12 May 2013 John 17:20-26
A picture of some African boys seated in a circle with their
legs straight out and their feet touching appeared on my Facebook timeline many
times in the past few weeks. The accompanying story is that someone placed food
some distance away and told the boys that the first one there could have it.
Instead of racing against each other, however, the boys joined hands and ran as
one person. They could not conceive of the idea that one of them should get
something that the rest could not share.
We marvel at such stories and pass them on. We marvel
because seeing ourselves as “one” is hard for those of us born into a culture
of “rugged Individualists” who are supposed to “pull themselves up by their own
bootstraps” in order to "attain the American dream.” While those core
values have built a strong nation, the downside is that all of us, through our
action and our inaction, live as if anything important is a zero-sum game. The
rich can't get richer unless the poor get poorer. Goodness can't survive unless
evildoers are punished or killed. I can't feel secure unless others are
excluded. We reject negotiated settlements unless they are achieved at the
expense of the other.
Whether consciously or unconsciously, we seem to rule much
of our behavior by a theology of scarcity. It is hard to love when we are
competing for scarce resources. When we
cannot love, we cannot do justice.
Injustice is the inevitable outcome of a theology of scarcity. Are
those African boys actually wiser than we are in the ways that matter most?
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