Treasures

It’s the cutting edge of making choices,

splitting what you choose from what you don’t choose.

And making your choices will set you apart

from others, even friends and family.

This is the work of becoming your own self.

When your choices upset those around you

it may be because you’re being foolish.

But it may be because you’re making your choices

instead of letting them. It will be like this.

Abandon that owned self, and find your own self.

Listen deeply to God.

Let God alone lead you.

Make yourself available to God

as an instrument of righteousness,

and know that even as you let go of your life

you receive life.

-Steve Garnaas-Holmes

According to Matthew, Jesus moves on from stories of God-the-Mad-Farmer who sows seed everywhere, to stories of choices that must be made, stories in which it is not God, but we who must do the choosing, between small seeds that can grow God-crops in the world, and all the welter of things the world wants us to choose instead.

The grain of mustard seed – the smallest of all the seeds, can grow in a weedy patch to become the largest of all the bushes and offer shelter to many birds.    A small amount of yeast can grow flour into bread enough to feed a town.   The priceless pearl, a small thing among fakes and baubles, has value far greater than everything we own.   A great treasure, unexpectedly found in the field of your life, will require everything you have.  And the full fishnet, teeming with life and trash, will best be sorted on shore, so bring it all in.

Each of these tales requires everything.  And each requires just one thing.  The price for the treasures of God is everything we have.  And the prize, the treasure, is only one thing, one thing that must be seen and named and taken and prized.And none of them would get you a round of applause in your choosing. And most of them would get you some rolled eyes, or some catcalls, or some Damn Fool! remarks, maybe muttered, maybe said to your face.

After all, who are the likes of you and I to be purchasing pearls?  To be selling the farm for something ywe found in a field?  To be wasting all our yeast on three barrels of flour for strangers?  To be planting mustard instead of fig trees or olive groves?  And as for that fishnet full of junk – throw it back!

What’s precious, say all Jesus’ stories, is likely to be judged as junk by most folks, and likely to require a lot from you and me.

Suzanne Guthrie, in her blog The Edge of Enclosure, offers Pearl, the little out-of-wedlock daughter of Hester Prynne, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter:

“ . . . . so had Hester called her; not as a name expressive of her aspect, which had nothing of the calm, white, unimpassioned lustre indicated by the comparison. But she named the infant “Pearl,” as being of great price, – purchased with all she had, – her mother’s only treasure!” 

And I can’t help but think about the children who, all around the world,  have been decried as worthless this week by some.

Three boys in Israel, killed, just for spite, a few weeks ago.  And then a Palestinian boy, tortured and killed for revenge.  And then four Palestinian little boys, bombed on a beach, in an Israeli military operation.

And here on our own border, some 57,000 children have arrived without parents or passports or permission to enter. They are seen as an economic threat, an humanitarian crisis, and a political football.  What will happen to them?

Coming from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, they are likely all to be baptized, and therefore brothers and sisters of every Christian in the world.  And very likely none of them has been innoculated against any diseases and all may be malnourished.  And again it is likely none of them speaks more than a few words of English.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus tells of the man who was beaten on Jericho road – and the priest and the lawyer, who saw a problem and a nuisance, and passed by without stopping  – and the Samaritan, who saw a pearl, a treasure, and took everything he had to pay for the life of this man.

The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof . . .  and yet the welcome this requires of us is hard.  All around the earth, migration is streaming people and cultures together. Immigrants come for every reason, in fear, seeking safety, hoping for education and jobs they cannot get where they came from, for love, for money, for hope, for adventure, in sickness and in health.

The hand of God is in this.  And not a single story or teaching of Jesus, about the kingdom or God’s love, comes to my mind that would let us say Go Away.

All the stories say – Make yourself available to God, who comes as a stranger, a treasure, a child.

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Poem by Steve Garnaas- Holmes, from his Blog, Unfolding Light

Illustrations:

1.  Mustard Seed vs. McWorld – Jordan Cooper, Poster, 2007.  Worship Freehouse, an alternatigve worship community in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.  Vanderbilt Divinity School Library, Art in the Christian Tradition.

2.  Breaking of Bread Service, 2013, Annunciation of St. Mary Greek Orthodox Cathedral, Toronto, Canada.  Vanderbilt Divinity School Library, Art in the Christian Tradition.

3.  Children On the Run, UNHCR Poster about children crossing into US illegally.

4.  Hester Prynne and Pearl, freeze frame of

6.  Syrian Refugee Children