This post comes from ELCA World Hunger’s weekly email list, “Sermon Starters.” For this week, Rev. Angela Khabeb of Holy Trinity Church in Minneapolis, shares with us her reflections on forgiveness and how we are called to make this gift more than an act, but a lifestyle as followers in Christ.

If you’d like to receive posts like these ahead of the liturgical calendar, please subscribe to ELCA World Hunger Sermon Starters by clicking on the link, or email us at hunger@elca.org.

Here is a recent review of the resource from Vernita Kennan of the Saint Paul Area Synod:

“I receive the ELCA World Hunger Sermon Starters each week from the ELCA and find it is a helpful way for me to look ahead and “preach my own sermon” in preparation of what I will hear next Sunday at my home church, Incarnation Lutheran…You needn’t be a rostered person in the ELCA to find them inspirational.”

February 24, 2019 – Seventh Sunday after Epiphany

Luke 6:27-38

We continue this week with the Sermon on the Plain. We hear Jesus proclaiming a new way. “Turn the other cheek, go the second mile, love your enemies.” Unfortunately, this passage has been misused in some religious circles.

Please allow me this commercial break…

If someone is in an abusive situation, they are not required to stay and risk their life and/or the lives of their children. There are times when it is best to forgive from a distance. We can continue to love the person but if the relationship is physically, verbally, emotionally, or economically abusive, the most loving and faith-filled response we can have is to practice self-care. When we try to enforce forgiveness like it is a law and not an act of God’s love and grace, all of humanity is in jeopardy.

We’ve heard these passages many times before. But for the original hearers, these words were earth-shattering. Jesus’ words were radical. More to the point, his life was radical. After all, Jesus constantly challenged the status quo. He repeatedly broadened the center so that those on the margins of society would be included.  He challenged the religious leaders of the day and caused so much political upheaval that he received the death penalty.

Jesus was revolutionary in ways that people never expected. Even today, Jesus enters our lives in unexpected ways and I love it. After all, Christianity should not be comfortable for us. The Gospel should not be like our favorite pair of jeans or a pair of old shoes or a worn-out sweater that we drag out this time of year. Certainly, we find comfort in God’s word. But we don’t need to have a hold on the Gospel because Jesus does not belong to us. Rather, the Gospel needs to have a hold on us because we belong to Jesus. Otherwise we are just nominal Christians playing church. We create our own brand of Jesus that suits our needs and pets our egos. We manipulate Jesus into whatever makes us feel safe, or superior, or righteous. So, what is the earth-shattering news we need to hear?

You see, the life changing power of the Gospel message has the greatest impact on our lives when it is destabilizing. Whenever we are challenged to redefine or examine who we understand Jesus to be, we grow. Whenever we challenge what it means to be a Christian in our world today, we grow.

In the Sermon on the Plain, Jesus is encouraging his followers to abandon business as usual. Through his sermon, Jesus turns the accepted societal norms inside-out. This is Good News because even when we dishonor God by our actions or inactions, God still seeks after us. Now, for the life of me I cannot figure out why. But Jesus chooses to use us as the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Jesus chooses us even though we are broken, selfish, and woefully imperfect. Jesus chooses us to broaden the center in our own communities so that all God’s people have a seat at the table. Jesus uses us to increase God’s healing and hope in the world. Is this the earth-shattering news for us?

Genesis 45:3-11, 15

It’s hard to ignore the theme of forgiveness in this week’s lessons—and believe me, I tried. Yes, the story of Joseph is a powerful illustration of love and forgiveness overcoming hatred and bitterness. But even as I encounter this undeniable witness to the hidden hand of God, I find myself distracted by many questions.

Firstly, what does true forgiveness look like for us? What happens to trust? Is it wise for me to trust this person again if they had deliberately betrayed me? What if the best I can do is just be cordial to them? Isn’t that enough? Isn’t it enough for me to simply not hate the sight of them? Let’s face it, forgiveness is hard. There’s no “forgiveness switch” on our hearts that we can simply click on or off when we need more or less of it. I’ve been wondering if forgiveness is like love. You know, when you give away love it multiplies and comes back to you.

