Things to be Treasured

Luke 2.19

Preached Canberra Baptist Church January 1, 2006

But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.

One of the tricky questions to be addressed in the office this week was whether to take down the Christmas tree. Working on the view that we’ll be governed by the liturgical calendar (which says its still the season of Christmas!) rather than the secular calendar (now insisting its New Year) we’ve left the tree where it is. Undoubtedly in some of your homes the tinsel is coming down, ornaments returned to that old cardboard box where we’ll easily find them again next year and the Christmas cards are being filed away. If not this week, than at least next week.

Christmas is very soon cleared away. The outward signs of it and ‘the festive equipment’ are soon packed up. But the inward reflection on it also gives way very quickly to reviews of the year past and anticipation of the year ahead. In some ways this is understandable. Unless it’s your baby, the excitement very soon passes. And after all, it was only a baby. For all the announcements of world peace and angelic songs, very little (if anything) had changed, nor would anything significant come of all the hoo-ha for at least another thirty years. Like all of us, the shepherds and even the Wise Men had to get back to work after the Christmas interruptions. They had seen it, and had the story to tell their children and grandchildren, but as it does for most of us, the celebration of Christmas rapidly became occasional memories or after dinner stories.

But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. Twice in this chapter are we told that Mary treasured either ‘these words’ (vs 19) or “these things’ (vs. 51). Some think this is a hint as to how the details of the birth of Jesus were preserved, given that thirty years elapsed between his birth and his arrival on the ‘stage’ of public ministry. Perhaps it is allusion to the experience of every mother, who remembers and ponders the events around the births of their children and cherish hopes of what they might become. But the use of the verbs ‘treasuring’ and ‘pondering’ seem to imply more than this.

‘Treasuring’ comes from a root with the sense of ‘keeping’, ‘guarding’, ‘watching over’, but in the two usages in Luke the word is intensified with two different compound formations. It has the sense of profound valuing, careful keeping, joyful receiving. ‘Treasuring’ is an appropriate translation.

The word translated ‘pondering’ is again a compound word, used only by Luke in all the NT, which literally means “‘tossing together’ in her heart”. It has the sense of ‘tossing it around’ or ‘turning it over’ or, as if one scholar has expressed it, ‘trying to hit upon their right meaning’.

This is not just an historical note, or some kind of proof of the accuracy of the account. It points to a deep and significant spirituality – a way of holding and living out faith. I want to explore this way of living out faith with you as an important pathway we can follow.

Mary’s actions are very counter cultural for us in a modern western social context. Ideas are valued for what we can make out of them, how we change the world or create ‘products’. We speak about ‘intellectual property’ or the ‘next big idea’. We write books or make movies to get our ideas across (and perhaps preach sermons to people as well – so I’d better careful here!) If we can’t do that we ring in to talk-back radio. We have created a world of ceaseless chatter. All this is driven by the economic concepts that drive our culture – concepts like ‘consuming’ (in which ideas become mental fodder to be ingested and then processed to get the meaning out of them and then spat out) or ‘investing’ (in which ideas become a way of making money – of being owned and their value on-sold).

Mary was involved in a very different activity with knowledge and experience. She took these words and these ‘things’ into herself, and ‘treasured’ them (guarded, valued, watched over them) and pondered them, tossed them around, reflected on them. We are not told that she did anything with them in terms of outputs, statements, books, interviews – anything. She just took them in, treasured and pondered them.

I suspect this is a spiritual pathway in contemporary life that is out of favour. We live in a society that is focused on outcomes, results, measurable product. In education, in professional and working life we have to live with goals and Key Result Areas (KRA’s) and all the overlay of a measurement obsessed society, looking always for the outcomes against the inputs. But Mary simply took these words, these things, into her heart and treasured them.

And we can too! It’s good spiritual practice just to take some things into your heart, treasure them and ponder them, if necessary, for decades. A faith that endlessly exhausts itself in talking, and seeks results, or ‘evidence of God’ or wants ‘answers to prayer’ or ‘signs and wonders’ or any of the ways an ‘outcomes focus’ is expressed is not necessarily healthy. One of the exciting aspects of ministry is visiting very ordinary people who rarely speak up in the church and discovering what has been treasured up and pondered, sometimes for a lifetime.

What sort of things are worth treasuring in this way?

The Scriptures are eminently worth treasuring! I grew up in the days of the dreaded Sunday School Scripture examinations. I don’t think anybody under fifty will have a clue what I’m talking about here! It used to be that in churches like this for weeks on end young people who could easily have been out sailing or playing ball sports were locked up on Sunday afternoon and forced to copy out slabs of the Bible until we knew them by wrote. Then the last Sunday afternoon we be locked up for the Examinations, when we’d have to write out the same passages from memory, to be sent away and marked for completeness, spelling and punctuation and every year we’d get a new medallion to stick on our framed certificates. As an educational approach I suspect it had its limitations. All I can remember is how to sepll the word ‘sepulchre ’ – every year there was a sepulcher somewhere. BUT it did plant a seed of respect for the Scripture, and a desire to remember at least parts of it - favourite texts, unusual stories, beautiful words – yes, even words like sepulchre.

