Sermon Transcript for November 26, 2006 Gerber Baby Foods! You know the brand? They have the picture of the very cute, chubby baby on the jar. Gerber is the staple diet of most babies growing up. When products enter into the African market, what they generally do, because of the language problem, is place a picture of the item being sold on the jar. So when Gerber went into Africa with a picture of a cute chubby baby on the front of their packaging, Africans panicked about what these crazy Americans were now doing- bottling young children. And so Gerber had to rethink their whole marketing approach in Africa. The point that I want to make out of this is that we have to constantly check our assumptions about what is on the inside. That’s what the Thich Nhat Hanh poem is getting at- (you can read the text of the poem here http://www.quietspaces.com/poemHanh.html , and listen to audio of Thich Nhat Hanh reading the poem here http://www.parallax.org/realaudio/call_me.ram ) The Basis for Social Justice The poem asks us to check our assumptions about what is on the inside of another person. This becomes the basis for compassion and social justice. We must check our assumptions about the motivation of another person. We might check our own insides as well, and wake up to the reality of what exists within us. Thich Nhat Hanh suggests that until we can name the oppressor and the oppressed within each one of us, we are not ready to do social justice work. If we haven’t named the oppressor deep within ourselves, then all we are going to do in our justice work is blame and judge others. Until we have owned the oppressed within each one of us, we cannot begin to have compassion for what the other is feeling. Thich Nhat Hanh is calling us to wake up to the reality that we are within all other people and all processes in the world. We could relate this Thich Nhat Hanh poem to the great retail giant ecosystem that is Wal-Mart. I want you to think about the experience of the Wal-Mart effect in the light of the inner journey that Thich Nhat Hanh is calling us for: I am the shopper walking through the aisles while hoping there is enough money in my wallet to pay for the groceries. I am the cashier ringing up the bill and putting the money in the register, hoping that there will be enough money in my paycheck to buy my own groceries for the week. I am the attendant that watches the self-checkout line as people move through, wondering what this technology is going to mean for retail jobs in the future. I am the supplier to Wal-Mart, trying to balance my own company’s hopes and dreams with that of the much larger company Wal-Mart. I am the CEO of Wal-Mart, trying to hold together, in dynamic tension, Profit – People – Planet. I am the salmon in over crowded, polluted farms in Chile, and I am the salmon farmer, trying to hold together the tension of low prices and environmental demands. All the way up the ecosystem, and all the way down the supply and demand chain, I find myself. Competition or Collaboration This interconnectedness impacts our views on competition and collaboration. Are we in competition with something that we are one with, or is collaboration a better word? Is there a place for competition? Consider this story about a business owner in a small village. It was a small business, but doing quite well. But then another business opened up directly across the street, immediately threatening the survival of the first business. The shopkeeper became very anxious about the new business, and could hardly operate from day to day, because he was so distraught. He went to see his local rabbi and said, “I just don’t know what to do. A new business has opened across the street, and I fear the worst for my business.” And the rabbi said, “Let me tell you a story.” “Each day I take my horse to the trough to take a drink of water. And each day my horse looks into the water and sees it’s own reflection. Of course, the horse does not know that it is it’s own reflection. The horse thinks that there is another horse there, competing for the water. My horse cannot stand the thought of sharing the water, so it puts a hoof down into the water and disturbs it so the reflection of the horse disappears. Then it happily drinks.” The Rabbi then shifted his gaze onto the business owner- “The horse cannot understand that there is enough water for many horses? Don’t you see that this is a world of abundance, God’s abundance, and there is enough for everyone?” The shopkeeper was hugely challenged by that thought, and also surprisingly upbeat. So he left the meeting with the rabbi feeling much better about his new neighbor across the street, knowing that there would be competition as well as collaboration. So often in our lives, it is when we go to one extreme or the other that we find ourselves in a muddle. Competition and collaboration must be an exercise in interconnectedness. We look in the faces of our neighboring businesses AS IF we are looking at a reflection of ourselves. In so doing, we undertake competition without self indulgence, and collaboration without paternalism. Competition speaks to an attitude of scarcity. That is, there is only so much resource, and only so much demand, and I must fight to maintain my market share. Collaboration speaks to an attitude of abundance. That is, I can build my own possibilities and at the same time, bolster the possibilities for another person. Neither are right or wrong. They are simply two sides of the same reality. Pushed to an extreme, the fear of scarcity may lead to greed and fear of abundance pushed to an extreme may lead to victimhood. Scarcity and abundance, competition and collaboration exist in dynamic tension. God and Goddess I want to speak this morning about the notion of “God and Goddess” as they are portrayed in the Old Testament, because they speak of this same dynamic tension between competition and collaboration. Our religious lives hold the same type of balance- the religious life of scarcity and the religious life of abundance. Here is a sample of each one in extreme. The religious life of scarcity is lived in fear of breaking the rules. A person is born in sin, and lives their life trapped in sin, in a co-dependent relationship with a savior, who is the only one who can beat this cycle of sin, and liberate them from their entrapment. In the religion of scarcity, this life, this world, and this earth are simply pale imitations of the life that is to come. This is a religion of competition, where people have to compete for the attention of their co-dependent god. A religion of abundance says that everything you need already exists. You were born into blessing. You were born into abundance. This world is full of beauty, and full of all the treasures you could possibly imagine. Everything you could ever need already exists within you, and around you, and beyond you. Each extreme has a pitfall. Scarcity’s pitfall is a limited worldview. Abundance’s pitfall is a naïve lack of social structures. When god and goddess, scarcity and abundance, are lived, one to the exclusion of the other, we end up in a muddle. The notion of god and goddess holds together a similar tension. God is scarcity; fear, reward and punishment, systems of belief, structures for ritual, and morality. Goddess is interdependence, intersecting stories, inseparable from the earth. God and goddess are not two separate