Location, Location, Location

Photo of The Very Rev. Dean Terry White by The Very Rev. Terry White, Dean

Location, location, location.  How many times have we heard that in real estate nothing matters more than location? How many businesses have proved the truth of that saying, how many homeowners have learned this truth while selling a home?  In real estate, nothing is more important than location.

When it comes to faithful discipleship, Jesus says the same thing.  Location, location, location: where is your heart?  And by extension, where is the heart of the Church?

The Gospel reading for this day requires that you and I wrestle with the literal warnings about piety and economic hoarding.  To be sure, I find I am more comfortable wrestling with the question of piety. Am I being pious in order to obtain divine approval or human approval?  And most likely my wrestling leads me to a justification that goes something like this: “as a sophisticated, 21st century Anglican, the age-old practice of physical fasting doesn’t have much of a place today, and so long as I ‘fast in my heart’ that is good enough.”  Episcopalians are by and large suspicious of literalism, but at the same time, not everything in scripture is to be interpreted as metaphor. Reducing fasting to a spiritual metaphor is so convenient and thus makes fasting so easy to dismiss.

Further, if we do the same violence to verses 19-21 on economic hoarding and engage these verses as metaphor, we rob this passage, and this day, of the power to convict and convert us, to transform and heal, to enable us to experience a life-changing Lent, that brings us closer to the heart of God.

Your heart is where your treasure is, Jesus says.  Where is our heart?  And what kind of fast are we called to?

The readings from Isaiah and Matthew each address the issue of economic justice as being a true and accurate reflection of how sincere we are as disciples.  Each lesson points the faith community to a sober examination of all the energy and time and creativity we put into attaining earthly treasures, verses the amount of time and energy and creativity we employ in storing up heavenly treasure.

Matthew’s warning about hoarding is identical to Isaiah’s question about whether a pious fast without earthly justice is a fast acceptable to YHWH.  Can our liturgy on this day, the Litany of Penitence, confession and absolution, Eucharist and dismissal, cause us to turn round right not simply in spirit, but in lives that are lived differently? 

The danger, of course, is the modern day justification: So long as I believe in my heart that economic justice is a godly virtue worth striving for, then that is enough. So long as I desire peace, I don’t need to work for it personally right now.  And in the meantime, we save our better energies for storing up earthly treasure.

Today the prophet’s cries trumpet through this cathedral:  Are you ready to assume the fast that God demands:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them

The prophets, and the Lord Jesus, do not call us to assent to a spiritual metaphor.  This fast is most specific, and cannot be fulfilled through prayer and abstinence alone. This fast requires the strength of a true servant, the unquenchable desire to empty one’s self, and the selfless generosity of resources which overcomes the greed of the hoarder.

On this day, as our annual pilgrimage to the Passion begins, we are called to die to self as the Christian community, that we might be raised to bear much fruit, build up the reign of God on earth among all people, and so add to our account in heaven.

Margaret Aymer sums up our lessons this way:

Reading all of these lessons in concert, we find that the Lenten fast
does not call us to public piety, but challenges our community to live as Isaiah proclaims. 
          The call is not to discipleship that ignores injustice, but to discipleship that dismantles it.
          The call is not to discipleship with no demands on one’s money or one’s life, but to a discipleship that demands all that one is and all that one has. 
           (M. Aymer, New Proclamation, Year C, page 132.)

Where our treasure is, there is also our heart. Location, location, location. It is time to relocate.