Sometimes it seems, in our country, we are more concerned with punishment than we are with peace. We seem more concerned with revenge than reconciliation. We find it easier to fight than to forgive. No wonder some of us find it difficult to accept God’s extravagant gift of love. Even when we are receptive to God’s mercy and forgiveness, we may yet be reluctant to give mercy and forgiveness to others. Maybe we feel that we are giving away our power when we forgive. Maybe we are simply afraid of being hurt again and use our grudges to keep us safe. But, at the end of the day, ministry involves risk.

It can feel like a risk to forgive. But what exactly are we risking? Our power, position, politics, morals, self-constructed ideas of who we are and how others should perceive us seem to be potential risk-factors to forgiveness. But on the other side of forgiveness, on the other side of the tension and resistance we often experience when confronted with someone who has “wronged” us, we find relationship. We find a leveling and sharing of power, we find mutual respect and dignity, and we find the Holy ground that lives between us all. If hunger and poverty are symptoms of deeply broken relationships around the world, forgiveness could be our first-step on the path to living lives of abundance and sharing.

Forgiveness is not necessarily an event, but rather a lifestyle. God doesn’t expect us to forgive perfectly every time. But God is encouraging us to live our lives with forgiveness as our North Star. In doing so, we honor God and we help heal the body of Christ. C.S. Lewis illustrates forgiveness as part of our baptismal identity as Christians:

“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”

This is both gift and challenge.

To be clear, forgiveness cannot erase pain or eliminate the need for justice. But forgiveness is God’s gift to us. The Holy Spirit empowers us to share that gift with others. Fortunately, forgiveness, like most things, gets easier with practice. The more we remain open to the Spirit, the more able we are to forgive. Forgiveness can be extremely difficult, but it is possible. In fact, God makes all things possible for us. This is good news.

Children Sermon

Forgiveness seems to be an overarching theme in this week’s lessons. Forgiveness is an important concept that might be difficult for children to grasp. We learn to say we’re sorry but that does not always lead to forgiveness. Have you ever heard a child offer an angry “sorry!” because her mother told her she had to apologize?  It happens with my kids on occasion.

So, it might be a good idea to ask the children to help you describe forgiveness. This way you can gauge the understanding of the group. Invite the children to share examples of times when they needed to receive forgiveness or times when they needed to forgive someone (be prepared to share your own examples if need be).

For an object lesson, bring two items–something rather heavy and something rather light. A brick and a feather would work well and pretty easy to get. Grudges are heavy like this brick (or rock or concrete paver–probably less than $1 at your local hardware store). Forgiveness is light like this feather (or cotton ball or stuffing from a pillow). You could get a sturdy backpack and put several heavy objects in it and invite a child or two to try and carry it. Ask who would rather carry the heavy bag or the cotton ball all day.

Remind them of the words about forgiveness in the Lord’s Prayer. Say it out loud, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” Encourage the children (and adults) to listen for those words later in worship. Remind them that Jesus helps us forgive and forgiveness brings joy.

As Reformation Sunday approaches and the winter months ensue, do you find yourself already daydreaming about summer? ELCA World Hunger would like to encourage that habit by offering a sneak peek into ELCA World Hunger’s newest VBS program, “Who is My Neighbor?”

Based on the Good Samaritan story, “Who is My Neighbor?” engages participants in a week of fun, laughter and play while learning about how we are called by God to love and care for our neighbors within our communities and around the world.

Each day focuses on a different character from the Good Samaritan story, with Day 1 introducing the main character—the lawyer who asks Jesus the question, “Who is my neighbor?”

This full, five-day curriculum will be free and available in print or through download. You’ll find skits, family time, games, snacks, crafts and stories that will help participants explore what it means to be a neighbor in Christ by learning about neighbors in six parts of the globe!

Please enjoy this Day 1 sample and be on the lookout for the full “Who is My Neighbor?” VBS curriculum to be available in mid-November!

We pray that the children in your VBS will see the ways God has blessed them and their neighbors—and the role they can play in God’s promise of a just world where all are fed.

Learn

If you’d like to learn more about other resources that ELCA World Hunger offers to congregations,  please visit www.elca.org/Resources/ELCA-World-Hunger.

Give

Gifts to ELCA World Hunger are acts of love towards our neighbors living with hunger and poverty both here and around the world. Together, we are creatively and courageously working toward a just world where all are fed.

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Advent is a season of hope and expectation. It is a season in which we “prepare the way of the Lord” (Mark 1:3). Advent candles, wreaths and calendars are joined with as-yet unfinished nativity scenes to mark our preparations for the birth of Jesus Christ. This year, ELCA World Hunger’s Advent Study celebrates this season with reflections focused on the preparation of the people of God for the work of the new year – the work of feeding, clothing, accompanying and advocating with our neighbors for a just world in which all are fed.

