[Sermon preached on 9 September 2018, 16th Sunday after Pentecost / 3rd year, ELCF Lectionary]
Today, we look at the topic: Trusting in God’s care.
Last week, we already touched upon this theme when we reflected on the words from Paul in his first letter to the Thessalonians:
Rejoice always, pray constantly, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.
A constant attitude of prayer, of connection and communication with God, changes the way we look at ourselves, our neighbors, and our circumstances. It opens the eyes of our heart to see them the way God sees them. Moreover, prayer helps us to see the hand of God in much that happens. And where we cannot yet see his hand, it helps us at least to trust that God’s hand is at work in everything. That trust, that conviction, makes it possible—perhaps even natural—to look back at what God has done in our lives with thanksgiving, and to look forward to what he will do in the future with joy.
The words from Matthew 6 that we just read build on the findings from last week. At a first glance, we may be put off by the demanding tone: “Don’t do this! Do that!”
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth! – – Instead, store up for yourselves treasures in heaven.”
There is no doubt about it: Jesus is very radical and demanding in his teaching. But Jesus is not being legalistic, replacing the 600 dos and don’ts from the Old Testament with new ones that are even more demanding. Jesus is being helpful. His purpose in the Sermon on the Mount, from which we read this passage, is to equip those who want to follow him and be citizens of the kingdom of heaven. Those who were here last week must remember the words that Jesus said elsewhere:
Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
What Jesus said in that context is that we should not try to know God through human wisdom or secure our salvation through efforts of our own. Rather, we should turn to Jesus who said of himself:
“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
Therefore, coming to him is the key to knowing God and to getting connected and reconciled with God.
In order to understand the words of Jesus about the dos and don’ts of storing up treasures, we must look at the words that immediately follow today’s Gospel lesson:
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life… Do not worry about tomorrow… Your heavenly Father will take care of you… Your heavenly Father will provide your needs… But you, seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
Perhaps, you can see the pattern and the logic emerge from this context. What Jesus is saying is this: On the one hand, because we can trust in God to provide for us every day, we need not provide for ourselves, for our tomorrow, but, instead, we can focus on the mission that every Christian has received: the mission of making the kingdom of God come true. And on the other hand, in order to learn to trust in God for all our needs, we must eliminate from our lives everything that makes us trust ourselves—what we are and what we own—more than God.
The Old Testament reading from Exodus gives us a marvelous case study of how this worked or did not work among the people of Israel, when they wandered through the wilderness from Egypt to the Promised Land. They had constantly been complaining about Moses and about God. They felt that they were not being taken care of well enough. Especially, the divine catering service was not up to their standard.
So, God decided to provide them with a special kind of food that they had never seen or tasted before. They could not identify it, so they called it “manna”, which means “What is it?” And to tease them a little bit, God offered them that same breakfast for forty years, seven days a week. And God told them to go out and gather fresh manna every morning except on the Sabbath day. They should gather just what they needed for breakfast that morning, nothing more. They should not collect some extra for tomorrow just in case God’s catering service broke down. They should trust that, tomorrow again, God would faithfully provide them with fresh manna. The only exception was the Sabbath. On Friday, they should collect food for two days so that they would not need to go out on the Sabbath to collect food.
God faithfully and graciously provided. But at the same time, he tested their faith and trust in him. And for sure, there were people who did not take God at his word. They collected more manna than they needed for breakfast and saved the rest up for the next morning. But surprise, surprise! When they opened the fridge the next morning, the food was spoilt. They could not eat it anymore, and they had to go out to get fresh manna after all. God taught them a lesson: They must trust in God’s promises and take his word for it that he will provide. Another surprise awaited them when, on Saturday morning, the manna that they had collected the day before had not spoiled. Still, there were people who went out to see if there were any fresh manna to be had on Saturday, but they came back disappointed and ashamed. They had not trusted in God’s perfect catering plan.
