Ask most of us what we think about money and we will change the subject. You do not ask a friend what he makes. Plenty of us never told our own kids what was in the account. It is private, it is sensitive, and because it goes untouched, a wrong idea about money can live in a person for forty years without ever once being examined.
Jeff Sullivan, a pastor from Granada Church, preached Matthew 6 with us and started where a financial counselor starts: what is your earliest memory of money?
His went to his grandmother. She was a child of the Depression. Her childhood was scarce — whether there would be food, whether it would be enough — and in that house you did not waste a thing.
By the time he knew her, none of that was true. Nice house. Huge meals. Gifts for the grandkids. She was not poor. But she used to make biscuits and pour Karo syrup and butter over them for dessert, and when that jar was empty — genuinely empty — she would not throw it out. She would put a biscuit on the end of a fork, reach down into the jar, and get every last drip.
It was a two-dollar jar. She could have bought another. But the story in her head said you do not waste anything, because you never know when you will run out. Sixty years on, that story was still moving her hands.
Which is the point. However you think about money, it is shaping what you do, even when you are not thinking about it.
Where your treasure is
Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. Most of us hear that and translate it into something we already believe: if I had more, I would be safe. If I had more, the problems would go away. Just a little bit more.
Look back at being a kid, though. Carefree. Everything provided. Then adulthood arrived with the bills, and the work to pay the bills, and more work to pay more bills. You finally have the things you could not wait to have, and nobody warned you what came attached — the hours traded away, and sometimes the relationships that went with the hours.
There are shelves of studies on money and happiness. One that ran across more than forty countries went looking for the number that makes the difference and could not find one. What it found instead was purpose. The people who had found meaning were satisfied. The people who had not, were not — at every income level.
Which is an expensive way of arriving at something Jesus said plainly two thousand years ago. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. This passage was never really about money. Money is a tool. It is about your heart, and money is only the most reliable X-ray of it we have.
The healthy eye
Then comes a verse that sounds like it wandered in from another sermon. The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.
The word translated healthy carries more than medical soundness. It means open. Full. Generous — the way we still use it when someone serves you a healthy portion, meaning as much as you could want and probably more.
So think about the last time you went down the line at Chipotle. You ask for the steak, and the person behind the glass lays the smallest possible pinch of it on your burrito. It is devastating. And almost nobody has the nerve to say anything, because they trained for three hours and that is exactly how much steak you get.
Then there is the other one. You ask for the steak and they pile it on, and wave off the charge for guacamole. You walk out feeling like somebody was good to you — over a burrito.
That is what a generous eye does. Learn generosity with money and you find you have it with your time, your compassion, people. A stingy eye does the reverse. How little can I give and still be fine? How little can I do and still be a good person? Ask that long enough and the world shrinks to the size of your own accounting — and how great is that darkness.
Every idol fails
No one can serve two masters. Jesus lands the passage there, and the reach of it is wider than money. Any idol will fail you, because nothing can take the place of God. If money is the thing — if I just get to that number, I will make it — it will fail you. If it is a person who is finally going to complete you, or an accomplishment just up ahead, those fail too. Not because they are evil, but because they cannot do what only God can do in you.
And here is the version that gets into church people. It is possible to be religiously stingy — to treat God as a return on investment. I showed up, so bless me. I gave, so take care of me. Jeff pointed at a line from a Christian songwriter about the false gospel of winning: glory is in the presence of God — and heard the other word inside it. The presents. The gifts. Come to God for the gifts and there will come a day when you feel he did not deliver, and you will walk.
The real gospel runs the other direction. God's generosity has already saved you. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. He did not run the numbers on you first, did not ask whether you would pay off. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. God led with generosity, which is the only reason any of us are here.
You do not have to start writing checks to get him to move. He already moved. If that has never landed on you, receive it today.
And once it lands, what is left in you is not obligation. It is gratitude — and gratitude has open hands. If there is a chance to give, give. If there is a place to serve, take it. Because where your treasure is, that is where your heart will be also.
