Repurposed: Treasure

FBCGSO Sermons

Sunday’s sermon continued our summer sermons on Jesus’ parables – “Repurposed” – remembering that in describing the Kingdom of God, Jesus never asked people to leave their world. He imagined it in ordinary and everyday things, repurposed to make known the Kingdom. Read or listen to the sermon below.
https://fbcgso.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/08-21-2016_sermon.mp3

Matthew 13:44-46

The Sower by Vincent Van Gogh

Today I’m going to do something you don’t always see a Baptist pastor do…

Now, I’m not sure how many things are on that list for you, and I don’t want your imaginations to go too far, so I’ll just tell you. In one of the great honors of my life, our friends John and Kim Martin recently asked me to be the godfather to their daughter, Liza. So just before the end of our service today at First Baptist, I’ll slip out and over to St. Pius X to stand with family and friends at the baptism of Liza, all with apologies to John Smyth, our 17^th century Baptist forerunner, who so rejected the Church’s practice of baptism that he baptized himself so he could then baptize others.

But I have great hopes for this service. For one, my son, Jack, this morning was putting up a bit of a fight about attending church, and I’m hoping that after attending mass today – as I hope any time he attends another church – his conclusion will be that it could be worse.

But mainly I’m looking forward to standing near – to witness to a baptism in a way that I don’t practice, yet a way I can appreciate and admire – promises made to a child, pledges made for our hopes for her faith in Jesus Christ, and hopes that she will remember in some mystical way throughout her life that these promises were made.

Theodore Wardlaw has expressed the same hope for his children. Wardlaw, who is President of Austin Presbyterian Seminary and previously a pastor in Atlanta, is also the father of two daughters. And when his daughters were younger, one of his habits was to periodically put his hand on their foreheads and make the sign of the cross, as he had at their baptism years before. “Remember your baptism,” he would say, which strikes me as just the sort of annoying thing that children of pastors have to endure, but it became a ritual in the home. When they were getting ready for school in the morning: shoes on, hair combed, backpack ready, sign of the cross, “Remember your baptism.” Tucking them into bed: teeth brushed, book read, sign of the cross: “Remember your baptism!”

You can imagine how his daughters responded as they got older. It happened less, but he still said it from time to time. When one of his daughters was a teenager she was heading out the door with friends, “Do you have your license?” he said. “Yes.” “Do you have money for the movies?” “Yes.” “Do you…” and she cuts him off, “Dad, I’ve got my license, I’ve got money, I know what time to be home, I’ve done my homework, I’ve walked the dog, and I’m remembering my baptism… okay?!”[1]

But he wanted to instill it… to rehearse it… because Wardlaw knew, as Liza will come to know, as all of us beloved children of God know from time to time, that sometimes our faith, our hope, the kingdom that Jesus inspires us to imagine, sometimes it’s a small thing. It’s not sweeping and overwhelming, not dramatic and all-encompassing; it can be as concealed as a single treasure in a vast field.

It’s a small thing, which means it’s hard to find, hard to see. It can be difficult to remember. It can be so easy to hide.

In this stretch of the gospel of Matthew, Jesus is teaching us about the kingdom of heaven that is composed of such small things. He does so with a string of parables about the small things: seeds and leaven and treasure and pearls.

As the teaching starts, first he is teaching a large crowd. He is saying that the kingdom is as miniscule as a mustard seed, as tiny as a spoonful of leaven. The kingdom will surprise you; you won’t see it or touch it or possess it, but it will still move about you.

But notice as Jesus moves to the next two parables, he is meeting privately with his closest disciples, and to them he says the kingdom is like treasure in a field that someone stumbles upon, or a pearl of great price that a merchant searches for and finds.

The kingdom is that one thing in your life that holds such value that it makes all other things seem unimportant, and unlike the mustard seed and the leaven that he tells the large crowd about, when it comes to the treasure, Jesus speaks as though he expects those of us who follow him to discover it, to encounter it. Only he doesn’t tell us what it is. Jesus doesn’t tell us what it is, only that it’s something of such incalculable value that all else becomes dispensable.

Jim Collins, the leadership theorist, cites in his work an ancient story of the fox and the hedgehog. A fox who is cunning, brilliant, fully grasping the complexities of his surroundings, sets his mind on making a meal of a hedgehog. He plots the perfect attack. Meanwhile, the hedgehog, who is described as simplistic, goes about his business unaware. The fox attacks and the hedgehog rolls into a tiny, spiny, impenetrable ball. The fox is undeterred and keeps strategizing, but again when he attacks the hedgehog rolls into a ball. And the pattern repeats over and over, with new and innovative attacks that can’t get past the prickly ball of defense. The story famously concludes, “The fox knew many things… but the hedgehog knew one big thing…”[2]

The kingdom is like treasure hidden in the field; it’s one big thing. When someone found it, they knew it, and they said this is it; this is worth all that I have to give.

Jesus doesn’t tell us what it is, but he does give us some idea of where to find it.

That peaks our interest, because we all have a bit of treasure hunter in us. You know this if you’ve been in the mountains at all this summer, and followed the signs and the winding roads that lead to one of North Carolina’s great cottage industries: the gem-mining business. Cut out of the side of a mountain are these stops where you can pan for gold, or rubies, or sapphires, which is what caught my dad’s eye years ago when we were stopped at one such place and a local man hanging out in the parking lot flashed a sapphire the size of his fist that “came right out of that mountain.” Next thing I knew, my dad was back behind this man’s beat up car, and the man was showing him rings in a suitcase. “Alan do you think mom would like this?” my dad asked me. And that was the time my father bought birthday jewelry for my mother out of the back of a Crown Victoria on the side of a mountain. She doesn’t really wear that ring much anymore.