The four sessions of this Advent Study and the accompanying Advent calendar are based on the Scripture readings for each week of Advent. Each week includes a meditation on the theme, reflection questions, a prayer and hymn suggestions.

May you, your family and your community be blessed this season to see the important role the people of God are called to play in God’s transformation of the world – as individuals, as families and as the church together.

We begin at the end, and we will end at the beginning. What an odd way to go through Advent! We enter this season of expectation of Jesus’ birth and the advent of his ministry, only to start by hearing the words of Jesus describing the end of days. In a few weeks, we will celebrate the beginning of Jesus’ incarnate life among us.

We begin at the end, and we will end at the beginning.

The heavy thumb of Roman rule, high taxes and widespread vulnerability to poverty were all part of everyday life in first century Palestine. The people among whom Jesus would be born were eager for the Messiah who would deliver them. And there was no shortage of “false messiahs” (Mark 13:22) claiming to offer salvation. Some promised military victory over the Romans. Others claimed gifts of magical power and prophesied re-taking the temple.

And yet, here, in the Gospel of Mark, the true Messiah comes offering a very different story. The people of God will not ride triumphantly into Jerusalem – they will “flee to the mountains” (13:14). They will not re-take Jerusalem and its temple – “all will be thrown down” (13:2b).

But “after that suffering” (13:24)…

In the end…

Of all the Gospels, Mark is perhaps the most honest about suffering. Facing persecution at the hands of Rome, early Christians needed a message that was honest about suffering. More than that, they needed to know that God was honest about their suffering. In Mark, Jesus does not hold back in naming that suffering. The Messiah is born into suffering. The people will face suffering. He himself will suffer.

This wasn’t a newsflash to first century Jews any more than it is to the millions of people today for whom suffering is a mournful part of life – those who know the pangs of food insecurity, those who long for clean water, those who grieve the loss of their homes or their jobs. The idea that suffering is a part of life is sadly nothing new to so many of us. But Jesus makes clear two things that transform how we understand suffering. First, God knows our suffering. And, second – God rejects it.

The “great buildings” (13:2) in Jerusalem, which occasioned the beginning of Jesus’ long speech in Mark 13, were not merely beautiful examples of architecture. They were symbols of the powers and principalities that maintained systems of oppression and marginalization and would eventually carry Jesus to the cross. They seem imperishable, unshakable, overwhelming.

But the world is about to turn. And those walls are coming down.

Advent is a season of hope and expectation, but with Jesus’ exhortation in Mark 13:33 (“Beware, keep alert”), we move from “Advent as anticipation” to “Advent as active alert.” As we await the birth of the Messiah, let Advent be a season not of patience but impatience, not of passivity but activity, seeking out those places where God is already at work undoing systems of suffering and living in the daring confidence founded on faith in the promised end of suffering, sin and death.

Reflection questions

1. How has God been present with you in your suffering?
2. Where do you see suffering in the world today? How are people of faith actively working to end it?
3. As people of faith who believe God rejects suffering, how are we called to respond to suffering in the world?
4. What is the difference between patient anticipation and being on “active alert” during Advent?

Prayer

Loving God, in your incarnation, you took on to yourself our humanity and our suffering. Be present with us today as we face the pain of hunger, thirst, war, disease and neglect. Keep fresh in our hearts your promise of an end to suffering and an eternity of well-being with you. Send us out among our neighbors, that we may share with them your promise and share with you in the transformation of our world. In the name of your son, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Hymn suggestions

Canticle of the Turning ELW 723

The People Walk (Un pueblo que camina) ELW 706

Each Winter as the Year Grows Older ELW 252

To download this entire study, or to see some of our other congregational resources, please visit www.elca.org/Resources/ELCA-World-Hunger.

Large, multinational corporations controlling prices and driving down wages, masses of people too poor to afford basic goods, an economy that favors the wealthy, politicians and church leaders at the mercy of banks….1517 was quite a year!  So much has changed, so much remains the same.

Many people remember Martin Luther’s sharp critique of the abusive practices of the church, but few of us are as familiar with Luther’s equally sharp critique of the abusive economy of his day, an economy that made a few people wealthy and a lot of people poor.

