Enough Heaven To Go Around
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So this Thursday is Thanksgiving, in case anyone hasn’t been paying attention. It’s a holiday defined by eating and gratitude, usually in that order. It’s a holiday that shows us how much we have; and when we don’t have much, it shows us that too. Most of all, it’s a holiday about sharing what we do have with others.
This is not as easy as it looks. When we’re kids it’s hard to share toys that we feel are ours; when we’re grown-ups it’s hard to share money that we feel is ours; when we’re a community or even a country it’s hard to share space and resources that we feel are ours. I think we worry that if we share it, we won’t have enough left for ourselves. And there’s some logic to this, except that it doesn’t really seem to work out that way. Religions from around the world including our own teach us that actually sharing does not create scarcity; sharing creates abundance for everyone. And conversely, hoarding or stealing will never actually land you a better life. Emerson put it simply, “Thefts never enrich, alms never impoverish.”
In the Biblical story of the Loaves and Fishes, Jesus got into a boat and rowed out onto the Sea of Galilee (which is really a big lake), far from everything, in the wilderness of what is now Tabgha, Israel. The crowds found him and were clamoring for him and so he rowed to shore and started talking with them and teaching and healing sick people among them. When it was getting toward dusk, his disciples took him aside and said, “You know, it’s getting late and we’re here in the middle of nowhere; you should really send these people away so they can go buy dinner for themselves in the villages.”
Jesus said, “They need not go away. You give them something to eat.”
They said, “Yeah, right. Are we supposed to go and just buy 200 denarii worth of bread and bring it back here and give it to them to eat?” (The disciples are always the foil in these stories. A denarii was a whole day’s wages, so 200 denarii was an astronomical sum.) They continued, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.”
Jesus said, “Bring them here to me.” He took them and blessed them and the disciples passed them out among the people, and miraculously everyone received, the text says, “as much as they wanted.” Over 5000 people were there and everyone got enough to eat and there were twelve baskets of bread left over at the end.
That’s the story. It’s the only miracle (aside from the resurrection) that shows up in all four of the Christian gospels. But what exactly was the miracle? As some people envision it, the miracle was that Jesus actually, physically made more bread and fish appear out of thin air. And while that would certainly have been amazing, it would not have been anywhere near as miraculous as what I think actually happened.
When the disciples came to Jesus with this conundrum about feeding the people, they were stuck in the conventional, secular worldview that money is what makes the world go round. They said that the people are going to have to go buy their food. And when Jesus said that they could feed the people, the disciples essentially said we can’t afford to buy that much food. Money is what makes the world go round and we don’t have enough.
It’s as if they were saying, “Come on folks, get real. This spiritual stuff that Jesus is teaching us is all well and good (‘man does not live on bread alone,’ yadda, yadda, yada) but when it comes down to real life, we all know it’s not quite like that. We can have all this feel good stuff by the sea and that’s all fine, but at the end of the day (which it was, literally) we’re gonna have to go buy ourselves some food.”
The spatial landscape of this story says it all: you have this seaside wilderness and then you have the villages. The wilderness births a kind of pop up spiritual community where people are engaged in healing and learning. The ethic is relational. The villages house the secular world of buying and selling. The ethic is transactional. The disciples, representing all the people, argue that Jesus is ultimately going to have to break up this spiritual community and send them back to the secular world to get their nourishment.
And Jesus says No. The nourishment is right here. All of it. What I’m teaching is real. What makes the world really go round is God and love. And this is the lesson inherited by our faith. The oneness promised by Unitarianism and the love promised by Universalism is not only real in a nice, poetic fantasy, but is really real. The heaven promised by our prophets is not doled out in miserly little portions to some and not to others as if it’s going to run out. At the end of the day we all wind up there. We can relax: there’s enough heaven to go around.
It’s no accident that the Loaves and Fishes story is full of numbers: 5 loaves, 2 fishes, 200 denarii, 5000 people, 12 baskets left over. It’s full of numbers because the people – all the people — are stuck in the transactional world, quantifying and scraping and hoarding what they have – too scared that if they give some away, the math won’t work out for them.
The miracle is that Jesus changes the equation: he inspires these scared people to share. He inspires people to take a leap of faith that this is not a world of scarcity, it’s a world of abundance if we but share. And all the people shared what they had, and everyone had enough.
That scarcity mentality has deep, deep roots. Becky talked about it in her homily – how people who have been really hungry are terrified about not having enough to eat. But even those of us who have never been seriously hungry have a primitive instinct to cling to what we have. We’re like the disciples in the story: we compartmentalize the spiritual world from the material world in our heads. Though we may theoretically believe what we hear in houses of worship about the abundance and grace that surround us, we figure that at the end of the day, we’re still going to have to go back out into the world and protect our piece of the pie.
You see this everywhere in our society. You can especially see how much a society is willing to share by looking at its social safety nets. How do we treat the poorest among us? Does our relational consciousness or our transactional consciousness win the day? As for us, here in the U.S., we just cut food stamp benefits on November 1, so that now instead of $1.50 per meal, people have $1.40 per meal. Can you imagine? How much food can you really buy for $1.40 …in New York? And there’s a proposal in Congress to cut food stamp benefits even more as part of the current Farm Bill, while increasing assistance to even the wealthiest factory farmers. The voice of scarcity is loud in our ears.
The fact is that there is no good reason for anybody to be hungry in this country or even in this world. We have untapped abundance. Yes, we’ll have to do things differently, we’ll have to eat differently, we’ll have to think differently. But there is enough food to go around if we learn how to really share. In fact, the perennial miracle taught by our faith is that there’s enough everything to go around. The blessings of heaven are not just reserved for the few who manage to protect their piece of the pie in the sky; they are for everyone. Everyone can be included in the abundance of the earth. Everyone can be included in the blessings of community. Everyone can have enough to eat, clean water to drink. Everyone can have a friend. Everyone can love and feel loved. We can relax: there’s enough heaven for us all.
