Part One of Sermon for August 25, 2002
Scripture: Psalm 10
There is actually a rather direct connection between the subject matter of today’s service and what I was reflecting on in the sermon last week. I wish I could say that this is a result of careful planning, but it wasn’t. It just sort of happened.
I was thinking out loud last week about my needs for a greater “purity of heart”, a greater simplicity of spirit. Granted that within ourselves and within a faith community we want there to be plenty of room for questioning and seeking, granted that faith can be a struggle and our relationship to God can be many-faceted and complicated and we want to leave room within ourselves and within the household of faith for those spiritual struggles that are a necessary part of faith, still there is a need within all of that for a faith that is clear and simple in the sense of being basic and compelling, not just complicated and confusing. It’s another one of those two-sided realities. Just as the world is both beautiful beyond any ability to describe and at the same time ugly beyond our ability to even look, so faith needs to be embraced as both an immensely difficult and complicated struggle and at the same time the fruit of a pure heart, clear as the ring of a crystal bell and heartfelt as though placed there by God herself.
By the time I was trying to put those kinds of thoughts into words last week, B.C. and I had already met to talk a bit about the service for this week. He had just returned from being with a group that he has been a long-term member of that he will tell you about, and he was telling me that the group had focused its discussion on a book called Affluenza—which he will also tell you about.
If you don’t already know what affluenza refers to, you can probably guess. It sounds like a disease, which it is. It also sounds like it has something to do with affluence, which it does. By last Sunday we had decided to focus today’s service around the general concept of affluenza. And then as I was giving the sermon last Sunday I realized that the notion of simplicity that I was talking about in connection with faith also carried over into what Bruce and I had been talking about.
Just as I had been feeling an urge for a greater simplicity in matters of belief, there is also an urge that I believe is widely felt these days for a greater simplicity in matters that have to do with what I would call life-style. A common bumper sticker says, “Live simply that others may simply live.” A group of people looking for a less commercialized way to celebrate Christmas discover that not only is there a large response to this but that the same concerns extend into many other areas of life and the group becomes Alternatives for Simple Living. Books, websites, tv shows are produced along this theme. Meanwhile individuals may feel rushed, pulled in too many different directions, without time for themselves or energy for others, a sense that life somehow needs to be calmer, slower, less complicated.
The theme of simplicity can touch people at a number of levels these days. There is the question of whether we consume too much, waste too much, produce too much garbage—the question of whether we deplete the world’s resources and despoil the earth’s beauty and sacredness. The need for a simpler life. There is the question of whether some of us are consuming way more than our share of the earth’s abundance and thus contributing to an enormous gap between the rich and the poor. The need to simplify our living. There is the question of whether we fall into ways of living that cause us to lose track of things that are most important to us—or whether the scramble to get through one day and then another and then another causes us to stray from some calmer path that we would like to be on. The need for a simpler life.
We have addressed such concerns before in our worship of course. The gap between rich and poor and how that affects our spirits, the place that money occupies in our lives and how that affects our spirits, our care for the earth and what our faith may have to say about our environment and what environmental concerns may have to say to our faith. We have dealt with such things before, but in every case I think, I hope, with the sense that you can never say that we have dealt with that already and therefore don’t need to talk about that any more. In every case feeling that whatever is said on any one occasion is just a small part of an ongoing conversation among us and between us and our God.
And so we return to such concerns again today. The need for simplicity. Part of an ongoing conversation of faith.
B.C. speaks…
I have three thoughts in light of what B.C. has said, and I’ll try to speak them briefly.
First of all I always remind myself, when I think about the abundance of our lives and the abundance of my life, and all the issues that are raised in connection with that—I always remind myself that these concerns are not the concerns of everyone. For some of us, our lives may be cluttered with too much of too many things—not only cluttered with things and with endless opportunities for more things, for greater consumption, but also cluttered with too many things to do, or commitments to honor, or too many places to be, or too many voices inside our heads telling us we ought to be doing this or that, or ought to have done this or that.
But that’s only for some of us. For others of us, for many others of us, simplicity is not the issue, not the issue at all. For many people, clutter is really not the problem. Many people are quite far from being afflicted with an overabundance of things or with overconsumption. Many people are quite far from being afflicted with too many things to do or too many places to be or too many things to think about. The simplicity movement (and there is such a thing), sometimes recognizes this by using the language of voluntary simplicity and involuntary simplicity. But involuntary simplicity is much too “nice” a phrase. What we are talking about is poverty, and loneliness, and depression. For people who sit in those places, to have others talking as though abundance—material or non-material abundance—talking as though it were a problem, might seem to be a mockery.
A second thought is that there are some un-helpful kinds of attitudes and stances connected with all this. In line with what I was just saying, to engage in excessive hand-wringing about the problems and burdens of an abundant life, just does not seem very appropriate. Nor is the point of any of this discussion to make ourselves or anyone feel guilty. Any kind of breast-beating about one’s abundance is probably not becoming and certainly doesn’t get us very far. At the same time ignoring the legitimate issues raised by books like Affluenza doesn’t get us very far either. Without denying the comforts and blessings of abundance, and without trying to make anyone feel guilty about it, it is still important, I am thinking, to recognize with honesty the brokenness of our lives—the overconsumption that threatens the life of the planet, the unevenness of consumption that creates enormous gaps between the rich and the poor, and those whose lives are abundant in other ways and those whose lives are not abundant in those ways. Being honest about who we are without trying to pile guilt on ourselves or others but also without ignoring the need for change in the world and in ourselves—this is the challenge before us.
And a final thought. We deal with things like this best if we commit ourselves to dealing with them with other people—in the context of a committed and trusting group of people who both offer support and hold each other accountable. I did want B. to speak about the group he has belonged to for many years. It was developed, as I understand it, on the model of the Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C. which in turn is based on small face-to-face groups, who gather in that case around the question of how we live out our Christian faith. What does it mean to do that, here, in this place, at this time?
This is not the typical way of going about things either in the church or in our culture generally. We’re very individualistic in the way we go about things. We move from one topic to another, seeing what looks interesting, channel surfing our way through life. We may even, in church, engage in what I referred to as an ongoing conversation about things like wealth, or about racism. But by and large we assume that it’s up to each one of us, on our own, to think things through, and translate our good intentions into actions of some kind. And so we take things in and maybe take some things to heart and we do what we can, and we mostly struggle with issues on our own the best we know how.
But for me it is a big step forward when a small group of people commit themselves to something together—to seek simpler ways of living, to make the effort to dismantle racism part of everyday life, to ask together what it means concretely to lead a Christian life. We don’t take that step very often, but I know for myself that without that step I am much less likely to follow through on all my good intentions and all the other things I think about. With such a group all sorts of things become possible. Today, for me, that is just a confession—that I find it hard to follow through on things I care about without the support and accountability of others who care about the same thing. Today it is just a thought, and I have no proposal. But someday, when the time is ripe, I do hope and look for such covenanted groups to be a part of our congregational life. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 25, 2002