At the 2015 “Forgotten Luther” conference in Washington, DC, theologians and historians shared this little-known side of Luther’s teachings.  The presenters described Luther’s critique of monopolies, price gouging, and greed. They showed the clear economic teachings in Luther’s Catechisms and the political side of his theology. They also shared Luther’s insistence that the church be part of the solution to injustice, a heritage that can still be seen today in the many ways Lutherans respond to poverty and hunger 500 years later.

ELCA World Hunger is proud to offer for free videos of each presentation from this important conference, as well as video interviews with each of the presenters. You can find all of the videos on the ELCA’s Vimeo channel at https://vimeo.com/album/4043021. The presentations were also collected into a short book, complete with discussion questions and other contributions from the conference organizers. You can purchase the book for only $15 from Lutheran University Press at http://www.lutheranupress.org/Books/Forgotten_Luther.

Here on the ELCA World Hunger blog this month, we will feature some highlights from this collection of resources.

In this final excerpt from the video series, Dr. Jon Pahl of the Lutheran School of Theology at Philadelphia contrasts the devastating consequences of self-serving greed with the joy that can be found in working together toward a world in which all are fed – and how congregations, organizations, and partnerships can get us there. Find this video and more at https://vimeo.com/album/4043021.

Large, multinational corporations controlling prices and driving down wages, masses of people too poor to afford basic goods, an economy that favors the wealthy, politicians and church leaders at the mercy of banks….1517 was quite a year!  So much has changed, so much remains the same.

Many people remember Martin Luther’s sharp critique of the abusive practices of the church, but few of us are as familiar with Luther’s equally sharp critique of the abusive economy of his day, an economy that made a few people wealthy and a lot of people poor.

At the 2015 “Forgotten Luther” conference in Washington, DC, theologians and historians shared this little-known side of Luther’s teachings.  The presenters described Luther’s critique of monopolies, price gouging, and greed. They showed the clear economic teachings in Luther’s Catechisms and the political side of his theology. They also shared Luther’s insistence that the church be part of the solution to injustice, a heritage that can still be seen today in the many ways Lutherans respond to poverty and hunger 500 years later.

ELCA World Hunger is proud to offer for free videos of each presentation from this important conference, as well as video interviews with each of the presenters. You can find all of the videos on the ELCA’s Vimeo channel at https://vimeo.com/album/4043021. The presentations were also collected into a short book, complete with discussion questions and other contributions from the conference organizers. You can purchase the book for only $15 from Lutheran University Press at http://www.lutheranupress.org/Books/Forgotten_Luther.

Here on the ELCA World Hunger blog this month, we will feature some highlights from this collection of resources.

In this interview, Dr. Cynthia Moe-Lobeda from Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary talks about her personal journey as an advocate for justice and the importance of seeing the well-being of the neighbor, including economic well-being, as a matter of faith. Find this video and more at https://vimeo.com/album/4043021.

Large, multinational corporations controlling prices and driving down wages, masses of people too poor to afford basic goods, an economy that favors the wealthy, politicians and church leaders at the mercy of banks….1517 was quite a year!  So much has changed, so much remains the same.

Many people remember Martin Luther’s sharp critique of the abusive practices of the church, but few of us are as familiar with Luther’s equally sharp critique of the abusive economy of his day, an economy that made a few people wealthy and a lot of people poor.

At the 2015 “Forgotten Luther” conference in Washington, DC, theologians and historians shared this little-known side of Luther’s teachings.  The presenters described Luther’s critique of monopolies, price gouging, and greed. They showed the clear economic teachings in Luther’s Catechisms and the political side of his theology. They also shared Luther’s insistence that the church be part of the solution to injustice, a heritage that can still be seen today in the many ways Lutherans respond to poverty and hunger 500 years later.

ELCA World Hunger is proud to offer for free videos of each presentation from this important conference, as well as video interviews with each of the presenters. You can find all of the videos on the ELCA’s Vimeo channel at https://vimeo.com/album/4043021. The presentations were also collected into a short book, complete with discussion questions and other contributions from the conference organizers. You can purchase the book for only $15 from Lutheran University Press at http://www.lutheranupress.org/Books/Forgotten_Luther.

Here on the ELCA World Hunger blog this month, we will feature some highlights from this collection of resources.

