Treasures in Heaven

Transcripts are computer-generated and may not be 100% accurate.

Marta: Thank you for the sweet little bird whistle. That was very cute. My name is Marta. I'm the pastor of youth ministry here at the table. If you don't recognize me, it's probably because you don't have a kid third grade or older. Normally, I'm the person that walks them out and brings them back in. That's who I primarily work with. So on most Sundays, I am not listening to the sermon in real time.

But I do listen to the podcast, which is back on Spotify. Everyone thank Maggie and Christian. It was gone for a long time. It's back, which I love because that's my primary way of listening to everything. So this week I had my headphones in and I'm doing my house projects listening. And Justin preached last week. And I'm listening like I'm folding laundry. And I'm like, Justin sounds so anxious. Like I saw him that morning and he didn't seem that nervous. And I'm like, I've heard him preach before and he hasn't seen that. I'm like, dude, slow down. I realize my default podcast listening setting is 1.2X, which works for Michael Barbarro on The Daily. But it's really weird if it's someone you know. So if you're listening to me in the future, turn me back to 1X and I'll sound more like myself. Thank you.

If you were here last week or if you caught on the podcast like I did, you'll remember that we're moving through the Sermon on the Mount in the book of Matthew. And Justin preached on the Lord's Prayer. And there's a line in that prayer that's really going to center where we're staying today. It's: thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

And Justin read from Revelation 21 and he said this. He said, "Escaping the world and leaving all this behind has never been the plan." I'm going to take out my earring. When I was in college, there was this lady that had an earring and then nobody listened to her. And now I should have learned my lesson to not wear a dangly earring. But here we are. All right.

Justin said last week, "Escaping the world and leaving all this behind has never been the plan. The plan has always been to restore this world to men-broken relationships here, to fix unjust systems here, to live in harmony with God and with each other and with this earth."

So we're really going to camp out on this idea even more today. So with that in mind, let's go to where we last picked up in the sermon on the mount, Matthew 6:19-24. And I have this on the screen if you want to follow along. It says:

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. The eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is healthy, the whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness? No one can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

So if you are one of my middle school students, I see a few of you today, you'll know that when we have Bible study, two different people read the text out loud. And after we read it through twice, we pair up into partners and ask the question, "What did you notice?"

So if you all were my partner, I would tell you the first thing I notice is a call for less. Don't store up treasures on earth. And that's so antithetic, I took it out, but what the little pocket in my pocket, or the computer in my pocket tells me daily, right? This weekend I was at a bonfire with my parents and their neighbors and someone asked, "Val, you don't have Instagram, right?" And my mom said, "Well, I technically do, but I don't like using it because it's all ads." And she's so right, isn't she? There's a 2020 study that I found that the average Instagram feed is about 20% advertisements and sometimes more depending on how well your algorithm knows you and how often you engage with them.

So my Instagram, this is just things I pulled up when I was procrastinating writing my sermon. These are my Instagram ads. So my Instagram knows that I'm a homeowner and I want it deep cleaned by somebody else. It knows that I'm a reader and I like cute merch and I would love a free hat that has a cute little reader thing. I'm a millennial with a lot of American Girl Doll nostalgia and so I love a cute little shirt with a little American Girl Doll. My girl was Josefina, shout out. And I have a greedy little dachshund who eats multiple greenies every day. They know this about me. And it's so easy to store up on all these things, you know, book now, buy now, shop now, learn more. Last week was Target Circle Week and Amazon Prime Day. And my phone all day was just giving me notifications, like something on your wish list is on sale. Home baskets and organization, shout out, 40% off, that's my aisle. Spend $50 on skincare, get a $5 gift card, right? This is just going off in our pockets all day.

I want to show you a trailer for a documentary on Netflix that some of you might have seen came out last year. It's called Buy Now and I want you to take a look.

[trailer plays] Voiceover: Buying new stuff feels great, right? The problem is that every year we're consuming more, producing more and there's a flip side to that that no one wants you to see.

