One of the Olympic stars from four
years ago – and I don’t remember which one – was interviewed. She was at a loss to know what to do because
she already had her treasure – she’d won gold and since her goal had been
achieved she didn’t know what to do next with her life. Her solution, go to Rio, and try for another
gold. That’s all well and good but for how many years can she do that? What do you treasure and how far are you willing
to go to achieve that treasure – to acquire that treasure? What do you want that is worth waiting for?
We did not have a lot of money when I
was growing up. We got by. There was
always food on the table, a roof over our heads, a car in the driveway. I was an only child, so that helped. Perhaps part of the reason, cash was
sometimes tight was because my dad had a passion. He loved to travel and so part of every
paycheck went into a vacation fund. It was important to him to explore
somewhere different - away from home, every summer. I remember, however, one summer when we had a
bad year. Dad was laid off from his job,
made a bad investment trying to make up the difference and had spent some time
looking for a new job. In my mind’s eye, I am always 10 so I think I was about
10, which would have made it around 1960.
And if memory serves, my father had started his new job and did not have
vacation time that summer. Even if there had been time there was no money for a
two week vacation. My dad had an idea – we lived on Route 6, east of Cleveland,
small town called Chardon. Dad decided we’d get on Route 6 on Saturday morning,
drive east as far as we could go in a day, stopping to see what there was along
the way, find a motel, spend the night and go back home on Sunday. My mom
packed us a lunch. We drove along, found a beautiful place to eat along the
way. We went by many parks where we
would stop and explore. We spent the
night in a family owned motel in Pennsylvania.
The family had a daughter my age.
We played together while her parents and my parents played Bridge. The next morning, we had breakfast and drove
home, stopping to eat somewhere along the way.
Now, doesn’t that seem like a vacation you might forget and yet, it is
often one of the first ones I remember.
It was a treasure. I think that is because it reminds me of what was
important to my dad – one of his great
treasures in life was his family and he always wanted time to spend with his
family in a place where the everydayness of life did not intrude. Often our vacations included one or more my
aunts and uncles. It wasn’t so much
going someplace, although he did love to explore new places, it was going
someplace and having family time – away from phones, away from the
responsibilities of everyday life, away from work, away from chores. Our summer vacations were definitely
something worth waiting for, something to look forward to and I don’t ever
remember whining because I’d be away from friends and our summertime
activities.
In this morning’s passage from Genesis,
Abram didn’t think he had anything worth waiting for. When God tells him how
great his reward is going to be, he responds by saying, “Lord God, what can you
possibly give me, since I have no children.”
He actually tells his God, that God has nothing for him – nothing worth
waiting for – no treasure that he wants because the one thing Abram treasures
most is heirs and he doesn’t have any and he pretty much figures he is out of
time.
Now if I had been God, I think I would
have started by telling Abram to quit whining – but that’s me. God tells Abram to look up at the sky and
count the stars because that is how many children – descendants he is going to
have. Not only that - but God goes on to
say, he will have the land before him to possess, and still Abram whines – “How
do I know I will actually possess it?”
Obviously – at least in the beginning –
Abram was not a patient man, nor a trusting one. Now we all figure that if God
came to us and talked to us the way the Bible portrays God talking to Abram, we
wouldn’t hesitate to believe that there were great treasures awaiting us, would
we?
And yet – that is exactly what God has
promised us. God promises us treasure.
The real problem may be that what God treasures and what we treasure are not
always the same. The passage from Luke
says, “Don’t be afraid, little flock, because your Father delights in giving
you the kingdom.” Well, that’s all well
and good but how much worth can there be in a promised kingdom when we need
things right now. We don’t want to wait
for God’s time, we want things in our time.
We want things and some of the things we want are commendable.
Right now,
our world needs to be fed. Right now, we
want the terrorism to stop. Right now we
want every life on this planet to matter. We want to be able to walk the
streets of our towns and cities and know we are safe. And given the things that are plaguing our
world right now, it feels like – a promised kingdom in some distant future – is
a pie in the sky dream that doesn’t help our day to day living.
A woman’s son dies on the street in a
terrorist attack. An innocent child is
caught in the crossfire of a drive by shooting. Fires, not only destroy homes
and rob us of ancient trees, but often take lives. Accidents happen on busy freeways. Lives are
lost. And the things, the people that we
treasure are gone.
Telling the survivors that it’s all
right, you can rebuild. Telling the survivors that it’s all right because your loved ones doesn’t have to wait anymore.
They have achieved the kingdom. They
have achieved the treasure that God has promised, still doesn’t help the day to
day living that must continue. Doesn’t fill the hole that is left behind.
Doesn’t avert the tragedies.
So what does? What is it that we need to treasure?
My family just spent a week celebrating
my mother-in-law’s 95th birthday.
She often says that she has been lucky.
She has had a good life. Does
that mean nothing bad ever happened – that she never lost a treasure? No, she is able to say that in the midst of
these facts: one of her treasures, her husband of 65 plus years died quite
suddenly. She lost her first grandchild
to SIDS and another grandson to cancer at age 10. Her 5 children are scattered across the
country so she doesn’t see them as often as she’d like. Her life has been good, but not perfect. No
one’s life is. We each deal with our own
devils, with things that seem to rob us of our treasures.
I often wonder from time to time,
because it is the way my mind seems to work.
What if Abram and Sarai hadn’t been able to have children – what if the
treasure they wanted the most had never become a reality? Well, I believe that God would have worked
it. He would have helped Abram realize
that his faith was his treasure and God would have given him eyes to see that
all the children surrounding him and learning from him were his legacy.
Perhaps it is as simple as that. Perhaps our true treasures are: remembering
the good times and the people with whom we shared them – those still among us
and those gone on to be with God.
Perhaps our true treasures involve looking at how God has helped us get
through the hard times, seeing who God has put in our paths to help us move
forward, treasuring the moments when we could see God at work, even when we
felt robbed of a treasure.
The
passage of Luke that we read this morning contains a profound thought that we
have probably all heard:
Where your treasure is, there your
heart will be also.
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