All Saints’, Dorval
July 4, 2021
The fire in Lytton, BC, on June 30th
“Prophets are not without honour, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.”
This Greco-Roman proverb, quoted by Jesus in response to the critics in his own hometown, is a variation on the more straightforward axiom, “Familiarity breeds contempt.” I’m sure we can all think of examples of this dynamic in our own experience!
But when I read this week’s commentary on the lectionary passage by Emerson Powery, I learned something new to me. Powery quoted a book titled The Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, by Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh. In the book, the authors discuss the role of honour in the ancient world. They say that “honor [sic] was a limited good. If someone gained, someone else lost. To be recognized as a ‘prophet’ in one’s own town meant that honor due to other persons and other families was diminished. Claims to more than one’s appointed (at birth) share of honor thus threatened others and would eventually trigger attempts to cut the claimant down to size.”
I found this utterly fascinating – that something as nebulous and abstract (to our modern minds, anyway) as “honour” could nevertheless be seen as a limited good, as part of a zero-sum game.
As I’ve mentioned from this pulpit before, I was taught growing up, as my mother’s daughter and as her Sunday school pupil, that the essence of the Gospel was that in God there is enough for everyone and that we don’t have to be anxious or keep score. This was enshrined in the scripts for her felt board stories, in the phrases, “Enough and more than enough” and “we don’t have to be afraid, and we don’t have to fight.” Jesus came into a world that was fractured, violent, and fearful, constantly squabbling over limited resources (much like our own …), and the single most consistent thing he said to people was that these limits were illusory, and that if only they would let go of the anxiety and the need to be better than the next person, the kingdom of God would be revealed.
Humans have an intractable drive to see themselves in competition, to dehumanize the “other”, to amass things and power, and to sneer at their opponents, “I’ve got mine, who cares about you?” Jesus rejects the whole premise underlying this dynamic. And while in today’s passage he doesn’t really follow up on the remark about honour, I suspect that if he had done so, it would have been to say something like, “The idea that honour has a limit is nonsense; being the child of God is all the honour you need, and anyone who follows me can have it.”
This framing of things – deemphasizing anxiety and competition in favour of the idea that there is “enough and more than enough” – is often termed the “theology of abundance”. I want to caution that this is not a cheap abundance. It’s not the prosperity gospel. Nobody is claiming that if you follow Jesus you will be blessed with all the material goods you might want – or at least, they certainly shouldn’t be saying that, because Jesus promised the exact opposite, and sometimes demanded that people sell everything they had.
It is essential to point this out, because people putting their faith in a fictive and illusory material abundance – acquiring and consuming as though there is, literally, no tomorrow – is what has brought us to the pass that we’re in now, where the world is literally on fire. This past week, we watched in horror as an apocalyptic “heat dome” parked itself over the northwestern part of this continent, and after three consecutive days of record-shattering high temperatures in the tiny community of Lytton, BC, the town burned to the ground on Wednesday evening. Many residents barely escaped with their lives, and some are still missing.
For us, this is not just a story torn from the headlines: one of the now-homeless refugees is Melanie Delva, reconciliation animator for the Anglican Church of Canada. Lytton is in the Territory of the People, our partner diocese, who were already reeling from the revelations of mass graves in Kamloops and of the misconduct of their new bishop.
When we accumulate too much stuff, burn too much fossil fuel, cut down too many trees, fill too many landfills, and wear out too much land, this is what happens: drought, fire, and flood. It’s natural consequences. We were warned about this in the law and the prophets. This is the opposite of a theology of abundance. It is a growth-at-all costs mentality, a pathological hoarding that leads to the kind of wild inequalities in wealth that are causing poverty and suffering worldwide, while a handful of mega-corporations continue to defend the status quo at the cost of human lives and the future of the planet.
For far too long, “honour” in our society has been implicitly defined as wealth, fame, and power. If you have the fancy car, the big house, the glamourous job, the trophy spouse, and the clout to get whatever you want whenever you want it, that’s considered “success”. And of course, if you understand honour this way, then it is a limited good, because not everybody can be rich; somebody has to be doing the actual work and getting paid peanuts.
The true theology of abundance says that none of us have enough until all of us have enough. It calls on the rich to give away what they have, rather than blaming the poor for not having it. It insists that community is essential for human flourishing, and that that community needs to be centred around God, not things. And it tells us that true honour is to be found in faith and love; in learning and wondering and creating; in growing gardens and telling stories and raising babies and making music and caring for the helpless and rejoicing in the free gifts of God; in generosity and humility and joy; not in accumulation and competition.
The Apostle Paul (whose second letter to the Corinthians I have not done justice to in my preaching as we have read through it over the past month or so!) makes a similar point in today’s climactic passage, when he shares the words of God revealed to him in a vision: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”
True honour and power are not about piling up goods and exercising control, but about the free and abundant life of God flowing through a community, filling everybody in it with the power and honour of God. In order for that to happen, the community has to make room for God.
This is what Jesus is getting at when he sends the disciples out without food, money, luggage, or an extra tunic. They are not in control. They must take what they are given. What looks like weakness and shame in the eyes of the world opens space for the indwelling power of the living God, and indeed, as they travel around preaching the message of repentance, they are able to drive out demons and heal the sick, as even Jesus was unable to do in the fact of the lack of faith in his hometown of Nazareth.
And while we all wish heartily that Lytton had been spared the fire, the need of its people in the aftermath has certainly revealed the strength and power of community, as people have rallied round, from the Primate and PWRDF to individuals sending five or ten dollars to a GoFundMe campaign for those who have lost everything.
This is a hard thing to get our heads around. I know it makes me super anxious to think about relying so completely on God and on others, instead of trying to be in control of everything in my individual life. But this is what we’re called to. This is what God means by honour and power, by abundant life, by “enough and more than enough”. And our lives – all of our lives – literally depend on it.
In the words of the hymn we just sang:
Yet we hoard as private treasure
all that you so freely give.
May your care and mercy lead us
to a just society …
That the world my trust your promise,
life abundant meant for each,
give us all new fervor, draw us
closer in community …
Amen.
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