The text from Exodus has at least two crucial lines. The first is in verse 12:
“Then you will know that I am the Lord your God.”
God provided generously for his people so that they might “know” that Yahweh was their God indeed. The word “know” refers to a certainty—a conviction that cannot be shaken. This catering miracle should have been the “final proof”. After this, the people of Israel should never have any doubt left about Yahweh’s faithful commitment to his people. But the rest of the story drives home to us how fast “certain” knowledge and unshakable conviction evaporate in the heat of day-to-day life. Perhaps, you recognize some of that in your own life?
The second crucial line is in verse 17. The Common English Bible translates it very well:
Those who had collected more had nothing left over, and the ones who had collected less had no shortage. Everyone collected just as much as they could eat.
In the Bible study last Tuesday, some of us almost got sick at the idea of eating more than two liters of manna for breakfast every morning. The omer is 2.3 liters. For bread or porridge, that is way more than fills the stomach. Perhaps, we could eat 2.3 liters of popcorn in one go, but bread or porridge… But anyways, it seems that the people quickly learned to collect the amount they were able to eat. So, in the end, the distribution of food was probably not equal—the same amount for everyone—but in proportion to the needs—how much each of them could eat.
Further on in the story of the Old Testament, we learn that, when Israel got to the Promised Land, the supply of manna stopped, and the people had to rely on the proceeds of the land and the livestock. That opened the gate for a potentially unequal distribution of resources and wealth. Some people became exceedingly wealthy, while others were reduced to poverty and were sometimes forced to sell themselves as slaves.
Therefore, God imposed a system of re-distribution every seventh year. Debts had to be cancelled and slaves set free. Every fiftieth year, land that had been sold to pay for debts, had to be returned to the family that originally owned the land. This way, they could take up farming again and be self-sufficient.
Unfortunately, those with money, land, and power did whatever they could to manipulate the system. We know that, by the time the last Old Testament prophets wrote their prophecies, the political and economic system of Israel had been totally corrupted, and the God-given system of social security and re-distribution of resources had been abandoned altogether.
When Jesus preaches his Sermon on the Mount—the manifesto of the kingdom of heaven—he doesn’t simply call for social justice, like the Old Testament prophets did. His solution is much more radical. He goes straight to the root of the problem. His message is that we must learn to trust God with our lives. If we don’t—that is, if we look for other pillars of security to build our lives upon—our lives are bound to derail.
In Matthew 6:19–24, Jesus warns his disciples for the way in which money can take control over our lives and banish the true God from our lives. As such, money or possessions are not wrong. Don’t we see many times in the Old Testament how God blessed people from Abraham to Solomon with wealth! As such, money is okay. The question is what our attitude is towards money and possessions. Do we look to our savings and treasures for financial security instead of looking to our God who graciously provides? Does our attitude towards money set the course of our lives?
To start with, Jesus warns us not to start collecting treasures. He is not talking about saving money, e.g. to buy a washing machine, a car or even a house. The wording in the original Greek language speaks of collecting for the sake of having more and more of it. It is an act of greed.
Paul warns us for the consequences of greed in 1 Timothy 6:10:
“For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.”
When money becomes important, when our first priority is to fatten our bank account or our investment portfolio, our focus shifts away from God to wealth. We put our trust for our future on the savings we have instead of trusting in God for each new day. And if the bank goes bankrupt, or the stock exchange collapses, we have nothing left. It is like building a house on the sand instead of on a solid foundation. That is the image that Jesus uses at the end of the Sermon on the Mount.
When does money start to be a problem in the life of a Christian? The very moment we want more and more. The moment when our decisions and actions are informed by the need or desire to get richer. Because that way, we put God on a lower priority than he deserves. It even puts our neighbor on a lower priority than they deserve. If we save money because we don’t trust God to provide for our tomorrow, our lives and values are derailed. We are on the wrong track, and in the following verses, Jesus explains where that track leads us.
