejoicing? According to the rabbis’ interpretation, God did not think so. God says to the angels, “My handiwork is drowning in the sea; would ye utter song before me!” (b. Sanhedrin 39b) In other words, “Stop celebrating. The Egyptians were my children, too.”

I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of God I choose to believe in.

When life hands you lemons...

... make a lemon person!