Buried Treasure

Scripture: Matthew 6:19-21

My father had a deep and abiding fondness for stuff. He liked his tools, his hunting gear, his boats, his pocket knives, and his comprehensive collection of every device that was ever invented to help a human being catch a fish. Whenever he acquired something—no matter how small—you could sense in him the special delight that can only be experienced by those who spent their childhood in profound poverty, as he did.

At the same time, my father seemed to have a philosophical attitude toward all of these things. He grew up without any of them and so understood that they were not essential to his survival or happiness. He lost all of them, and had to start over, after the business that he had worked hard to build fell into ruin. And, as he grew older and struggled with serious health issues, he had to put these things aside as he gave up the various activities that they had allowed him to pursue.

Indeed, when I think about the overflowing garages and basements of my youth, it seems ironic that I can hold all of the physical things that descended to me from my father in one hand. There is a small wallet that contains his pilot’s license and a badge that he received for serving as a volunteer deputy sheriff. There is a silver belt buckle that bears his initials—and mine—and is so hopelessly garish that it cannot be worn in the sunlight. And there is a small plastic religious medallion that none of us knew he carried around until after he passed away. All of the other things he had accumulated seem to have gone by the wayside over the course of many years, many moves, and many changes.

This stark reality reminds me of the lyrics of a wonderful song by Guy Clark called “Step Inside This House.” The song begins with these lines: “That picture hangin’ on the wall / was painted by a friend. / He gave it to me all down and out / when he owed me ten. / Now it doesn’t look like much, I guess / but it’s all that’s left of him. / And it sure is nice from right over here / when the light’s a little dim.” When I was a boy I had the sense that a caravan of stuff followed my father wherever he went. Now I can fit into my coat pocket “all that’s left of him.”

When we read today’s passage from Matthew we may understand it to be offering a cautionary message about investing too much of ourselves in stuff. These powerful words of Jesus remind us that physicality is deceptive: it seems solid and permanent; but, in the end, it is ephemeral and fleeting. Physical things can be eaten by moths and overtaken by rust and carried off by thieves—and sooner or later we will have to leave them behind.

I think it is clear that this passage conveys this message and that this message is important. But this morning I want to suggest that this does not really get at the central meaning of these verses. Indeed, I hope to persuade you that this passage is only indirectly about the true nature of stuff and that at its heart lies something much more critical—something that can, and should, fundamentally change the way in which we move through the world and live our lives.

Now, to tease out what I think Jesus was trying to convey to us here I want to tell you a story. It is a very old story, it is one of my favorites, and it is one that you know. Significantly, Jesus knew it, too. To borrow a phrase from Philip Yancey, it was part of “the Bible that Jesus read.” So here goes.

A very long time ago, there was a man named Moses. For reasons we are not told—and probably would not comprehend anyway—the Lord decided to tell Moses many awfully important things. The directions he gave Moses were pretty clear, including this one: “You shall not make for yourself an idol.” In fact, God mentioned this prohibition before He got to the parts about not murdering or stealing so it seems fair to conclude that the Lord was terribly serious about this directive.

Anyway, Moses and his brother Aaron and the Israelites fled Egypt and the oppressions of Pharaoh and wound up in the wilderness, which made the people grumpy—very grumpy. They got even more restless when Moses wandered up a mountain to talk to the Lord yet again and stayed away longer than they expected. When Moses came back down the mountain, he discovered that Aaron had allowed the Israelites to make an idol in the image of a golden calf and that they were dancing around it in wild abandon. Moses was outraged at this plain violation of a plain rule.

Please permit me here to take a brief detour. When Moses confronted Aaron about this offense, his brother offered up an excuse that can only strike us—to use the parlance of today—as unbelievably lame. Aaron told Moses: “The people said to me, ‘Make us gods, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him. So I said to them, ‘Whoever has gold, take it off’; so they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!” “And out came this calf,” indeed.

In a New York Times article several years ago, William Schneider noted the tendency of politicians to “apologize” for their mistakes by using language that suggested that some unnamed individual or force was responsible. He cited as an example the notorious phrase “Mistakes were made,” which political figures of all stripes have deployed from time to time. Schneider jokingly suggested that these individuals had invented a new grammatical tense that could be called the “past exonerative.” Schneider evidently forgot that Aaron had actually initiated this as a strategy a few thousand years ago.

So why am I reminding you of this story from the book of Exodus? Because one thing is absolutely clear about it: it is not a story about a golden calf. After all, if the Israelites had molded this object to use as a lawn ornament or a doorstop then we might think their conduct foolish—particularly given the absence of lawns or doors in the wilderness—but we would not think it sinful.

No, this is not a story about a golden calf—it is not a story about a physical object, about stuff. It is a story about a state of mind. It is a story about where the Israelites set their hearts. It is a story about a decision that the Israelites made concerning what to focus upon, what to love, what to treasure.

Indeed, the Second Commandment is not limited to tchotchkes made from precious metals. To the contrary, the commandment says (in the NRSV translation): “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” The commandment thus anticipates our seemingly limitless capacity to fixate on things and make idols of them; and it tells us to resist that temptation and to set our hearts on the Lord.

In the same way, the warning that Jesus offers us is primarily concerned with an internal reality—not with external realities about moths and rust and thieves. Indeed, the point that Jesus is making would have no less force if we could figure out a way to manufacture something that was immune to those forces. Neither the Second Commandment nor these verses from Matthew turn on the question of whether we are worshiping something made out of Kevlar or corn flakes. They turn on the question of whether we have started worshiping something other than God.

Interestingly, this concern applies with equal force when we make a fetish out of something that has no physical substance at all: an idea; a doctrine; a memory; a tradition; a way of going about things. It applies even to notions of religious observance. Indeed, over and over again in the gospels Jesus locks horns with priests who so idolize a rule that they elevate it over the work of God. Consider, for example, their quarrel with Jesus over some of his miraculous healings because he performed them on the Sabbath.

Of course, this very simple command—to love and honor the Lord and to seek after His kingdom—is easier said than done. After all, in the grimy grind of everyday life such treasure tends to get buried under layers of other stuff. Some of that stuff is physical; some is emotional; some is cultural; some is ideological. Jesus cautions us that if we do not dig deeply enough we will mistake one of those layers for the thing we have been looking for; we will own it so devotedly that it will own us; and we will be lost.

At various points, the scriptures provide direction about how to find and hold onto that buried treasure. It tells us to seek; to be watchful; to pray without ceasing; to stand guard; and, above all else, to love.

We might sum this up by saying that to unearth and keep a hold on this treasure we must be constantly present in the quest for it. Without such presence, those other layers of life will wash over and obscure it. And in these our times, when we are besieged by so much sensory overload, the challenge to remain present in this search is perhaps greater than it has ever been in the history of our species.

I would like to close with a quotation from the author Diane Ackerman, who recently wrote a beautiful article about these contemporary challenges. She ends her piece with this line: “On the periodic table of the heart, somewhere between wonderon and unattainium, lies presence, which one doesn’t so much take as engage in, like a romance, and without which one can live just fine, but not thrive.”

Amen. And amen.