I was president of the Adidas brand. I started at Apple. I worked at Amazon for 15 years. It's a highly refined science to get you to buy stuff. They know you. Like, we know you. We were constantly developing new ways to get you to buy. Influencing your behavior in subtle ways that you'd never even realize.

And every trick in the book is being used to hide what's really going on. Look at this bag. They're doing what marketers always do, which is showing you the shiny little thing over here. Because they don't want you to look at what they're doing over here. This is what they do with unwanted merchandise. Amazon was dumping into landfills toys.

The voices of we're going to protect the business went out over the little voice in your head saying, “Should we really be doing this?” These things are hazardous waste. We're drinking them, breathing them and they're poison. It just becomes this cycle of pain that may be providing you and your family with a lovely lifestyle. But you have to still reconcile that with things that are important to you as a human being.

Everybody wants to believe that the company that they're working for is not evil. We can decide that this is not the way that we want to live and move it in a different direction. Every industry needs to stop putting it on the consumer. Stop making it our responsibility. It's yours. Life is about the experiences and the people that we're with. And the stuff that we have supports it but it's not the end. Whoever dies with the most stuff does not win.”

Marta: Do not store up treasures on earth where moth and rust consume. And Jesus, I wish moth and rust would consume some of it because it's piling up and it's not going anywhere. And if consumerism and the just in case mentality was strong in Jesus' time, it's exploded since then.

So obviously we know what not to do but what are we supposed to do? Store up treasures in heaven is what it says. And it's easy to imagine heaven like a giant reward system. You do good things. You collect points and you cash them in for a mansion in the sky.

If you've ever played Stardew Valley, this is my current hyper fixation. I'm very late to the trend but you can ask my husband, it's all I do these days. And you go on a couple of nice little side quests for your neighbors. You pick up a couple of things for them and they say thank you so much. Here's a little ticket. And you go into the mayor's house and you cash in your ticket for more supplies, exclusive home decor stuff, more skill building stuff. And I think a lot of us imagine heaven to be that way that I'm just collecting all these little tickets.

Whatever version of the song you know best, you're probably familiar with the most recorded gospel song of all time that goes, “When I die, hallelujah, bye and bye.” What? [Congregation sings:] “I'll fly away,” right? I'll fly away if you're imagining to what I'm imagining, a place filled with all my favorite stuff waiting for me to live out my days in eternal bliss. But that's still a consumer model, right? That's still capitalism just spiritualized. And this is where theology matters here. Because if your theology says you'll fly away to a celestial shore with a mansion filled with good deed tickets ready to be cashed in for good prizes, or if your theology says this world is going to burn and the good stuff comes later, then it doesn't really matter what happens to earth. But I don't think that that's what Jesus meant.

In Matthew's gospel, Jesus keeps talking about the kingdom of heaven. Rather than imagining a castle in the clouds, right, the kingdom of heaven, I want us to swap out some words to get us in the mindset of the original sermon. So kingdom, think of something active and ongoing. So there's a reign, there's a ruling, there's an action that's happening, an immediate and ongoing thing. We can swap out heaven with God, the Creator, a sense of goodness, inherent rightness. So instead of a storehouse in the sky, Jesus invites us to an active reign of goodness happening here and now. The place and time of God's power is right here, right now. It's not a someday place, but a movement of today.

And when Jesus is preaching all of this, this whole sermon on the Mount, he's not talking to the powerful, right? We saw this in the Beatitudes a few weeks ago. He's talking to the poor in spirit, the mourners, the persecuted, people living under Roman occupation crushed by taxes and empire. So when he says store up treasures in heaven, he's inviting them into a different economy. One ruled not by scarcity or fear, but generosity and trust.

I want to go back to the scripture Justin talked about last week and I alluded to at the beginning and I'm going to read [Revelation 21:2-4] from a different translation than he did so we can maybe hear it in a different way.

