Storing Up Treasures

Scriptures: Psalm 91:1-6; 14-16, I Timothy 6:6-11, 17-19

Those of you who looked rather carefully at the sermon title as printed in the bulletin – or in last week’s bulletin when it was billboarded for this week – might well have responded with a suspicious, “Oh, oh, I smell a stewardship sermon coming.”  Well, not quite.  I’ll save that for when we get closer to November.  (By the way, as a complete sidebar here, I would be interested in getting feedback from you about having the sermon title and scriptures for next week printed in the bulletin – is this helpful as a way of preparing for worship the following week?)

What we are about this week is looking at all the things we have, or might accumulate in the future, as a means of leading us to what Paul in I Timothy refers to as “godliness combined with contentment.”  Great concept that.  Which of us doesn’t yearn for contentment?  Well, Paul here (and in other parts of the Bible) helps us to see how we might receive that.

We all know the phrase, “You can’t take it with you.”  A somewhat cuter way of saying the same thing is:  “I’ve never seen a hearse pulling a U-Haul”.  Shakespeare has a yet more poetic way to put it in his play Cymbeline:  “Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”  We come into the world with nothing and leave with nothing – in the sense of the possessions we have.  Yet, in all those years in-between what we have and how we utilize it is of crucial importance.  The key questions I’d like us to focus on this morning are:  to what extent do our possessions define us? or:  to what extent can we use them to give meaning? and then:  what kind of a legacy will we leave?

Many of us – well, OK, perhaps most of us – are at or well past retirement age.  How we handle our investments now has changed from when we first started thinking about investing.  The younger we are the higher our tolerance for risk, generally speaking.  And, of course, when the economy is on an up-swing, as if was for much of the 90’s, any investment looks like it’s going to pay big dividends – including the money we put into our homes.  Well, I don’t have to rehearse for you what’s happened over the past ten years.  Last week’s paper showing a 14.4% unemployment rate for Nevada and a 14.7% rate for Las Vegas tells you all you need to know about how bad things have been.  The cumulative invested wealth for all Americans has decreased in the trillions over the past few years.  Many smart investors moved their funds from stocks to bonds as the stock market dipped lower and lower, since bonds can be an ideal investment in a deflationary economy.  But I just got a letter from our financial advisor this past week who reports, “An interesting fact that is commonly overlooked today is that the dividend yield from stocks in the Dow Jones index are paying on average higher that Government Bonds.”  He continues, “This sounds to me as if it could be a good time to invest in stocks.”  Counter-intuitive?  You bet.  But investing has never been an activity that was sure-fire or had any guarantees.

OK, I know you didn’t come to church to hear a disquisition on investing – especially in this economy where just about everyone is hurting in one way or another.  But the point is that we do spend an inordinate amount of time concentrating on money – how to get it, what to do with it – and by extension our possessions – whether we need more, what to do with them.  And this obsession with possession leads to some unhappy results.  ELCA clergyperson Lori Claudio notes:  “Debt is our most raging addiction.  Why, we even have support groups for the compulsive shopper.  Debtors are becoming alarmingly younger and younger.  College students, for example, are prime targets for credit companies. From tuition to books to basic necessities and pleasures, students are encouraged to charge it up.  Not knowing how to get out from under, some have been driven to commit suicide. “

Paul says to Timothy in a comment that has been much mis-quoted, “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil…..”  (By the way, it was probably a disciple of Paul’s rather than Paul himself who wrote these letters to Timothy and Titus, but for convenience sake I’ll refer to him as Paul.)  He continues with a phrase that I find particularly felicitous:  “in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.”  The image brings to mind for me a kind of acupuncture for the wealthy.  And I know that it’s not easy to talk about the dangers of money and possessions here in Las Vegas where the love of money is raised to the level of a national pastime, if not, indeed, a religion.  Moreover, constant advertising pushes us to always want and need more and more.  But Paul wants to lead his young friend Timothy onto another path.

John C. Bogle tells the story of how the author Joseph Heller responded at a party when someone mentioned to him that his billionaire party host made more money in a single day of hedge fund trading that Heller had ever earned from his book Catch-22.  “Yes,” Heller replied, “but I have something that he will never have:  enough.”

When can we say that we have enough?  That’s the key matter of faith that Paul wants Timothy to seek.  Kristin Swenson, commenting on this response from Joseph Heller, goes on to say, “When one can say to oneself, ‘I have enough,’ the noisy grinding gears of endless acquisition come to a halt, and we’re drawn deeper into life with all its wonder and pain and beauty.  Saying ‘enough’ also has environmental and social effects that ripple out in ways that we can only imagine.”

The problem with money, the problem with possessions, isn’t having them as such.  It’s what they come to symbolize and how you come to feel about them.

Ray Stedman in his book The Power of His Presence says, “Possessions also change your relationship with others.  You discover that people are treating you differently because you have something that is a symbol of prestige or status. People no longer treat you for who you are; they are treating you for what you have, so you become suspicious of your friends and your friendships.  All these complications occur when the love of money starts to possess you.  That is the trap involved.”

