Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

August 9, 2009

“Negative Scarcity? Or Abundance?”

Rev. Barbara Horner-Ibler

I love preparing for a sermon. I learn new things all the time. For instance this week, it turned out to be economics. I’ll show you how I got there from the Gospel of John in a few minutes, but first I want to share with you what I learned, because I was fascinated by it. I am not an economist, so this was all new learning for me.

The dominant school of economics today, neoclassical economics, defines its entire field by scarcity: “economics is the study of allocating scarce goods among competing ends.” Scarcity is the difference between a person’s wants and a person’s possessions. As long as people’s wants exceed their possessions, the economy will continue to expand. Now, to those of us NOT economists that all sounds a little convoluted. But you want to know what is even more convoluted? The fact that there exists a condition of “negative scarcity.” Negative scarcity…..in other words, abundance. But economists don’t call it abundance….but we will come back to that.

In the past few months, I was in a meeting with a person, who was previously a Vice-President at one of the large pharmaceutical companies. He spoke about one of the practices of those companies to frequently make overruns of certain pills, because they have machines that can make only 10M pills. But the order is for only 7M. So they run 10M….the machines can’t run less, remember. And then, rather than release the extra pills to poor or uninsured patients, who could use the medication, they pay to destroy 3M pills! And it is cheaper for the companies to dispose of 3M pills than to build a new machine that could make only 7M pills. You can’t release the extra pills into the market, because that would increase the supply and decrease the price. So, instead they choose to destroy the overrun. We have really gone crazy in this world….when this practice makes sense to anyone!

But that is what the principle of scarcity does to all of us. When we live by that principle, we will die by that principle….for some of us in this world, that death will come earlier than others. Living by the principle of scarcity, or even by the principal of negative scarcity, gives us all a narrow perspective on life. But is does not need to be so. We can choose to see the world differently. We asked those questions in our Call to Worship…..

Is the glass half empty….or half full?

Does the thorn have roses? Or do roses have thorns?

Are you eating leftovers? Or is it a buffet of delicacies?

How you look at something makes all the difference in the world!

We began reading from the 6^th chapter of the Gospel of John two weeks ago in the lectionary readings, and it continues in that that same chapter for the next several weeks. First, there is the story of feeding the 5000, which gives us examples of both scarcity thinking and abundance thinking. When Jesus tells the disciples to feed the thousands of people who have gathered, they insist that “six months wages wouldn’t buy enough bread for all of them to get even a little!” Scarcity thinking.

Scarcity thinking makes us afraid that there isn’t enough. It creates anxiety within us that we will “run out.” The message of scarcity seems to be always before us. We are told that our planet is running out of oil. We are told that we are using more water than our region can supply. We are told that there is not enough credit for our economy. There are not enough jobs for our workforce. There are not enough buyers for homes. Our world seems to be running out of just about everything that we need….not to mention, everything we want!

Scarcity makes most of us uncomfortable. We don't like to think that we might not have something we want and need. The fear this message creates can lead us to hoard our resources and be reluctant to share with others. If we accept the message of scarcity, all other people are potential competitors for the possessions and resources we crave.

But there is a different way….a way offered by Jesus in the Gospel story. This is the thinking and acting in God’s kingdom. It is not starting from “negative scarcity” thinking, but starting from “abundance thinking.” It isn’t starting from scarcity: “Isn’t this Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary, whose father and mother we know?” But rather, beginning with abundance, “I am the living bread…Whoever eats this bread will live forever!” But it is not easy to give up that scarcity thinking. In the beginning of the 6^th chapter, Jesus is surrounded by 5000 people, who hang on his miracle of feeding them all. Throughout the chapter, they hear Jesus words about “the bread of life.” Still, by the end of the chapter, all but the disciples have all abandoned Jesus, and in fact, there are those who are looking for the opportunity to kill him. Scarcity thinking is what we fall into, and the trap of that thinking limits all of us.

If we begin with the assumption and the non-economic principle of “abundance,” as irrational as that is, then all of us are partners. We are in this together. We are true sisters and brothers. And each of us brings, not only our needs, but all of our gifts and abilities to the table, as well. Suddenly, we have not only potential scarcity, but abundance to address that scarcity. And we find that there is more than “enough.” In fact, there is enough to fill us! And leave leftovers! Those are the principles of God’s economics.

I learn this lesson over and over again at the Bread of Healing Clinic. Our patients teach the volunteers how to do this. Those of us who volunteer at the clinic expect to give out of our abundance, and yet we find our patients live, much better than we do, the principle of abundance. Shawn is a young adult with diabetes since adolescence. He grew up without functioning parents. He now lives with an older brother. He takes buses 3 hours round every day to the airport, where he works in a minimum wage job, earning about $13,000/year. He lives from pay check to pay check, needing help from our food pantry and meal program occasionally. He has so very little. And yet, one day a patient ended up at the clinic for so long that his transfer expired, and he had no bus ticket to get home. Before the volunteers could reach for change, Shawn pulled out his 10-pack of bus tickets without a moment’s hesitation, tore one off, and gave it to the other patient. Talk about a widow’s mite….Shawn could have hoarded his tickets…could have thought about having one less ticket if he shared….could have feared “not having enough.” But he didn’t. He had a bus ticket to share, and he hurried to share it. Abundance thinking. The other patient is not a competitor, but a brother. And Shawn shares, not out of his scarcity, but out of his abundance.

I work with another most incredible woman in the neighborhood of the clinic. Her name is Sharon Adams. She is the director of the Walnut Way Conservation Association, a neighborhood association just a few blocks from the Bread of Healing Clinic. Sharon insists on working from a perspective of abundance, even though she lives in a house at 17^th and North Avenue. She insists that everyone around her think from a perspective of abundance.

Hers is a neighborhood with a lot of boarded up houses, but fewer since she returned to her childhood neighborhood 12 years ago, and reclaimed an old Victorian house scheduled for demolition. She and her husband turned it into a neighborhood meeting house.

It is a neighborhood with a lot of crime, but less since she has established community gardens and a community orchard and her husband became a beekeeper….and now they have a way to keep youth and young adults occupied and employed.

It is a neighborhood that saw much violence, but less since there are now young neighbors from apartments in the area growing food in the back yards of elderly neighbors…and now people know each other’s names and have met each other’s families and they have shared their vegetables with one another.

It is a neighborhood that has seen the worst of times, but has turned around….because of “abundance thinking.”

We tend to poo-poo the miracle stories for our own world…as though it is not really possible. But it is….I see it happening at Walnut Way in Milwaukee, and I see it happening at Bread of Healing. In a lot of places, it would be frightening to think in terms other than “scarcity” or “negative scarcity.” But God’s economy doesn’t work that way. God’s economy refuses to accept scarcity thinking….half empty glasses, roses with thorns, and leftovers. In God’s economy, those are hallf-full glasses, thorns with roses, and a smorgasbord of food. And that is why there is so much potential for hope and for change. Because the gifts really are endless….

God’s economy refuses to accept even “negative scarcity” as a principle. It is too convoluted…too negative. The reality is that, when we can step outside the truly convoluted world of human economics, we can see that the only kind of economics that makes any sense is God’s…not scarcity….not negative scarcity….but abundance! Finished.