Proper 14 (August 7-13)
Texts: Luke 12:32-40;
Heb 11:1-3, 8-16; Gen 15:1-6
MATCHING OUR ECONOMICS TO OUR TREASURE:
CENTERING RELATIONSHIPS, NOT CAPITAL
“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Think about that for a moment. Where is your heart right now? What is your treasure? What’s most important to you in the world? For me, that’s easy. Our precious new grandson. Everything for Ellen and I revolves around helping our grandson get off to a great start in life. And he is such a happy, smiley baby that he simply brings joy to our lives. He is our treasure. That’s where our hearts are right now.
How do you answer that question about your treasure, your heart? I’m willing to bet that for most of us our answer involves not a thing, but a person, a relationship with someone or someones. Our treasure, our hearts, lie with the relationships we have with loved ones. Isn’t that true?
If so, then we have another question to answer: why do our economics insist on teaching us that our treasure, our hearts, should lie with things, with commodities we own and consume, with capital? We name our economics aptly, “capitalism,” signaling where our treasure lies. But if our true treasure lies with the relationships we have with loved ones, then why not center and ground our economics accordingly? If our true treasure lies not with things but with relationships to the people that gift our lives, then why not center and ground our economics with those gifted relationships? Capitalism turns every thing, including relationships, into not just things but into commodities to be produced and consumed. If our treasure is truly where are hearts are, shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t our economics teach us to see and treat every thing as a gift to be treasured? Shouldn’t we come to see everything in terms of our relationships to it as a gift?
Last week, we embarked on the middle part of Luke’s Gospel, which revolves around Jesus’s encounters with six rich men over eight chapters.1 Jesus came to launch the reign of God in this world, with a very different politics than our typical human politics. For my time here with you, we’ve been trying to learn those very different politics, especially under the shadow of the rising Christian Nationalist movement.2 Well, at the heart of our politics is our economics. Should we be surprised if Jesus also came to teach us God’s very different economics? I believe we see this first and foremost in this middle section of Luke’s Gospel, through Jesus’s encounter with six rich men.
Let’s do a quick recap of last week. The first of the six rich men we encounter with Jesus is the rich man in his Parable of the Rich Fool. We noted that the Rich Fool, whose life is bound up with hoarding his resources, seems to have been the model human being for Adam Smith’s founding of capitalist economics. Smith was counting on the fact that our most natural inclinations are to hoard scarce resources, so he devised capitalism as a fairer way to distribute those resources. Adam Smith, in short, devised capitalism because he thinks we need to accept that we human beings are stuck with the thinking of Jesus’s Rich Fool. That we act primarily according to our self-interest.
But I don’t think that Jesus thinks that. He comes as the “Son of Man,” as the next generation of being human. He came to lead us away from our Rich Fool thinking into being better human beings, into forming our thinking around our better angels, not our lesser ones. Last week, we recalled that Jesus was an indigenous man in the Roman Empire. So the better thinking he came to teach us is in the category of indigenous wisdom which centers itself on the creation as God’s gift to us. In the passage immediately after the Parable of the Rich Fool, Jesus begins to teach us that indigenous economic thinking. ‘Pay attention to the ravens . . . pay attention to the lilies of the field. Do not be anxious about possessions.’
This week’s Gospel Reading actually gives us the conclusion to that teaching, before moving on to the rather ominous “Son of Man” saying. Jesus wraps up this portion of his Divine Economics 101 by repeating the message about not being anxious. And it’s all grounded in the gift of the relationship we have with our Creator. “Do not be afraid, little flock,” says Jesus, “for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms. . . . For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
That ‘selling possessions and giving alms’ will be a big part of Jesus’s economics lessons over the next number of weeks. In the context of thinking about our treasure as commodities, that feels threatening, right? Sell our possessions and give them away? But the point is that it’s not so threatening if we change our thinking. If we think instead about our possessions in terms of our treasure centered on the gift of relationships, giving them away isn’t so threatening. What do we do with gifts? We share them, right? If our treasure revolves around relationships instead of things, then the value of our things is determined through the value of our relationships. Our capitalist focus in economics seems to have the priority reversed.
