Henrietta United Church of Christ

The scripture:

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.

The sermon:

These parables remind me of a similar one told by Eckhart Tolle:

A beggar is sitting on an old wooden box asking for money. A man stops, looks at him and says, “I don’t have any money to give you. But have you ever looked inside your box?”

“Inside this box? I’ve been sitting on this old box for years. Why should I look inside it?”

“Well, you never know what you’ll find until you look.”

So the beggar pries the box open, and he finds, to his amazement, that it is full of treasure.

Treasure in the ground. A pearl of great value in an oyster. Treasure in an old wooden box. Is there something very valuable that’s hiding beneath the surface of our ordinary lives, just waiting to be discovered?

Let me tell how Eckhart Tolle found this treasure, which he describes in his first book, The Power of Now. Until he was 30 years old, he lived in chronic anxiety, interspersed with periods of suicidal depression. One night he woke up with feelings of absolute dread. Everything around him seemed alien, hostile, and utterly meaningless. But nothing seemed more loathsome and meaningless than his own existence. He said to himself, “I can’t live with myself any longer.”

Suddenly he became aware of what he was saying. If he was saying that he couldn’t live with himself, then there must be two of him–the self he couldn’t stand to live with, and the self that couldn’t stand living with that anxious, depressed self. He thought, “Maybe only one of them is real.” He was so stunned by this realization that his mind stopped. He was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts.

Suddenly he felt his mind swirling, like in a vortex, and being pulled into a spacious, open emptiness within himself. As soon as he entered this space, his initial fear was gone. He just totally let go and fell into it, and went to sleep.

The next morning, everything around him seemed to glow with the beautiful luminosity of love. He walked around the city amazed at the miracle of life in all its wonder. He began living in continuous state of deep peace and bliss. He even went through a time when he had nothing in the world–no relationships, no job, no home, no social identity. Did that make him depressed? No. He says, “I spent almost two years sitting on park benches in a state of the most intense joy.”¹

He had “gone out of his mind”–his egoic, fearful thoughts and feelings. But was he crazy, or was he extraordinarily sane? People would tell him, “I want what you have. Can you give it to me or show me how to get it?” He would say, “You have it already. You just can’t feel it because your mind is making too much noise.”

Looking back on that time, he realizes that when he was being crushed by emotional pain, he stopped identifying with his fearful, depressed self, which was who he had always thought he was. Instead, he found the inner soul that was aware of his thoughts and feelings, but wasn’t defined by them. He experienced for himself what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said: “We’re not human beings who have spiritual experiences. We are spiritual beings who are having a human experience.” As soon as Tolle stopped believing that he was just his human thoughts and feelings, it was like the plug was pulled out of his struggling ego That part of him collapsed, leaving only his pure spirit.

It’s hard for us to believe that underneath all our human feelings, thoughts, roles, and actions, there’s a treasure like that pure peace, joy and love that Tolle found, waiting for us to discover it. Sometimes we can see the light of someone else’s spirit leaking out. I can see it all the time in you, whenever you act in love or generosity or hope instead of fear, pride or greed. But it’s hard to see this treasure in ourselves.

Each of the three parables I began with can point us to a way that we can find that priceless treasure that God has created in each and every one of us.

Let’s start with the first parable of the treasure in the field that was unearthed by a man who was farming.

Both in Hebrew and in English, the word for human and humus have the same root. The humus that covers our treasure is the human part of us–our fears, insecurities, wounds, judgments, and pride. Short of having a sudden transformation experience like Eckardt Tolle, how can we remove these things?

Let me share a true story. Ron and Lois Winters were driving in the Adirondacks a few weeks ago. Suddenly, as they rounded a curve, a car was coming right toward them in their lane. The other driver had crossed the double yellow line to pass a couple of cars and a truck. Ron hesitated a split second to see what the other driver was going to do. He started veering over onto the narrow shoulder on Ron’s side, so Ron veered left as close to the path of the oncoming truck as he dared. The Winters’ right mirror and the other car’s mirror clicked as they passed, but they were okay.

As I was waking up the next morning after I had heard about this, I started imagining that I had been in Ron’s place during this very close call. My body began to wake up more as my adrenaline started pumping. In my mind, I somehow got the other driver to stop so I could have a little talk. And I began saying things and doing things to him you couldn’t imagine your pastor ever saying or doing. By this time I was much more awake, my muscles were tense, and my heart was beating fast.

When I finally came to myself, I thought, “Look what you just did. You created a whole reality in your mind that put your body in overdrive, got your emotions riled up, and totally affected your mood. All of this happened in your mind while you were lying safely in bed!”

As soon as I stood outside myself and saw what I had done, I stopped identifying with being the near victim of an accident. The plug was pulled, the emotions drained right away, and I was free and open to meet the day.

I was using someone else’s experience in that scenario I had created. But I’ve generated the same kinds of thoughts and feelings when I’ve seen myself as the victim of being ripped off or misused. In fact, every time we get into a snit about something, or get touchy about what someone says, or get caught in negative thinking, or start beating up on ourselves, that’s a sure sign that we’re identifying with the humus of our human nature, and that our egos are creating our own drama out of it.

