A Fourth Church Sermon by Sarah A. Johnson

August 8, 2010 | 4:00 p.m.

The Economics of Abundance

Sarah A. Johnson
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Luke 12:32–40

This week I looked up on the Internet website Wikipedia the origin of “retail therapy.” According to an online post, the term surfaced in the 1980s and was first referenced with this sentence in the Chicago Tribune on Christmas Eve 1986: “We’ve become a nation measuring our lives in shopping bags and nursing our psychic ills through retail therapy.”

The idea behind retail therapy being, of course, that we can therapeutically treat our moods—our depression, our worry and anxiety—with stuff. I can easily confess to being a master at this. I have bought clothes, decorative pillows, and even lattes all in the name of retail therapy. It is highly possible that a majority of my shoes were bought in some sort of insecurity-driven panic.

We all know that the cliché for dealing with our anxieties about identity and meaning as we get older is that with a midlife crisis comes a sports car. We obsess over our 401(k)s, the status of our bank accounts, and the strength or weakness of the market: “When will it go back up? Will we have enough for today, for tomorrow?”

And whether you have a lot or a little, we all know those moments when we look at our stuff and feel woefully inadequate compared to those around us, when we fear a void in our lives or an uncertain future. In order to fill that space, to quell our fears, we often hold on tightly to our stuff in order to prove that we can compare, that we can keep up, that our lives matter, that we have enough.

Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann writes, “Today, the fundamental human condition continues to be anxiety, fueled by market ideology that keeps pounding on us to take more, not to think about our neighbor, to be fearful, shortsighted, grudging. Over and over we are told that we have to be sure to have the resources to continue our lifestyles, especially as we approach our ‘golden years.’”

The gathering of and holding onto things has become a natural response to some of our greatest fears.

I think this is the same message Jesus reminds his disciples of in the Gospel of Luke.

Jesus is well on his way to Jerusalem, the city where he will be tortured and crucified. With every passing chapter of Luke’s Gospel, as Jesus gets closer to this destination, the crowds increase as does as the pressure and the anxiety created by Jesus’ presence. At the start of chapter twelve, we learn of the massive crowd pressing in on Jesus. The crowd will continue to be a constant presence from here on out. The disciples are nervous. Their inability to control the events of their lives, let alone the growing number of disgruntled people around them, is palpable. With stunning irrelevancy, a man from amidst the crowd yells to Jesus to mediate a family inheritance dispute. The atmosphere is chaotic, fearful.

And Jesus, easily grasping the symbolic function of possessions in human existence and the connection between fear and the accumulation of stuff, offers these words of comfort: “Fear not.” “Don’t be afraid,” he wants them to know. Your security, your life, does not depend anything that you acquire.

It’s a reminder that you and I do not have to toil and spin, scrambling and storing up stuff, in order to secure our lives. All that we have, our very lives, is a gift from God, who in his infinite care, created the universe and continues to provide faithfully. God, who created the universe, does not sit back and dispassionately watch it unfold but attends to the sparrow, the ravens, the lilies, with concern for humankind that extends to the very hairs on our head. Fear not. Our security lies in God’s faithfulness, not in the effectiveness we can make.

And then Jesus also adds this, “Sell your possessions. Give alms. Make for yourselves purses that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is your heart will be also.”

“Do you want to discover a life of true abundance?” Jesus wants to know. Then spend your life giving away what you have been given. Sell it all. Jesus paradoxically reminds us that experiencing abundant life is not about securing more stuff but about generosity.

Thus the two parts of the story fit together: the belief that our lives—all we have been given—is a gift not of our own effectiveness but of God’s faithfulness, and the freedom this provides us to discover abundant life through faithful generosity.

Reformed theologian John Calvin, who has often been credited with paving the way for economic shifts of modernity, connects God’s generosity to us with a kind of radical economic sharing. This path of generosity begins, he affirms, with the acknowledgment that “all the gifts we possess have been bestowed by God and entrusted to us on the condition that they be distributed for our neighbors’ benefit.”

It is an understanding of life that is grounded in the theological doctrine of providence, the assurance of God’s continued care for each one of us so that we might share generously with others. This belief in God’s provision for our lives enables a response that runs counter to the human propensity to be afraid, a response that challenges the tendency to hold onto what one has.

It is an important word, a challenging word, in a time when in American culture the intellectual and spiritual momentum seems to be moving in the other direction—away from generosity toward unrestricted wealth; away from responsibility for anything other than our own private world.

Peter Gomes, Harvard University professor and minister of Harvard’s Memorial Church, writes in his book The Good Life: Truths That Last in a Time of Need about the decline in higher education’s emphasis on a life of virtue connected to the common good. “Except for the occasional deferential nod to the notion of public service, American higher education in the last decades of the twentieth century,” Gomes writes, “has seemed to go out of its way to avoid any kind of oral claims on the minds, hearts, and lives of its young constituents” (p. 18). Higher education must teach students the value of making a good life not just a good living.

I love what novelist Isabel Allende wrote in an essay from the NPR radio and book series This I Believe: “You only have what you give. It is by spending yourself that you become rich. . . . What is the point of having experience, knowledge, or talent if I don’t give it away? Of having stories if I don’t share them with others? Of having wealth if I don’t share it? I don’t intend to be cremated with any of it! It is in giving that I connect with others, with the world, with the divine” (pp. 14–15).

Winston Churchill once said, "We make a living by what we do, but we make a life by what we give."

God’s faithful providence and our responsive generosity—it is an important word. According to the Gospel story, you only truly have as much as you give.

It is not really about just putting sizeable sums in the offering plate, donating to causes—although that’s a great start—and calling it a day. This understanding of gift and generosity requires not just a redistribution of wealth and resources, but also a full reorientation of our values, of where we place our hearts, as we understand ourselves in relation to God and to others.

This week I met with a member of this congregation who is interested in expanding the meal ministries of the church, of finding places where there are unmet needs and filling them. It is not an easy task, and it will take hours of his time and energy let alone his financial contribution. When I asked him why he was doing this (he already has a family and a full-time job), he said, “Food is a basic need. It is not OK that some people have plenty while others go hungry. I am so fortunate, and none of it is really mine anyway.”

There are lots of ways to extend generosity by understanding ourselves as intimately connected to those around us. You can sign up to tutor a child in our Tutoring program, you can give to our mission programs, which allow kids who have never considered college an option the opportunity to afford that. You can provide safe passage to school for a child in a neighborhood plagued by violence. You can be a part of advocating for fewer guns and safer neighborhoods. Discover the disparities in the world and in our community and figure out how to use your life, what you have to make a difference.

In the end it is really about the type of abundance and blessing in my life and yours. Give it all away—your heart, your mind, your time, your money—and see what kind of abundance you receive in return.

Scholar Phillip Hallie wrote, “One’s life is usually about as wide as one’s love.”

Jesus Christ calls us to live faithfully in response to what we have been given. We do not earn his grace, his love. It has been freely given, as has the responsibility to rejoice, to respond, by trusting in God’s faithfulness and giving of our whole lives in return.

“For where your treasure is, your heart will be also.”

All thanks be to God. Amen.