St. Gregory’s Church Woodstock
Sunday, 2 August, 2009, Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
The Rev’d Susan Auchincloss
If we were part of this group that is peppering
Jesus with questions, we could be pardoned if we felt frustration. Does he never
answer a question straight? We ask about time: “When did you come here?” He
replies, in effect, “You are here for the wrong reason.” Then we ask, “What
shall we do?” Jesus replies enigmatically, “Believe.” Next, we ask for a sign.
He replies with a little dissertation on bread. Finally, we ask for bread; and
he replies, “I am the bread.” If I read this passage out of a psychology
textbook, you would say, “Right! That must be the chapter on dysfunctional
communication.”
Is it dysfunctional communication or is it something deeper? We all know this to
be something deeper, but what? Perhaps this is it. The summer after my sophomore
year in high school, one of my friends broke ranks with us, and spent the summer
in Mexico. Her church was sponsoring a work camp. She went with others from her
church to build a community center for a village in the Sonoran desert. At the
end of the summer she came home, but as far as we could see, she had left her
old self behind. We were all mad for “Rock Around the Clock” with Bill Haley and
His Comets. She didn't seem that excited. We were scandalized by Elvis Presley.
Elvis didn't get a rise out of her. And when the captain of our high school
football team broke up with his girl friend, stunning the rest of us, she
scarcely cared. In all the ways that counted with us, she was living in a
different world.
We could say that Jesus lives in one world, his questioners in another. What
tells them apart? Beliefs and assumptions. Jesus uses the word, believe, but
don't let it mislead you. It goes deeper than thoughts. Jesus meant – we could
put it this way – “Come to live and work in the Sonoran desert.” Believe, as
Jesus intended it, meant to enter a different world and become part of it. Let
the alkaline air fill your lungs, so to speak; let the dust fill your pores; let
the sun bake your skin and the sun-baked clay bricks strengthen your hands. So
when Jesus called believing work – “This is the work of God, that you
believe in him whom he has sent” – he did not mean simply take on a new idea.
How can we make this practical? Suppose we are seriously interested in doing the
work of God; how do we enter that other world that Jesus calls believing? We
start by untangling the confusion over the word bread. The questioners are after
the bakery item, plus all that goes with it for the well-being of the body.
Jesus could have led them to a new way of thinking. He could have said, “Good,
but you should also seek the spiritual food that endures for eternal life.”
Instead, he tried to shift their whole being from one world to another,
from their habitat to his. He wanted to turn their relationship to bread upside
down.
A plant from the world of the Sonoran desert, as we all know, could not survive
in the arctic, and vice versa. So also, with these two, inner habitats.
We cannot acclimatize to both. I will describe them in a moment; but first let
me acknowledge that in what follows I am indebted to a book, The Soul of
Money, by Lynne Twist. She suggests the terms sufficiency and scarcity.
Jesus' questioners dwelt in a scarcity habitat. Jesus, himself, dwelt in a
sufficiency habitat. No one can straddle the two; and in fact they scarcely
speak the same language. No wonder the exchanges between Jesus and his
questioners sounded like dysfunctional communication.
What sustains the scarcity habitat? A system of three basic assumptions – all
unexamined – that work together like climate, soil, and typography. The first
assumption says, “There is not enough.” In other words, someone is bound to end
up holding the short end of the stick. It jolly well won't be me. The second
says, “More is better.” That ends up meaning: those who have more count
for more; so those on the financial margin can be discounted. This second
assumption also means that “even too much is not enough.” The chase for 'more is
better' usurps our attention, saps our energy, and closes down opportunities for
fulfillment. We can never arrive! The third assumption says, “That's just the
way it is.” In other words, scarcity is a given, so we might as well resign
ourselves to the status quo. Put these three assumptions together and they
create a joyless habitat of resignation. In it we feel small and disconnected.
If you are like me, we can grow greedy, selfish, petty and fearful. We judge
ourselves as winners or losers. We lose our sense of the possibilities in life;
we become wary, afraid to share. It's all about holding on to what is mine. A
lack of money becomes an excuse for holding back from commitment and
contributing what we do have.
Oddly enough, it matters not at all how much money one has; the scarcity
mentality oppresses the wealthy no less than those on the margin. Mother Teresa
once said, “We have heard of the vicious cycle of poverty; there is also a
vicious cycle of wealth.” Speaking for myself, I can easily focus on what I do
not have enough of and what I want to get. “I didn't get enough sleep last
night.” “I don't have enough time.” “I don't get enough exercise, or have enough
work.” “I am not thin enough, or smart enough.” It almost goes without saying,
“I do not have enough money.”
Sufficiency, on the other hand, is not an amount. It is not a state just short
of abundance, or just above poverty – more than enough or barely enough.
Sufficiency is an experience, an ecosystem we generate, a knowing based on
believing. Dwelling in the sufficiency habitat, we can be thoughtful and
generous, courageous and committed. We value friendship and love and an open
heart. We can respond with awe to nature. We can risk being vulnerable and
express ourselves truly and honestly. We trust and can be trusted; we feel
connected to the whole world and we feel the peace that can bring. Living in the
realm of sufficiency, we use our money to express our soul's values. Sufficiency
is being conscious of the power and presence of our resources – inner and outer.
'Better' comes not from more, but from deepening our experience of what is
already here. We still strive and aspire, but not out of fear. In sufficiency we
live in a sense of our own wholeness.
How do we move from one ecosystem to the other? Step one: we uncover the lie of
scarcity. Step two: we note how the two systems are sustained. Assumptions
sustain the habitat of scarcity; thanks to these false assumptions, we think we
are living in a world where we are in constant danger of having our needs unmet.
Not only are these assumptions false, but they come to us passively. Twist
comments that we often speak of the “great unanswered questions of life.” We
could equally ask about the “great unquestioned answers”. So then, what sustains
the habitat of sufficiency? Believing. Sufficiency is the truth, yet it has been
buried under a sand dune of assumptions. It takes work to shovel ourselves out
from under that mound of lies; and Jesus called that work believing.
We 'believe' by practicing the truth of sufficiency. This is not counsel
against prudent money management; we need to invest and save and spend our
resources wisely. It is, however, introducing the concept of personal
transformation through money. For each of us, money in any amount acts as a
carrier of energy and intent. We do not need a fortune to funnel our
money into the world with the force of our commitments and integrity. As we
practice the truth of sufficiency, money becomes more and more a way to express
the longing and fulfillment of our souls. We express our soul's integrity
through the medium of money, time and energy. Our watch word becomes, not
'accumulate' but 'allocate'.
We 'believe' by practicing the truth of sufficiency, yes; but something drives
that practice and that driving force is prayer, especially meditation.
Meditation has the effect of taking us back to 1969 and standing us beside the
astronauts in the first human lunar landing. For the first time, humans saw the
earth from the moon. We saw, as Buckminster Fuller put it, “Spaceship Earth.” We
went from being part of the system to being outside of it. Prayer, and
especially meditation, takes us outside of that scarcity habitat with its sand
storm of lies; it gives us distance and a chance for truth to wipe clear our
vision. Friends, Jesus was not trying to change our thinking about bread;
he was trying to change the whole context we think within. He wanted to change
our spiritual habitat.