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When you go to a financial adviser, they ask you three basic questions in order to discern how best to handle your investments.
1. What is your goal? (retirement, simple and sustainable lifestyle, travel, funds for children's education, etc.)
2. What is your timeline? (5 years, 20 years, 50 years)
3. What is your tolerance for risk? (are you willing to take chances? how do you handle setbacks? volatility?)
When we think about investing our lives in the kingdom of God, of living a life of faith, the same kind of questions apply. What do we desire or love? What are we pointing our lives toward? Do we frame things short-term or long-term? What foundation we are laying for future generations? How do we respond to hard times? Do we experience a significant amount of fear and paranoia or are we willing to take risks? Does our perspective take into account the long arc of redemption and grace found in Jesus?
When Jesus tells his listeners to seek first the kingdom of God, he is inviting them to think beyond their everyday needs and desires. On the one hand, Jesus makes a point to feed the crowds that follow him, demonstrating God's care for their daily needs. However, he also rebukes those who come just for the food. Life is more than bread, Jesus says, and then he calls people to broaden their perspective, to invest their energies in something greater than themselves. "So do not consume yourselves with questions: What will we eat? What will be drink? What will we wear? Outsiders make themselves frantic over such questions; they don't realize that your heavenly Father knows exactly what you need. Seek [strive for, aim at, desire] first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and then all these things will be given to you too. So do not worry about tomorrow. Let tomorrow worry about itself. Living faithfully is a large enough task for today." (Matthew 6:31-34, The Voice)
Jesus asks people to trust God with the day to day life and set their intentions on something much greater: the kingdom of God. In the biblical narrative, we find story after story of people who did exactly that: they believed God's promises (to bless the nations, to rescue them, to send a Messiah to redeem the world, to make things right), and as a result, they took setbacks in stride, they demonstrated patience and faithfulness, and they said No to fear and worry.
In Hebrews 11 we find a list of some of these faithful ones, those who set their heart on more than filling their bellies and titillating their senses. "Faith is the assurance of things you have hoped for, the absolute conviction that there are realities you've never seen. ... All these I have mentioned [Abel, Noah, Enoch, Abraham, Sarah] died in faith without receiving the full promises, although they saw the fulfillment as though from a distance. These people accepted and confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on this earth because people who speak like this make it plain that they are still seeking a homeland." (sections of Hebrews 11, The Voice)
Note that most of the faithful ones listed in Hebrews 11 did not see their hopes fulfilled in their lifetime, but because their perspective was long-term and went beyond their lifespan, they were able to experience a sense of fulfillment. Their hope was not in instant results but in the expansive story of God loving the world generation after generation.
Let me tell you three stories which feature a long-term, kingdom of God perspective. We find the first one in 1 Samuel. Hannah is the wife of Elkanah and is childless. Being barren distresses her to no end, both because it is a great shame in her culture and because Elkanah's other wife has many children and mistreats Hannah. During one of the annual pilgrimages to the temple at Shiloh, Hannah goes to the temple to cry out to God. She prays: "Eternal One, Commander of heavenly armies, if only You will look down at the misery of your servant and remember me - oh, don't forget me! - and give Your servant a son, then I promise I will devote the boy to Your service" (1 Samuel 1, The Voice). A year after her prayer of distress, Hannah gives birth to a son and calls him Samuel. When the child is weaned, Hannah remains true to her promise, bringing the boy to the temple and leaving him there to serve God. Samuel goes on to become one of the greatest prophets and leaders in Israel's history.
So what do we learn about desire, long-term investment, and risk in this story? Hannah's desire for a son is fulfilled, but instead of enjoying all the benefits that come with bearing a son in a patriarchal culture, she gives her son back to God. She sees beyond her own desire, her own fulfillment as a mother, her own family dynamics, and chooses to invest in the kingdom of God. To any bystander, Hannah's decision looks risky, foolish, and unnatural. But to a woman who trusts God and seeks those things which God values, the decision makes perfect sense.
