Back when I was in seminary, at the Claremont School of Theology, I took a theology class, which is what you do in seminary. My very first theology class. The very first session. The professor introduced the class, and introduced the subject of theology by giving us a simple tool for analyzing any religion.
She said the first question to ask is, “What’s the problem?”
Every religion begins by observing that there is some problem with the world, with life, or with human existence. The field of theology begins by identifying what’s wrong. Why aren’t we in paradise?
So, for instance, in Christianity, the problem is death. Death is the problem that we face, according to Christian theology.
In Buddhism, for instance, the problem is suffering.
And then, having identified the problem, every religion goes on to tell us what causes the problem, and then what we can do to remove the cause and solve the problem.
In Christianity the problem is death. The reason we die is that we sin which requires the God of Justice to punish us with death. The solution is that Jesus takes the punishment for us when he dies on the cross, in what is called substitutionary atonement. Then, by allying our selves to Jesus’ sacrifice through the sacraments our sins are absolved and we earn back the eternal life God intends for us.
Don’t worry, there’s no quiz.
In Buddhism the problem is suffering. The cause of our suffering is that we bind ourselves mentally and emotionally to a material reality filled with attractive but impermanent things so that we are constantly forming desires that can never be satisfied. The solution is to train our minds to recognize the dependently arising nature of the material world and to live into the deeper realm of unindifferentiated consciousness.
My apologies to Buddhists and Christians in the room for that grossly simplified synopsis. There is a reason that theology is an academic field and not just the first 10 minutes of a first year seminary class.
But that question of my theology professor is a good one to get started with. Whether analyzing a world religion, or your own spiritual path. What’s the problem? What problem are you trying to solve with your spiritual life?
In fact, that was the next question my theology professor asked me and the rest of her first year students. “What’s your problem?” she asked us. “What do you see is the problem of the world?”
I’d never thought about it before. But, challenged to think about it, and given just a few minutes to write down our answers and share them with a classmate, the answer I came up with is, “scarcity.”
It seemed to me that the problem of the world is that the world is a finite place and that people have competing desires for the same few, nice things. There are a limited number of nice apartments in the best places, or reservations at the best restaurant. The best land for farming, clean water and air are limited. Only a few people can achieve their dream to be pop stars or professional footballers. A lot of people would like to marry Prince Harry, but Prince Harry only wants to marry Meghan Markle.
The things of the world that human beings need for life and love and meaning and purpose are finite. When the available resources are desired by more people than can share the resources then we respond with selfishness and greed and the powerful use violence to acquire and defend what they can, and the less powerful go without. That’s the problem of the world.
Well, that’s what you can come up with in the first five minutes of your first theology class. Not really so profound. The idea that the valuable things of the world are scarce is a foundational principle of economics. In fact the reason that valuable things are valuable is because they are scarce. We assign value to scarcity. Common things are cheap. Rare things are expensive. A DaVinci is more expensive than a donut. Lots of people can ski, but only some people can ski fast enough to compete at the Olympics, and only one person can win the gold medal.
Capitalism is based on the idea that the valuable things in the world are scarce. Consumers compete for finite resources. If you’re good at the capitalist competition you get what you need, and some get even more than they need. If you aren’t good at the capitalist competition, or if you’re held back by unjust cultural and legal barriers, then you might not get what you need. Resources are scarce. There isn’t enough. There are winners and losers.
Socialism starts with the same assumption of scarcity. Socialism is nicer about it, but socialism still starts from a world where what we all need for life and love and meaning and purpose is assumed to be limited. The finite resources of the world require careful management so everyone gets a share. There isn’t enough. So government controls the resources and then divides them equitably throughout the system.
The scarcity assumption permeates our lives. Only so many hours in a day. Only so many years in a life. If we visit your parents at Thanksgiving then we can’t visit mine. If I buy this, I can’t have that. If I eat the plums in the icebox tonight than you can’t have them for breakfast. In an economy of scarcity, the goal is to expend as little as you can, take as much as you can, and hold on to it as best your can. The finitude of the things of the world is so obvious that to question it seems absurd.
