Ash Wednesday: Buried Treasure
Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Psalm 51:1-18'; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; John 8:1-11
‘Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.’
Where is your treasure? What are your debts?
I love today’s epistle. The prose drives us into the present moment through pattern and repetition: ‘See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!’
And then that great crescendo of bearing through every hardship, receiving grace and virtue and in the end a glorious rhapsody of triumph over the world: ‘We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.’
It is the voice of a church that is misunderstood, persecuted. It is the voice of people who are victims of violence. The people of Ukraine are on our hearts today. We will hold some time in silence for them later in the service – They will not need ashes on this day to know their mortality, but this barbaric invasion is a reminder to the whole world of the precariousness and preciousness of life.
as having nothing and yet possessing everything.
‘where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.’ Where is your treasure?
Life is contradictory. We tend to think that it is what we are and what we have that matters. We look back and take security in the accomplishments of our lives, the places we have been, how we have looked, whatever awards, careers, responsibilities we have held – our CV can become the measure of us. Equally we can look around us and see the accumulation of furniture, a nice flat or house, of the books, some of which we have read, the cars, antiques, paintings, children; all the things we own that go towards defining us as a person of a particular taste and personality, and let that be the measure of us.
As Christians we do not normally bury people with their possessions though, nor is our CV read at our funeral. Today we remember that we are dust. Ashes and dust.
So we are challenged to imagine ourselves at our final moment and to reflect from that perspective; to ask when the enzymes and bacteria have broken everything down, what is it that endures? That will remain? Where is our buried treasure?
Paul’s reversals, of being treated as imposters but being true, of dying and yet being alive, as poor yet making many rich, are all about a different way of being and having; a way that endures; a way of burying treasure if you like.
For Paul what endures, what remains, is not who we are but how we have loved and not what we possess, but what we have given. His model is Christ who, in the ancient hymn that he repeats in Philippians, ‘though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself... and became obedient to death.’ We are all guilty of grasping. Our insecurity demands that we grasp at who we are, finding affirmation in status and the high opinion of others. Our insecurity demands that we grasp at things of value to make us more secure, more comfortable and more respected. These are our treasures. But our buried treasure lies in how we have loved and what we have given, and this is the treasure, the buried hidden treasure, that endures.
Today’s Gospel tells us of a woman who has been publicly humiliated. She is weighed down by debt. There is an interesting corellation between sin and debt in the Bible. It is as accurate to translate the Lord’s prayer ‘forgive us our debts’ as it would be ‘forgive us our sins’. This woman is weighed down by debt. Her sense of shame, and the weight of condemnation. Publicly humiliated, she has no self-worth; The angry mob wishes to kill her. Here, we see Christ release her. We see the people who cause her shame walk away one by one. Where are our debts? Where are our hidden debts? We come to Ash Wednesday to acknowledge our sin, to repent, to recognise our frailty; But it’s not to wallow in it; Not to remember the misery of life. It’s to find release. To give it to Christ. Ash Wednesday should be for us a liberation. We step into the tomb with Lazarus, in order to walk out with Christ.
Where is your hidden treasure? Where is your hidden debt?
This focus on what is secret and hidden, the secrets of the heart, is a common theme and finds its way into the Book of Common Prayer Service for the Burial of the Dead: Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer; but spare us, Lord. Suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pain of death to fall from thee. Said at the graveside, this reminds us that at the last there is no distance between us and God and all is held in secret, we are left with only our buried treasure, what we have loved and given in our time here.
Because it would equally be a mistake to think that it is simply by what we achieve for others, or how well liked we are, that we build up our buried treasure. God has no preference for a packed funeral. As Paul says in the earlier letter to the Corinthians: ‘If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.’
We are now beginning our journey to the cross, which is the perfect secret. It is glory, truth, power, and love, in short divinity, contained in the kernel of rejection, humiliation, pain and death, that is to say ground-zero humanity. Humanity under siege. It is our symbol, our reminder, of perfect love and the perfect gift of a person giving his life for those whom he loves.
We are and will be how we have loved and what we have given. This is our buried treasure, buried with God. In Christ this is perfected as a complete giving of all for all. Our hidden debts are paid, and we are released from them. This costly grace reminds us that the hidden God is a God of perfect love – a standard, an example, and a gift for us through all our days, because we are treasured by God.
What then is our buried treasure? Where is our hidden debt? What holds us back? Where is our love? What have we given? Where your treasure is there your heart will be also. Amen.