Sermon on Matthew 6:19-33

written by Rev. Dr. Luke Bouman

Matthew 6:19 „Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; 20 but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. 22 „The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; 23 but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! 24 „No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth. 25 „Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? 28 And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you– you of little faith? 31 Therefore do not worry, saying, ‚What will we eat?‘ or ‚What will we drink?‘ or ‚What will we wear?‘ 32 For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33 But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 „So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.

(I am indebted to Dr. David Applegate of Ft. Worth, Texas, for an idea that inspired this sermon.)

Happiness in a box

When my son Nathan was just a few years old, he had a favorite restaurant. It is famous the world over for its logo, featured on a sign with bright yellow arches. When we passed such a sign Nathan would begin begging with devotion bordering on addiction. The meal that could be had for a child inside was no ordinary culinary experience. Well, the food portion of the meal itself was ordinary: small pieces of fried chicken, fries and a drink. Even the addition of a toy, of the dime store variety, didn’t make the meal what it was. It was the name, more than anything about the meal, that set it apart. It was the “meal of happiness.”

The genius of this meal is that children the world over, and some parents with them, are sold on the idea that happiness is for sale and can be had at the sign of the yellow arches for less than five bucks. And far be it from me to say that it didn’t work. Even when Nathan was sick and would eat nothing else, this meal would not only disappear quickly, but it would return a smile to an otherwise forlorn face. It was true to its name. It brought happiness. For a moment.

The difficulty is that the moment didn’t last. Sometimes the happiness was gone and we would be asked to return for another meal of “happiness” before we were even out the door. It seemed that there was a hole inside of Nathan that could only be filled with a meal of happiness. But the hole was growing. It never really could be filled, and the more happiness he had, the more he wanted.

You would think that as adults we are beyond such thinking, beyond the wiles of marketing people. Corporate America is not betting on that. As adults we have simply moved to bigger and better things that might fill the growing hole inside of us. It seems true, that old bit of folk wisdom, “The only difference between men and boys are the size and the cost of their toys.”

Technology companies make a living on the principle of planned obsolescence. They introduce new gadgets at a pace that renders the old ones obsolete almost the day we buy them. All of this is to make us want more, and more, and more. The idea, somewhere behind all of this, is that if ever we have “enough” we’ll be happy. But the hole inside of us grows, and expands so that it is always larger than what we have to fill it. In fact, we are never full. The more we have the more we want. It is the trap of consumerism, and is an addiction as powerful as any that exists. The difficulty in our culture is that so many of us have it that we see it as normal, or even good and healthy.

Be careful what you wish for!

The notion of happiness in a box dominates our lives, and yet it is a disease that kills. Sometimes it kills literally, as when a person has a stress related illness from the many years of chasing but never really catching the American Dream. But it is worse when you finally arrive. It is worse when you finally get what you want. It is worse when your dreams come true.

It is true that some people think that getting what they want is God’s positive answer to prayer. They have not considered that it may be God’s judgement, abandoning us to our hearts desire and seeing how we fare. The god of our appetites is something that will consume everything around us, our possessions, our relationships, our very spirit itself. This god is not merciful and demands more and more from us until we are completely spent.

The false god of consumerism leads not to lives that are happy and satisfied, but lives that are fragmented and broken. The false god of consumerism leads to a whole culture of emptiness in the midst of excess. Comedian George Carlin talks this when he does a routine about “stuff.” People have so much stuff that a whole industry has grown up around stuff. We have whole stores dedicated just to the idea that we need more stuff to use to store our other stuff. We even rent storage units to keep our excess stuff. We hold garage sales in order to get rid of our old, but still useful stuff so we can get even more stuff. We never know when enough is enough.

Certainly we fight off anyone who comes to us and tries to tear away from us some of those resources that we count on to get more stuff. We resent it when our taxes go up. We vote for politicians who promise us that we will be able to keep more of OUR money. We resent it when Churches hold financial drives, telling ourselves that they are only interested in our money, or giving just enough to get people off our backs so we can get back to the serious business of gathering more stuff, even though more stuff doesn’t do any more for our lives than less stuff did.