So next time you’re aware of that happening, just watch yourself doing it. And then let yourself shift from being the person who is caught up in the drama to being the person who is watching the drama. Watch how you play the role of the victim and exaggerate your pain, powerlessness, innocence, courage, or cleverness to heighten the action. The more you just watch what’s happening, the less of a grip it has on you, and the lighter, freer and more open you feel.

It is said that angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. When you can take yourself lightly and maybe even chuckle at your theatrics, it’s like removing clods of heavy humus from your inner treasure. Your light begins to shine through.

Jesus’ second parable was about a merchant who found a pearl of such value, he sold everything he had to possess it.

Think of a large, round pearl shimmering with various subtle colors. The deep essence of who you are is much like this pearl. In his book The Diamond Approach, John Davis says that when someone experiences their essential spiritual nature being expressed through their own unique personality, they sense themselves as a precious being. “There is a fullness, a completeness, and a contentment.....Nothing is lacking.” He refers to this essential self as the Pearl Beyond Price. When people find it, they say, “This is who I really am.”²

How do we find this pearl that’s the real us? It’s hard to find, because we put so much energy into fixing and editing ourselves in order to find acceptance, approval and admiration. We might “succeed” to the point that we come to value ourselves because others value us. But in the process of trying to create ourselves in other people’s image, we lose touch with the part of us that was already created in God’s image.

Our own pearl comes into view when we begin to love and accept ourselves as God loves us–purely and unconditionally. On human terms, think about what it would mean to love yourself as unconditionally as you would want to love your own child. You wouldn’t make your child feel ashamed of things that are undeveloped, or belittle your child’s pain, or mercilessly berate your child for past mistakes. When we love ourselves unconditionally, we try to understand ourselves, accept the fact that we’re learning as we go along, open for healing the parts of ourselves that are wounded, and affirm the parts that are growing.

Rachel Naomi Ramen wrote these wise words:

Reclaiming ourselves usually means coming to recognize and accept that we have in us both sides of everything. We are capable of fear and courage, generosity and selfishness, vulnerability and strength. These things to do not cancel each other out but offer us a full range of power and response to life....Sometimes our vulnerability is our strength, our fear develops our courage, and our woundedness is the road to our integrity. It is not an either/or world. In calling ourselves "heads" or "tails," we may never own and spend our human currency, the pure gold of which our coin is made.³

Loving ourself well is not selfish, or Jesus wouldn’t have commanded to love our neighbor as we love ourself. Loving ourself as we are loved by God is what brings out the full luster and nuanced colors of our inner pearl–and it’s what enables us to love our neighbosr unconditionally in all of their humanness.

Finally, the third story, about the beggar, reminds us that if we’re going to find our treasure, we have to unwrap our gifts and open our box so our treasure can be shared.

Let me tell you about a cab driver named Wally who gave a man named Harvey Mackay a ride from the airport. Harvey noticed right away that the taxi shone, inside and out. As Wally was putting Harvey’s luggage in the trunk, he invited him to read his mission statement: “To get my customers to their destination in the quickest, safest and cheapest way possible in a friendly environment.” This was different!

After Wally had opened the back door for Harvey and slid behind the wheel, he offered Harvey his choice of regular or decaf coffee or three kinds of cold beverages. Then he said, 'If you'd like something to read, I have The Wall Street Journal, Time, Sports Illustrated, and USA Today.” He gave him a list of radio stations with the kind of music they played. And he offered to tell Harvey about some of the sights, or just be quiet and give him some solitude.

Harvey had never experienced anything like this. He asked Wally if he had always treated his fares like this.

Wally said that he used to be like the other cabbies–complaining about his job, the traffic, the customers, the low pay. But he heard personal growth guru Wayne Dyer on the radio, who had just written a book called You'll See It When You Believe It. Dyer said that if you get up in the morning expecting to have a bad day, you'll rarely disappoint yourself. He said, 'Stop complaining! Differentiate yourself from your competition. Don't be a duck. Be an eagle. Ducks quack and complain. Eagles soar above the crowd.''

So Wally decided he’d rather be a soaring eagle than a quacking duck. The more he gave to his customers, the more they responded, the more Wally enjoyed his work, and the more ways he found to make his customers happy. And by the way, he said, his income had almost quadrupled in the last two years. He rarely sits at cabstands anymore, because his past customers keep calling him for appointments.⁴

Wally had always had that potential to soar like an eagle. But he never saw it until he opened his box and started sharing it.

In God’s economy, everybody is already rich, and has what they need to live in joy, peace, love, and generosity. “The kingdom of God is within you,” as Jesus said. We just haven’t fully discovered this treasure that lies just under the humus of our humanness. But if we see our human fears, thoughts and emotions for what they are and don’t identify with them, we can lift that heavy humus off the treasure it hides. If we learn to love ourselves with the unconditional love with which God loves us, our true essence will begin to shine like a luminescent pearl. And if we take our treasure out of the box and share it with those around us, we will see it multiply and come back to us with dividends.

May we keep on digging for that inner treasure. May we keep on calling it forth in each other and ourselves through the power of unconditional love. And may we keep on sharing it with the world around us. Just see what abundance we are creating even now as we do that together!