But so often isn’t that how we approach the good things of God? As though you have to climb a mountain, up some winding road, dig for it. You have to possess some sort of secret knowledge, or at least know an insider who can tell you the way.

But that’s not where Jesus says this treasure is found. It’s not up a hill; it’s at ground level.

In our parable, it’s in a field when someone seems to stumbles upon it. There’s nothing about this person’s efforts that are particularly notable. They’re probably literally just plowing along, like always, hands gripping the tools, teeth gritted, and they strike something.

And it can happen like that.

Part of the wonder of Jesus’ parables is how mundane they are – dealing in the everyday elements that are buried in the earth.

We might want to travel to some extraordinary, holy place to search for it. We might think we have to climb a mountain or into a cave.

But it turns out that the kingdom and all its possibility is hidden in plain view, not in any of the places the slick treasure hunters would be sure to check, but maybe in the last place we look, on the ground that we walk, or beneath the surface of our everyday, ordinary lives.

See, in describing the kingdom of God, Jesus never asks people to leave their world; it need not be some distant dream.

You don’t have to go somewhere else for God to dwell with you. The parables of Jesus tell us that it happens as you are doing the everyday things, as you are drawing water from wells, preparing food, tending sheep. It happens as you’re baking bread, sowing seed, walking a familiar road, or plowing a field.

You can stumble upon it, which is underscored when you compare this parable of treasure to the parable of the pearl that comes next. Unlike the merchant hunting the pearls, the person who finds the treasure in the field doesn’t seem to be looking for it. But when he finds it, he doesn’t wait; he buries it again. He runs to the bank, sells everything he’s accumulated on his laborer’s salary, and then goes back to the owner of the field, “So, how much would you take for this plot of land?”

Jesus says that the kingdom belongs to people like that. See Jesus doesn’t tell us what the treasure is, not precisely. He doesn’t tell us what the kingdom looks like, not exactly. He doesn’t tell us how to find it, at least not specifically, but I think he tells us how we will know when we do.

How is it in the middle of a field or the middle of a life you decide this is it? This is worth my all?

The one who found the treasure seems to know what is worth more than anything else, and he clears all else away in favor of this one big thing.

Jesus seems to be saying this is the way we are to live, finding treasure in the earth of our world and pursuing it no matter the cost or the consequence.

How do we know which is real and which is fake? How do we know treasure when it doesn’t look like treasure? How do you know that you’re ready to give up everything else, when you’ve stumbled upon something of such great value? We’ll know it’s real – we’ll know we’ve found it – because of this quality that describes the man in our parable, “In his joy.”

Right in between when the treasure was found and the field was bought, Jesus uses this phrase. The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field which someone found and hid again, and then in his joy he goes to sell all and buy that field.

When we find it, there will be joy, all-encompassing joy.

And when we find it, Jesus tells us how to respond.

When you find something of great value that makes other things you own seem dispensable, something that gives you that all-encompassing joy, don’t think twice. If you’ve found the kingdom, stake your life on it.

It can be a tiny and overshadowed reality at times, but once you’ve found it, once you’ve experienced it, give your life to it. Buy the whole field, for it’s the kind of thing that can start to make us different people and this world a different place.

It is worth our wholesale efforts. For it does not come through piecemeal approaches; it won’t come about through all the best proven practices, the safe and secure strategies.

Sell all and give your money to the poor, Jesus says to the rich young man.

Drop your nets, and follow me into a whole new way of being, he says to the disciples, come along and you will become more than you knew you could be.

Jesus tells people, if they follow him, they could be rejected by their own family. Everybody could turn against them. There might be jail time, beatings, worse. He tells them there’s no way to follow him without a cross.

And wouldn’t you know that some dropped everything they were doing, deserted their homes, let the fishing business go, flipped over the tables at the family shop, and followed him.

That’s what you do when you stumble upon the Kingdom of God.

It’s there just below the surface of our lives, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be claimed.

Just imagine there was the thing of greatest value, that made all other things seem trivial, that gift offered to this world, the one thing you could be or do or give or have—you’d want nothing to encase that, nothing to stand in its way or obscure it. You’d want nothing to bury it. And yet we know there’s so much that obscures it, hides it from our view. There is so much in our world that keeps us from seeing it, from discovering it, from knowing it. I wonder sometimes where it is found and how, and if I’d recognize it when I do. I wonder sometimes if I will remember it’s there.

In a few moments I’ll stand with Liza and her family, and I will see that sign of the cross, and I will know so much will obscure and hide that from her view, and I’m wondering will she be able to remember, will they all be able to remember, will we be able to remember that it’s there?

That’s what Ted Wardlaw and his wife wanted so badly for his daughters, which is why, annoying as it was, he made that sign all of their lives.

The day came when Ted Wardlaw and his wife dropped their oldest daughter off at college. They were standing there saying goodbye, wondering had they done enough, been enough? Their daughter gave them one last hug and then left with other first year students. And she rounded the corner, all grown up, and they stood there, not knowing exactly where to put their feet or which way to turn, and then just before they left the daughter turned back, and she’s 30 yards away, and she looked at her parents and she offers them the sign of the cross.

And in the middle of that field, they realized they had helped her to find one thing of great value.

Maybe you’ve been forgetful, or preoccupied, or cautious with this treasure.

That’s okay. It’s easy to do that with small things. It’s easy to miss something when it’s hidden in plain sight, when it’s as small and concealed as a single piece of treasure buried in the earth.

But, don’t wait any longer. Go out today and buy the field whatever the cost, remembering as you do, the one that when he found it, gave his very life so that we might find it, too.

Thanks be to God.

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[1]Related in a sermon by Benjamin Dorr, Northridge Presbyterian Church, Dallas (August 4, 2013)

[2]Jim Collins, Good to Great