Where Our Treasure Is

 

I could feel my limbs growing cold with anxiety. I was standing with tall, dark mountains on all sides of me—a tiny figure surrounded by mountains…mountains of boxes and bulging black trash bags, that is! My stomach clenched as the tilting mounds of stuff trapped me in a self-made prison. “How am I ever going to get rid of all of this?” I thought, completely overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task.

 I was preparing to move, you see, to "downsize.” My last child had just left for college, and I was suddenly an empty nester. Unfortunately, my possessions, like my waistline, had somehow expanded over the last twenty years. All this stuff didn’t look so overwhelming when tucked away in closets and cabinets, but now, brought out into the open, it was more than I could handle.

Yet, deep down, I still wanted to keep it all. “I can’t give away my grandmother’s good china,” I thought—“even if I do have plenty of other sets." I looked over at the boxes of family photos and papers. "I can't throw these away--even if they are crumbling and faded. Oh, and here are the piles of cute books and toys that my sweet babies loved so much. Maybe I could rent a storage room or two?” I reasoned with myself.

How easy it is to accumulate more and more things, and how hard it is to let go of them. I've moved several times in my life now, and each time, I'm bowled over by the sheer amount of stuff that has mysteriously sprouted in my closets since the last move. I can certainly identify with the rich "fool" in Jesus’ parable. He's not a bad guy. The text doesn’t say that he gained his wealth dishonestly. It doesn’t say that he refuses to tithe to the Temple or to let widows and orphans glean from his fields. It just says that he's blessed with an abundance of wealth, and he feels good about hanging onto it. He's even a religious man who knows his bible by heart: He quotes a bit of wisdom from the book of Ecclesiastes: “There is nothing better for a man under the sun than to eat and to drink and to be happy, and this will accompany him in his labor all the days of his life.” What can be wrong with a little bit of hard-earned happiness, after all? Right?

Like me, Jesus' “rich fool” isn't a bad guy, but he is a foolish one. He's counting on finding lasting happiness from the wrong kind of treasure. He has forgotten, as we all like to forget, that neither our fleshly bodies, nor the earthly treasures that we value so highly, nor the dreams that we spin for ourselves, will last forever. Most of us know, in our rational minds, that we “can’t take it with us.” And yet, we drool over the latest tech gadget or piece of jewelry that we see advertised, even when we know that we don’t really need any of it. You see, our gnawing desire for more and more things isn't really a rational decision. It's a reaction born of anxiety. The acquisition of things is a kind of drug for filling up the empty places in our souls. It's a drug that numbs the quiet dread that we don't have enough, that we are not enough.

It's therefore not surprising that the parable of the rich fool in Luke is found in the middle of Jesus’ teachings on anxiety. Right before today’s Gospel, Jesus preaches about the care that God lavishes even on ordinary little sparrows. Right after today’s parable, Jesus again reassures us, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life.” But we do worry. Who among us isn't worrying right now about inflation, about recession, about retirement accounts, about the church budget? “If we just get a little more,” we reason, “then we can relax, then we will have enough and won’t have to worry anymore.”

 We're lying to ourselves, though. When it comes to amassing possessions, there's never an end to the worry. “Things” only add to our worries: we worry that our things will be stolen, that they will be destroyed in a flood or a fire. As we accumulate possessions, we worry that we need a bigger space to store them in, and then we worry about how to pay for that space. Then perhaps we worry that we're spending too much money on air-conditioning or heating for that bigger space, then we worry about the climate crisis that our energy use is causing.  We even worry about the dangers to the environment caused by the things that we do decide throw away. And yet, it's rare that we summon the courage to break the cycle.

Jesus isn't trying to load us down with more worry in this parable, though. Jesus is offering to make us free. He wants to give us treasure that leads to life, in place of the treasure that is inevitably swallowed up by death. “Do not be afraid, little flock,” he says to us tenderly in verse 32, “it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” 

What is this divine treasure? The treasure that Jesus offers us is more than just detachment from the world of things. To be free of the anxiety that traps us in covetousness and competition, we must put not just our “things” but ourselves in God’s hands. To be rich toward God, we must be not just frugal, but we must love. The treasure that Jesus offers us is Love—God’s own out-pouring, self-giving Love. The kind of love that God shows us human beings in today’s beautiful words from Hosea, the love that is more powerful than judgment. It's the never-ending love of a Parent for her child. It's the love that brings God to pour out God's life for us on the Cross. Here at God's Table, we find God's Love in a tiny pinch of bread and a small sip of wine. And yet, God's food is always enough, isn't it? When we consume Christ's Body and Blood, we join together in Christ's death and in Christ's life. In Christ, there are no more boundaries between "mine" and "yours."[1] We are one in the grace-filled Love of God. Each of us is always enough.

