Treasured Possession

This sermon was preached by Pastor Ted Carnahan for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, July 26, 2026.

Grace, mercy, and peace be with all of you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I want to start off our reflection on the day by asking you to consider a question for yourself. What is it that you treasure?

And it's not a trap. It's not a trick question. I'm not asking you to give up everything that you treasure here.

Actually the things that we treasure are often really good things, right? Some people treasure land—you want to get more. Or reputation—you want to have a good reputation in the community. Maybe you treasure security, financial security or physical security. Maybe you treasure your family and you want your family to be happy; your church, and you want your church to grow; your friends, and you want to have more of them and have more connections and for them to be happy.

The World's View of Growth

And with all of these things, our approach is very naturally that when we value these things, when we treasure these things, we want them to increase—and we want them to increase in ways that are easy to see, to measure, to understand that that increase is happening. So if you value land, you want more land. If you value reputation, you want a better reputation. You can't necessarily measure a reputation, but you know what a good one is and you know what a bad one is and you want yours to be better. If you value your security or your church, you want those things to be measurably better. If you value your family, you want your family maybe to grow, but certainly to be happier.

And none of these are bad. All of these things are good! They come from the hand of God. They're good and they're blessings and we should be grateful for them. It's good to desire that they grow!

But the lesson that we should take away today is that the way that the kingdom of God works is a little different than the way that the things of this world work. You see, because when you look at the things of this world and you want them to increase, you know what that should look like. And when you see a way to improve upon the things that you treasure, then you feel it deep in your bones: That's the ticket. That's the thing to do. That's what I need.

That's what advertisers capitalize on. They don't try to make you value something new. They start with something that you already value and then they tell you either that you will have more of what you value or less of what you don't on the basis of what they try to tell you about their product. That's a natural way of approaching the things that we treasure.

God Approaches Things Differently

But as I said earlier, God approaches things differently. He doesn't choose the things that we would regard as impressive.

For example, our great father Abraham was an old man living in an idol-worshipping city on the eastern edge of the desert when God came to him and said, “Pick up everything and move to this country that I will show you, sight unseen, and I will make you the father of many nations. Many descendants will come from you.” But he knew that Abraham's heart was willing to trust a God whom he could not see, and so he did; he promised, and Abraham believed.

Similarly, the Hebrew people who were descended from Abraham in slavery in Egypt were nothing special to look at. Yes, they were numerous, but not more numerous than any other people, and they were slaves—slaves who had even forgotten who God was—to the point where Moses, when he's confronted by God in the burning bush, one of his questions is: the Hebrew people are going to ask me, “Who sent you?” and I don't even know your name. And he says, “I am who I am.” And that's the name that Moses bore as he went back to demand that Pharaoh let his people go.

They were not impressive people. Moses had a stutter. Moses had already killed a man! But God doesn't justify based on worldly ideas of grandness. God claims the unlikely because he sees past outward appearances. He claims Israel, not because they appear to be ready to give him a profit — they're a bunch of slaves who have forgotten their heritage living in a foreign land. (What would God need from us anyway?) But he chooses them and claims them because he made a promise to their ancestor Abraham, and God is always faithful and he always keeps promises.

The Pearl Is Not a Finger-Wagging Tale

Sometimes we want to turn the Parable of the Pearl of Great Value into a moralistic tale. It goes like this: Jesus is the pearl, he is the great treasure. When you find Jesus, you have to give up everything and follow him. Every cost we pay to follow Christ is worth is, so you had better straighten up and fly right and give up the things you were doing that were bad, and be good. Wag that finger!

I think that that might get the interpretation backwards.

Because what I find in Scripture over and over again is that God is the one who seeks us. God is the one who searches for you.

In Deuteronomy, the treasured possession of God is a particular people—not because they're glorious or most numerous, not because they're useful or even that they have a history of faithfulness, but because God has chosen them out of his love. God made a promise long ago to Abraham and his descendants, and he intends to keep it even if they have forgotten. This was his plan from the beginning.

Foreknown, Predestined, Called, Justified, Glorified

Look at what St. Paul says to us in Romans: “Those he foreknew, he predestined; those he predestined, he called; those he called, he justified; those he justified, he glorified.”

