"Serve Somebody"

Rev. Matthew Miller

FROM THE GOSPELS Matthew 6:19-24 SERMON “Serve Somebody” 

Over the past few weeks, as we’ve been making our way through this collection of Jesus’ teachings known as the Sermon on the Mount, we’ve seen a couple of recurrent themes. Jesus began his ministry by repeating the message first announced by John the Baptist, “repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Most people don’t receive those words as good news. For starters we’ve either heard tell, or personally encountered someone ourselves whose call to repentance was simply a fancy, dressed-up church way of criticizing or casting judgement on our lives. ‘Repent,’ just sounds like, “you’re wrong. You need to fix your life because you’re doing it wrong and you better do it the way I think you should.” Sometimes they’ll throw in the likelihood that God agrees with them and that it could all end very badly for us if we don’t change our terrible and wrong-headed ways. Nobody likes that. Nobody wants to be around that. We had a family member who got VERY invested in their faith and it became the running joke for awhile to NOT let them take you to the airport unless you were prepared to have them call you to repentance. Yeah. 

But it’s the second part of Jesus’ announcement that we’ve forgotten. He doesn’t call people to repent because they’re going to some kind of hell. He’s calling them to turn in a different direction, which is what it means to repent- to go a different way- in order to see and experience and enter into this thing he calls the kingdom of heaven, or elsewhere the kingdom of God. Sometimes we call it the Kindom of God, or the Kinship of God. Essentially, the realm or household of God’s active presence in the world. Instead of the picture of some remote deity looking down from the sky like some kind of satellite surveillance system, Jesus suggests that God has come near and is in fact at hand. It isn’t something we have to wait to experience later, when we die. It is right in front of us and all around us if we will shift our perspective, repent, to see it. 

It looks like blessing in all the unlikeliest of places. More on that in a second. It tastes like the salt that enhances the flavor of everything else, and sheds light on things we might not otherwise see for the darkness. It is a world put right not by commandments and religious habits, but by the way those commandments and practices connect us to the divine life of heaven on earth; less concerned with earthly punishments and rewards and more concerned with how we are made complete and whole by the goodness of God that nourishes us daily in both body and soul.  

We don’t have cable, but our particular brand of TV comes with its own channels from the internet. I haven’t perused them all, but they seem to be grouped by theme. There are throwback TV show channels, or channels with old movies grouped by genre. And then there is our default channel, the one that comes up when we turn on the TV. It is the Antiques Roadshow channel. Yes, this is a channel dedicated to re-running old episodes of that PBS favorite all the way back to the 1990’s. For those you unfamiliar with the premise, the Roadshow travels to different cities around the country (there is a separate channel dedicated to the UK version). People bring in all manner of antiques to be viewed and assessed by expert appraisers across a variety of disciplines. People bring in jewelry, furniture, toys, pottery, paintings, letters signed by famous historical figures or athletes, and perhaps creepiest to me- dolls. The conversations follow a familiar pattern. The appraiser asks what the person has brought in, where they got it (garage sale, flea market, family heirloom) and how much they know about it. Then the appraiser tells them what they know about the object in question before pronouncing an insurance or auction value for the item. The reactions may be the most entertaining part. Some people are elated to discover they’ve been holding on to a hidden treasure, while others are clearly disappointed to learn that this thing they’ve been hanging on to isn’t worth nearly as much as they had hoped. Some of the episodes that run from the 90’s finish with an update on the value. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes it stays the same, and sometimes it goes down. Reminding me of a conversation that we will sometimes have with one of our children when they want to tell us about a thing and are impressed by how much it is worth. That’s when I like to remind them that when it comes to things, it doesn’t matter what someone says it’s worth. In the marketplace, at least, a thing is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it. I have an old chest from my childhood bedroom set that contains some of my most treasured possessions. The items themselves wouldn’t bring much on the Roadshow, but they mean something to me. That is different. And the truth is that it’s been a while since I’ve cracked the lid of that chest to take a stroll down memory lane. That’s probably because I carry all the memories that those things represent with me all the time. The memories themselves have almost entirely to do with certain moments in time and people I knew, the friendships I made and still cherish even if I haven’t spoken to those people in decades. 

When Jesus advises against storing up for ourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust consume and thieves break into steal, most of us understand what he’s getting at. He’s not necessarily saying that it is bad or inadvisable to have nice things, or even to take care of them. It’s more a question of how we view them, the priority they have in our lives. It’s easy to let our investment in those things have more influence in our lives than is healthy, or advisable. When it comes to stuff, or even our accumulated wealth, we may understand that we can’t take it with us, but we often act as if we aren’t 100 percent convinced of that. Or worse, we grow concerned that someone else does not value our stuff as much as we do. Over the past couple of decades, I have heard any number of people grieve the fact that their children have no interest in inheriting the collections they’ve assembled over their lives. The issue for Jesus, however, isn’t the stuff itself. It’s our eye. How we see what we have and determine if it’s the kind of treasure that’s worth storing up in the first place. 

When we see as the world sees. I’m not talking physical sight, but spiritual sight. When we see as the world sees, we tend to equate blessing with things that will validate us. Look at this vacation, this car, this house, this achievement. I must be living right, so blessed. But when turn to see what Jesus would show us- this kingdom of heaven come near, the kinship of all people as children of God- things look different. The treasures of this earth are just so much stuff and even the things we think are the most important to us are important because of the people and the memories that they connect us to. When our eye is healthy and we see what Jesus would show us, we recognize and treasure the blessing when we are poor in spirit that comes to us as pure gift. We treasure the blessed comfort we receive when we mourn, the mercy that saves us from our worst mistakes, the abundance of the earth as we live gently upon it. When our eye is healthy and we see what Jesus would show us, we understand that no human being is an independent entity unto themselves. In the words of the old Bob Dylan song, “you’re going to have to serve somebody.” It may be mammon, or it may be heaven, but everyone serves somebody, or something eventually. To serve the former is see as the world sees. It is to believe that value is determined solely by the market, by how much one is willing to pay for the thing, or for one’s time, one’s expertise, one’s ability to produce results. To see in that way may enrich our bank accounts but it will surely bankrupt our hearts until the light within us is darkness, And how great is that darkness. We will hate all the things that are not for sale, everything that cannot be transacted, bought or bargained for, including our own lives. 

On the other hand, if our eye is healthy and we learn from Jesus how to see where true treasure lies, the blessing to be found in the kinship of God that claims us for God and one another, our bodies will be filled with light and we will see so much more of this world that God so loves. When we learn to see people’s value not in terms of what they can or can’t do for us and instead in terms of their belovedness to God, then our lives are changed and we begin to love as God loves. Without counting the cost, or the benefit, because blessing and grace abound. As St. Thérèse of Lisieux famously stated, "God knows all the sciences, but there is one science God does not know; God does not know mathematics." Because she says, “when one loves, one does not calculate.” Indeed, one cannot calculate, because a love like that is beyond measure.