When I read today's parable, I couldn't help but think of the founding members of St. Ambrose. Far from being fools, they must have been an unusually courageous and determined lot. They left a flourishing downtown parish to form a totally different kind of faith community. They wanted to be a community without a building that would weigh them down with costs and cares; a community without the burden of paying weekday clergy; a community not afraid to talk about money in their mission statement; a community that pledged to give half of all income dollars to serve the needs of others. Admittedly, this ideal didn't last long, as growth and church habits called for "bigger and better barns." But it makes me wonder what Jesus is asking our community now.

What would we do if God came to us here today and announced: “This very night your life is being demanded of you,” just like he said in Jesus' parable? What would we decide to change about our individual financial lives—and about our life as a parish community? I'm not declaring it to be God's will that you quit paying my salary or sell the building or go home and give away your 401K to the poor. But I am saying that we might want to reflect on Jesus' challenge. In these angst-filled days, how much is truly enough for a follower of Christ? What burdensome barns does God hope we can leave behind? What would free us for love, for freedom, for rejoicing in the Life that never dies?^[2]

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[1] See William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2008), 94-96.

[2] Question asked by Debie Thomas, "Rich Toward God," Journey with Jesus, July 28, 2019. Found at https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2291-rich-toward-god.

Summer Fruit

 

That’s some first lesson from Amos that we have today, isn’t it? It’s one of those lessons that I feel like I have to address in my sermon, even if finding the Good News in it is a challenge. First of all, I was struck by the familiar list of injustices that God condemns in Israel’s Northern Kingdom. Amos lived almost three thousand years ago, but he lived in a time of violence, greed, and injustice that sounds almost like it comes out of our news headlines. As one scholar writes, the citizens of Amos’ day “took pride in their misguided religiosity, their history as God’s elect people, their military conquests, their economic affluence, and their political security.”[1] Then, as now, God wants them to change their ways.

If the sins of the Northern Kingdom resemble our own, perhaps the metaphor that God sets before the people will help us today, as well? I don’t usually do an object lesson in a sermon, but I figure that if God can do one in Amos, then I might as well give it a try. [Hold up basket of fruit.]

So: “What do you see?”

 … Yes, a basket of fruit, a basket of summer fruit! I love fresh summer fruit, don’t you? Here at St. Ambrose, we know all about summer fruit from our orchard. I can still picture that table out in the parking lot last year, filled to overflowing with peaches, apples, and plums. The prophet Amos knew all about fruit, too, since he was a tender of fig trees. Yes, sweet figs are the ancient summer fruit that Amos probably would have seen in God’s basket.

There’s one problem with a delicious abundance of fruit, though. Unlike apples and oranges, which can last awhile, summer fruit starts to go bad much too quickly, doesn’t it? The pieces at the top of the basket might still look plump and shiny, but down at the bottom, hidden in the dark, an icky gray fuzz will start sprouting and silently spreading. Quickly, the disgusting mold will move up and down, in and out, from one piece of fruit to another until the whole basket is spoiled.

You won’t notice without reading the notes in your bibles, but “summer fruit” in Hebrew is a clever pun on the word “ending.” When God shows Amos a basket of summer fruit, he’s also showing him a “basket of endings.” Holding the cup of rotting raspberries in my fridge, I can easily imagine a rotten basket of endings— endings that run and stink, endings that we can’t swallow, endings that creep up on us through death, through sin, through time. Fear, violence, sickness, greed, destruction … they are all the bearers of endings. They all seem to spread through the fragile skin of our lives like mold through summer fruit, touching us all, condemning us all.

