Community Church Sermons
Sixth Sunday After
Epiphany – February 16, 2003
“A Faith Worth Finding:
Matthew 13:44
Stephen Nash
I don’t know if you are a reader of poetry or if
you remember studying American literature in school, but one of the most noted
of American poets was Emily Dickinson.
She is known for her short, imaginative verse. Not everyone is crazy about her because her poems are so
difficult to understand. But those who
do like her find that part of the attraction.
It’s a challenge to find out what she means by some of her bizarre
lines.
She has some of the most intriguing lines in all poetry and some of them are rich in meaning for Christian faith. One fascinating poem is entitled, “Finding is the First Act.” It’s perfect for the parables Jesus told about treasure, and particularly the Parable of the Treasure Buried in the Field, which was read for us.
It’s barely a parable. It’s only one verse long. “The Kingdom of Heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” You can see in the parable that finding is the first act.
That expression, “Finding is the First Act” is the title of a book by the Jesus scholar John Dominic Crossan, who took it from Emily Dickinson’s poem. I wasn’t familiar with the poem, and when I looked it up and read it I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It was one of those poems that has words but doesn’t seem to say anything. I thought surely Crossan would explain the meaning of the poem in his book since he titled his book after it, but after looking through it for his explanation I couldn’t find it. Crossan doesn’t mention the poem after quoting it in the title. But I don’t blame him. After the first line, “Finding is the First Act,” the poem becomes apparently meaningless:
Here it is:
Finding is the First Act,
The Second, loss.
Third, Expedition for
The Golden Fleece.
Fourth, no discovery—
Fifth, no crew—
Finally, no golden fleece—
Jason-sham-too.
I know! Not much you can say about a poem like that. No wonder Dominic Crossan doesn’t mention it after he mimics the opening line. But that one line—that opening line—is useful for unlocking one message of the parable.
The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field that a man found. That seems innocent enough, except, once again, Jesus is taking a common image—a common story type familiar to everyone—and turning it on its head. Jesus seemed to have a knack for turning conventional ways of thinking, seeing and being on their head.
You see treasure stories were common in that culture. Treasure stories are a form of literature common in every culture. The audience would have been familiar with the genre—the story type. The rabbis frequently told treasure parables and the plot was always the same. A man buys a field and works it. His plow hits something hard, and lo and behold, there’s a great treasure, making the man rich. Now the rabbis flesh that out in all kinds of different scenarios.
But a classic formula is common to all these treasure stories: First you buy the field. Second, you work hard. And third, you find a treasure. The rabbis wove some wonderful stories on the loom of this little formula.
Here’s one for example. A man buys a field and finds a treasure in his field. He sees two rabbis walking down the road. The rabbis are in tattered clothes, and they’re hungry. They haven’t eaten for days. Out of compassion the man gives the treasure to the rabbis, goes back to the field, starts plowing, and discovers an even greater treasure.
In that rabbinic story, the message is “give and you will get more.” It was a moral lesson. These kinds of stories that illustrated moral law were referred to in Judaism as Haggadah. Stories that illustrate the moral teaching of Scripture. The meaning of the story was that there was reward for doing good. That was the common expectation--the conventional wisdom. At was just a fleshing out of many of the biblical proverbs, and the treasure stories are always told to reinforce that theology. The formula is always the same. There is a treasure hidden in the world, which could mean that God is hidden there, or the Kingdom is here someplace, hidden. In other cultures, the treasure stories affirm salvation, or nirvana, your “bliss” or whatever it is you are looking for, is here, hidden in the world.
All religions say the same thing. What you are looking for is here. The human venture is to find it, and religion is the map, or the secret, or the clue, or the formula, or the method for finding it.
That’s why all religions contain law. The rules are there to lead you to the
treasure. Not that it’s easy. It’s hard obeying the Law. But the Law, the Torah, (better translated
“Way” than “Law”) is the Jewish rule for finding the treasure. It’s hard work. It’s like plowing a field.
If you’re persistent you’ll find a treasure, but you have to follow the
formula: First buy the field. Then work it hard. And finally, the treasure will be discovered.
Now. Look at what Jesus does with this formula. “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field.” So far so good. “ . . . which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys the field.”
But wait. He is expected to buy the field first. That’s the way all treasure stories went. But Jesus says that first he found the treasure; second, he bought the field; third, he didn’t work at all.
I tell you, this story is an affront to religious piety and morality. It is subversive to good religion. The treasure is supposed to come at the last, the result of some great effort, a long spiritual journey or vision quest, the result of doing something good, a tremendous investment of effort, at the least, a long, patient waiting.
