Are God's Priorities My Priorities?

I hate today’s Gospel passage. I hate the choice that Jesus presents to the disciples gathered round him, disciples who have probably left everything to follow him. I hate that they have to make a clear choice about whose servant they will be. I hate Jesus’ implied suggestion that worrying about everything they own undermines their loyalty to God. I hate the clear command Jesus gives the disciples that they are to put God and God’s righteousness first in their lives.

Following Jesus’ command, making the right choice, could not have been easy, either for Jesus’ disciples, or for the Christian community to whom Matthew addressed his Gospel. Ancient Mediterranean culture placed a high value on personal and family honor. For religious leaders, Jews who were serious about maintaining the distinctiveness of the Jewish community, maintaining personal honor involved being scrupulous about what one ate, especially following the minutiae of the dietary laws, wearing distinctive dress, and bearing the cost of numerous required ritual sacrifices. For wealthy Gentiles, maintaining personal and family honor required conspicuous consumption, especially in food and dress, but also in the possession of houses, furniture, and animals. For the poor, of course, ensuring access to the basic necessities of life, to adequate food, sufficient clothing, and adequate shelter, was an ongoing struggle, probably on a daily basis. I would guess that neither Jews nor Gentiles, neither wealthy nor poor, appreciated being confronted by Jesus. None of them wanted to hear Jesus’ suggestion that concern about material things undermined their ability to serve God.

Any more than we do. Any more than I do. It seems as if Matthew always confronts me with a very clear choice. Today, I have no choice but to ask myself what has been the highest priority in my life? As I look back on my own life, I might wonder where my highest priority really has been. Oh, easy, you might say, you gave up a dean’s position at a large university to become a parish priest. True enough. But then I look around at all my stuff. In 1972, when my husband and I moved from Madison, Wisconsin, where I’d been a graduate student, to Tucson, Arizona, where I started as a faculty member at the University of Arizona, everything we owned fit into a Ford Econoline van and the trunk of a ’68 Valiant. In 1990, with three children in tow, it took a moving van to get us to Maine, and another one to get us to Ohio seven years later. Of late Jack and I have been sorting through our “stuff,” including giving away the best of the thirty-two boxes of scholarly books that came out of my Arizona office. We’ve donated a lot of books back to Wisconsin and given a lot of other things to charity, but we still have a lot of stuff, in addition to two cars, three computers, two TVs, two ipods, two smart phones, and now a Kindle – which I like a lot! So what’s been my choice? Whom do I serve? God or stuff? Hopefully, on most days, the answer is, “God.” Because I know deep down that Jesus is right, that God is more important to me than accumulating a lot of stuff, and that worrying about all my stuff really does undermine my loyalty to God.

Dare I say any of this in our American consumerist society? Dare I even question my own loyalties? In order to get the U.S. out of recession, don’t we have to keep buying, buying, buying? Whether it’s the latest in designer jeans or tech toys, we can’t turn on the TV or open a newspaper without being assailed by invitations to buy more, or at least to trade up to the latest version of our favorite gadgets. In this country a whole new industry has sprung up: storage lockers to hold all the stuff that no longer fits in our bursting houses!

At this point, you might be saying, O.K., Mother Leslie, we get it. We have too much stuff. So what’s the good news? Let me begin to answer that question first by suggesting what Jesus does not seem to be telling the disciples here. Jesus is not telling the disciples not to work hard. He is not telling them to become beggars. He is not telling them to give up all their possessions – although you might remember that in Luke he tells the rich young man to sell everything he had, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow him. For some people that might be the right course, but Jesus is not necessarily saying that here. Jesus is also not telling his disciples to be utterly thoughtless about the future, not telling them to be unconcerned about adequately providing for their families. What he is telling them is that they don’t need to be anxious about whether they have enough stuff, or about what the future might hold for them. They are to remember that they have been called into a community with a new and different set of values, a community with values that are more closely aligned with God’s perspective than with the values of the either the religious leaders or the Roman conquerors. As his disciples they are no longer required to worry about ostentatiously displaying their possessions or heaping up produce in their barns against a possible disaster. Through Jesus, the disciples have bound themselves to a God who cares for them and all creation, who loves them even more than a mother loves a child she has nursed, who loves them, the birds, the flowers, the rest of the animals, indeed all creation. Through Jesus they are liberated from concern about possessions and free to love God and their neighbors as Jesus himself loves them.

And so for us. Through our baptisms, through our own inclusion in the Body of Christ, through our deepening commitment to God, we too are called to live our lives by different standards. We too can be liberated from the consumerist culture around us. We too are free from anxiety about the necessities of life. We are not called to be idle or lazy, we are not called to sponge off rich friends, we are not called to forget about adequately providing for our families, churches, and chosen charitable organizations. Most certainly, we are not called to forget about the needs of the poor. Indeed towards the end of Matthew’s Gospel, in chapter 25, we will hear Jesus reminding us that those who fed the hungry, gave a drink to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, tended the sick, and visited prisoners will be joyfully blessed by God.

In all this, Jesus is reminding us, as we pursue our vocations, as we use the resources that God has given us, that we must continue to question our life choices and what they show about the object of our loyalty. We must continue think about the standards by which we live. We must ponder whether our life choices have been made with God’s perspective in mind or only to fulfill our own selfish desires. And we need to look at our reasons for acquiring what we have, not once, not annually, but daily. When you review your day, ask yourself whether your checkbook or the possessions with which you have surrounded yourself reflect a commitment to God’s standards, and whether you are truly living into the standards of God’s reign.

Beginning to live up to God’s standards will look different for different people. Some people are called to follow Francis of Assisi into holy poverty. Many of today’s members of religious orders have made that choice. Some have chosen to work in the poorest parts of the world like the sisters of our own Community of the Transfiguration, some of whom work at the Centro Buen Pastor in the Dominican Republic. Some are called to live among the urban poor in what one writer has called “the abandoned places of empire.” Greg Lanham, Jonathan Youngman, and Jonathan Ryder, for example, started the Franklinton Cycle Works in Columbus to provide restored used bicycles to people, especially to the marginalized people of Franklinton, and to train others to repair and maintain bicycles. And some are simply called to vocations that by their very nature provide only a modest standard of living. David Leininger* tells of his father, a minister, who both faithfully tithed and supported other charities. There were few luxuries in his home, but his family always had all the necessities. All six of his children went to college. Never anxious, Milton Leininger was confident that God would provide for his needs. And when he died, the congregation he had so faithfully served commissioned a bronze plaque in his honor. On its base were the words he had lived his life by, “Seek ye first, the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.”

As we approach Lent, all of us are called to prayerfully consider our uses of our God-given resources. Perhaps these questions can guide our reflections. Is my relationship with stuff what Jesus would have it be? Am I enabling God to work through me to provide for the poor? Am I participating with God in the healing and nurturing of creation? Are God’s standards guiding my resource decisions? Most importantly, are God’s priorities my priorities?

* In Lectionary Tales for the Pulpit (Lima Ohio: CSS Publishing Co, 2007), pp. 49-50.