On laying up treasure

 

“Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” – Matthew 6:34, KJV

 Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal …”- Matthew 6:19, KJV

My grandmother’s and my mother’s autumn “laying up of treasure upon earth” included shelves and shelves of jars of canned meats and garden produce. This preparedness for a harsh winter was both their pride and their security. It was an investment of time and effort that paid off in reducing the “what shall we eat, and what shall we drink” anxiety.

               Stored food is treasure. Stored money likewise. Not surprising is the feeling that if stored food reduces stress and makes us feel happier, much stored food (or money) should makes us feel super-secure and super-happy. But then Matthew, that old curmudgeon and spoilsport, reminds us that the shelves of canning could all collapse and where would our security be then? Thanks Matthew (quoting the hardest taskmaster of all, Jesus) would you now spoil my sleep by raising anxieties about the integrity of the shelves in my basement?

               Storing money where it’s safe (and preferably where it accumulates value) is called investing. But like the canning shelves in the basement, cash treasure is subject to the corruption of moths and rust, according to Matthew’s hilarious backwards-investment advice. Inflation, internet scamming, fraud, Ponzi schemes, stock market collapse, tax-law changes, you-name-it. There are many ways for the money-storing shelves to give way, without even mentioning the thieves Matthew’s Gospel warns us about: currency speculators, investment brokers and advisors, people who buy and sell mortgages, stock dealers, whose entire daily work is sneaking a few jars of jam away from everybody’s basement storage into theirs.

               After a stock market collapse, the poor sleep the best; it’s the wealthy who throw themselves off balconies. If we don’t derive some wisdom from that observation—and with Matthew’s relating of Jesus’ weird but incisive investment advice—we would have to be as thick as two fat, oak planks.

               Most of us can talk about persons we’ve known who were hoarders, people suffering under an easily-identified neurosis.  They are generally compulsive about keeping even useless objects, and suffering anxiety when they’re lost or destroyed. The obsession/compulsion to put away one’s surplus money in a safe place can develop into a life-consuming preoccupation as well, like the material hoarder whose house is piled so full of boxes and bags of stuff picked up at garage sales that it’s no longer clear how one would find a pathway from one room to another. Thoughtful budgeting so that both immediate and foreseeable expenditures are covered is one thing; hoarding money until no expense—expected or unforeseen—can “get you” is quite another. I call it the neurosis everybody wants. If the first thing you do every morning is to check your portfolio on the internet, Jesus, through Matthew, is telling you to get help, and soon.

               But what’s the same gospel saying to you if you’re one who worked hard to get a solid, respected education, went immediately thereafter into a well-paid job and for years already have earned twice as much as your family needs to cover a comfortable and interesting lifestyle. Invest your surplus in heaven?? What does that even mean? I think Matthew would say, “If you have to ask, you wouldn’t get the answer.” 

        We once spoke to a financial advisor a few years before retirement. She assured us that in order to maintain our “lifestyle” through retirement, we’d have to lay up treasure on earth up to at least one million dollars. Luckily, she had investment opportunities that could get us closer, if not completely there. We decided instead to retire early, apply for a scanty Province of Alberta pension to tide us over to CPP, applied for our Province of Manitoba teachers’ pension fragments (too many years taken off for MCC, education leaves, one business venture) and we freed ourselves up for volunteering, church work, some travel and fulfilling a few dreams (B & B, writing, for instance). Laying up treasure on earth has never been our most pressing neurosis.

               There’s merit in teaching your children that each day has enough to worry about without adding a heap of anxiety about tomorrow. Equally meritorious, though, is teaching them that a carefree nature shouldn’t be earned at the expense of someone else’s day’s anxieties. There’s a heap of difference between the sluggard of Proverbs and the hoarder/accumulator Matthew’s gospel warns us about. But most of us live in the space between … somewhere. If being a follower of Jesus means wearing out your sandals by day and sleeping under a tree with a rock for a pillow, I can’t say that I’ve ever met one. But I have known many who being neither sluggards nor compulsive hoarders of that which moths and rust corrupts,

have found a sweet spot: responsive to the needs of others; knowing that each day has enough worries in it to make adding tomorrow’s kind of stupid; realizing that if you want to feed your children in the winter, some planning and work must be done; having only a vague idea of what portfolio means and finally, sensing when they give $500 to the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, that their gift has something to do with treasure in heaven.

               A hamburger-flipping single mom leaves work to drive her 1987 Chevette home, picking up her two-year-old at the daycare on her way. As she walks to her car, she passes a homeless woman huddled and shivering beside a rusty shopping cart of hoarded junk. She stops, then walks briskly to her car, takes a faded car blanket from the back seat and returns to spread it over the woman on the sidewalk before going on.  

               In the dictionary, when you look up Christian, you’ll see a picture of that single mom in her McDonald’s uniform. For Elon Musk’s picture, you’ll have to look elsewhere.