Treasure stories support what we believe, the way we were raised. The conventional wisdom. Hard work produces reward. You don’t get anything in this life without working hard for it.
In Aesop’s collection of stories there is an illustration of this common wisdom. A farmer has two sons. Both of them were lazy. Neither of them would do any work on the farm. When the farmer was about to die he called his two sons to his bed and said, “I have buried the family treasure in the field.” Whereupon his two sons became interested in farming, went to the field and started plowing. If you want a treasure, you gotta work.
Now let me say this. The work ethic has its truth. Most of us were raised that way. An undisciplined life leads to ruin. Rewards come from hard work. Finding, like dessert, is last. It should come after a hard day’s work, a long, perilous journey, or patient waiting. That’s the way it is with most things in life. That’s the way life is structured, and that’s what we teach our children. You reap what you sow. That is conventional wisdom.
But left with only that, life in society, and by implication, life with God, becomes a performance-based kind of striving. Trying to achieve something we don’t yet have by what we do.
One of the most difficult things for us to grasp in the Christian faith is that the life of faith is not simply a religious version of conventional wisdom. One of the most difficult things for us to grasp is the reality of Divine grace. God doesn’t play by the rules. God messes with the rules. God loves first. God gives first. You’re not supposed to do that. You’re supposed to love the loveable and reward those who deserve it and forgive those who repent. That’s why people couldn’t understand Jesus. He messed with all those rules. And people just couldn’t quite grasp the assertion that grace would come out of the blue, without our deserving it, without expecting it.
Well, what do we do with the work ethic then, either in its religious or secular form? It’s not necessarily hard work per se that is wrong. Nothing wrong with disciplined effort. That’s a value, not a vice. But our perspective on working hard, whether in the religious or secular sense, is different in the Jesus way of seeing things.
Jesus has a radically different take on life. He advocates an unconventional wisdom that questions society’s dominant values of achievement, affluence, and appearance. If we live our lives according to those values, our self worth and level of satisfaction depend upon how well we measure up to those cultural messages. And make no mistake, it is a world that is obsessed with measuring worth. Not only is the effort to measure up burdensome, but even when we are reasonably successful at measuring up, we often find the rewards unsatisfying. We may have the experience of being both satiated and yet still hungry. For as Saint Augustine said, there is a God-shaped vacuum in the hearts of each one of us, and “Our hearts are restless until the find their rest in Thee, O God.”
The religion of Jesus is at its deepest level not about performance or achievement, which is a life of anxious striving. It is a life of expression of the grace God has given us freely as a gift.
A number of years ago I read a book by a New England pastor, Gordon MacDonald, entitled Ordering Your Private World. I don’t now remember too much from the book, except for the helpful distinction the author made between being “driven” and being “called.” You see, a driven person is motivated by a deficit in their life. They have to achieve in order to find something they have not yet found. You know the person. “Old Joe, he was a hard worker. You’ve got to admire him. Of course, he was a bore and a curmudgeon, but he was a hard worker—lived for his work. Right up to the moment he croaked, he was a hard worker. He went the way he wanted to go, working hard.” People admire hard workers, and there’s nothing wrong with hard work—its our motive and goal that’s the issue.
Psychologists say that ultimately there are two basic human psychological needs: a sense of security (or, put another way, unconditional love) and significance (or meaning and purpose). If we think that we have to achieve those things, or earn those things, or discover those things, our activities in the world will be “driven.” We will be operating out of a deficit of what we do not yet have. It is a life of anxiety and striving, lived by most people in our society.
But there is a different kind of work. It is not “driven,” it is “called.” It is called out of us by an appreciation of the fact that we have already been graced with our two most basic needs: love—God’s perfect and unconditional love. And that our lives, no matter how insignificant they may seem through human standards, have tremendous meaning and purpose to God, and to us. So our work becomes simply an expression of what we already possess . . . what God has given us, and not an attempt to achieve something that we don’t yet have. Do you see the very crucial difference?!
Almost all of Jesus parables were a frontal assault on conventional wisdom. An assault on the common understanding and images of the good life which was based upon a dynamic of rewards and punishments.
That conventional wisdom has powerful social and psychological and religious consequences. It is a grim life. It is a life of bondage to the dominant culture in which we become automatic persons, responding automatically to the dictates of conventional wisdom. It is a life of limited vision and blindness, as Jesus pictures it, in which we see what our culture conditions us to see and pay attention to what our culture says is worth paying attention to. It is a world of judgment: I judge myself and others by how well I and they measure up. It is a world of distinctions and comparisons: I may be aware that I am not the most attractive person in the world, but I am more attractive than some, so I am “okay.” Our identity and our self-esteem often depend upon these kinds of comparisons, most of which are even unconscious but very powerful.
