I’ve been in Costa Rica for a week, staying with a Christian community whose work includes accompanying migrants, ecological repair, and hospitality. Last night I was invited to share the biblical reflection during their weekly worship gathering which I’ve edited slightly for the newsletter. Thanks to Micah for translating as I spoke!

“It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil, for he gives sleep to his beloved.” (Psalm 127:2)

It takes me about fifteen minutes to walk from the apartment where my family lives in Chicago to reach the edge of Lake Michigan. Covering 57,800 square kilometers, Lake Michigan is the fifth largest lake in the world. Standing on its edge, with the city at your back, all you can see is water stretching to the horizon. When my sons were younger, they would talk about walking to the “sea” or going to swim in the “sea.” To them, the lake was an ocean.

Sometimes Lake Michigan behaves like an ocean. During winter storms, the wind blows violently across the water and creates massive waves which crash against the shore. Sometimes the highway nearest the lake has to be shut down because the waves have flooded the road. Because of these storms, the city long ago placed large blocks of limestone along much of the shore to keep it from eroding. More recently, workers have been replacing the limestone with poured concrete.

In our neighborhood, the lake shore is still protected by the limestone blocks because many of our neighbors have organized to stop the city from covering the shore with concrete. They are partly opposed to the concrete because they believe it is uglier than the limestone. But they are also motivated because they don’t believe the poured concrete will provide better protection than the stone blocks which have been in place for almost one-hundred years. At other places along the lake, it is possible to find examples of concrete which was poured with the promise to provide long-term protection but which has been undermined and weakened by power of the lake. To my neighbors who want the limestone to remain, the city’s efforts to wave-proof the shore are vain. They believe that the effort and money required to replace one form of storm protection with another will prove to be futile. A waste. Vain.

To me, the attempt to control the wind and waves of Lake Michigan is a good example of human vanity. In Psalm 127, Solomon writes about this manner of futile living that we are each susceptible to: “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest.” Solomon is not saying that we should always sleep late and always go to bed early. Parents of young children never get to sleep late and university studies and certain jobs regularly require late nights. No, the clue to the vain striving that Solomon imagines comes in the third line of the poem: “eating the bread of anxious toil.”

Eating the bread of anxious toil. It’s not early mornings or late nights that Solomon warns us about. It’s anxious toil that is the problem.

To toil anxiously is to never be at rest. It is to be preoccupied in your mind even when your work has finished. It is to be restless in your heart, to always be wondering what more you should do. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night worrying about a challenging situation in our church, a complicated circumstance in our family, or a persistent injustice in our neighborhood. I toss and turn, spinning things around in my head, trying to figure out what I can do to fix the problems. And do you know what? Never – not once – have I managed to fix any of my problems by worrying about them during the night. In vain do I stay up later than I should trying to solve the world’s troubles. In vain am I awakened by the restless worries which tempt me to believe that if I work just a little bit harder, if I push just a little bit longer, if I just do a little bit more… then I will manage to finally rest from my anxious toil.

Of course, it’s much easier to recognize the vanity of our anxious toil than it is to do something about it. There’s a reason for this. While it’s true that you and I will always be personally tempted by the lie that we can toil our way to peace, it’s also true that our societies push us to believe that anxious toil is the only reasonable way to live. We are told by corporations and marketers that the world is fundamentally a place of scarcity. There is, according to their argument, not enough for everyone and so we must toil, compete, and hoard in order to gain what someone else would otherwise take.

The logic of scarcity pervades our world. Historically it provided the rational for colonial conquest as European states identified “zones of extraction” in Africa, Asia, and Latin America where natural resources could be stolen and Indigenous communities enslaved. It continues today in the forms of ethnic cleansing in Gaza, destructive mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, climate change-fueled migration around the world, and international trade agreements which favor corporate interests over the well-being of local communities and their economies and ecosystems. My own country, the United States, has made the logic of scarcity the basis of our domestic agendas and foreign policy, evident in the ways we assume certain people and places as acceptable for exploitation.