Story two. In Luke we read about Anna, an old prophetess and a widow (at least 84 years old) who spends her days at the temple, praying and fasting. When Mary and Joseph bring Jesus, just over a month old, to the temple to dedicate him to God, Anna sees them. "When she approached Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, she began speaking out thanks to God, and she continued spreading the word about Jesus to all those who shared her hope for the rescue of Jerusalem” (Luke 2, The Voice). Though Anna encounters nothing more than a squalling baby, she sees in him a fulfillment. Before Anna sees Jesus perform any miracles or preach any sermons or gain any disciples, she proclaims the good news that the hope of Jerusalem has come. In all probability, she died before witnessing any of Jesus's ministry, and yet, she was content. Her desire for God's salvation led her to give herself to fasting and praying, to invest her life in waiting on God. Decades and decades passed as she prayed and waited. Many would have said she was wasting her one life by living inside the walls of the temple, but she was a hopeful and patient woman investing in something much greater than herself, in something far beyond her own lifespan. She caught but a glimpse of what was to come, but when Anna the prophetess saw a tiny baby, she saw the gift of God for the world. And it was enough for her.
Story three is not really a story, but a look at trees. I recently read The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. Learning about trees puts the short human lifespan in perspective. Most trees live for several hundred years, and one of the oldest trees on earth is a spruce which is more than 9.500 years old. Trees live on a different time scale than humans, but their longevity requires certain conditions. Here is an excerpt from the book: "A tree is not a forest. On its own, a tree cannot establish a consistent local climate. It is at the mercy of wind and weather. But together, many trees create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of heat and cold, stores a great deal of water, and generates a great deal of humidity. And in this protected environment, trees can live to be very old. To get to this point, the community must remain intact no matter what. If every tree were looking out only for itself, then quite a few of them would never reach old age. Regular fatalities would result in many large gaps in the tree canopy, which would make it easier for storms to get inside the forest and uproot more trees. The heat of summer would reach the forest floor and dry it out. Every tree would suffer. Every tree, therefore, is valuable to the community and worth keeping around for as long as possible." [1]
Wohlleben, a forester, goes on to describe how a tree grows from a small sapling into a majestic tower several hundred feet high, forming part of the canopy that shelters the ecosystem below. As a tree matures over the years, it loses some of its vitality and slowly begins to weaken. Its crown begins to thin, it is more susceptible to fungi and insects, and one day, the trunk snaps and the tree dies. But that is not the end. Wohlleben observes that "service in the forest doesn't end when life ends. The rotting cadaver continues to play an important role in the ecosystem for hundreds of years." [2] Trees can teach us a thing or two about the necessity of living in community (trees planted metres apart cannot share root systems and as a result, have significantly shorter lifespans than those in the forest). Trees also remind us that the overall well-being of the forest is more important that the timeline of an individual tree.
What can we learn from these stories about seeking first the kingdom of God? Let's go back to the questions from the financial adviser.
1. What is your goal? What do you want?
If we desire the kingdom of God, we seek to invest in something bigger than ourselves, both in terms of being focused on a community instead of our individual lives and in seeing beyond our immediate needs and even our own short lifespan.
2. What is your timeline?
Patience is underrated in our fast-paced culture. Let us take a lesson from the trees and realize that we are not here just to grow big and tall, but to plant seeds, to make space for others to grow, to nurture sick ones, to contribute to an ecosystem of health, and to fertilize the soil so others can carry on after we are gone.
3. What is your tolerance for risk?
There is a saying in my church tradition: How do you spell faith? R-I-S-K! There can be no loving relationships without trust, without faith, without risk. If we are lovers of God, followers of Jesus, and as such, investing our lives in the kingdom of God, we will find ourselves in situations which require us to be faithful (like Hannah) and hopeful (like Anna). In other words, we must become comfortable with risk. We must look beyond the immediate, temporal realm.
“… the kingdom of God is not about eating and drinking. When God reigns, the order of the day is redeeming justice, true peace, and joy made possible by the Holy Spirit. You see, those who serve the Anointed in this way will be welcomed into the whole acceptance of God and valued by all men. Join us, and pursue a life that creates peace and builds up our brothers and sisters” (Romans 14, The Voice).
NOTE: This is the final installment in a three-part series: Inviting God into our Past, Present, and Future. If you want to check out the other two parts, you can find the first one (taking an honest look at our past) here and the second one (developing a rhythm of life) here.
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[1] Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees (Vancouver, BC: Greystone Books, 2015), 4.
[2] Ibid., 67.
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