For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be. –Luke 12.34
Once a man told me the story of a woman–his wife–who traded their children for twenty black bags of garbage. I kid you not. Nor was he kidding when he told me the tale. As he related the event, his wife could not part with her garbage. The problem began early in their marriage, with her holding onto items that had no surface value. The marriage soon enough was being buried under a heap of garbage.
He tried everything, but nothing worked. She would not allow anyone to clean the house, although every room literally was a trash bin. Exasperated and exhausted, the man one day went home while his wife was away and he filled twenty black bags with garbage from the rooms in which they were supposed to live. Most of the garbage, he said, was used take-out containers from fast food places, old flyers or magazines that had come in the mail over the course of many months, and even dried-up pieces of pizza that she had refused to throw away.
The man loaded the car with these many bags of trash–a smelly and nauseous experience, he assured me–and hauled them to a dumpster outside the city. That was intentional because, as he said, if he had dumped the trash bags anywhere nearby, his wife would have retrieved them. He had tried the sidewalk several times before and she had hauled the trash right back into the house. Having disposed of it this time miles away, he showered, put on clean clothes, and headed back to the office.
A short while later, his wife called him. Upon her return, she had found her treasure looted and lost. She was livid with rage. She demanded that everything was to be returned to her. Everything. Even the dried up slices of pizza. And to be sure that he did as she said, she told him that she had their small children in the car with her and she would not return them to the house until he returned all her garbage. Needless to say, he went to the far away dumpster, retrieved all the bags of trash, and returned them to the house. Once his wife was assured all had been restored safely, she came back with their children.
It came as no surprise to me when he said he ended the marriage a short while later. He would not have his children live in a literal garbage bin and he would not have them used as hostages in any future negotiations over the rights of ownership of garbage. He concluded his story by saying that his children now lived with him in a clean house and his ex-wife now lived in their old home with her garbage bags.
It would not take a degree in psychology to conclude that this woman had serious problems. And from our safe perch of sanity, we can pity her. But that decision to see her as insane and to see ourselves as sane would not be entirely fair. At least not in the Jewish Rabbi’s eyes. As he sees it and as he tells it to us, we’re all as deranged as that poor woman because we also hold onto our possessions with the same tenacity. Granted, our treasure may not be old fast-food containers or dried-up slices of pizza, but as the Teacher argues, it’s just a difference of a matter of degrees. Or as the old adage goes, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” Swiftly, the Galilean knocks us from our high horse as surely as Paul fell from his steed. “Provide money bags for yourselves,” he tells us, “that do not wear out, an inexhaustible treasure in heaven that no thief can reach nor moth destroy.”
With those words, the Teacher from Galilee urges upon us minimalism. Rather than seeking more–more of everything–he tells us to live with less. Admittedly, he was onto something important long before ecologists started preaching the perils of our insatiable appetites or environmentalists warned of our big footprints upon the earth. Our world, it seems, is becoming a giant dump site for all our stuff. This is the literal truth. Take, for example, the island of garbage that floats in the Pacific Ocean. Made up of two principal parts, the floating garbage pit–scientists say–is somewhere between the size of Texas and the size of Russia, neither of which is a small entity, as we all know.
And what, pray tell, is the trash that makes up this island? It is home to just about anything we have held as important–plastic lighters, toothbrushes, water bottles, plastic pens, baby bottles, cell phones, plastic bags, and wood pulp that probably came from the thousands of tons of toilet paper we flush into the oceans each day. Also you’ll find discarded fishing gear and nets in the heap. Scientists say the island has increased tenfold each decade since 1945. And the bad news continues. The island shows no sign of decreasing in size, only increasing. Our “Treasure Island” is a dump site.
So, the Teacher asks us to accumulate less and to give away more, to live without so much and to die with little. He wants us to make our investments in heaven, not in our local financial adviser’s office. Truly, it is a radical reorientation of our lifestyle. We’re faced here with tough questions. Is it even possible for us? Yes. Is it going to be painful? Yes. Is it a better way to live? The Teacher says yes. Those treasure chests in which we put all the things that we think are important to us have to go. Why? Because, as he tells us, it’s fool’s gold we’ve put into them.
The Jewish Rabbi called Yeshua bar Yossef knows well our hearts and the many things we love. With good cause, then, he tells us, “For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.” In those few words, he asks us to decide what are the things in which we are going to invest our heart. Will it be take-out food containers, or will it be love of neighbor? Will it be dried pizza slices, or will it be sharing what we have with others? Will it be keeping the garbage bags, or will it be keeping the kids? All are serious questions we ask ourselves today because the Teacher would like to know the answers. Also, our answers might tell us where we fall on the sanity spectrum.
— Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 