On Friday a sequel opened to the 1987 movie “Wall Street” called “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” (which, incidentally, is a pretty good one-phrase description for what Paul is getting at with Timothy).  You’ll remember in the earlier film Gordon Gekko’s famous mantra:  “Greed is good”.  Here is the polar opposite of having enough.  I like what Michael Douglas had to say about his character Gordon Gekko in an interview:  “Gekko has endured because audiences give him the same kind of respect we’ve got for the great white shark.”  In other words it is fear that is the prime motivator for those who feel that they never quite have enough.  But as the Psalmist says in our text today, “you will not fear the terror of the night, or the arrow that flies by day…..”  The Psalmist affirms God’s action by having God say, “Those who love me, I will deliver…..”  And Jesus, as we know, as Paul certainly knew, came in order to move us beyond fear – to move us, as I said at the beginning of this sermon, to a “godliness combined with contentment.”

God’s gift of enough.  This is one of the promises of God that, I’m afraid, we don’t often enough contemplate.  Here is the opposite of the prosperity gospel.  Yes, God will provide – God will assist us when we are in need – but God holds out something more to those who are faithful:  the peace of knowing that we have enough.  That knowledge makes us partners in God’s work in the world.

What does God’s gift of enough have to do with our investments?  Well, we can use our investments as symbols for God’s love.  One of the other lectionary texts for this Sunday that we didn’t read is from Jeremiah, chapter 32, when the army of the king of Babylon was besieging Jerusalem, Jeremiah was imprisoned, and it looked like all was lost for the kingdom of Judah.  In the midst of all this God directs Jeremiah to buy a field at Anathoth, as a symbol that, as God says to him, “houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.”  Jeremiah is using his right of possession as a symbol that when all appears lost (think:  recessionary economy) God will be present for us.

A contemporary prophet, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, became engaged to Maria van Wedemeyer at the darkest time of World War II, and, indeed, soon after their engagement he was imprisoned.  Reflecting on Jeremiah’s action in buying the field at Anathoth, Bonhoeffer writes to his fiancé from prison:  “When I also think about the situation of the world, the complete darkness over our personal fate and my present imprisonment, then I believe that our union can only be a sign of God’s grace and kindness, which calls us to faith… And I do not mean the faith which flees the world but the one that endures the world and which loves and remains true to the world in spite of all the suffering which it contains for us.  Our marriage shall be a yes to God’s earth; it shall strengthen our courage to act and accomplish something on the earth.  I fear that Christians who stand with only one leg upon earth also stand with only one leg in heaven.”

A field, a marriage, an investment, a book – our “things” can symbolize meaning in what so often seems like a meaningless world.  For Dietrich and Maria against the nightmare darkness of their time, engagement was a confession of faith.  What are the “things” in your life that you can use to demonstrate meaning in what seems like a meaningless world?

It may be cold comfort, but one thing this damnable economy is teaching us about is the uncertainty of riches and the amassing of wealth.  So, the question becomes:  what do we do with what we have?

As part of the offering liturgy we sometimes quote the Matthew passage from the Sermon on the Mount:  “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.” (6:19-21)  What I take from this passage is basically the same as what Paul is telling Timothy is important to pursue in this life:  righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness.  Yes, it would be easy to dismiss this list as a bunch of nice but rather general and bland platitudes; but if we look at each one of these terms and seek to discern how they can help us in dealing with our approach to money and possessions we might find depths in each one that can lead us to a mature, strong spiritual life.  Timothy is asked to do this “in the presence of God, who gives life to all things…..”

So, we come to our final question:  what kind of a legacy will we leave?

Frank Ramirez tells the story of Abraham Harley Cassel, who was born into the culture of the Plain People of Pennsylvania.  He was a member of the Dunkers, otherwise known as the German Baptist Brethren.  His father did not believe in schooling.  The more you knew, the feeling went, the more potential for sin.

The result was that though Cassel had only six weeks of formal education in his entire life, his passion for learning and books never abated.  Largely self-taught, he grew to prize books with a passion.  He collected books, amassing over 10,000 volumes.  His collection, especially when it came to German language books and documents, was unparalleled, and people traveled from around the world to examine his collection.

Cassel was not only a farmer who managed a large property and many employees, and a scholar and writer of historical articles (although he always insisted he was uneducated because of his lack of schooling), he was also a minister among his people.  Not only had he collected books, but he had preserved church records, ledgers, and letters, which helped him interpret the history of the German-speaking religious separatists of Colonial America. All of this important history would have been lost without him.  However, in his last years as he went blind and his health began to fail, he worried about what would happen to his collection.  He wanted it to benefit others, but he also hoped it would be kept together as a legacy.  But as his death approached that seemed less and less likely.

So what happened to the Cassel collection?  Well, unfortunately, before his death it was divided in three directions.  However, decades later most of it was brought together again in the Cassel collection of Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania.  It remains a blessing for many who study this important period in American history.

Abraham Harley Cassel had discovered through his desire to leave something of benefit to future generations that “godliness combined with contentment” which Paul is talking about.  He had stored up treasures in heaven.  Our legacies are the ones we offer – out of our money, out of our possessions – to those who will most need them, both during our lifetimes and beyond.  That is what storing up treasure in heaven is all about.

Amen

Dave Pomeroy