In its first stage, it leads us to ignore God and our neighbor. We sin against the Great Commandment, because we love ourselves and our money more than God or neighbor.
In the second stage, our love for money starts to darken our perception of good and evil. Jesus speaks about the eye: how it either give lights to our body or keeps it in the dark. In the original Greek, Jesus actually speaks about our eyes being either generous or greedy. Let me give a simple example of a greedy eye. You see somebody who has something you don’t have, and you are immediately filled with jealousy. And you think: I need to get that! And you are ready to do almost anything to get it.
The Old Testament tells the story of the wealthy and powerful king Ahab whose neighbor owned a little vineyard. Ahab wanted that vineyard, but his neighbor did not want to sell it. Ahab’s jealousy got the upper hand. It made him sick and depressed. When his wife Jezebel found out what bothered her husband, she plotted to have the neighbor killed. When he was dead, Ahab simply took the vineyard, without the least tickling of a bad conscience.
When love for money changes into greed, it makes us look at the world around us with dollar signs in our eyes. We don’t want to listen to God, read his word, or hear Christian proclamation. We just want to have more, and we are ready to do almost anything to have our desires fulfilled. And that is when our whole life becomes shrouded in darkness. That is what Jesus is saying here.
But he goes one more step further. He says that we cannot serve two masters. The Greek word used for serving means being a slave. It is obvious, that a slave cannot belong to two masters at the same time. As Christians, we belong to God. He has bought us with the precious blood of Christ Jesus. But if, instead, we serve another master—Mammon, or money—we cannot belong to God any longer.
The problem with wealth, Jesus says, is that when it becomes an important factor in our lives, it starts to rule over us. It starts to call the shots. It dominates our lives, our choices, our decisions, our attitudes—everything. We become addicted.
That should not happen! And therefore, Jesus warns us to limit the power of money, wealth or possessions in our lives before it takes control over us. The earlier, the better. And that is why Jesus says that we should not store up treasures on earth. Of course, his concern is not the rust or moths or thieves or crashing stock exchanges. He just uses a very human argument here to make the point clear: What you collect here on earth, has no value for you when you die. But there are ways in which you can make your possessions generate revenue that lasts even across the final frontier. That should be our priority: to look at the long-range profits that our money, our possessions, and our investments can make. And with long-range, I mean: beyond this life into eternity.
Today’s lesson is not just for the rich—for those who have savings, real estate, and an investment portfolio. The story of the widow in the temple, which we read two weeks ago, may serve as an extreme example from the other end. This poor widow put two little copper coins into the offering box of the temple. It was her way of saying to God: “This money could keep me alive a few more days, but I don’t want to put my trust on these coins, but on you, who owns all the riches on earth.”
Each of us should take a moment and answer the question for ourselves: What do I really put my trust in? Is it my savings in the bank? Is it my health or life insurance? Is it my professional skills or networks which will get me a job if ever I lose the one I have? — Or do I genuinely put my trust in God, trusting that he can provide for my every need even when I have nothing and nobody else to fall back on?
I think that if we are perfectly honest to ourselves, we will find that we trust first of all on those resources we can see and measure and control. And in God we only trust as a last resort, when everything else fails. That’s why it is so easy to identify with the people of Israel in the wilderness. We are just like them, aren’t we!
To the rich young man who came to Jesus, he said: “Sell everything you have and give the money to the poor. Then come and follow me.” In the early church in Jerusalem, many rich people sold property—some of them sold all they owned—and laid the proceeds at the feet of the apostles, who distributed it to all believers according to their needs. To some, Jesus may be saying the same as he said to the rich young man. For others, he may have other plans. Remember: God does not condemn wealth. But the more we have, the heavier our responsibility. And the greater the risk of becoming addicted to storing up more and more and looking at the world with dollar signs in our eyes. Let us keep in mind the words from Paul to the Corinthians:
Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously.
Amen.
