Finding Hidden Treasure
In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, AMEN.
Today, the Church commemorates someone fairly obscure, someone I’m guessing no one in the room has heard of. His name was John Mason Neale, and he was a priest in the Church of England in the 19th century. He may be most famous for writing hymns and translating the hymns of the ancient church from Greek to lovely English verse.
He is responsible for some of our favorite Christmas hymns, O Come O Come Emmanuel; Good Christian Men, Rejoice; and Good King Wenceslas.
Though John Mason Neale is obscure, he encountered something in his life that I think we all can relate to, which is the necessity of flexibility, the ability to re-invent ourselves when things don’t work out as planned.
After Neale’s ordination as a priest in the Church of England, he was energetic and excited about taking on his first job as the vicar of Crawley parish.
He threw himself into the work; as one early biographer puts it, “no cottage door could be closed against him; he was ready to pray by the bedsides of the sick, and to comfort the aged and sorrowful” (65).
His sermons were met with great success, and the parish began to increase its numbers. The people loved him and he loved the people. He was living his dream, his best life; he had found his place in the world and was doing what he loved.
Then, only one year later, he had to retire from this new vocation. He suffered from chronic lung disease. His health was failing, and it was clear that he could not continue the rapid and demanding pace of the parish priesthood without falling into more serious illness.
After several years of prayer, questioning, and discernment, Neale was offered a post as the warden of Sackville College, a seventeenth-century almshouse.
Essentially, this position was like the chaplaincy of a retirement home for the poor. Sackville only had twelve residents. It was in East Grinstead, far from the urban seats of power and importance.
This was not a prestigious position by any means.
In fact, quite the opposite— to accept it, as his biographer writes, was “practically to relinquish any hope of advancement; he would be isolated, unknown, in all probability forgotten.”
To accept the position, in other words, was to admit defeat, at least if Neale were looking through the lenses of his own expectations about the way his life would go; or the lenses of career advancement; or the lenses of wealth and influence.
What John Mason Neale found at Sackville was his life’s purpose, however.
Unexpected, yes; but at the same time, a gracious gift of God.
He grew quickly to love the elderly pensioners he served there, and he had time and leisure to study and write, which he did, voluminously.
He wrote scholarly works and hymns.
He helped to found the Society of Saint Margaret, an order of Anglican nuns dedicated to nursing the sick.
He served at Sackville for twenty years, until he died at 48 of the lung disease he had struggled with his whole adult life.
In talking with many of you over the last four years, I have heard stories not completely unlike Neale’s.
Many of us ended up at ESA through circumstances that did not follow the straight lines of ambition.
Many of us landed here contrary to our own expectations about where life would take us.
Some of us are definitely not from around here, but found a home here.
Some of us went away, then came home again and have many old friends and family around.
Some of us worked in industry, or taught in other educational environments.
Some of us, like myself, swore that we would never teach middle school.
God has a sense of humor, for sure; but even more than that, I believe that God teaches us all that we are not the masters of our own destinies.
We find ourselves in unexpected places in life, as did John Mason Neale. We are, as the prayer we heard earlier put it, tested in ways that we cannot foresee.
Our response is to do what God has given us to do with integrity and courage—the work that God has given us to do, not the work we ourselves think we are doing.
After all, none of us really has any idea of what will happen this year; but there are probably a few things of which we can be fairly certain.
We will have both successes and failures.
We will face times of joy and ease and times of great difficulty and stress.
We will have interruptions to our routines and our expectations.
Our personal lives, our relationships with family and friends and students and colleagues, will not always go well.
We will disappoint others and they will disappoint us.
But we will also have profound moments of grace, interruptions of the Divine into our daily lives.
Some of Jesus’s shortest parables, just one-liners, are about these interruptions.
What is the kingdom of heaven like?
What is it like to live in such a way as to see Divine interruptions as grace-filled moments?
Yes, it is like a treasure hidden in a field, Jesus says, which someone found and hid, and then in their joy sells everything they have to buy that field.
But what do we imagine the treasure that the person found really was?
I wonder if countless other people had walked right by that treasure before, unaware that it was even there.
The Greek word Matthew uses, thesauro, can refer to a strongbox, something in which we place the things of great value to us.
Often the container of great riches and beauty is unattractive.
Often what we find inside is contrary to our expectations.
Jesus seems to be saying, in fact, that the kingdom of heaven is everywhere around us, hidden in plain sight.
That the kingdom of heaven is vision; better spiritual eyesight.
It is being given the gift of vision to perceive beauty
beyond our expectations, beyond our circumstances, beyond our immediate understanding.
To be an educator, as we know, requires a grace-filled understanding that what we see is not always what we get.
We have to dig and work diligently to open the strongbox and see what riches it might contain.
John Mason Neale’s life was not without struggle, even after he settled in at Sackville College. His own theological convictions were often at odds with the leadership of the Church. So, in addition to poor health, he often had to contend with superiors who did not recognize his gifts and talents.
But he had the vision to see the work of the kingdom all around him, especially in his ministry to twelve elderly retirees who would otherwise be forgotten by the world.
Even though he was writing and publishing hymns and works of history and theology, he never neglected his primary duty.
He tended his flock; he poured forth his efforts in writing eloquent, simple, and moving sermons for those twelve pensioners.
They were the treasure hidden in the field, in plain sight of so many, yet hidden because of their poverty and their lack of worldly acclaim and influence.
It is easy to find many treasures here at ESA. We serve a community in many ways different from Sackville College.
And yet we all know of hidden treasures, of children and young people and parents and grandparents who are signs of God’s grace in the most surprising and unusual ways.
I pray that our hearts are open this year to seeing the treasures hidden in plain sight;
I pray that God gives us the grace to see and to work,
to uncover the treasures of simplicity, of goodness, of kindness, of beauty
in
our selves, our students, their parents and family members, and in each other.
AMEN.