Seek ye first the kingdom of God

My parents still live in the house where I grew up, a half mile from where my husband and I now reside.  My brother and sisters and I used to ride our bikes this way, too, down the road to the west toward Mud Crik.  Sometimes we brought our fishing poles and a Cool Whip container of night crawlers and fished off the bridge.  Once we rode past the bridge, over the railroad tracks, and explored the old Persoon place.

The house still stands at the end of a driveway that winds parallel to the tracks for a quarter mile or more.  I see it now as Marie and I crest the hill, gray and weather beaten.  It slumps like an old man, the vacant gaze of the upstairs windows directed at the ground. 

               

The story goes that when Mrs. Persoon died, Leo, her grief-stricken husband, left their home and all that was in it.  There is also the story that Leo once chased trespassers off his land with a shot gun.  And there is the prohibition of our mother: “You kids are not allowed to go there!  Do you understand me?”  My heart beats hard as we pedal up the driveway and walk through the crooked front gate. 

I remember the porch of the house, the chicken coop, and the way Mud Crik curled around it.  I remember the carvings on the barn walls, one of them – the profile of a man smoking a pipe – dated 1886.  I remember the television lying face-down in glass shards on the living room floor, the silverware still in neat rows in the kitchen drawer, and the baby cards in the scrapbook.  I can still see the mass of books that covered the floor of the room at the top of the stairs, the shelves blown over by the elements that entered in through empty window frames.  I remember the cotton dresses hanging in the bedroom closet, and the two pairs of square-heeled shoes that waited below them.

I went back to the Persoon place once more, when I was in college, a member of the Photography Club, camera in hand.  The floor of the porch was so rotted that I didn’t dare enter the house, and animals had dug a den where the cellar once had been.  Coyotes, perhaps?  Now, when the train rolls through at dusk and sounds its whistle, a whole chorus of coyotes down that way yap back, laughing and scolding as the engine chugs past.


And where is your treasure?

Is it in a house or barn – the one that you now have or one that you hope to have some day?  Is it in possessions – a car or computer, television or books?  Is it in memories, carefully preserved in scrapbooks and photo albums?  In dishes or in the clothes that your wear?


Sometimes we are just like the Israelites, with our gods of wood and stone.

Jesus tells us to lay up our treasure in heaven (Matt 6:19-21; Luke 12:34).  Eventually all of our possessions, whether we carefully maintain them until we die or abandon them like Leo did, will fade away.  Even our names will be remembered only for a short time.


Stanley Kunitz put it well:


I’m passing through a phase: 

gradually I’m changing to a word...   

nothing is truly mine

except my name. I only

borrowed this dust.

List the names of your great-grandparents if you can.  And what do you know about them?  Even your body, your life, is not your own.  And the name that you leave behind, it will not last long, either.


How do we lay up treasure in heaven?  Jesus tells us that in the parable of the steward in Luke 16, an unfamiliar parable with a much-disputed interpretation.  But our Lord Himself expounds its meaning, instructing us to use our money and our earthly possessions to invest in eternal treasure.   He notes that the unrighteous are wiser than we – they believe that this world is all there is to live for, and then they live accordingly.  In contrast, we say that our home is in heaven but expend our resources investing in earthly things.  We forget that we are stewards of the mysteries of God (I Cor. 4:1) and that only our works that cannot be destroyed by fire will endure (I Cor. 3:11-15).


It is a marvelous reality, really, that our heart follows our money.  Do you wish you had more of heart for missions?  Put your money into missions, and your heart will follow. Do you wonder why you care so little for the poor?  Give them your money, and your heart will follow.  Do you care little for the saints with whom you worship each week?  Give money without grudging when you see a family in need or when you see that the shingles on the church roof need to be replaced.  Use the money that’s been entrusted to you to spread the gospel and to minister to souls. These are eternal things.


And in the end, we will be rewarded according to our works.

"Moreover, it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful" (I Cor. 4:2).