I think churches feel obligated to break out the red letter words from Jesus found in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew at least once a year, “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.” (Matthew 6: 19-21, NRSV). The words may appear during the yearly stewardship season or when the finance team begins to fret about giving falling short in comparison to the mounting bills, but a recent incident made me start to rethink the power of Jesus’s words for the community.
Whenever I move from one church to another, I am asked to bless the pastoral leader who will follow with a list of things that the church congregation feels a deep attachment to, often called “sacred cows.” For some congregations, it may be the stained-glass windows. For others, it may be a structure, schedule, or way of doing things. In my current congregation, the organ is one of those items with a deep congregational attachment.
It becomes very easy for these attachments, whether tangible or intangible, to become treasures that we store for ourselves on earth but think we are storing in heaven.
How does this confusion happen? Because we place religious thinking as a glaze over an item or system. That beautiful stained-glass window that once was used to tell the Gospel truth to those who responded to visual stimuli more than words was bought through sacrificial giving and tended to with love. But when the goal of the church becomes to care more about the windows than the people who will never see them, we have confused our treasure.
Or if a church once had to hold certain fundraisers to fund missions or ministry and reach out to those who do not yet know Jesus, but now we care more about the fundraiser than about our mission, we have confused our treasure.
We miss the power Jesus is saying when we start to put things before people.
This came to my attention when a discussion about the organ became unnecessarily heated because of people trying to triangulate one another instead of being in conversation. What could be used to proclaim the Gospel became placed above and beyond our relationship. We needed clarification about where our treasure was located.
With these red letters, Jesus invites us to think about what our treasure truly is – and what it should be. When our tools become prioritized over the harvest, we miss the point. We miss the point when we focus more attention and time on our physical resources over the people entrusted with our care.
Lest we start to chastise a few amongst us, the reality is that we are all guilty of doing this. When we walk past people who are in need to get to our next appointment on the calendar, we want to control our giving so it doesn’t go to “those people.” Or we worry more about how our action or inaction will affect us than our neighbor—our treasure, too, becomes displaced.
What if instead of preaching these words once a year around stewardship season, we took them to be words that guided how we showed up in the lives of those who God sees as treasure every single day? What difference could we, as the body of Christ, make in our local communities and the world?
