“Be a wetland. Detoxify what is upstream. Pass on liberation.”
Wetlands help purify air and water, they detoxify wastes, they promote new life, restore degraded resources…they harbor biodiversity.
They harbor diversity.
Wetlands model mutuality and function in sustainability.
What would it look like if we approached our personal living informed with the wisdom of wetlands?
“And God planted a garden of delight [gan-eden], in the east, and there he put the earth-creatures he had formed. A river flows out of the place of delight to water the garden…[And there] Out of the ground God made every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden…And God commanded the earth-creature: you may eat freely…freely…of every tree of the garden…” (Genesis 2: various verses)
All of this abundance is for you, god said. Well, there was that one tree that was off limits…but still…
Gan-Eden. The Garden of Delight.
I am quoting from the Book of Genesis, of course, (though the story is also told in the Quran).
The Garden of Delight. A welcoming home. A place of abundance, watered by flowing rivers. You can imagine it as the early Christians did, green and growing, filled with all manner of animals. The lion and the lamb… Our ancestors there as well, happy in that paradise.
For centuries, images of that garden and its abundance focused Christian worship spaces…long before suffering on the cross came to dominate the European theological imagination.
When Jesus preached of the Kingdom of God being somehow already present, if we only had eyes to see it…he was not making a promise about the future. He was reminding his listeners of history that empire needed them to forget. His fundamental promise was about the possibilities open to all of us then…and now.
He was proclaiming that scarcity has no place in the Beloved Community and that spiritual scarcity, that emptiness that begs to be filled, need not prevail. His promise was that abundance can be ours.
As Rebecca Parker and Rita Brock painstakingly develop in their book, Saving Paradise, that sense of abundance was lost over time. Scarcity came to dominate western faith.
Was it the association of that faith with empire? Or later with mercantile and capitalist economic models? The Reformation? You need to paint with a very broad brush to capture all the elements of that transition. The details are more than you want me to lay out for you this morning.
But what we can know, is that the culture that emerged still relied on the abundance of the natural world…the world hadn’t changed, just the way we viewed it. For European Americans, this continent stolen from native peoples, provided abundance, plenty for everyone, and still does.
But the culture came to operate in win-lose mode, a zero sum game. My advantage purchased only at your expense. Despite the multiplication of wealth and comfort our productivity makes possible, the story in which we live and the theological assumptions that support that story remain grounded in scarcity.
There is never enough…despite all that we have. Never enough wealth. Never enough money. Never enough food. Never enough housing to go around. The needs are just too great. Only the few can be well served.
It is as if we are trapped in a culture that wants only to play Let’s Make a Deal…trying to best one another…or the Art of the Deal…a game of winners and losers…That is the cultural game we play…even when that culture works against us and leaves us constantly unfulfilled…unfilled…empty…and yearning for something more.
Be a wetland. Detoxify. Pass on liberation.
This sermon is not just a rant about the spiritual bankruptcy of acquisition and unconstrained materialism.
Because the losers in the game we are playing are our neighbors. They are some of us. And they are all of us. And the losses are real.
Abundant life…our culture can’t begin to imagine it…we’re too focused on winning and acquiring more and more…because there is always more to acquire. There is never enough to satisfy us and there is most certainly never enough charity to care for the losers.
Never enough housing.
On any given night, more than 4000 people experience homelessness in Multnomah County…despite our success in moving individuals and families back into permanent housing. First Church has been a part of that successful effort through our 13 Salmon Family Shelter. Not to mention all the families that are also supported so that they don’t slide into homelessness.
We know how to do this…even in the midst of gentrification and the building boom that we see all around us.
I want to thank both Ryan Deibert and John Elizalde for help in thinking through this sermon. From the two of them and many others, we have real expertise on these issues right here in this sanctuary.
We know what works.
We are just not doing enough of it. The needs are great. Resources are scarce. Abundance is hard to imagine.
Except…if we just shifted our frame we might realize that the cost of providing temporary shelter and emergency room medical care and extra policing…that those costs are so much greater than the cost of decent housing.
And that’s just the dollar cost. The human costs of our scarcity approach are enormous.
It would be cheaper…for all of us…to provide decent housing for every homeless person in the county and in this country…and supportive services as well…cheaper than funding the very expensive delivery of emergency services that address the symptoms of our broken system that insists on winners and losers.
The Multnomah County Commissioners just received a major report calling for the creation of 2000 units of supportive housing in the county. That report is becoming a central organizing framework for advocacy.
The analysis is not new. The model of abundance that begins with providing permanent housing has been around for decades. It has been tried and tested. It works.
Ryan Deibert, a member of our Board of Trustees and, in his work life, manager of Planning and Evaluation for Portland and Multnomah County’s Joint Office of Homeless Services, wrote me: “Homelessness is something we will pay for one way or the another – We [only get to] choose [how]. Either you pay for policing, jail, emergency shelters and ER’s, or you pay for housing with supportive services. The former is more expensive, less humane, and gets worse outcomes for everyone (homeless and housed alike); the latter is cheaper, honors the dignity of all people, and leads to stability, hope and healing (for homeless and housed alike).”
The narrative of scarcity that says we can’t afford affordable housing…well…that narrative of scarcity costs us quite a bit more in the end.
