And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” (Matthew 13:52)
Every Sunday our priest offers us “the gifts of God for the people of God”–the presence of Christ ministered physically in bread and wine. In meditating on that amazing statement I have come to see almost everything as categorized into three types of gifts: Scripture, Sacrament, and Spirit. Thinking in those categories I am amazed at the incredible goodness of our God…and I am blown away at our capacity to reject those gifts.
We have family treasures–treasures to which God has graciously given us access in Jesus Christ by His Spirit. Treasures like any homeowner has–new and old treasures. These are what Jesus tells us a student of his Kingdom will bring out–things with innate value and objects of practical worth. (Matthew 13:52)
Interestingly I have found that most rejection is half-hearted–Jesus said the disciple of the Kingdom values the new and the old. Most Christians seem to fall into camps of valuing one or the other. One camp sees all innovation as bordering on heresy, forgetting that the first thing we learn about God is that he is creator; the other camp insults our Lord by rejecting beautiful, ancient, family treasures with the snub, “dead religion.”
The nature of our post-modern culture still trends to the progressivism of the modern era–valuing the new for newness sake, or perhaps much more pessimistically despising the old for the sake of its age. So, most of my discussions about valuing God’s treasures tend to be in reminding people of the value of the old.
Puddleglum Contra Mundum 