The Incomparable Treasure

June 22, 1986

Download Sermon

Scripture: Matthew 13:44

Do you know what I almost wish? Not really, I guess, but I almost wish people didn’t know the Bible so well.

Now, that may be a funny thing for a preacher to say, and if you tell the Bishop I said it, of course I’ll have to deny it, but I really do almost mean it. I wish people didn’t know the Bible so well.

Most of us have just enough familiarity with it to keep us from hearing what it really says. How different it must have been in the beginning.....

WHEN JESUS SPOKE, PEOPLE LISTENED..... I’m convinced of that. He spoke with a freshness,

with a sense of vividness that stabbed people awake and made them remember. That’s the kind of person he was.... He spoke about things that were impossible to forget, simply because they were exciting, and because HE was exciting.

Listen to this story he told, and play like you’re hearing it for the very first time:

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure lying buried in a field; the man who found it buried it again, and for sheer joy went and sold everything he had, and bought that field.”

Imagine that you were that man.... Put yourself in his shoes and see if your heart doesn’t beat a little faster.

There used to be a program on television a long time ago.... I mean a LONG time ago, back in the days of Howdy Doody and Bishop Sheen....[1] Those were 2 different programs, by the way.

Anyway this was an old-timey program. I don’t think it’s even on re-runs now, but in its day it was a pretty popular series. I was called “The Millionaire”....do I see some looks of recognition?

It was the story of a fabulously wealthy man.... sort of like Andy Baran, or somebody like that, who, apparently just for jollies, just for kicks, would sit down periodically and write out a check for ONE MILLION Dollars and give it away.

He did this anonymously to some person he didn’t even know.... He did it every week to somebody different as long as the show was on the air... The person who received the check had no idea it was coming.... didn’t know where it came from, or how he had been chosen..... And best of all he didn’t have to be deserving.... SUDDENLY AND INEXPLICABLY, THERE IT WAS, in his hot little hands, or her hot little hands, as the case may be ....ONE MILLION DOLLARS.... free and clear, tax exempt, no strings attached, to do with however he darned well pleased.....

Put yourself in that person’s shoes and see if your heart doesn’t beat a little faster.

BACK WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL, at least the day I heard the story, some college boys took off from class one day and went swimming in the Suwannee River, up around Live Oak. They were swimming in a spring, legend says PIRATES had hidden treasure they didn’t want stolen from them.

Suddenly, as they were swimming around, diving to the bottom, kicking up sand, one of them touched something hard and metallic on the bottom. They went down to investigate. They didn’t have any scuba equipment, and it was difficult, but they finally ascertained that it was a chest of some sort, almost totally buried in the sand.

They pulled and tugged, all of them, as hard as they could, but they couldn’t budge it....it was too firmly embedded.

So, finally, they left it and went to get some equipment. When they returned a while later with a block and tackle, they had managed somehow to borrow...don’t ask too many questions.... they went back down to the bottom of the spring....AND THE CHEST WAS GONE.... It had disappeared. They looked all up and down the river, probing, desperately, frantically.... but they were never able to find it.

MAYBE SOMEBODY HAD BEEN WATCHING AND BEAT THEM TO IT.... Maybe it had sunk deeper into the sand.... They never found out. And those college boys.... those ex-college boys wonder to this day, I suppose, just how close they came to being fabulously wealthy.

Put yourself in their shoes and see if your heart doesn’t beat a little faster.

There’s probably no more famous and moving story in the annals of archaeology than the discovery of a grave in 1922 in the country of Egypt....Howard Carter was the archaeologist.

Through sheer persistence and luck, they came across an underground passage that had lain untouched for nearly 3,500 years. They couldn’t be sure, but they thought it might be the burial place of a great Pharaoh.

For weeks the work went on..... They dug through the debris that separated them from the inner chamber, where they believed the sarcophagus still rested. It all had to be done very carefully, and as they inched along the tension picked up.....

Finally, they were inside the anteroom, with only one door separating them from their objective. The workers picked a hole just big enough for a man to squeeze his head and shoulders through.

Dr. Carter was first....He looked inside and caught his breath... Those behind called, “What do you see? What do you see?”

And for several seemingly endless seconds, all the great archaeologists could bring himself to say was, “Wonderful things”. It was the multi-billion dollar discovery of King Tut’s tomb.

Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure lying buried in a field.”

Now, let’s be clear on a couple of things before we try to say anything else. This story Jesus told is a PARABLE, and a parable, by definition is a story that has. ONE, and only one major point to make.