In this interview, Dr. Samuel Torvend of Pacific Lutheran University talks about justification and justice, the experiences that shaped his own perspective, and how to reconcile Luther’s conservative positions with the Reformer’s progressive call for economic justice. Find this video and more at https://vimeo.com/album/4043021.

I used to wish for a giant returns counter where I could exchange stuff I didn’t need  for stuff I did need. Behind the counter would be a system for redistributing, reusing, or recycling goods, so that no “returns” were ever junked. We’d all get what we needed, less perfectly good stuff would sit idle in closets and garages, and a lot less new stuff would have to be made.

My dream is coming true. It’s called “collaborative consumption” – a trendy new term for the timeworn habit of sharing.

For more details, watch this fabulous TED talk or read this Sunset magazine article on the economy of sharing. But the bottom line is, a world with too much stuff is an opportunity for people to share, swap or pool instead of buying more and more. We are born and bred to share and cooperate, says Rachel Botsman, the young economist leading the TED talk. Hyperconsumption interrupted that pattern, but the internet is bringing it back in a big way in three new forms:

1. “Redistribution markets” that are moving used or pre-owned items from where they aren’t used to where they will be used. Think Craig’s List or swaptree.com, whose slogan is “turn what you have into what you want.” (The 3 Rs are now five: reduce, reuse, recycle, repurpose and—implementing my returns counter—redistribute!).
2. “Collaborative lifestyles,” in which people work, live, and stay intentionally. Are you familiar with coworking, where independent workers share an office space and creativity? Couch surfing, which matches budget travelers and homeowners with rooms or couches to spare? Landsharing, which matches gardeners and small farmers with underused yards and acreage? They are fast becoming household terms!
3. “Product service systems” like car sharing that let people pay for the benefit of a product without having to own it  outright—a great option for things with “high idling capacity” like cars and power tools. The typical homeowner will use a power drill for 13 minutes in its entire lifetime. Says Botsman, “You need the hole, not the drill!”  So why not rent it from or to someone else?

Collaborative consumption built this community cooker in a Nairobi slum

Does this trend benefit only rich folks with video games to spare? No. Collaborative consumption relies on trust and has always been practiced in communities rich in trust and relationship. Check out this trash-burning community cooker developed in a Nairobi slum, and think about the state of our trust, relationships, and communities.

Collaborative consumption sounds like a basic Christian practice. It’s our job to give away our extra coats and sponsor food pantries. But I wonder whether all that giving keeps us locked in paternalism: I have something, you don’t, you can have mine and I’ll feel good. Collaborative consumption invites us into a more mutual model: I’ve got something, you’ve got something, let’s trade. We’re equally gifted: let’s share.

On the ground, hunger programs are brought to life less by money than by people’s dignity, resourcefulness, and willingness to work hard. Their assets contribute to a process you could call “collaborative construction.” But it’s funny how other people’s gifts vanish when we talk about hunger in congregations. We stick to the same old trope, contrasting our abundance with other people’s lack. We have money, they don’t; therefore they are needy and you should write a check.

I’ve got something, you’ve got something, let’s trade  or I’ve got something, you’ve got something, let’s create something new together frees us to see new, more collaborative ministries. Collaboration is harder. It takes a lot more time than writing a check. It changes the relationships between the people involved. It also changes the stories we tell about one another. (David explored this in his post contrasting two videos—one focused on a little boy playing in the dirt with a bleach bottle, and one in which “underprivileged” Native American teens named their strengths.) And it changes us.

The collaborative consumption concept is changing my vision of the giant returns counter. Now I see that showing up with a toaster I don’t need is just the first step. I have to be able to vouch for the condition of my toaster. I have to trust the person offering whatever I swap it for, be it a working radio, five pounds of green beans, or an hour of sewing. If I choose the hour of sewing, I might have to get to know someone new. And it will be slower than buying in the drive-through lane or pulling $20 from an ATM machine….but I think it will be a whole lot more satisfying.

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity: A  Journal

In October a friend from Holden Village spent a few days with me on her way to Alaska. It was like having a prophet visit. To my dinner table she brought her life as a worker for the Mennonite Central Committee in El Salvador, as a resident of a Catholic Worker house in Portland, Oregon, and as a peace activist who—like her fellow Mennonites, Quakers, and Brethren—earns only enough to support herself but not so much that she has to pay the ‘war tax.’

