Abundance
A SERMON BY REV LINDA A HART
Nearly 2,000 years ago, the rabbi Jesus was asked to divide an inheritance between two brothers. He chided the man: "Take heed, and beware all covetousness; for your life does not consist in the abundance of your possessions." Then he spoke to his followers:
I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat, nor about your body, what you shall put on. For life is more than food and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And which of you by being anxious can add a cubit to his span of life? If then you are not able to do as small a thing as that, why are you anxious about the rest? Consider the lilies, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass which is alive in the field today and thrown in the oven tomorrow, how much more will God clothe you, O ye of little faith!
This is for me one of the most profound statements found in the Christian scriptures. Its truth is the truth of the transcendent: it speaks to our human condition here at early in the third millennium, it speaks to our human condition even in the midst of ongoing economic crisis and trouble.
The rabbi Jesus those many long years ago spoke wisdom to his followers, begging that they not put their faith and hope in material possessions, but rather asked that they trust that they would be provided for, that they should not squander their energies getting and spending, storing up storehouses of things, but he challenged them to put their energies into what matters most. He said: "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." The truth of those words rings through the ages to our own time, to our own days, to our own lives.
Nancy Mairs speaks well of the sense of scarcity that we are seduced into believing:
[A] sense of sufficiency can be hard to come by in a society premised on scarcity. Immigrants will come and confiscate our livelihoods, we fret; pollution will destroy the very air we breathe and the water we drink; small children will bleed away our scant fiscal resources with their demands for food, medicine, education. The certainty that there is never enough of anything to go around condemns us to a state of chronic anxiety.
"Our society would unravel altogether if we stopped believing in scarcity," she tells us again. True enough. And few, if any, of us escape the press of culture and advertising that tells us, insistently, that we've not got enough, we need more and better whatever it is we already have.
Coming into the season of harvest, when we should easily see the abundance of earth, still we are often left feeling that we haven’t enough of what is needed.
What is it about us, us human beings that we have a seemingly unstoppable longing for that something more?
Now, don't get me wrong. I do know and realize full well that there are those who suffer from true privation: the homeless and hungry of the world are out there, without question. If only on our television sets, if only in the reports in the paper, we all do know about those whose life is truly characterized by not enough of anything: not enough food, and so children's bellies distend, and they grow lethargic; not enough shelter beds, and so men and women freeze on the streets wanting for a warm place to be, bundling up in blankets over the subway vents; not enough jobs, and so despair grows, and so do threats to families; not enough care and compassion in a society that seems too fat and well fed and those in need are too often denied a helping hand, too often denied food and shelter and too often, denied hope. It comes -- at least in some measure -- from the belief that there is not enough to go around.
The truth is, at least as I see it most of the time, that we have an astonishing abundance around us all the time, but we often lose our ability to see it. Rachel Naomi Remen recounted this story of the husband of one of her patients:
An organized and frugal man, her husband had reserved compact cars on each of the four islands months in advance. On arriving on the Big Island and presenting their reservation to the car rental desk, they were told that the economy car that they had reserved was not available. . . . "I am so sorry, sir," [the clerk] said. "Will you accept a substitute for the same price? We have a Mustang convertible." Barely mollified, her husband put the bags in this beautiful sports car and they drove off.
The same thing happened throughout their holiday. . . . After the Mustang, they had been given a Mazda MR-10, a Lincoln Town Car, and finally, a Mercedes, all with the most sincere apologies. The vacation was absolutely wonderful and on the plane back, she turned to her husband, thanking him for all he had done to arrange such a memorable time. "Yes," he said pleased, "it was really nice. Too bad they never had the right car for us." He was absolutely serious.
We get blinded in all sorts of ways. This man too intent upon what had been promised never noticed that he had been given more than he had wanted. So intent upon what was right, he missed that he had been even more generously provided for than he had asked. How often does that happen to you? How often do you miss those gifts, the generous moments, the unexpected kindnesses because your vision has been blurred, you have been blinded to the abundance around you? It happens more than we know, I fear.
"Take heed," said the rabbi, two thousand years ago, "and beware all covetousness; for your life does not consist in the abundance of your possessions."
In some measure, it all has to do with the attitude that we bring to our lives, and the fall back position is a belief in scarcity. We have to train ourselves to see what we've been given in ever new light. We have to continually cultivate a new way of seeing the world so that we see the abundance in which we ever live.
Annie Dillard tells of how as a child she used to hide pennies in the roots of trees, or in a crack in the pavement. Since she couldn't be sure that someone would see it, she'd begin at one end of the block and with her chalk, she'd draw an arrow that pointed toward the penny. Once she learned to write, she would scrawl out: "Surprise ahead" or "Money this way." She never stayed to see who got the penny, but would run home straightaway, and wouldn't think of it again until she was struck with the compulsion to hide another penny. She comments upon this behavior, and her more adult perceptions of the world:
There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But -- and this is the point -- who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.
It is hard to imagine what the world might be like if we could cultivate a strong belief in abundance. It's hard to imagine what all the changes that would take place if only we could believe that we are enough, and that what we needed would be provided for us.