In an age of ready books and internet searches and glamorous wallpapers on our computers and mobile phones our eyes and our heads are full of junk. Are there scraps of Scripture, words of hope and beauty that have been treasured up in our hearts to spring to mind in our moments of despair and struggle, or moments when the need of another person and their despair and struggle might be met from the treasure that has been quietly pondered in our own heart?

The Bible is a wonderful book. Sometimes we’ve been ‘bashed’ with it so much, have had people ‘come the heavy’ with the Bible that we get little joy from just sitting with it and letting God speak to us from it. But it is a wonderful book and however we read it, it can deliver treasures worth keeping and pondering in the heart. Sometimes it can be a phrase or a sentence that speaks to us that we remember and take comfort from:

Put thou my tears in thy bottle – are they not all in thy book?

The dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty.

We preach Christ crucified –a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles – but to those are called , Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

Sometimes it can be a Psalm or a passage that we remember by heart:

O Lord my heart is not lifted up, I do not occupy myself with things too great and marvelous for me.

But I have calmed and quieted my soul like a weaned child

My soul lies within me like a weaned child

O Israel hope in the Lord, now and forevermore.

Or it may be a Bible story in which you identify with a particular character. I remember a visit soon after I entered the ministry when I went to the ladies fellowship: they were having a session “My favourite Bible woman and why” in which each woman present (all in their 70’s and 80’s) had to tell the name of the Bible woman they identified most with and why. I had to close in prayer. After listening to all the Ruth’s and the Mary’s and the Esther’s and Elizabeth’s I stood to pray and said, “Ladies, I’m disappointed – not one Bathsheba amongst you!)

Whether its isolated texts, or extended passages or stories with which we identify, on the first day of the year, a day for resolutions and looking forward, let’s all plan to regularly read the Bible and allow bits of it into our hearts to be treasured and pondered. And don’t worry – there will be no examination!

But other things we can treasure are our experiences. I have often known people’s lives to be turned around, quite transformed, by very ordinary experiences in the community of the church. In our interactions with each other things happen, very ordinary things with quite marvelous consequences. Some people think I have a story for every occasion (most undeserved I assure you!) The reason I tell so many stories are that these experiences embodied in the stories are gifts people have given me, gifts that I have treasured and turned over in my heart until something of their meaning has become part of me.

Some times our writers help us to know how to read experience and draw the treasure from them. From a Christian perspective one of the most helpful writers in this regard is the American writer Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor has a deep understanding of the soul of the American south, of the simple black folks and ‘white trash’ of the 1950’s and sixties. She could take simple acts between a husband and wife, or words between a father and son and tease out the spiritual meanings, the yearning for love, the possibility of transformation. She’s not the sort of writer you can easily quote in a sermon, but she teaches us how our own experience is often a treasure, a deeply significant treasure that should be pondered and guarded in our hearts.

As a community of faith how do we know how things are going? (We come back to that fetish about ‘measuring’ our progress.) Is it by counting membership numbers, or by the unofficial ‘scoring’ of the service/sermon that we all do inwardly (you know - the “6.4 but better than last week” mentality)? As a pastor I’m privileged to share with people what is being “treasured and pondered in their hearts” – the texts and Scriptures, the significant memories and stories, the experiences that they have held onto in life and carried with them.

In Colossians Chapter 3, from vs 12 there is a wonderful exhortation of what it means to be a Christian community. It builds in that typical NT kind of way from the basic virtues to a richer spiritual practice. Hear the progression of the author’s thinking: …

12 As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. 13 Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 14 Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. 15 And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. 16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly ; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God. 17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him .

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly … The ‘word of Christ’ is not just the Scripture – it is the remembered text and context of Christian experience – the stories Biblical and communal, the memories of what faith means.

The irony of all of this is that as we treasure these things they change us and become in fact the most precious thing about us. How do we evaluate ourselves, assess our net worth? There’s been a fair bit of this over the last week following the death of Australia’s richest man. How do you measure your own worth? Is it assets or income, qualifications or lifestyle, is it your networks or potential or prospects? Paul the apostle was very clear that the real value in us is like ‘treasure in old clay pots’, it’s the word of the gospel we have received, the stories we have remembered, the experience and sharing of love that we have taken into ourselves and valued.

These are the things that sustain us when sorrow pierces our soul like a sharp sword, when our fortunes, like all fortunes, are subject the rising and the falling of many.

The strength of the church is not measured by bottoms on pews, or the weekly offering or even the warmth of the welcome or the vitality of the programs. It is how much is treasured up and pondered in the hearts of its members, how dearly it is valued, how tenderly it is tossed around, and how reverently and carefully it is shared with one another in the hard times and difficulties of life.

Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.

May we have the wisdom and grace to do likewise.