Because she doesn’t own a car, she didn’t find my carless life strange. She was fine riding the bus and bikes everywhere and sleeping on the floor of my teeny little house. Many details of my existence that strike people as odd were completely familiar to her. But watching her move through life with such principle sent me back to my Bible of simple living, Doris Janzen Longacre’s 1980 book, Living More with Less.

This classic taps the wisdom of Mennonite missionaries who refined their simple living skills on international assignments and kept living that way when they came home. Like my Alaska-bound friend Lisa, they always, always walked their talk.

Rejecting the term lifestyle, Doris proposed that Christians should seek to live by five Life Standards. Her book offers wise suggestions for implementing each one of these standards:

1. Do justice. Living by this standard will always draw us more deeply into economics and politics. It’s up to us to draw the lines that link our consumer ways with environmental and justice consequences around the world.
2. Learn from the world community. Our global partners have a lot to share, if we would only listen instead of continually insisting we know it all! Longacre’s book lifts up “overdevelopment” projects proposed by global Mennonites who would like to minister to North Americans drowning in materialism and “maldevelopment.”
3. Nurture people. What could happen if we cared more about other people than we cared about price, convenience, or comfort?
4. Cherish the natural order. What could happen if we remembered that we are stewards, not owners—that God’s world demands our respect, not our thoughtless consumption?
5. Nonconform freely. What could happen if we were more like my friend Lisa and the Mennonites, and a little less worried about what other people think?

Longacre’s gospel-based Life Standards offer a path out of the lifestyle that is choking us. They are also a tool we can us to “occupy ourselves,” as David Creech suggested (quoting David Brooks) in this post. Occupying ourselves can mean recognizing the consequences of our own habits, actions and purchases instead of reflexively seeking to blame scapegoats.

Mikka said the other day that, from a global perspective, almost all of us reading this blog are the One Percent. Instead of insisting we’re not privileged, asking “who, me?” and pointing fingers, let’s start Advent by following what Longacre calls “the path of health outlined by faith: Repent by recognizing and accepting our guilt, be forgiven, and change!”

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

I love the voices on this blog: Lana eating snow and shopping for a GMO-free meal; David probing our call to social justice; ELCA camp directors talking about the carrots and lettuce their campers are growing, eating, and giving away.

And then there’s me, carrying on about public transportation, old socks and shoes, and how, while we profess our belief in God, we act as if The Market is at the center of our lives.

“Maybe,” Nancy suggested gently the other day, “it’s time to remind blog readers what your topics have to do with World Hunger.”

What a good idea! Even I forget, sometimes, when I get carried away. So, here goes.

Most of my 33 posts since April 2009 focus on stuff: buying and selling stuff, storing stuff, having too much stuff, recycling stuff, giving stuff away, disposing of stuff, and transporting ourselves and our stuff. Recently I’ve looked at our notions about our economy—the role it plays in our lives; the assumptions we make about it; the possibility that the Market, not God, is the deity we really serve.

Figuring out how to reuse or recycle several hundred unmatched socks at Holden Village was my September stuff preoccupation.

My corner of the hunger discussion is our North American lifestyle. It’s about how our overstuffed lives keep us from walking our anti-hunger talk—and sometimes completely contradict the beliefs we profess to hold.

Consider this: Statistics show under our present system, a child born in North America will consume, waste and pollute in his or her lifetime as much as 50 children in developing countries. This good-sized tendril of the root causes of hunger starts in our own backyard.

We Lutherans love to cooperate in starting and supporting water projects in other countries. We rejoice that in Chiapas, Mexico, our support is helping an indigenous community irrigate its fields. Meanwhile, speaking of consuming 50 times more than everybody else, at home we treat our water with little respect. We run our faucets while we brush our teeth, take 10-minute showers, and insist on bright green lawns no matter what the climate. It took three liters of water to make our 1-liter plastic water bottle? 70.5 pounds of water to manufacture (in Asia, probably) a 2-gram, 32-megabyte memory chip and its plastic package? Not our problem!

It’s odd to me that our passion for water in Chiapas doesn’t inspire us to connect the dots between green lawns and the fact that, for example, the United States consumes 95 percent of the Colorado River’s water.  The paltry 1.5 million acre feet of Colorado water we give to Mexico is about what farmers in Sonora used in 1922. They can’t farm; the indigenous living along the Sea of Cortez, where the Colorado once emptied, can’t fish. And how are the farmers down the road from that thirsty computer microchip plant faring? All we know is that we can get a computer for a song at Best Buy, and when it wears out, we can recycle it. We don’t want to know streams, groundwater, and children will be poisoned when an offshore e-waste recycler sends it back to Guiyu, China—increasing the very poverty, hunger and environmental degradation we claim to oppose.