Last week, I also introduced you to this little book, that I highly recommend for its wisdom about economics: The Serviceberry,3 by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who also wrote the best-selling book, Braiding Sweetgrass. She’s a botanist, not an economist, but Jesus wasn’t a professional economist either. Yet he gave us the indigenous wisdom that begins with paying attention the gift of creation. “Pay attention to the ravens . . . to the lilies of the field. . . .” As a member of the Potawatomi nation, Robin Wall Kimmerer also begins her indigenous wisdom by focusing our attention on the gift of creation. “Pay attention to the Serviceberry tree. . . .”
So let me share a portion of her book this week that mirrors Jesus’ words we read, including the part about selling possessions and giving alms:
In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away. The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is “we” rather than “I,” as all flourishing is mutual.4
The Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity rather than accumulation, where wealth and security come from the quality of our relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.5
Where is our treasure? With the quality of our relationships conceived as gift. That’s where our economics need to be centered — there with our hearts.
I’d like to end with a little discovery I happened upon this week that brings us back to where I started this morning: with the gift of relationship to my grandson. This discovery came from an unusual source, a word study.6 I was trying to go deeper with the word that dominates our Second Reading this morning, the word faithfulness. In Greek, the word is pistis, which we more often translate simply as “faith.” I offered you my translation this morning which renders the Greek pistis as “faithfulness.” I did so because when we use the word “faith,” it so often goes quickly to thinking about a list of beliefs. But that word pistis really is not so much an intellectual thing about our beliefs as it is about the quality of our relationships. This is especially true in this Letter to the Hebrews, when we think about which Hebrew word is behind the Greek word pistis. Hebrew and Aramaic were the languages of Jesus and the apostles. The New Testament is written to the Greek dominated world of the First Century. They spoke Hebrew but they wanted to speak their message to the Greek world. So it is often helpful to ask which Hebrew words are behind the Greek words. Especially such an important word like pistis, “faithfulness.”
As it so happens, we do have good clues to this sort of question. Around two hundred years before the time of Jesus, a group of scholars translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, a book we call the Septuagint. So when we ask what Hebrew word might be behind the Greek word pistis, “faithfulness,” we can compare the Septuagint to the Old Testament. When pistis appears in the Septuagint, which Hebrew word is it translating? It turns out that it’s the Hebrew word we know the best! “Amen”! Yes, the Hebrew word “Amen.” Did you know that Amen basically means something like ‘have faith’? Or even more to the point, Amen is a shorthand way of proclaiming, “God is faithful!” We end prayers by reminding ourselves, “God is faithful!” Amen is above all else about the quality of our relationship with God. That’s how Amen is used in the Old Testament, to assure us that God is faithful. God is reliable. God is faithful to God’s word.
But here’s the discovery that brings us back to my relationship with my new grandson. In the large commentary on the words pistis and amen, it says that the origins of the word amen were not religious. Amen came to be the preeminent word about our relationship with God, but it didn’t start that way. No, the origins of the word amen begin especially with the relationship between mother and child,7 between caretakers of children . . . dare I say grandparents, too? Amen speaks to the quality of those relationships, that they are reliable and enduring, grounded in love.
How is it that our economics have become so narrowly focused on things, on commodities? How can we begin to rethink our economics in terms of the gift of relationship with God, God’s creation, and with our neighbor — who is, when all is said and done, our sister or brother. How do we recenter our economics where our true treasure is? With sharing the gift of creation with God’s children? Siblings in Christ, I believe we have an important role to play with our fellow citizens to help recenter our economic priorities from hoarding to sharing, from things to the quality of our relationships grounded in gift. Grace. Amen! God is faithful! And so can we be faithful! Let’s follow our hearts to our true treasure. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, August 10, 2025
Notes
1. The primary source for reading Luke’s Gospel in terms of “Six Rich Man Sequences” is Ched Myers’ Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics (Fortress Press, 2025).
2. See the webpage “Preaching God’s Reign under the Shadow of Christian Nationalism.”
3. Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (Scribner, 2024).
4. Kimmerer, The Serviceberry, 32-33.
5. Kimmerer, The Serviceberry, 72.
6. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT), Vol. VI, ed. by Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, trans. by Geoffrey Bromiley (Eerdmans, 1968): the article on πιστεύω, πιστις, πιστος, et al., pages 174-228. The portion on the New Testament is by Rudolf Bultmann, the portion on the Old Testament background by Konrad Weiss.
7. TDNT, Vol. VI, 183.