ideas; they are the two sides of the same reality. Think about the reading from Isaiah this morning in the context of these two concepts- god and goddess. A covenant was set up between God and the people of God. When the people of God broke the covenant and marred the creation of God, Isaiah prophesied that god would curse them. They would be cursed with a malfunctioning ecosystem. It would all go haywire. Then think about the Isaiah reading from the perspective of goddess. We are in a covenant with goddess, with mother earth. When we break the covenant, when we mar the face of the earth, we don’t need to be cursed by god because the curse will be self-perpetuating. This will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. What happens when the whole of religion becomes about the god of scarcity and we lose the entire other sense of goddess, joy and abundance, is that it becomes a curse for us. We become trapped in this cycle of fear, discipline and punishment. It is time for us to reclaim god and goddess in perfect harmony. It is time for us to reclaim competition, scarcity, collaboration, and abundance, in perfect harmony. We’ve been living in scarcity for too long. It’s time for us to reclaim goddess and move into a time of blessing, a life of abundance, because it has always been there. It’s just that we have had our vision blocked by the dominant patriarchal god of scarcity for too long. Just as the church has controlled salvation with this system of scarcity, so markets have controlled production with a system of scarcity for too long. Commodities are made scarce to increase demand and raise prices. Industrialization brought us a new form of scarcity. There was a shortage of laborers, and an abundance of natural resources. Now today we have a scarcity of natural resources and an abundance of laborers. We have plenty of boats, but hardly any fish left in the water. We have plenty of sawmills, but very few trees left in the forest. We are living the curse. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Repaying our Debt to Earth So how do we repay nature? How do we rebalance according to abundance, and repay this huge debt that we owe to the earth? How do we do it in our lives, and how do we encourage large companies to do that in their processes? There are some large companies that are beginning to do it, and that is encouraging. I think that when many people saw that I was planning this series on social justice, they suspected that I was going to be bagging Wal-Mart. That is not the case. I believe that Wal-Mart is doing many fine things, particularly around profit and planet, but not so well around people. They have the profit part worked out very nicely, and we each do our part to ensure that that’s the case. They are beginning to do better on the planet part, better than they were doing. They are creating all sorts of new structures to rebuild the earth, and to put capital back into nature. There are some experimental stores around America that are trying to create a natural capital environment. There are stores that are reusing cooking oil to heat the stores. There are stores that are reusing parts of airport runways as sidewalks around the store. It is a beginning. They are also addressing the issue regarding salmon in Chile, and many other global situations. When it comes to the people (employment) aspect, they have a long way to go. But the point is that they are showing signs of hope. They are inspiring me, and I hope they are inspiring you, that it is possible to live a balance of People – Planet – Profit. It is what we all need to be seeking to do in our lives if we are looking to regain just the right harmony between scarcity and abundance, competition and collaboration. Gandhi and Abundance Let me tell you a story about Gandhi, who is another great inspiration for the balance of god and goddess. In the 1930s in India, at a time when the British were in control and setting all sorts of oppressive taxes on the Indians, Gandhi led a group on a three-week march to the sea in order to reclaim self-determination. After the three-week journey, Gandhi waded into the water, up to his knees. He stood there, and bent down to pick up some salt. The British had imposed a tax on salt. Gandhi leaned down, and I can only imagine that he saw his own reflection, and I can imagine that he saw the face of every single person in the world who lives in fear and scarcity, in oppression at the hands of corporations and governments. I can only imagine what it was like for him as he saw his reflection in the water. He stood up with salt in his hands, and turned to face the crowds who were lining the beach to watch him. I can only imagine that those crowds, as they looked back at him, saw in him their greatest hopes and dreams, for self-determination and justice. It was an act of civil disobedience, that Gandhi would be so bold as to take the salt out of the water unlawfully. That led to a chain of events in which people began to take salt, even just a pinch of salt, as an act of civil disobedience, as if to say, “You will not run our lives, you will not take away our freedom, and create a life of scarcity. We won’t let that happen.” How will we be inspired by Gandhi, as so many other civil rights activist have been inspired through the centuries, to reclaim what is in abundance in the world, and is the right of every human being? There is no shortage of justice. There is no shortage of blessings in the world; there is enough for everyone if we simply claim the blessing that has been ours all along. How will Gandhi inspire us? How will he inspire this community to live a life of abundant simplicity? Abundant simplicity is just that right balance. It is a balance of competition and collaboration, scarcity and abundance. I see many examples in this community already. Next week there will be a book fair, and the week after the Alternative Christmas Market. We’ve had a produce table out in the narthex. We had a rummage sale in June, and all of these activities are wonderful examples of abundant simplicity, going back to the essence of what makes us tick as human beings. We clear out the cupboards, come together, and at the same time serve our church, the earth, and the people around us. Whenever all of these things come together in People – Planet – Profit, time treasure and talent, however you word the combination of holistic living, we are living abundant simplicity. Maybe there are more ideas out there. Maybe you are inspired to start a clothing exchange, where there is no money exchanged, but at that point we are building collaboration, where for so long we have functioned according to scarcity. This world can be a win-win world. That’s the way it should be, that was the covenant that God had with the Hebrew people. It was a covenant of win-win. If you live as part of the earth, you take care of the earth. If you live separate from the earth, you abuse the earth. It’s that simple. If we live separate from the earth, we live separate from God, and the covenant is broken. This is a win-win world, where people and the earth come together and live in harmony. How are you going to live abundant simplicity? How is this community going to continue to live abundant simplicity? How will we continue with the win-win covenant that is the blessing we were born into, and must take hold of? close window | ^ top | home |