What Are We Missing?

What do you treasure?

It sounds like a simple question. But I suspect the answer is different for every one of us.

For some, treasure may be something handed down through generations. For another, it may be a photograph, a place, a relationship, a memory, or something that would appear almost worthless to anyone else. Treasure is strange that way. Its value cannot always be measured by what someone else would pay for it.

One of this Sunday's readings tells the story of the young King Solomon. In a dream, God comes to Solomon and offers him an extraordinary gift: Solomon may ask God for whatever he desires.

Imagine the possibilities for a young king. Wealth. Power. Victory over his enemies. A long and prosperous life.

Solomon asks for none of them.

Instead, he asks for wisdom. More literally, he asks God for a "listening heart" so that he can lead God's people well.

There is almost an innocence in that request. Solomon recognizes that he has been given an enormous responsibility and does not pretend to have everything figured out. His treasure is not having all the answers. His treasure is becoming wise enough to listen.

Jesus also talks about treasure in several short parables we will hear Sunday.

He compares God's kingdom to a tiny mustard seed that grows into something much larger. He describes yeast mixed into flour until it transforms the whole batch. He tells of someone unexpectedly discovering treasure buried in a field and another person searching for a single extraordinary pearl.

Jesus finds the language of God's kingdom in ordinary things: seeds and soil, bread and treasure, pearls and fish.

There are no palaces here. No piles of gold. No symbols of power.

Maybe Jesus is inviting us to reconsider where we look for treasure.

We live in a culture constantly assigning value. We are told which homes are valuable, which careers are successful, which possessions are desirable, and which people are influential. Before long, it becomes easy to confuse value with usefulness, price, status, or success.

Even faith can become tangled in this way of thinking.

In another of Sunday's readings, Paul assures the Christian community in Rome that God is for them and that nothing in all creation can separate them from God's love.

Those words have offered comfort and courage to generations of Christians.

But "God is for us" can easily become "God is on our side." And from there, it is a dangerously short journey to believing that God must therefore be against someone else.

Paul is not declaring our superiority.

Paul is declaring the persistence of God's love.

Which brings me back to one final story Jesus tells.

He describes people pulling a fishing net ashore and sorting their catch. Some fish are gathered into baskets while others are thrown away.

We should be careful about pushing a parable beyond what Jesus intends. But I find myself wondering about those discarded fish.

A fish that was not suitable for someone's dinner was still a fish.

Its usefulness to the person holding the net did not determine its place or value within God's creation.

That distinction is worth remembering.

Something does not become worthless simply because it is not useful to us.

Someone does not become less valuable because they cannot produce what our culture prizes.

And treasure does not cease to be treasure simply because someone else fails to recognize it.

This may be why the wisdom Solomon requested matters so much.

We need listening hearts. Hearts willing to question what we have been taught to call successful, valuable, desirable, or worthwhile.

The kingdom Jesus describes may be hidden all around us. Sometimes beneath the soil. Sometimes within something remarkably ordinary. Sometimes in places we have walked past a hundred times without noticing.

Perhaps wisdom begins when we stop asking only, "What is this worth to me?"

And begin asking:

What treasure might God be inviting me to uncover?

Kevin+