The Quest for Treasures

Please remember that today is our INC Picnic at 1pm on the lawn. All are Welcome. Vacation Bible School with INC begins on August 7th, please reach out for more information or to hold your spot. The Village Fair is on August 19th starting at 9:30 – 1:30 (this is a NEW TIME), with the 5K Walk/Run/Crawl beginning at 8:30 (to try to beat the heat).

There are treasures all around us.  Things that are precious and in need of protecting.  There are the treasures of wisdom and the treasures of “a listening heart”.  The heart of justice.  

Perhaps the quest and the challenge is to disentangle the grace of God from the world of humankind.  They can get very tangled and messy.  When in doubt there are quest clues: look for the helpers, look for the goodness, look for the kindness, look for the love.  Those are the echoes of God’s Love in this world.  

It’s been a week of old stories and toys.  The Barbie movie.  Baseball cards. Raggedy Ann and Andy.  It’s Harry Potter week. These are often “charged” things.  We like or we hate.  My team.  Your team.  Good.  Bad.  There’s often no in between.  Notice the Barbie movie ads: “whether you love or hate Barbie”…there’s no in between.  

Sometimes, we find Good-work and God-work in the unlikeliest of places.  In each of these old toys, if you look, is the hand and face of God.  We find Grace in the memories and sometimes, it’s bittersweet.  

Sometimes, we find grace where it seems there is an absence of God.  In the absence of love and kindness.  Those stories are real too.  Stories mixed with good and bad and, yes, everything in between.  Because mostly, it’s the “between” we live in, the softer grey areas, not so stark black or white.  Stories that make us think: what if it was different?  What if God was part of this story?  And often, there’s God, even in the most unlikely of places.  Often, we realize later that Grace was there all along.

We find treasures when we seek to find the blessings in everything.  We learn how to change the story and change our lives when we seek the love and the goodness.  We can transform stories of something “bad” to a story of something “good”.  Perhaps we had to move through the “bad” to get a place of good.  To become who are and to find our place.  And perhaps, all along, it was more grey than anything else.  

The wisdom passage from this week is where King Solomon asks for the treasure of an “understanding heart” which is often translated as “a listening heart”.  He asks for wisdom to rule God’s “vast people” well.  He doesn’t ask for money or power or gold.  He knows that wisdom is the treasure.  In some ways, maybe wisdom is a quest to find and unbury the deepest treasures.  

What matters and what is truly precious: God’s Love and Human Kindness.  

Sometimes, we dig in the likeliest places and “find nothing”.  Sometimes, we dig in the unlikeliest of places and “find everything”.  If God is everywhere, then even the places filled with “nothing” are filled with something.  Sometimes, it’s there, we find our way, our path, our call.  

Stories are one of our greatest treasures.  We know this, we have an entire library of Books.  Stories are universal and they are ingrained in us as human beings.  They’ve been with us since the beginning.  They help us to sort through the stuff of life and the bigger stuff beyond life.. Novels are often a person’s work of sorting through the stuff to find the treasures.  Art and poetry.  They inspire a sense of wonder.  The unreal and the imagined are ways of exploring great treasures under new lights.  

July offers a new saint for us. One who makes us think of the unexpected ways we might come to God. Things that may seem unGodly leading and guiding us unexpectedly to God. Moments of Grace are more often than not shrouded in the unexpected and Mysterious.  He shares a date near to Harry Potter Day and perhaps (if you’re a Harry Potter fan) you’ll see echoes of the Harry Potter story in his story:  

Saint Ignatius of Loyola.  He was a military man, a soldier.  He wanted, more than anything, fame!  He was also known for: gambling, womanizing, drinking, being quick to attack, arrogance, and a big ego.  Very human, we could (kindly) say.  

He was extremely competitive and determined to win every battle and to be noticed and glorified by king and country.  He seemed on that path until an injury in battle ruined his military career.  While he was recovering, he was bored.  Imagine, for a moment, this heroic soldier suddenly confined to a bed.  He longed for adventures and excitement.  

He asked for books of battles and chivalry. He wanted books about King Arthur and Camelot,  courtly love, knights and knighthood, and glorious battles.   

The only books available were on Christ and the Saints of the Church.  With nothing else to do, he read them anyway.  As he read them, he decided to discover how he could do even better than the saints and Jesus!  He brought his fighting, competitive nature to these new stories.   He brought what he already knew to these new stories and new heroes.  

He read and lay in bed day dreaming about glorious battles and fame and courtly love.  He lay in bed and imagined himself in the stories as a one of the saints or acting as Jesus.  He discovered that after his imagining of saints and Christ, he felt peaceful and calm.  

When he recovered, he continued to practice a “competitive rivalry” with the saints and created a new spiritual discipline which he wrote down in The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius.  It was a practice fed by his military and competitive experience.  Fed by the stories of the glorious knights and courtly love.  It became a practice of discernment and discipline for God.  A practice of “simple contemplation” where one puts oneself into the story and discovers: Who am I?  Who could I be?  How might it have been?  A practice to bring one closer to saints, to Jesus, and to God.  

His imaginings created a place to uncover the buried treasures within and to measure one’s self against the highest of role models.  He brought what he knew, no longer for the glory of war and man, but for the glory of God and peace.  

He became a saint of a different sort than we might imagine a saint should be.  Competing for God.  Competing for Jesus.  One might not imagine a man like this becoming a saint at all.  And yet…there he is.  

We find the greatest treasures in the most mysterious and unexpected ways.  We are called in unexpected ways.  We are all beloved by God even when we feel we don’t deserve it.  It is unexpected and glorious.  

Our work is to unearth, uncover, and perhaps shine up the treasures we have been gifted with and to share it with the world around us.  Our work is to keep looking, keep seeking, keep questing.  Everywhere.  We often find Grace in the oddest of places.  Usually in the guise of kindness, compassion, deep love–sometimes in the tough love that looks like less than it is.  It is often in the places that make the least sense that the hand of something bigger has touched.  

The treasures are there for us to find in our own ways, through our unique gifts and passions.  As we read, may we look for God in the story.  As we study, we might look for the imprint of Jesus.  As we watch, may we seek the Goodness.  As we listen, may we quest for the Love.  And where there is ‘absence’, may we dig deeper.  Perhaps within the absence is the Presence.  Perhaps, where we least expect it is the Treasure and the Call.