It doesn’t tell a lot of things, it tells one thing. It doesn’t contain a multitude of truths, it contains ONE truth. It doesn’t encompass all of Christianity, it just makes a single point. It’s not like an allegory, or a novel, or some other literary device where the details have all sorts of interesting meanings....

That’s not what a parable is, and you have to remember that when you read one.

IN A PARABLE THE DETAILS ARE RELATIVELY UNIMPORTANT, AND ARE THERE SIMPLY TO BUTTRESS AND UNDERSCORE THE MAIN POINT.

So you mustn’t let it lead you astray.... It’s not saying, for example, that Christianity should be hoarded, the way this man hoarded the gold, or whatever.... It’s not saying you ought to be materialistic.... It’s not saying that people should be sneaky in their behavior.

It’s a PARABLE...it has one thrust, one idea, one point to make... and the point of this parable is that membership in the Kingdom is the most precious possession a person can have in his or her life.

It’s like---treasure in a field....that valuable, that exciting.... It’s worth any sacrifice, it’s worth any effort, it’s worth giving up anything and everything you have in order to possess. And what does membership in the Kingdom mean? All the Gospels suggest that Jesus used that word Kingdom a lot. What did he mean?

We tend to think of “kingdom” as meaning a place, an area, real estate.... We think of it in terms of geography,.... We speak of the Kingdom of the Hittites, or the Kingdom of the Aztecs, or the Kingdom of Transylvania....and we think of a specific body of land.

But that isn’t the deepest meaning of Kingdom in the New Testament. The Greek word is “basileia”, and a better translation of it is REIGN.... The “reign” of God, the RULE of God, the SOVEREIGNTY of God over a life or a situation. That broadens it.

It’s not a matter of geography, it’s a matter of relationship. It’s not a matter of going somewhere, it’s a matter of accepting something. It’s not a matter of boundaries, it’s a matter of commitment.

IT’S LETTING GOD’S WAY TAKE PRIORITY IN YOU..... KINGSHIP.

Old Matthew, in his uniquely Jewish way....He doesn’t say Kingdom of God, notice, he says Kingdom of heaven....all pious Jews did that....the name of God was too sacred to be spoken out loud.... Matthew in his typically Jewish way is saying letting God come first is the best thing that can ever happen to you. “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure lying buried in a field.”

And one more step. To tie it down even more concretely.... To us, of course, who see it from this side of the Resurrection, THE KINGDOM IS EMBODIED IN THE STORY TELLER... This is our Gospel.

Christ is the Kingdom, Christ is the treasure, Christ is the best thing that can ever happen to you....... Let that get hold of you and see if your heart doesn’t beat a little faster.

Our whole purpose, then, as a Christian community, our whole purpose as God’s people, our whole purpose as CHURCH is to bear witness to Him, to point to Him as effectively as we can and say.... LOOK! There he is, There’s the One you’re really looking for, whether you know it or not.

ACCEPT HIS KINGSHIP OVER YOUR LIFE, AND FIND THE TREASURE.

Oh, I wish we could do it better than we do. I wish I could do it better than I do. I wish I were a better pointer.... I wish I knew how to be.

This has always been the despair of witnesses. NO MATTER WHAT YOU SAY ABOUT HIM, IT’S TOO LITTLE. He’s always more than you can express.

And yet, somehow, through some miracle of the divine working, when we do lift Him up, even in the feeble way we do it, even to people with little background for Him, or even to people inoculated against receiving Him.... somehow He has a strange and powerful way of coming through.

Dr. Claude Thompson of Emory University, in his book “Theology of the Kerygma”, relates a true incident that took place a few years ago in a university in India.

In this great Indian school, where there was not a single student enrolled, a program was put on and the theme of the program was to dramatize the great religious leaders of the world. It was a kind of assembly presentation and the students entered into it with imagination.

Buddha was portrayed sitting out under the bo tree, and the audience applauded. Mohammed was shown making his trek from Medina to Mecca. There was Confucius speaking with his disciples..... Various deities of the Indian pantheon were presented and everybody was enjoying the program.

And then it happened. A young man took a rough purple robe and threw it around his shoulders, and then took a crude crown of thorns and placed it on his head, and walked out and just stood there in the center of the stage.... That’s all he did... He didn’t say anything, He just stood there.