So let’s be absurd for a few minutes. Let’s take a little of our limited time this morning and see if the valuable in life really always is so scarce as we assume.
When I was a kid my family owned an encyclopedia set. Remember them? 20 or so volumes, hardbound in red covers, lined up in alphabetical order. Most of my homework assignments in junior high or high school started by going to the shelf, finding the right volume and reading an article. The encyclopedia set had been a gift from my grandparents to my parents when they started having kids. They arrived one volume at a time, one month at a time, purchased on subscription. Not every family had an encyclopedia. If you didn’t have an encyclopedia you could go to the library and read it there, but you couldn’t check it out because the whole community needed to share.
Encyclopedias used to be scarce. Now we have Wikipedia. We all have an encyclopedia much vaster than the one I had as a kid, available over the internet. The articles are available wherever I happen to be with my laptop or phone, open 24 hours a day. The information is constantly being expanded and updated. It’s not scarce; it’s common. It’s valuable, but it’s not expensive. In fact, it’s free.
The internet has moved information from the scarce to the common but information is still valuable. As Stewart Brand, who created the Whole Earth Catalog said in the early age of computers, “Information wants to be free.” And increasingly now, it is.
And why? Because people like to share what they know. We write blogs for free. In fact now’s a good time to mention that I was inspired to write this sermon after reading a blog post by a guy named Doug Muder. Doug is a Unitarian Universalist in New England who writes a blog called, The Weekly Sift. Doug’s thoughts on this topic were inspired by his reading of a science fiction book called, Walkaway by Cory Doctorow. So right there is a nice example of the way ideas are gifted freely from one person to another.
We share opinions on facebook. We add comments to articles. We post interesting ideas and entertaining videos and photos of our adventures. If you meet your friends for lunch they will tell you all kinds of interesting news and not charge you a nickel. We’re social creatures. We want to share. Our stories and experience and knowledge is valuable. But mostly, we’re happy to give it away for free.
My mother worked as an elementary school teacher in Santa Monica. In exchange for her labor she was paid a salary and benefits, including a pension. My parents were able to retire when they were 55. Now they’re 85 and haven’t worked for pay in 30 years. But they still work. My mother volunteers once a week in the office at their church. My dad serves on the Board of his Kiwanis club and in the box office of the local community theater. And both my mom and dad volunteer every weekday morning as tutors at their local elementary school: my dad tutors math; my mom tutors reading and writing. So my mom has now worked for 30 years, for free, doing the same work she did for the previous 30 years for pay.
Why would she do that?
Because people want to be useful. Because people want to be of service. Because my mother likes teaching reading and writing to children. Because my mother receives meaning and purpose in her life by teaching. Because the professional teachers at the school appreciate her help, so mom feels wanted, and she feels proud as she watches the kid’s lives expand as they learn from her. My mom retired from being a teacher, and there were certainly parts of that job she’s glad not to do any more, but my mother likes teaching. Her teaching is still valuable, but the families in her community don’t have to buy it from her, she gives it away, for free.
Lots of folks retire from paid work and then keep right on doing the same work in retirement as volunteers. They become tutors, or consultants, or substitutes, or temps. Art lovers become docents. Gardeners keep on gardening. They shift from the business office to the church office, or from leading the organization to leading the Kiwanis Club. People like working. People want to contribute. People want to be involved.
What happens to workers in retirement is now happening more and more to people earlier in life. Advances in technology, including robotics, means that human work is shifting away from the kind of work that people will only do for pay: physical, repetitive, confined to specific times and places; to the kinds of work that people would be willing to do without pay because they find the work satisfying in itself. Work that shares. Work that serves. Work that expresses our deep and precious natures. Work that contributes. Work that feeds and nurtures the next generation. Work that builds relationships. Work that opens a place for us in community. Work that is valuable but common, not rare.
In the realms of information and service work, value can no longer be equated with scarcity. In the realm of material things, we’re not there yet. People who would do certain kinds of work for free still usually need to be paid, because landlords still charge rent for apartments, and Ralph’s still requires payment for groceries and so on. But what if food got even cheaper to produce, perhaps through less reliance on physical labor, for instance? And what if housing got cheaper to produce, through better pre-fab technology, and renewable energy generators that would allow folks to live in more remote areas? It may be that we are seeing the first glimpses of an economy that could assume abundance instead of scarcity.