If the needs are so great and the resources are limited…well, we need to have some way to decide who gets served and who doesn’t. Right?
One of the officials dealing with homelessness in LA asks (Molly Rysman, Deputy for Housing and Homelessness): “How do we get folks who are going to bleed to death access to a doctor, and folks who have the flu to wait. Its unfortunate…but it’s…what we’re stuck with.”
They are turning to digital algorithms to determine which struggling families will get the limited support.
The problem with this practice of high tech triage is that it treats social problems as if they are natural disasters—random, temporary, inevitable—when it has been our political choices that produce them.
The housing crisis in LA was not—and is not—random, temporary or inevitable. In the 1950’s opponents in LA blocked a plan to build integrated low-income housing by reporting the housing authority to the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Inspect the history of public policy on housing or any other issue and you will almost always find racism at play. It is true here in Portland. The impact of the Culture of White Supremacy…gets very concrete in public policy terms.
And the culture of scarcity.
What we need is not better triage that assumes those in need are in need because of their failures or the inevitability of poverty and mental illness.
What we need is not better triage…we need public policy that does not simply treat the symptoms of our collective failures. We need public policy that opens a path for us all to live in abundance.
You know the story about the group of campers who see a baby in the river. One of then dives in, braving the fierce current, and rescues the infant. But as he climbs ashore, another baby is spotted in the river. Then another. And another. They keep coming
Before long the river is filled with desperate babies and more and more rescuers are required to save them.
Eventually the rescuers mold themselves into an efficient life-saving organization and over time, an entire infrastructure develops to support their efforts: hospitals, schools, foster centers, social services, life saving trainers… But there are never enough services to save all the babies.
At one point one of the rescuers starts walking upstream.
Where are you going, the others ask.
I’m going to find out who is throwing all these babies into the river.
We do not need greater skill in determining which of us to save…
We need, finally, to look upstream and discover that we can stop the cascade of those desperate needs that threaten to overwhelm us…and that responding out of our abundance will take fewer resources in the bargain.
That is a deal we should welcome.
Punishment…it has been demonstrated over and over again…is one of the most expensive public policies ever designed. Whether it is building more and more private prisons or creating more and more shelter beds for those forced out of permanent housing…there is a better way.
This does not need to be complicated.
The first and most important thing a homeless individual or family needs is a home. Being without a home makes everything else more difficult.
John Elizalde, a member of COHHO, our Committee on Hunger and Homelessness, writes: “We have normalized poverty [and hunger] and created a service industry in response. How many years have we had free and reduced price meals in schools? …we have found that food drives feel better than facing the inequality.”
John goes on: “What does our moral compass say if it points in the direction of charity [instead of] equity…? What must I give up in order to assure that others have basics? Isn’t there really enough to go around? Better yet, am I really ‘so well off’ if my neighbor can’t meet the basic needs of food and shelter?”
John is asking the ‘mutuality’ question.
I‘m tempted to leave this as a “wonky,” public policy sermon. The analysis has been done so often in so many cities. There are examples of success to point to.
If you believe in facts…not alternate facts…the case is clear.
And here in Portland, we have the chance to take significant steps forward. We can…you can…in this election…support the Affordable Housing Campaign and pass both Measure 102 and 26-199, which “together could fund affordable homes for upwards of 12,000 people across the region. That’s direct upstream investment in helping people stay stably housed in the first place…that will also leverage a good chunk of the resulting funding to create supportive housing for people who are currently homeless.
So, vote.
And I could leave it there. But the question, the spiritual question for us remains.
What keeps us from choosing abundance? When we know it is available?
Is it the need to believe that those of us who live in relative comfort are somehow more worthy, superior to those who fall on hard times?
That our efforts, which are real, somehow justify our privilege?
Do we need to believe that we are somehow exceptional…a special elect group?
Are we so wedded to Lets Make a Deal that the possibility of the kingdom actually coming frightens us?
Or are we afraid to embrace abundance because we might have to confront how unfulfilled and unfulfilling the competition for acquisition and wealth has left us?
For those of us who live in relative comfort, is it that knowing of how much we still yearn for wholeness…is that knowing what we fear?
The possibility of living in physical abundance…that is hard enough for us to take in.
It is even more difficult, I think, for us to hear how scarcity-thinking can pollute and toxify our own lives.
The way that love operates is that the more love we share the more love we feel.
Remember the Universalist promise…that God or the Spirit of Life…whatever name you use…God is love and loves each and every one of us. The promise in our theology is that we already live in abundance…if we will only allow it to bless us. The gift has already been given.
We do not need to fear the promise of abundance.
Because if we can live into it…if we can open the channels so that love can flow…if we can live our lives…like wetlands…
If we detoxify and pass on liberation…
everywhere can be Eden once again.
Prayer
Will you pray with me?
Spirit of Life and of Love. Great mystery that we yearn to know and struggle to name. Dear God.
Help us trust
The truth of abundance.
Help us resist the toxic insistence
On scarcity which keeps us
Locked in competition.
And when we are in need,
And we are all in need,
Help us trust that we can
Help one another…
That we can support one another…
That there is a way…together
Even out of no way…
A way into the blessing
That is so freely given.
The more love we share
The more love we feel.
Help us remember that truth
And open the channels for love.
So may it be. Amen.
Topics: Mutuality