And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem descending out of heaven from God, prepared like a bride on her wedding day, adorned for her husband and for his eyes only. And I heard a great voice coming from the throne. See the home of God is with his people. He will live among them. They will be his people and God himself will be with them. The prophecies are fulfilled. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more, mourning no more, crying no more, pain no more, for the first things have gone away.

Escaping this world has never been the plan. The plan has always been to restore this world, to mend broken relationships here, to fix unjust systems here, to live in harmony with God and with each other and with this physical earth here.

And so again, I think theology matters a lot with we're talking about. When our theology is kingdom-focused, we care for this earth because this is where the new city will be. When we embrace the ways of Jesus, we care for people, community, for justice, because God's treasure is built in relationship. It causes us to reconsider whether we focus our resources on keeping ourselves comfortable or cultivating a community of abundance and flourishing for all.

After talking about treasure, Jesus immediately says the eye is the lamp of the body, which maybe feels like a strange jump, but it's not. Let me show you a picture of someone with a very unhealthy eye. This is my half blind wiener dog named Kevin. He's named after Kevin Garnett, number 21, because look at him, he looks just like him. And he was born this way, he's always been blind, so one eye always looks cloudy. When he is greedy, he claims he's always hungry. Brad and I, if you look through our text, 90% of them are just like, "I fed the dog this morning and don't let him tell you otherwise." That's just like every day, just boom, boom, boom. He will steal food right out of your hand if you're not careful. And he is the perfect sermon illustration for today.

Among the tribes of Israel, a greedy person is said to have a bad eye and unable to see the good road. Clouded and misguided. Meanwhile, a generous person was said to have a good eye, full of light and able to clearly see the good road. So the key to investing in kingdom treasure is not one of more and more and more and greed like Kevin's way, but to have an eye full of light and to live in a way of generosity.

The actions of caring for the earth as if in heaven and investing in a kingdom treasure does not need to be one of dread and guilt. I know oftentimes sermons and seminars and that documentary and talking about climate care in regards to what we can buy can make us feel really guilty and feel really hopeless.

Sometimes I still order things on Amazon because I don't know where else to get what I'm looking for. I love an end cap at Target full of candles. I'm going to smell them all and if even there's the slightest of sales, I'm going to come home with an armful of them. I don't throw my batteries away because I don't know what to do with them. I know you're not supposed to put them in the ground, but I know there's places where you can bring them. I don't know where. So there's just this big gallon ziploc bag of batteries in my house and I don't know what to do about it, right?

But listen, the call to kingdom treasure is not a call of guilt. I can't imagine somebody who lives a perfectly eco-friendly life day in and day out, filled with dread being described as full of light. This is a call to joy.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass, Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants writes, "Despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency." And so instead, she calls us to think of climate care and the kingdom of heaven treasure like this:

It's not enough to grieve. It's not enough to just stop doing bad things. We have enjoyed the feast generously laid out for us by Mother Earth, but now the plates are empty and the dining room is a mess. It's time we started doing the dishes in Mother Earth's kitchen. Doing the dishes has gotten a bad rap, but everyone who migrates to the kitchen after a meal knows this is where the laughter happens, the good conversations, the friendships. Doing dishes, like doing restoration, forms relationships.

Instead of cashing in treasure for a grand reward, I think Jesus is calling us to store up kingdom treasure through the relational work of restoration. It doesn't mean it's easy, right? Ask any kid, any of us, "Wow, what are half the roommate fights that you've ever had in your life?" Doing the dishes is not fun, but it can be filled with so much joy if we are in it together.

So I'll ask you this question: What is an act of sustainability or climate justice that brings you joy? What's an act that's filled with light and generosity, not cloudy eyes, that brings you the relational work of doing the dishes? I asked this question on my Instagram this week and here's a few things that my friends said. Some people said carpooling, taking public transportation and biking and walking to work is a way that fills them up with joy. Other than being one singular person in a giant car on the highway, adding to the numbers, what if you partnered up with someone who's going to the same place where you are? Or talk about the perfect time to be outside getting where you're going. This is the perfect time of year to just add a couple minutes to your commute.