In other words, every morning we wake up to a world which has been organized around the logic of scarcity. Every night we go to bed with the propaganda of competition and struggle ringing in our ears. To paraphrase what one historian has said, in our contemporary world the tiresome struggle for money has displaced the joyful reception of manna.

The vanity that Solomon writes about is not just about the futility of trying to save, rescue, and provide for ourselves. No, according to Psalm 127, our anxious toil is vain because it conforms the societal logic of scarcity. And while this logic has behind it the economic power of transnational corporations, the persuasive power of mass entertainment, and the lethal power of empire… the logic of scarcity has always been a lie. This is what makes conforming to it an act of futility.

And so, we come to the final line of this poetic stanza: “for he gives sleep to his beloved.” Though none of us have been immune to the lies of societal scarcity, the truth remains that God alone is the source of our sustenance. Though much of our world has forgotten that Creation is a gift to be gratefully received rather than a commodity to be purchased and protected at any cost, God is still the giver of fresh manna every morning. God gives sleep to his beloved. God fills our lungs with oxygen. God quenches our thirst with rain from his heavenly storehouse and feeds us from the abundance of his lands. God brings us into his new community, introduces us to our sisters and brothers in Christ, and calls us his friends.

Is it possible to leave the lie of scarcity behind and to accept the rest God gives his beloved? Jesus thought so. Seated before a crowd of harassed and exhausted Galileans, Jesus said, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?” (Mt. 6:25)

The women and men in that crowd had reason to worry about their lives. Some of their relatives had fled into exile under Herod’s oppressive rule. They were subject to harassment by Roman soldiers. Some of their young men had likely been crucified, their dying bodies lining the main highway as a terrorizing warning to any would-be revolutionaries. They groaned under the empire’s oppressive taxes and some had lost their ancestral lands. They too were vulnerable to the lies that the world was fundamentally a scarce place: not enough security, not enough justice, not enough peace.

Looking into their eyes, knowing full well the burdens they carried with them to that lakeside hill, Jesus asked them to turn their eyes toward the sky. “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.” (Mt. 6:26) And then he turned their attention to their flowering hillside sanctuary. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” (Mt. 6:28-29)

More than using the Galilean birds and flowers as an object lesson, Jesus was reminding the crowds of the logic of abundant grace which runs through all of God’s creation. With these simple reminders, rooted in the richness of God’s creation, Jesus dismantled the imperial logic of scarcity. God still feeds the birds and clothes the flowers. God still gives morning manna. And God still blesses his beloved with their nightly rest.

Sisters and brothers, in this life the powers of scarcity continue waging their deceptive and violent disinformation campaigns. But a day will come when the true nature of the universe is revealed as Christ returns to redeem all of his groaning creation. Until then, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, let us choose solidarity with the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. Let the endless generosity of God’s creation protect us from society’s pitiful propaganda of scarcity. Let us make the quiet, regular decisions to reject the deceptions of empire for the truth of God’s righteous kingdom. And let us be for one another the practical and providing abundance of God’s presence among his beloved people.

Reading

I’ve finished a couple of books since arriving in Costa Rica. Eddie Glaude’s American, U.S.A. was the perfect antidote to the historical revisionism the presidential administration is subjecting us to during this semiquincentennial year. And Radical Reconciliation by Alan Boesak and Curtis DeYoung is an excellent apologetic for the biblical conception of reconciliation.

Christian reconciliation is radical, costly reconciliation: not papering over the cracks, knowing it is not possible but between equals. It calls for systemic justice, a radical reordering of power relationships and sustained transformation of society. That it also calls for transformation of the heart and mind is not a contradiction to the call for justice. Rather, that is how reconciliation is sustained.

Exactly!

The View From Here

The Virilla River, near where I’m staying, is one of the most polluted rivers in the country. For a number of years, the Casa Adobe community has been planting trees near the river as part of an effort to return the watershed to health. Last Monday I joined a visiting youth group for a few hours to plant a bunch of native trees which the community had grown from seeds in their greenhouse.