It may be, then, that I was wrong in assuming that scarcity was a fact of our existence and the cause of our spiritual problems. Maybe the valuable things in the world, the things that give us life and love and meaning and purpose, aren’t scarce, and may even be abundant. Maybe our problem isn’t that the resources we require to lead lives of health and joy are scarce, but that we’re looking for health and joy in the wrong things.
A DaVinci painting is always going to be rare, and very expensive (a painting of questionable merit just sold for $450 million dollars). DaVinci paintings are certainly nice, but sometimes what I really want is a donut. It’s true that the world doesn’t have a lot of slots available for pop stars and football players, but if what you really want is a life of purpose and meaning, there are plenty of jobs that would serve as well, ask my mom, or me. Only one woman can marry Prince Harry, but I’ve found my prince, and I’m not trading.
Instead of assuming the worth of the world is scarce, and life is a battle over limited resources, could we test the absurd notion that the world is filled with worth overflowing, and that our best strategy to happiness is to give ourselves away fully to it, rather than to hold back? Maybe the world is filled with life-giving, love-giving, meaning and purpose-giving, resources, like angels hovering in the air around us filling our world with music that we just haven’t tuned our ears to hear. Maybe instead of simply wishing, “I could share all the love in my heart” we could go ahead and share it. “I wish I could give all I’m longing to give. I wish I could live like I’m longing to live.” We could live a life that assumes abundance instead of scarcity. We could step in. We could show up. We could reach out. What if we just did everywhere in life what so many of us are longing to do: share, serve, express, create, contribute, feed, nurture, build, connect? “Though I’m way overdue I’d be starting anew.”
And then all that has divided us will merge
And then compassion will be wedded to power
And then softness will come to a world that is harsh and unkind
And then all will be rich and free and varied
And then the greed of some will give way to the needs of many
And then all will share equally in the Earth’s abundance
Last week I shared some words from DeReau Farrar. He started with the challenge that to create the Kingdom of God the final requirement was to give away all you possess to the poor. And then he let us off the hook, saying that requirement only applies to Christians. But then he put us right back on the hook as Unitarian Universalists committed to racial justice saying, for us, we might interpret Jesus’ commandment as, “Denounce all your privilege and give it to those with none.” And he kept the connection between economic and racial justice explicit when in part of his admonition he said this.
“For a person to denounce their privilege, they would have to be willing to give up all that they have mythically come to believe they have earned. If we’re serious about dismantling the idea that White people are better than others, it means White people have to stop accepting better salaries and benefits packages than their colleagues of Color. It means preaching about living within your means instead of below them—to stop spending less money than one can afford to—because our money has an impact on others.”
What a strange idea! I didn’t even understand what he meant the first time I read that. “Living within your means instead of below them.” The only economic advice I have ever heard was to live within your means not above them. Who lives below their means? Who does that?
Well maybe I do. Maybe you do. People who have more than they need and hold on to it because we’re afraid of being caught short based on an assumption that the valuable things in the world are scarce. I’ve heard the message all my life to save for a rainy day. DeReau’s critique is that hoarding extra money “just in case” concentrates money in the bank accounts of the already powerful and creates an artificial scarcity that causes real harm to the poor. He says, “stop spending less money than one can afford to—because our money has an impact on others.”
So this is, you see, a sermon for the kick-off Sunday of our Stewardship Campaign.
Could we, in this church, if not yet in the larger community, create an economy of abundance? Imagine if we all gave to this church what we can actually afford to give, rather than holding back out of fear because we’ve so completely accepted the false message that the valuable things in the world are scarce.
I look around at a room filled with resources. And I see people who are longing to give. I see people who would find the life and love and meaning and purpose they seek if they could give all they are longing to give.
Friends, let’s —
“Make channels for the streams of love where they may broadly run;
And love has overflowing streams to fill them every one.
For we must share, if we would keep this gift all else above;
We cease to give, we cease to have—such is the law of love.”