Let's take that apart and understand what he's saying here:

• Those he foreknew, he predestined. God looked ahead in his divine knowledge and he knew us, he knew you. He looked ahead in his foreknowledge before the foundation of the Earth and he knew that you would exist. And he wanted to save you, redeem you from sin and death. And so he elected us, he chose us, he chose you, to be his priceless possession—to do whatever it was necessary for him to do to be connected to us.
• Those he predestined, he called. He didn't just say, "I want this to happen" - some pious wish from long ago, he said, "I'm going to call them." That election is not passive, it's active! He calls out to us, he reaches down to us. Jesus Christ becomes God's active rescue mission to save sinners. He sends his own Son into the world to call us back into a loving relationship with him. So you're not just predestined and foreknown. You are called—and not just called, because:
• Those he called, he justified. He didn't just call us and expect us to come running. Jesus said, “I'm here, come running,” and then we're all expected to beat feet to get there. He's the one who does the work of justification. He not only calls us to be his chosen people, but then he justifies us by his grace. He goes to the cross; he pays the ultimate price for us. So we are foreknown and predestined and called and justified. And then:
• Those he justified, he glorified. And that's what true glory is, where true glory comes from—not by the glorious ideas of the world — land or reputation or possessions or whatever else — but by the cross of Christ we find the glory of God, which is a strange thing to glory in. Have you ever considered: we have this giant wooden cross in the corner of our worship space here. And that is literally just an artistic rendition of an instrument of torture and death. Something much uglier—a much uglier version of that—was the instrument by which our Lord was crucified and died.

Notice though, who has the verbs here: I didn't foreknow or predestine or call or justify or glorify. It was not my effort or accomplishments that did that.

God foreknows. God predestines. God calls. God justifies. God glorifies. God is the one who is actively seeking and pursuing. And God does this for us out of his faithfulness and love.

We Don't Deny Reality; We Deny Finality

Therefore, when we face hardship and sufferings and challenges, we don't deny their reality. We don't say, well, we just need the power of positive thinking. We just need to believe better. We need to declare better into the world in the name of Jesus.

No, we don't deny the reality of suffering and death. We say, yes, these things are real. They are true. We don't deny the reality, but we do deny the finality—that these things are not the last word that anyone has to say about our lives.

Therefore, when St. Paul gives us his list of calamities—hardship and distress and persecution and famine and nakedness and peril and sword—all of these are real, all of them today. Hopefully many of them not for you, but across the world, Christians in countries like Myanmar or Nigeria and other places, in South Sudan and other places, they face tremendous persecution. And all of us face hardship and distress, and these things are real. But we trust the promise that God has given us.

St. Paul puts it this way: "neither death nor life nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." God doesn't just hold on to us, seek us, find us, claim us, grasp us, but he holds us tightly. We've been claimed by God as his priceless possession.

Treasure, Pearl, Net

Therefore, when we consider the parables Jesus has taught us today, consider perhaps that we are the treasure in the field, which God sells everything to purchase for his very own—even giving his own Son to live among us, yes, but then to die on a Roman cross and rise from the tomb. The cost for God is not silver or gold, but the life of his own Son given for the life of the world.

Therefore, perhaps you and I are the pearl of great value for which God sells everything to acquire it and to keep it forever. And we may not, to the untrained eye, be worth the great sacrifice of Christ, but God sees in us infinite value and holds on to us. And we don't find this in our own human ideals of glory, but we find this in the ideals of God.

Those ideals are very counterintuitive. The kingdom of God doesn't line up with the kingdom of this world.

Two Pictures of the Kingdom

Jesus gives us this picture in the mustard seed, right? The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed—it becomes this tiny, but it gets big. The mustard seed is small and unassuming, but if you plant a mustard seed in your garden, you don't have a mustard plant, do you? Because mustard is a terrible weed. It's useful, it's lovely, it's a good thing to have around. I love mustard on my hot dog. But if you plant it in your garden, you don't have it in one spot in your garden. You've got it all over. It's great at spreading around if you let it go to seed. It doesn't stay where it's put. It takes over. If left to its own devices, it will be everywhere! It starts with something small and insignificant and unimpressive, and it goes into the ground, and the kingdom of God spreads and gets so large that even birds can nest in it.

And then Jesus gives us the picture of yeast. A tiny amount is added to three measures of flour—lots and lots of flour. A very tiny amount of yeast, but what happens when you add water and you let it sit? The yeast spreads through the whole dough and makes it light and fluffy and delightful.

Neither of these things sound a trumpet. Neither of these things are glorious. They're tiny and seemingly insignificant, unimportant and weak and powerless, but somehow they work. They show us that God's work is done in the humble and the quiet and the unexpected things that escape our notice.

This is what the kingdom among us looks like. It's not grandiose. It's not perfection. It is the everyday faithfulness of followers of Jesus Christ seeking to live a cross-centered life—hearing the word of God, receiving the sacraments, turning again and again back to the God who loves us and claims us and saves us in Christ.

May you trust that the God who is seeking you loves you—so much so that he gave his only Son Jesus Christ to die for you and rise for you. May you remember that Jesus is our pearl of great value, but that God was willing even to give up Jesus himself for our sake. He has gathered you into his net so that you will belong to him, because you are what God has been fishing for. You are of great value to God.

And may the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord, to life everlasting. Amen.