These are anxious times. The economy is tanking. Friends and family members are losing jobs. More and more folks are seeking food and shelter assistance. Non-profits and congregational entities such as the Alliance of Baptists are considering budget cuts.
What is God’s call to us in such anxious and uncertain times?
Trust.
Perhaps the most difficult thing for any of us is to trust, especially in the face of the great unknown. Well, let me speak for myself – I find trusting God to be a challenge when in difficult times I don’t know what’s going to happen or how things will unfold. My tendency is to feel anxious and to try to control something or to put my head in the sand and to stop paying attention by numbing out. What if instead I choose to face the fears with eyes wide open trusting that God, too, is in this, and that, as Julian of Norwich says, “All shall be well. All shall be well. And all manner of things shall be well.”
This summer a friend of mine called and offered me a free ticket to hear James Taylor in concert at the Wolf Trap Performing Arts Center. She had received two tickets through her church and wanted to see if I would like to attend with her. I graciously accepted and enjoyed a beautiful evening listening to the music of my young adulthood underneath the most beautiful canopy of stars and the fullest of moons. It was a spectacular evening and it was free.
Later that week I was in conversation with my spiritual director as I told her about the magical evening and how struck I was by the fact that it all came unexpectedly and was completely free. She said, “there are always free tickets available to us. The question is, are we ready and willing to receive them.” Since that time, I have been on the lookout for more “free tickets,” those places in life where abundance is the rule and scarcity sits quietly in its place along with fear and hatred.
The thing is, it’s actually hard for us liberal people of faith to talk about abundance and to believe that God’s abundance is in fact the reality in which we live, that scarcity is an illusion. This is true for two reasons, one out of compassion and the other out of fear.
The first reason we find it difficult to believe in abundance is because there is so much need in the world. We recognize poverty, people without enough food, those with no home to call their own, devastating disease and war, and a many places where God’s children clearly do not have all they need. How can there be abundance in the face of such need?
Furthermore I can hear those critical of a theology of abundance saying that it’s easy for me, a person of great privilege – white, male, young, educated, American, from an upper middle class family – to speak eloquently of abundance. What do I know of need, of lack, of scarcity?
Here’s what I know. I know that need is about things and need is about so much more than the stuff we have. The times I have visited our partners in Cuba, friends in Armenia, and colleagues in south India, I have been struck by the lack of physical things and the abundance of love, hospitality, generosity, and Spirit. It seems that the more stuff we have, the less life we have.
The temptation, of course, is to glorify poverty, to idealize the graciousness of those in desperate need so that we don’t have to help them, to share our wealth, to voluntarily give up our privilege, to create a new system in which all the world’s resources are shared equitably such that no one is in need. But could we really make such changes?
Which leads me to the second reason: in addition to a compassionate disbelief in abundance, most of us liberal Christians also accept scarcity as the reality of life because of fear. We are afraid that if we start talking abundance, we’ll sound like mega-church preachers proclaiming a prosperity gospel that is self-serving or New Age gurus who in their eloquence about abundance gloss over the realities of a broken world.
Furthermore, we simply cannot accept that fact that there is an abundance because it would mean we would have to change how we view and live in the world. We are deeply afraid of change and even more than that, we are deathly afraid of our power to change ourselves and the world. Marianne Williamson says it so beautifully in her words from A Return to Love often misattributed to Nelson Mandela:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel
insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
We don’t have to be afraid. The reality is that there IS abundance. There IS enough. There ARE free tickets. Scarcity is simply an illusion we believe because we are afraid to see that we have the power and gifts as God’s children to receive the unbounded love of God with which we can then transform the world. But we can choose to see through the illusion and to receive and share the abundance of the universe, if only we dare.
In this time of anxiety and fear, I invite you to try to see the world and life through the lens of abundance. I invite you trust God. Just try it. See what happens. What’s the worst that could happen?
Transformation of ourselves and the world. And free tickets.
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