Other people said composting brings them a lot of joy and I think a lot of us imagine like the 2010 era of composting where you have to buy a lot of stuff and it smells really gross and you gotta like dig the hole kind of thing. You know what I'm talking about? But it's actually a lot easier than I ever expected. So if you live within, I don't know what it's like for every city in the metro, but if you live in the city of Minneapolis, you can request one of these green organic recycling bins for free and they'll bring it out to your house. You don't even have to buy those little green composting bags. You can just use a paper bag that you get from Trader Joe's and Whole Foods for this organic recycling program. And you can talk to your apartment complex or your workplace if this isn't something they don't already have and get this integrated. You can throw away things that were going to go in the garbage into a place that will be organically recycled.

The most popular one and I think the most fun one is secondhand shopping. Not all of this outfit, but much of this outfit is thrifted as most of my outfits on Sundays are. These are all things that I asked friends to send me some of their favorite thrifts that they've gotten. So I've got a shirt that says, or a friend has a shirt that says, "At my age, happy hour is taking a nap." Which, can I get a show of hands, amen? There's a blanket that my friend thrifted and she said, "Now I design my whole home around it. I just love the colors and it inspires me to get new things. That was only $10." This incredibly gorgeous hutch. $375 feels like a lot, but if you think about buying it new with real wood, getting it secondhand, all these different…

That $0 lamp is mine. I’m, if anything, a preacher of the gospel of Facebook Buy Nothing. I love people just post things they don't want and I said, "I'll take that. Thank you very much. You can put it on your porch and I'll come get it." It's oftentimes cheaper than buying new and it engages us in this storytelling of saying, "Thanks, it's thrifted," and curating a lifestyle of things that you love that are saved from a landfill.

A friend of mine, her name is Sarah, is committed to buying no new clothes in 2025. She works in an industry that really values fashion and staying up to trend. They have a very strict fashion-forward dress code. She's committed to sticking with what's in her wardrobe for this year. When I asked her about it, she said it's really taught her about how much buying clothes was just looking for that initial dopamine hit of having something on your porch waiting for you when you come home, something fun to unwrap, or a nice little de-stressing treat to the mall or to wherever you go after work. She did say it's very hard as her two biggest loves are Wicked and Taylor Swift, letting all the merch go. But also she says, "I have merch, and I can be happy with the things that I have." She's able to get really creative in outfit pairing and things she never would have thought of with things that she already owns.

And finally, some of us find joy by actually doing the dishes. When I originally posed this question at a 2021 book club of Braiding Sweetgrass, Debbie Manning, one of the Co-Lead Pastors, says, "I'm really committed to using reusable plates and silverware at every gathering we do." And if you know the Mannings, they really value having people around their table. I would imagine at least once a week between staff meetings and family dinners and small group gatherings, the Manning table is rarely empty, but they want to do the work of washing the dishes together.

In the same way, many of you have likely been the lucky recipient of a meal from Ellen Poulter. If there's a meal train, she's going to be the first person to sign up, and she's the type of person who is committed to getting it to you in a container that isn't going to end up in a landfill. And no, she does not want it back.

Every one of these actions is ordinary, but they're all light, and they're all kingdom treasure. The section of scripture that we're in today says, closes with, "You cannot serve God and wealth. You can't stock up unearthly treasure with cloudy, greedy eyes and still live in God's kingdom economy." And honestly, I think it's a lot harder to do now than when Jesus originally said these words. But my hope for today is this, that we lean into kingdom treasures, acts of generosity, reciprocity, and restoration to make this world, this physical earth, a better place to be. So maybe this week, as you're literally doing the dishes, remember that this is sacred work. This is restoration work. Look at your hands in the warm water and imagine God's hands doing the same thing, making all things new.

May our eyes be clear, our treasures be generous, and our hands ready to do the dishes together. Amen.