The audience, without a single Christian in it,.... sat bolt upright for a moment in stunned silence. It was too much..... Then somebody hissed, and somebody else booed, and then more and more, until finally, a whole chorus of the objections drove the young man from the stage and the program was disrupted. WITHOUT THE PRESENCE OF A SINGLE CHRISTIAN IN THE AUDIENCE, IT WAS MORE THAN THEY COULD TAKE.

“Ah”, says Dr. Thompson, in commenting on the story, “There is one figure of history, the bloody-headed Carpenter of Nazareth, who simply cannot be lampooned.”

And He’s the treasure we’re commissioned to offer It’s not the Church. It’s not even the Bible... not ultimately. It’s certainly not the denomination, or the preacher.... These are the treasures only in the sense that a treasure map could be called a treasure..... They point to the real thing.

CHRIST IS THE REAL THING, and there’s no other treasure of comparable value anywhere.

Let me ask you. I’m not much of an arm twister when it comes to this kind of thing, but I think this is important. WHEN HAVE YOU, LAST, SERIOUSLY CONSIDERED YOUR RELATIONSHIP TO HIM?

Have you ever, really, maturely, come to grips with his claim on your life?

Have you gone beyond the Sunday School atmosphere, and the little Bible story trappings to let the impact of this Carpenter’s life get hold of your mind and heart?

Have you ever thought about him as a PERSON, not a stereotype, but a PERSON, young and vibrant, and full of life? Once he went to a wedding, and straightened things out for a couple who were having trouble with the refreshments.... Once he walked straight through the middle of a lynch mob and not a soul in the crowd dare lay a hand on him.... I mean, this was no weak, namby-pamby preacher, this was a MAN.

He had a sense of humor that must have broken people up as he talked about a man with a 2x4 sticking out of his eye trying desperately to get a little spec of sawdust out of another man’s eye.... Who but a carpenter could have come up with an illustration like that?

BUT THAT’S THE KIND OF MAN HE WAS..... They called him a “wine bibber and a glutton” and he never seems to have denied it. They called him a “friend of sinners”, and he gloried in it. He was ALIVE.... a person, a human being, THE human being, more so than any person who ever lived.

And don’t stop here.... carry it out. See him, this most life-saturated person who ever walked on the earth.... see him walking up a hill, dragging behind him a Cross, on which some soldiers are about to nail his body.... see him hanging there, on that hill, the nails tearing into his flesh, the pain ripping into his nerves like steel wires....

IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE THAT..... It’s not very pretty, but that was the nature of Crucifixion.... by design and intent..... TAKE A GOOD LOOK AT IT.

And yet, see him, even as his life agonizingly slips away.... praying for the forgiveness of the very people who had put him there.... “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

It almost takes your breath away..... HE DID THAT FOR YOU.... HE DID THAT FOR YOU. I almost want to say he did it because he wanted to.... because that’s how much you mean to him.

Here’s how far real love will go. God, in Christ, suffering, that you might live and live abundantly.

What can you call it but treasure? Maybe it really is worth giving up everything you have to possess.

There’s an old story from India that once long ago on the northwest frontier of that country, a band of robbers came across a man traveling alone on a beautiful horse. As they came closer, they called out to him, “Brother, who are and where are you going?”

The man answered, “I am Amahl, servant of the Maharaja, and I am taking this horse to my master’s son as a gift from his father.”

So, the robbers grabbed him and beat him, and took the horse, and left him bleeding in the road.

Later in the day, another band of robbers came upon the man, and they asked him who he was and where he was going. He said, “I am Amahl, servant of the Maharaja, and I am carrying to my master’s son as a gift from his father a gold chain concealed in my turban.”

So, they searched him and found the chain and took it, but after beating him, they let him go.

Finally, after much walking, the servant reached his destination, and presented himself to his master’s son, and the son, seeing this beaten, limping man, wearing nothing but a loin cloth, asked him in astonishment who he was.

And he said, “I am Amahl, servant of the Maharaja, your father. And I bring to my master’s son this gift.

And with that, he took from his armpit where it had been all along, the great pearly, now known as the “mountain of milk”, which to this day is the greatest treasure in that entire land.

He had lost everything, except the thing that was really important.

WHAT ABOUT YOU?

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure lying buried in a field; the man who found it buried it again, and for sheer joy went and sold everything he had, and bought that field.”

--

[1] Both of these TV Shows were from the 1950s.  Howdy Doody was a children’s show with circus and western themes.  Bishop Sheen was a Roman Catholic and hosted a late night TV show, Living Life to its Fullest.