Where your treasure is…

Jesus knows about the dangers of this way of life when he speaks the words of Matthew 6. He knows that we are tempted to think our possession are ours, and that we are equally tempted to find our identity in those possessions. He knows that our worry of having enough will begin to drive a wedge between us and each other, between us and God. That’s why he warns us about the dangers. In fact, the whole bible seems much more concerned with monetary sin than any other kind of sin. Jesus says what he says because he represents a God who can liberate us from the “Chinese finger puzzle” of our addiction to stuff.

Jesus reinforces the notion that everything we have is Gods. We own nothing. We depend on God for it. We worship God out of thanks for receiving it, and we spend our lives figuring out how to be wise managers of the resources we have. We do not need to worry about where the next necessity will come from, for God does indeed provide (if we ourselves don’t get in the way). Then Jesus says the interesting words at the end of this section. “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

Almost always, in the past, when I”ve heard this passage, I am encouraged to think that this is a surefire way to find out where someone’s heart really is. “Just look where their money goes, and you will find the place where their heart is,” goes the common wisdom about this saying of Jesus. This is bad news, especially for those who are rich. We can’t seem to make sure that our hearts are completely devoted to God when we have to take care of our stuff.

Mark Powell, in his new book, Giving to God, (Eerdmans 2006) suggests that there is good news in this passage as well. He suggests that we can invest our treasure (or any other part of us for that matter) in such a way that it will turn our hearts toward the object of our investment. In other words, that by giving, especially as God gave in Jesus, we might turn our hearts closer to the giving heart of God.

The lilac bushes in the back yard of my parents house are an example of this for me. When I was 12 years old, I was commanded, upon occasion, to trim the lilac bushes. At that time, I hated those bushes. I would have almost done anything else than trim them. By the time I was 17, the trimming of the bushes was something that I had come to think of as my domain. I researched, found the best time to groom them, and trimmed them according to the instructions. I felt that my parents had entrusted their care to me to see to it that they would bloom the following year.

Several years later we had an old tree that had died, that was growing between the two lilac hedges. My father decided that we needed to cut it out. We planned for the tree to fall out a gap between the hedges and into the yard. The tree had other ideas. As the last cut was made, it began to fall straight onto MY lilac bushes. My instincts were faster than my brain. I leaped over the saw, heedless of the danger of putting my leg close to a chainsaw, and pushed the tree away from the bushes and out onto the grass. In the process, my surprised dad, pulled the chainsaw away and nicked me in the leg. I had invested too much time and energy into those bushes, and I was happy to save them at the cost of a couple of stitches. My heart had followed my investment.

God Invests in Us

Of course the model for all of this is God. God invested love in the creation, not only where we were made, but also when we turned our backs on God. God invested love in us even when we were inflicting pain on Jesus, God’s beloved. God’s love, the ultimate investment of God’s life, signals a commitment to us that is far beyond what we could have expected.

God’s investment in us liberates us from the tyranny of our addiction to self, addiction to stuff. We are free to give ourselves, even though it costs us, because we see the life that comes by God doing that very thing for us. We participate in that life and love through our baptism, and are called to struggle against thinking of the world as ours to consume and are freed to see ourselves as the ones who tend and keep the world, as we were created to do.

Of course this is good news for us. To “strive first for the kingdom of God” then does not mean simply giving God the first nod as we go about serving ourselves the rest of the time. It means sacrificing the self and choosing instead to follow God’s “kingdom way,” the way of giving love. When we build on the foundation of worship, loving God above all else, and the foundation of faith, trusting that God will continue to provide for us, then by becoming disciplined managers, we begin to realize how we will find the resources we need to fulfill our vocation as God’s giving people. And our hearts too follow our investment. God calls us to give ourselves to him, sometimes before our hearts our ready because God knows our hearts will follow our investment.

That is why Kathy and I became careful managers. An example was when we first bought a house. It was 4 years before Nathan was born, and we qualified for a much larger house on two incomes. But we chose instead to buy a house based on my income alone. When Nathan did come we could afford to give up an income and still give generously because we were not slaves of our house payment. We had planned carefully and not spent because our hearts were in a different place. It did mean that we didn’t live in the nicest house we could, such things could wait. We continued to be blessed in other ways. Most of all we were blessed by a God who gave us a heart for giving. Paradoxically, we found in the process that the hole in our hearts that could never be filled with any amount of stuff became full to overflowing, so long as we were giving ourselves in love for others.

Rev. Dr. Luke Bouman
Pastor, Tree of Life Lutheran Church
Conroe , Texas
lbouman@treeoflifelutheran.org