Exodus 20:14; Matthew 6:19-21
A Sermon Preached by Donald Mackenzie
University
Congregational United
“ For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Matthew 6:21
Doubtless one of the greatest treasures a human being can have is the companionship of another human being. It comes under the heading of blessing. But because that is a blessing, the lack of companionship, or pain in companionship for any reason whatsoever, can feel like the worst sort of curse. It’s amazing how much drama hinges on relationships, how much pain, how much love, how much hope.
One of the ways we can understand the meaning of commandment seven is by understanding it as a way to hold and nurture the treasure of relationships, a way to encourage faithfulness in relationships and to give each of us the best possible chance for happiness and fulfillment in relationships. But stepping back, it’s also a way to see into a model of integrity and to understand the value that such integrity holds.
A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for some light reading among the paperbacks on our shelves at home and my hand fell on a book about Gandhi. On page forty, I came to these two sentences: “Gandhi had mental health because in him word, deed, and creed were one; he was integrated. That is the meaning of integrity.” For Gandhi, what he thought, what he did and his rule of life were all the same. When I think of integrity, I think of treasure in the same way I think of it in terms of companionship. And that, I think is one of the important links between commandment seven and the teaching about treasure, between the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. Integrity.
Chris Hedges in his book Losing Moses on the Freeway, shocks us concerning the nature of our reality. “We live in an adulterous age,” he writes. “We live in an age when promises and faithfulness, the hard work of fidelity, to values to the moral life, seem secondary to the drive to attain fleeting scraps of pleasure. Adultery is often viewed as a secondary sin….but the consequences of adultery, to the lovers or to those born from the union, are often disastrous, and from the Bible to the works of Shakespeare and Tolstoy, there is a conception that plays with the deepest, most intimate connections of humankind. Adulterers are thrust into a life of deceit. Children born of the affairs, can grow up with feelings of inadequacy or rejection. Lies as any affair goes on, pile one on top of the other. It is morally corrosive.”
One of the ironies of all this is that what is even more morally corrosive is the judgment of the church, of other people, perhaps most of all, of ourselves when we perceive a lapse in faithfulness. In the story of the woman caught in adultery, Jesus is quoted as having said, “Neither do I condemn you.” Neither the gospel or the church is about judgment. The gospel and the church are about forgiveness, redemption, reconciliation, being made whole, healing, salvation. Jesus’ ministry assumes that being human we will fall short of our hopes and dreams for our thoughts, our behavior, our rule of living. The power of judgment is to deepen wounds, to further erode self-confidence, a fundamental sense of worth. The power of forgiveness on the other hand is to heal wounds, to build up self-confidence and to shore up our sense of self-worth as children of our creator. And, the power of forgiveness is to encourage us to change our behavior, our thinking, our ways of living so that, somewhere, sometime, each of us might actually experience that coherence of thinking, behavior and rule of life that was so central to Gandhi’s life, so central to the life of Jesus.
The phrase “nothing is ever as it seems” is such a good illustration of the disconnect between our outer and inner lives. We walk down the street and see a friend and we say “hey, how you doing?” And what do we say? “Fine.” Or “doin’ OK.” And in that precious moment of connection, we are doubtless telling the truth, testimony, of course, to the blessing and power of relationships. But everything is relative and in the moments before and after those answers, there may very well be other feelings, negative feelings and memories of experiences that, were we to actually tell it all would not actually add up to “fine.”
The same is true for each of us coming here on a Sunday morning. We might look around and, seeing other faces seeming to reflect a certain happiness or serenity, think that we are the only ones in trouble. Be assured brothers and sisters that while some of us do come here occasionally with that serenity and happiness, most of us bring a combination of experiences into this room that often contain a load of trouble. We are not alone. And the church, because of its purpose for healing is a place we can truly bring those things and try each week to leave at least a few of them behind.
The words “treasure” and “heart” in the reading from the gospel suggest preciousness that truly transcends anything else in our experience. They point us toward that coherence that Gandh’s life (trying to emulate Jesus) shows us. And, they encourage us to remember the countercultural nature of the church’s ministry, how radical it is in calling us out of a devotion to material things, out of a devotion to the idea that material things can actually redeem us, and help to move toward that place where relationships, held as they are by the love that God is and that God gives us to use, can reflect our desire to be as truthfully coherent in our lives as possible and to be strengthened by the gospel’s encouragement toward that knowing that every human being is in need of forgiveness.
The commandment against adultery reflects the need to consistently and persistently ask the question, “What is really important in life?” “What really matters?” When we stop to think about it, we must each of us confess that relationships in all their variety and configurations, matter and that the strength to make them matter comes from God and for we who are Christians, the life and teachings of Jesus show us the way.
Historically, these relationships have concerned a certain similarity in experience, blood relations, faith and even appearance. Different faith traditions have not been in the habit of genuine cooperation when it comes to truly being more than just polite to each other. An experience is coming up that will break open yet another place where the preciousness of relationships can be experienced in a new way. Habitat for Humanity is sponsoring an interfaith habitat build in West Seattle and our University Congregational Housing Association is a part of that and will be inviting us to be take part in an experience which is already bonding, and will bond us to experiences that are in many ways, truly different from ours. That experience will help us to see new treasures and will reinforce the answers to the question, “What really matters?” Treasures. Amen.