STUMBLING ONTO A BURIED TREASURE

 

GIVEN AT ST. THERESA (Rhodelia) AND ST. MARY MAGDALEN OF PAZZI (Payneville)

July 30, 2023

"The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field,

which a person finds and hides again, and out of joy goes and

sells all that he has and buys that field.”

Matthew 13:44-52

Today, Jesus compares discovering the kingdom of God to stumbling onto a buried treasure. In many cultures, divers and diggers, when they find lost treasures tend to have their findings seized by the government.

Unfortunately for me and my brother Gary, dear old Father Johnson agreed with that legal line of thought – the thought that buried treasure did not belong to the treasure hunter, but the institution who owned the treasure to begin with!

When the old St. Theresa Academy building was torn down in 1950, a lot of that junk was thrown into a ravine below the church. People were not as conscious of the environment back then, so the ravine dump became one of the most interesting places to explore, especially after the old Academy demolition.

One day, my brother and I were going through the stacks of junk dumped there when I came across a heart-shaped vigil light candle-holder from the church that Father Johnson had decided to discard. There used to be two matching ones in St. Theresa's sanctuary – one on one side of the church and one on the other. I can still remember that familiar sound of quarters and nickels sliding down the metal shoot as people came forward to light candles. I suppose that one was broken beyond repair or maybe Father Johnson thought one of them was enough. Anyway, one of them made it to the dump. The other one survived and is now in our new Family Life Center museum!

When I saw that discarded old heart-shaped candle holder in the dump, I picked up a small stick of wood and gave it a whack. I am not sure why I did that, but I did! When I hit it, the money chamber exploded like a slot machine at a casino! Nickels, dimes and quarters rolled out of it for what seemed forever. It amounted to a little over $25 in change – a huge amount of money in those days. It was so full of change that it didn’t rattle, which caused Father Johnson to send it to the dump without even checking it.

Gary and I picked up the money and put it in a cigar box, took it home and hid it in our garage while we tried to figure out what to do with it. Such a moral dilemma, especially when you are a country kid with no money, takes time to think through!

The big question was: “Should we keep it and give it back?” We knew that in a small town like ours, if we showed up at Harold Vessels’s store every day with money in hand to buy candy and soft drinks, it would have set off alarm bells big time! We knew ourselves enough to know that we could not resist holding back from spending it for long, so we rejected the “keeping it” option.

We knew that Father Johnson would not have thrown it away if he knew it was filled with money, so our little consciences got the best of us. We knew we had to take it back with our fingers crossed, hoping against hope that he would say, “Finders keepers! Losers weepers!” Bad idea! He took our treasure chest of found money and gave us one quarter each as a reward! I left there that day thinking to myself, “Crime may not pay, but neither does honesty!” It was a hard lesson in morality to learn when we were only 5 and 6 years old!

Traditional Jewish law, at the time of Jesus, in regard to hidden treasure was quite clear. I only wish Father Johnson knew about it! The law at the time said, “What is found belongs to the finder. If a man finds scattered fruit or scattered money, these belong to the finder.” It’s too bad Gary and I did not live in Israel at the time of Jesus or Father Johnson would certainly have been out of luck!

When I was 33 years old, I had an even better experience of stumbling onto a buried treasure - not money, gold nuggets or jewels, but a new understanding of what God is really like! I had an experience that opened my mind to a new way of understanding the Scriptures. Until then, I was a regular Sunday Mass attender. I had listened to Scripture readings in school and every Sunday at church throughout my life. In seminary, I had heard Scripture being read many times a day, had listened to hundreds of homilies and had taken several Scripture classes. After seminary, I had been preaching for eight years as a deacon and priest at the time I had my mind-blowing spiritual experience. Until then, I thought I was beginning to understand the scriptures pretty well. I knew I had learned some things about Jesus, but the day of the experience that I want to share with you, I came to realize that I had learned a lot of facts about Jesus, but I really did not know Jesus all that well!

My mind was opened to understanding the scriptures in a new way during a vivid life-changing dream forty-six years ago – a dream that I have mentioned several times in my preaching. In that dream I was on top of a small mountain. It had no trees or bushes or rocks. It had only very short green grass - very much like a golf green. I was sitting in a folding lawn chair and God was sitting in another one next to me. We were sitting side-by-side, in silence, facing the setting sun. Oddly enough. we were both smoking cheap King Edward cigars! I knew it was God, but I was afraid to look over. We just silently puffed on our cigars and watched the sun go down on the horizon. Finally, God leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Ron, isn’t this wonderful!”

I woke from the dream at that point with my world looking forever different to me. After that dream, all of the spiritual and psychological chains that had been holding me back melted away. I began to feel a lightness in my heart that I had never felt before. For the first time, I began to feel that it was OK to be me - just as I was! I began to fully understand what it meant to be “created in the image and likeness of God.” After that dream, instead of always obsessing about all those “sin" messages in the Bible, I started noticing all the “unconditional love" messages. I started to feel that I was that lost sheep that Jesus embraced and carried on his shoulders and that I was that prodigal son who made it home to an unexpected warm welcome. For the first time in my life, I started feeling that I was good enough for God just the way I was! From that day forward, I quit beating myself up spiritually for not being better than I was!

That experience was also the beginning of a new way of preaching. I began to preach about the “unconditional love” that God has for every one of us! Instead of always looking for sins to condemn in myself and others, I started looking for goodness to affirm in myself and others. I believe that the years following that dream prepared me to offer a clear message of “God’s unconditional love” that appealed to so many alienated Catholics which led to the rapid and consistent growth of the Cathedral parish when I was its pastor during the 1980s and 90s’s. That’s why my old column in The Record and my present blog have both been called “An Encouraging Word.”

My friends, the bottom line of this homily is simply this: God loves me and you, all of us, without condition - no ands, ifs or buts about it! As the gospel of last week put it, "Let those with ears to hear, hear it!" After we hear it with our ears, we are invited again today to let it sink into our hearts!

And to think that all this new awareness started with a dream about me and God smoking cheap cigars, sitting in folding lawn chairs on a mountaintop! That dream, even after forty-six years, still leaves me “simply amazed and forever grateful!”