I am always called back to my Universalist heritage when thinking of abundance. While they didn't use the language of abundance, the religious truth that inspired them was grounded in the most profound sense of abundance: that God's love was more plentiful than even the most imaginative of us could conceive. It is a truth that I come back to in my life again and again. The Universalists denied that there was a limit to the number of people who would be welcomed into heaven. Unlike their Calvinist neighbors, they believed that the gates of heaven were opened for everyone and not only a select few, chosen before birth to inhabit holy space. They held that it didn't matter who the person was, what their sins, what their troubles and turmoil in this life: the gates were ever open to each and all of humankind, and none would be forever excluded from the blessing of eternity in God's presence.
That language may be uncomfortable to some of us here. But the insight is true, I believe, and grows from that same understanding that Jesus spoke to his followers: "For life is more than food and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet [they are fed]. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And which of you by being anxious can add a cubit to his span of life?"
The insight is this: there is plenty in the world that is available to you. There is more than you can imagine there might be available to you, and all you need to do is to pay attention to see it, to know it, to feel it. This isn't something that we human beings know instinctively, or something we can believe without taking a step and trusting. The insight at the centre of the Universalists' understanding of the world was that there is, in fact, enough to go around: enough love, enough hope, enough promise. Our deepest worries about our lives should be calmed because we trust that there will be enough, in fact, more than enough. Universalism – a good companion to our Unitarian heritage – is most deeply about abundance and trusting that abundance. We cannot add to our lives by our anxiety over what it is that is missing in our lives. We can only lose the possibility of living an abundant life because we cannot see what is before us, cannot enjoy the Mustang convertible because it isn't an economy car, cannot see the pennies strewn through the world, cannot open ourselves to give and receive love that is ours to live within. If we remain caught in the anxiety, in the need to buy and spend, we might well miss those kind strangers that Dorianne Laux tells us about:
All day it continues, each kindness
reaching toward another. . . .
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them --
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.
Kindnesses that overwhelm the surly responses, beauty that overwhelms the losses, love that can touch us beyond imagining. What we see -- what we choose to see -- is what we get. And I don't want to suggest a polyanna-ish everything-is-beautiful sort of seeing, but instead, it demands a trust in the fundamental worthwhileness of life, a trust in possibility, a belief that this world at its most deep and profound centre, offers us an abundance, and it is given to us to see it, to celebrate it, to lift it up for all to see.
And how might our lives change if we really did trust and believe that this abundance is ours? It's hard to know, so few of us are able to live in that light. But I think of a brief newspaper story that Jane Rzepka tells about:
A one-paragraph newspaper article describes a subway platform during the morning rush hour at Grand Central Terminal. A train pulls in: a well-dressed woman gets off. Before the doors close, the woman realizes that she is holding only one of her leather gloves. She looks back into the train and spots the matching one on the seat. It is obviously too late to dash back in to retrieve it, so with a cavalier shrug, she flings her arm out and, the doors about to close, tosses her glove onto the seat alongside its mate. The doors shut and the train pulls away.
There's something about that image of tossing away a glove, of letting go, of being able to just offer out to the world that is appealing to me, and it can come -- perhaps at its best always comes -- from a sense of sufficiency, a recognition that there is enough, a belief that nothing important is ever lost forever, but will always return.
The Universalists of two centuries ago understood that their work of evangelizing was to let people know that they had no reason to worry about their salvation. Each and all, they believed, were embraced in the love of God, and there was no need for worry about it. Once freed from that worry, we might then learn to live within that knowledge, and grow more loving ourselves, more generous, more merciful, and from that, to know joy, deep and true, in a world that is ever more abundant in treasures. Indeed it would be ever more abundant in treasures because our eye would be tuned to see those treasures:
in the beauty of growing morning, and the wonder of the darkest moment of the night,
in the crispness of a morning and the colour of leaves in the trees,
in the faces of the very young and the faces of those who have learned wisdom's hard lessons in this life,
in the smell of cake baking, the pleasure of sweetness on the tongue,
in the thousands of moments of peace, of hope, of pleasure that are ours ever and always.
As the chatter all around us continues to tell anyone who will listen that there is never enough in the whole world: tax the corporations and they will leave us, make soldiers redundant because we can no longer afford them, slash benefits to all sorts of vulnerable people because they don’t deserve anything and we don’t have enough in any case. People are grasping and clutching and holding tight for fear that what little they have will be taken from them. Scarcity rules.
In the midst of the chatter and grasping may we hear again those words of the rabbi: "Take heed, and beware all covetousness; for your life does not consist in the abundance of your possessions." May we see this season of harvest -- and always -- the wide abundance that we live within daily, and seek in our lives to reflect that abundance, in beauty, in peace and in love.
Prayer
Spirit of love and life,
you who are woven into the world,
you who connect our small lives
to the intricate workings of the universe,
we pause in these moments to remember.
So often we move through life
unthinking,
reactive,
numbed by the worries of the world.
Remind us
that our foolish certainty can blind us;
that petty worries can consume our hearts;
Remind us
to stop,
to choose,
to breathe,
to be aware.