It’s a life of anxious striving when we try to live according to the “performance” principle,” in which everything depends on how well I perform. Life according to the performance principle is also life according to the conformity principle: Ironically, we try to be outstanding—to stand out—by conforming to the standards that our culture values most highly.
It is life under the lordship of culture. And it is a life of profound self-preoccupation—with how well we’re doing, with our identity, our security—and thus a life of profound selfishness. Selfishness seldom has to do with reaching for the biggest piece of the cake on the plate; rather, it is preoccupation with ourselves.
And this way of being isn’t unusual but it is pervasive.
And there is an image of God that goes with the world of conventional wisdom. God is primarily imaged as the lawgiver and judge. God may be spoken of in other ways too, such as forgiving and gracious, but the bottom line is that God is seen as both the source and enforcer, and therefore the legitimator of the religious form of conventional wisdom. God becomes the one whom we must satisfy, the one whose requirements must be met, whatever we understand those requirements to be, few or many.
This whole package leads to an image of the Christian life as a life of requirements. It is the most common form of Christianity. Even the Protestant tradition with its emphasis on grace became transformed into a system of requirement and reward, because in order to receive the grace, you have to believe the right things.
But Jesus, if he says anything at all, says to this way of seeing God and life, NO! And if you simply sit down and read the life and message of Jesus with discernment, you see that his life and message was one of paradox and reversal that shattered the conventional wisdom of his time. From his images of God to his pictures of what life with God really is like. It is gospel—good news, a new way of being that moves beyond both secular and religious conventional wisdom. It is a path of transformation that leads from a life of requirements and measuring up, to a life of intimate relationship with the loving Divine. It leads from a life of anxiety to a life of peace and trust. It leads from the bondage of self-preoccupation to the freedom of self-forgetfulness. It leads from a life centered in culture, to a life centered in God.
Emily Dickinson wrote her poem in the post-Puritan early nineteenth century in one of the most uptight regions of the country at that time, western Massachusetts. Maybe it is a poem about the difficulty of trusting grace.
Can it be interpreted that way? It might not have been her intent, but then again, it may be. Who will know? Emily’s been gone a long time.
Finding is the first act.
The second, loss.
Third, expedition for
The Golden Fleece.
Fourth, no discovery.
Fifth, no crew.
Finally, no golden fleece—
Jason-sham-too.
The story of Jason and the Golden Fleece is a treasure story, one of the oldest of all treasure stories, out of Greek mythology. Jason is tricked out of the kingdom that is rightfully his by inheritance. In order to get it back, he has to go on a journey, suffer many hardships, sail across perilous seas, face many dangers. In the end, with the help of Medea, he succeeds in winning his kingdom back and lives the way he is supposed to live.
Emily Dickinson’s poem is about the difficulty of trusting grace. We know that she wrestled with grace all of her life. She wrote, “We believe and disbelieve a hundred times an hours.” Its as if one day she discovered grace, just stumbled upon it: “Finding is the first act.” But then disbelieved—“The second, loss.” Then went on a search to recover it: “The third, expedition for the golden fleece.”
She “believed and disbelieved” because it’s so difficult to trust that God loves us the way we are. It’s so hard for us to believe that God loves us unconditionally when we’ve been taught that we have to earn love. It’s so hard to trust that God is offering us new life as a gift when we have been taught that we have to deserve life and salvation. So we conclude, this can’t be for us, this promise. Maybe it’s for those who are so dramatically lost that all they can do is reach for some rope to pull them up. Maybe it’s for them. It’s not for me. I’m able to pull myself up by my own bootstraps.
So like Jason in the ancient myth, we go looking for the kingdom that we know is ours. We know it’s here someplace. It’s an expedition for the Golden Fleece, for the life we hope will be better. We look for all kinds of things in all kinds of places, but what we’re really looking for is already ours—given as a gift of Grace.
We find grace, but we don’t believe it, so we end up imitating Jason rather than Jesus, looking for the Golden Fleece, or the golden opportunity, or the gold at the end of the rainbow. And then, eventually, some day, we discover they are sham, and Jason too.
It was to these people that Jesus said what you are looking for is like a treasure hidden in a field. A man stumbled over it--fell right on his face. This had happened to him before. Each time he got up, dusted off his clothes, cursed his clumsiness, and continued the search. But this time he said, maybe this is it. Maybe this is what I’ve been looking for. And so he began to dig into the gospel promise of grace, and discovered that it was a faith worth finding, because in it, God had found him first.
Amen.