Yes, we human beings are all much too well-acquainted with the basket of endings. What we crave instead is permanence. What we want is to know that the good fruit will last. My tendency these days is to demand reassurance from God that the rot will stop spreading. My prayers are pleas for fruit that doesn’t go bad, life that doesn’t end, a world that is guaranteed to stay sane and safe. Actually, my pleas remind me my mother’s fruit bowl. When I was a child, we might have had an old apple or orange rolling around in the back of the fridge, but we mainly ate our fruit canned—DelMonte-style. The only basket of fruit in my house was an intricate silver filigree bowl filled with wooden fruit. My mother placed it on the dining room table for all to admire year round. Each piece was painted to look like real fruit. When I was little, I loved to sneak over and play with the smooth wooden pieces when no one was looking.  I would pick them up one after the other, slowly and carefully, weighing each one in my hands. I would turn it in admiration, and then fit it back in its silver bowl, like a puzzle piece. Each fruit had such a smooth, cool heaviness in my hand. Solidly satisfying. Unyielding. Permanent. Just the way I want my world to be.

 But God doesn’t show Amos a bowl of wooden fruit, does he? Left with only my mother’s wooden fruit, we would starve, both in our bodies and in our souls. God’s desire for us is far from comforting imitation. It’s not there just for show. True life, God-given life, is not a bowl of changeless certainties. As I pondered today’s text, I made an interesting discovery. “Summer fruit” might be a pun on “endings,” but “summer fruit” is found elsewhere in the Hebrew scriptures in a positive, celebratory way. Summer fruit is the food of kings, of banquets. It is fresh and pregnant with life-giving juice. Elsewhere in scripture, there’s no mention of it rotting. Summer fruit in other texts stands only for the enjoyment of plenty and prosperity in the moment.[2]

It made me wonder why God shows Amos a basket of this fragrant, life-filled fruit in the midst of a world gone-awry, in the midst of the desolation of endings. Perhaps God puts this alluring basket out not only for judgment, as it might seem at first, but also to offer us life in the midst of death. After all, God sends God’s Son into this decaying world, where he becomes a part of all of its messy endings. God’s Son dies in the biggest ending of all, an ending similar to the one that God describes to Amos. Remember Good Friday: As Jesus breathes his last, the sun goes down and the sky darkens in broad daylight. The earth quakes and is tossed about like the waters of the Nile. Holy Saturday, just like this gloomy section of our text, ends in utter silence. And yet in Jesus’ Cross and Resurrection, this Ending of all endings is also a beginning, the beginning of our salvation.

Could the basket of summer fruit become a gift from God, a gift to remind us that ours is a God who makes beginnings out of endings? When the world gets us down, perhaps we can imagine God carefully choosing for us a ripe fruit from a tree at the corner of heaven and earth. Close your eyes and imagine God picking a fruit gently from the salvation-bearing arms of Christ. Picture God placing it in your parched mouth. Can you taste its live sweetness, like joy? Can you smell its deep fragrance, like incense? Can you feel it drip down your throat with all of the life-giving force of that first sip of orange juice after surgery? Can you feel it strengthening you to face the endings we must live in this world, strengthening you to turn and offer this same sweet gift to others?

My massage therapist told me last week how people these days are all just so empty inside. We’ve been so emptied by the trauma of the last few years that all of the pain and grief in our world just bounce around inside of our chests, wounding us with each blow. She suggested that we need something to fill us, something to cushion the blows. Like the people in Amos’ day, we are in desperate need of nourishment from God’s hand. When was the last time that any of us spent any time with God that could be likened to eating summer fruit? Full of love, full of sunshine, full of health? I know that I feel more like Martha in my prayers—dutiful, asking for help to get things done. I seem to ask Jesus for a quick vitamin pill more often than I ask for the sweetness of a ripe fig.

I wonder what fruit Jesus might want to offer each of us today? Is God perhaps offering us the chance to pray forth our despair with a psalm, a psalm that’s gritty like a fig? Or to immerse ourselves in a moment of music, luscious like a peach? Maybe it’s time spent with a book as juicy as a watermelon or with a poem as small and full of flavor as a berry? Maybe it’s spending time on a walk on a path as grainy as raspberry seeds? In the face of all of the endings that frighten us, all of the pictures of violence and injustice that haunt us, all of the silences that overwhelm us … choose to take a moment this week to sit in the sun at the feet of Jesus, and take a piece of summer fruit from his hand.

 

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[1] Dan Clendenin, “Amos: Will Not the Land Tremble?” Journey With Jesus, July 10, 2022. Found at https://www.journeywithjesus.net/lectionary-essays/current-essay?id=3416

[2] See 2 Sam 16:1-2; Micah 7:1; Isaiah 28:4. See also Yvonne Sherwood, “Of Fruit and Corpses and Wordplay Visions: Picturing Amos 8:1-3” in the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 92 (2001) 5-27.