My little blog posts fall under the World Hunger program objective, “to encourage members of this church to practice responsible stewardship of their lives and their financial resources toward the prevention and alleviation of hunger.” To me, responsible stewardship means making sure our left hand knows how the plastic water bottle it plunks  down at the cash register aggravates a situation the World Hunger dollars in our right hand hope to alleviate.

As consumers we are discouraged from connecting the dots between our stuff and its consequences. As Christians, we’re obliged to. Convenience and personal comfort at the expense of others are not gospel values. The opposite is true: the gospel exhorts us always to act with our brothers and sisters in mind.

See? My blogs are not stuff and nonsense, but stuff and challenge. Thank you, Hunger Rumblings. I’m grateful for this space and everyone blogging along with it.

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

Thanksgiving, Black Friday, the first Sunday of Advent: it’s a busy week.

At Thanksgiving, we celebrate our national creation myth. The sacred festival of Black Friday kicks off the high season of commerce and consumerism—unless you’re a devotee of its alternative celebration, Buy Nothing Day.

The first Sunday of Advent invites us to prepare ourselves to receive Christ through four weeks of quiet reflection, prayer and meditation. Too bad so many of us are going to ignore the invitation and simply squeeze an Advent candle and a verse of “O Come O Come Emanuel” into this season’s commercial demands.

I’d like to suggest an Advent discipline for us: noticing, as we participate in “the holidays,” all the ways in which act as if the world’s real god is not God but The Market. And all the ways in which we serve that Market, consciously or unconsciously.

These ideas are drawn from a powerful essay written by theologian Harvey Cox in 1999 called “The Market as God.” (For the whole article, click here)

While we have always had markets and bazaars and trading posts, says Cox, “The Market was never God, because there were other centers of value and meaning.” But today The Market is “the Supreme Deity, the only true God, whose reign must now be universally accepted and who allows for no rivals.”

Like God, The Market is omnipotent in its ability to commodify creation. It’s the reverse of transubstantiation. Instead of making ordinary bread and wine into vehicles of the holy, The Market, says Cox, “things that have been held sacred transmute into interchangeable items for sale.” Like land, or human body parts, or our labor.

We believe The Market has “a comprehensive wisdom that in the past only the gods have known.” Omniscient, it determines our needs, our worth, our pay, the cost of everything. Through reports from Wall Street, we seek to know whether “The Market is ‘apprehensive,’ ‘relieved,’ ‘nervous,’ or even at times ‘jubilant’” and respond by buying or selling. And like the God “unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid,” The Market seeks to know us in order to convert our hopes and fears, gifts and weaknesses into products and services for sale.

When it succeeds in knowing us, The Market becomes omnipresent, making decisions in areas of life that used to be personal, like child rearing, or marriage, or dating. It respects no limits. In religion, “The Creator appoints human beings as stewards and gardeners but, as it were, retains title to the earth,” says Cox. The Market says that the earth belongs to people with money who can buy anything they choose. “In the chapel of The Market…the First Commandment is ‘There is never enough.’”

The Market is omnipotent, too. Governments that seek to establish policies that contradict it are punished by The Market’s global priests.

Cox’s conclusion: for “all the religions of the world, however they may differ from one another, the religion of The Market has become the most formidable rival, the more so because it is rarely recognized as a religion.” Too many religious practitioners, says Cox, are “content to become its acolytes or to be absorbed into its pantheon, much as the old Nordic deities, after putting up a game fight, eventually settled for a diminished but secure status as Christian saints.”

Depressing, isn’t it. But spending Advent observing how we participate in—and through our actions, worship—The Market may help us name it. If we recognize The Market as a competing God, we can more clearly articulate what Christ and Christianity’s non-market God offer us. If we can grasp that gift, perhaps we can respond to it by more resolutely embodying, in our lives, Christ’s values instead of the Market’s values.

If we go on being unconscious about The Market, we’ll give lip service to the idea that we’re all children of God while we treat one another and our planet as commodities with price tags.

Starting today, notice the Market. And see what happens next.

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity