What are you storing?

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Matthew 6:19-21).

We’re pretty good, it seems, at storing things up…Last year we paid the US storage unit industry $40 billion so we could put our stuff into more than 2 billion square feet of storage floor space. Jesus, I think, has some words for us. These clothes that no longer fit and pieces of furniture and china from the previous generations and rusting exercise bikes and treadmills sit in their climate-controlled, dark, and silent cells, waiting for the day when they’ll finally be buried in the landfill, or maybe given to GoodWill. 

For where your treasure is, there you heart will be also.

We’ve all been storing up in other areas of our lives during this past pandemic year, I think. Storing up a few extra pounds from eating and drinking more “comfort food” that we ever had before. Storing up anger and distrust against those on whichever side of the political dividing line is opposite ours. Storing up animosity towards those who we don’t think are taking the right kind of precautions against this deadly virus. Storing up grief for all that we’ve lost:  meals with friends and extended family; football games; graduations and weddings; funerals; lives. What is all of this kind of storage costing us? What is its burden?

Indian novelist Arundhati Roy wrote this a few months ago for the Financial Times: “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, …our dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

Lent is always a gateway; as Roy says, a season we use to “break with the past and imagine our world”—our lives—anew. I’d like to suggest to you that, although today is the day when Lent starts on the liturgical calendar, realistically, we’ve all been living through a kind of Lent for the past year. Typically, we give up things for Lent; frequently things that are somewhat frivolous in the grand scheme of things—chocolate, coffee, French fries. For the past twelve months, we’ve already given up quite a lot—much of it not frivolous. 

If you feel the need for a Lenten fast, you could consider the one we heard today from Isaiah: “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?  Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them?” Not a fast from, but a fast for. A fast in which we imagine another world—a healed world—the Kingdom of God—and are ready to work for its coming.

If you really are wanting to give something up this Lent, then I suggest you give up all that you’ve got in storage. On the trivial side, if you’re renting a storage unit, clean it out and give the contents away, and donate that monthly fee. But much more importantly, give up the cobwebby, dark, and dank things that you’ve been keeping in storage in your life. Give up the anger and distrust and animosity and bitterness. Incorporate the grief you’ve stored up for what you’ve lost into a vow to cherish more fully the celebrations and relationships that you have, and use it to resolve to never go back to a renewed daily grind again that will get in the way of them. 

This Lent, free yourself from the heavy, ongoing cost of maintaining all that moth-and-rust-prone storage, and, in repentance and humility, start storing what Jesus offers for free and in abundance: relationship, community, forgiveness, love, and peace that passes understanding. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.