August 12, 2007

By Harry T. Cook
Luke 12: 32-40
The title of this sermon (“Is It Worth All This Effort?”) must in some way be a general reaction to the breathless mandate set forth in today’s gospel text from Luke. Sell possessions. Give alms. Be dressed for action. Have your lamps lit. Be ready.

It’s hard enough for the Church Militant Here In Earth to get people to bring stuff for bake sales and to teach Sunday School or to join the choir or to pledge and pay a reasonable amount, never mind getting them to gird up their loins for mortal battle and always be on the alert. Please!

Here’s why we don’t understand this text and, at least inwardly, recoil from its implications.

It was no settled community to which this passage spoke or in which it may have had its origins.

For such a community, it was not what had happened, or what was happening. It was what they were told was about to happen. The attitude and deportment mandated are appropriate to a time and condition that is temporary. The customary rules do not apply.

What Luke was talking about was the return of the master – a real urgency that was felt in some quarters of what we call the early church. The idea was that something had to happen to resolve the chord sounded by the crucifixion of Jesus and the resultant confusion of the disparate post-crucifixion communities.

The passage begins with Luke’ singular assurance that the “little flock” need not fear, because the Father is pleased to confer on them the kingdom – or rule. We may understand from this that the ethical teachings of Jesus summed up in what is known as The Golden Rule are, together, the framework of that rule. In Jesus, it is already conferred; the community has only to live by it and within it. Doing so, the community needs not fear. What is to fear when most people are treating one another in the way they themselves wish to be treated?

It doesn’t take a sky-rending Second Coming to banish fear and set up a rule of life – a rule of life, which, moreover offers freedom. Luke has Jesus say that those who would follow him should liquidate their possessions and use some of the proceeds to give alms. How does that free up anybody? Here’s how: To liberate oneself from the kind of onerous concern that is attendant upon the maintenance of many possessions and much wealth is to enjoy the rule which it has been the Father’s pleasure to confer.

Yet, this is not a slur on wealth. Wealth is the result of the realization of the rule, but it is not wealth that is liable to the erosion of time (moth and rust). This is wealth not subject to the whims of Wall Street or other people’s greed – a treasure that never fails. The freedom consists in the opportunity to give of the treasure in senseless acts of mercy and generosity.

As in Matthew’s version of this argument we come across in today’s portion the idea that where one’s treasure is, there will his heart be as well. John Dominic Crossan’s construing of the original is original in itself: You buried your heart where you buried your treasure.

As the First Century drew to a close, there was among the communities that had formed around the teaching of Jesus a longing for resolution and a fear of what might befall their little minorities. The advice of Luke’s Jesus in that situation was to be ready for anything at any time. Be dressed for action. The imperative has the feeling of firefighters who sleep clothed and ready at the sound of the gong to rise abruptly and slide down the pole to their waiting apparatus.

What this all means in practice is that the time is always now. To whatever numerals on the dial the hands point, it is always now. In every moment, in every face, in every event and development there exists the potential for that rule to be realized in its fullness. Members of the watching and waiting community will not want then to be encumbered by concern with too much “stuff,” as we say, when opportunity to do their thing arrives.

The odd-appearing allusion to the householder and the would-be thief is directly connected to the statements about the treasure. What’s true is that the kind of treasure Luke was speaking of cannot be burgled. It can only be kept against a day and time of sharing. That’s the beauty of this kind of wealth.

Has the church of 2007 buried its treasure along with its heart? Where is that heart, and where the treasure? How to find both, and how to give the latter from the former so that what our First Century forebears called “the kingdom of God” (and we might call “the rule of love”) may be realized?

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.