Money is part of what I want to talk about today, but it's only a small part. What I really want to talk about is the kind of community we have here, and the way that it affects our lives. Let me start with some background: I grew up in a farm-and-factory town in the Midwest, and I went to the Lutheran church that my parents went to. After I left my hometown I was churchless for a long time, but about five years ago my wife and I decided that we needed to have more in our lives than just our jobs, and we started coming to this church.
It's hard to describe to you the sense of amazement and wonder I feel about this congregation. I never fail to be impressed by the people I meet here. Almost without exception, they are very talented, extremely intelligent, well educated, thoughtful and articulate. And more than that they're the kind of people who know how to get things done. (Being so intelligent, you probably realize that this kind of flattery is always followed by the word "but".) But lately there's been a thought nagging at the back of my mind: What exactly is the benefit that comes from us being such talented, educated, and efficient people? This may be naive, but I can't shake the idea that a group of people like this ought to have some kind of advantage on a group of average people. Life ought to be easier in some way. We ought to be generating some kind of a surplus somewhere in our lives. I've been looking for that surplus for a while now, and I haven't found it. I thought that today I would share with you some of my thoughts about what might have happened to our surplus and what we might be able to do about it.
Now where would you begin to look for a surplus like this? You might start by looking for a surplus in time and energy. It makes a certain amount of sense: You might expect that talented, efficient people might be able to do whatever it is that ordinary people do, but do it with a lot less time and effort. If this were what was happening, you would constantly be running into people who have extra time for things. People who sleep late, have low stress levels. People who have a lot of time to talk, a lot of time to meet new people.
I don't know where those people are, but I haven't been meeting them here. One constant theme I hear from everyone I meet here is that we all have no time. It's one of the big problems of this congregation. Not just because we don't have time to spend on the church and its projects, but because we don't have time to spend with each other. The most obvious way this shows up is in the difficulties we have welcoming new people. But the problem is bigger than that. There are an awful lot of people in this church who have been coming for years, who have put a lot of energy into committees and activities, but who still don't feel like they have friends here. And it's not that people aren't friendly. We just have no time. We don't have time for the friends we have, and we certainly don't have time to make any new ones.
Where else would you look for a surplus? Well, you might expect to see a surplus of money. It stands to reason: One of the big things that soaks up time is that a lot of us work very hard. Many of us work long hours at very demanding jobs. A lot of those jobs are in fields that pay reasonably well, like engineering, the hard sciences, or management. You might expect that we could live the way that ordinary people live, and have a lot of money left over.
This isn't happening either. Believe me, I know. During the last two canvasses I have found out more about people's finances than I ever wanted to know, and there is not a lot of surplus money out there. No matter what kind of job they have or how hard they work, most people feel like they're just scraping by.
A third place you might look for surplus is in luxury. Self-indulgence. Hedonism. Tell the truth: this is where you thought I was going all along, isn't it? Guilt! You thought I was going to say that the problem is that we're all having too much fun. Too many trips to New Zealand. Too many red Miatas. [Another inside joke: One of the most popular and committed parishioners had recently bought a red sports car.] We need to get tough with ourselves and deny ourselves and think about the people starving in wherever it is that people are starving these days.
But you know, I think that the people in this congregation are very tough on themselves, and I don't see a lot of people having fun. One of the things I've been struck by is how few red sports cars there are. When I was writing this sermon I had a hard time thinking of an example of a material object that someone got visible pleasure from. I saw a lot more of that when I was growing up back in my working class hometown. The farmer who had a new combine, or the factory worker who had just put a camper on the back of his truck--they felt like the King of the Hill. But right now I don't know anybody who feels like the King of the Hill.
So where are we? No extra time, no extra money, no extra pleasure in material objects. Where's the surplus? What happened to it? Let me try to answer that with a story from my own life. Deb and I live in an apartment in Burlington that is a short walk from where we both work. A couple of years ago the thought came into our heads that it was finally time to buy something. We watched the ads and before long there was an open house at a really nice condo in Lexington. So we toured the place. It was wonderful--two or three times the space of our apartment, a garage, a complex with nice facilities. It cost a quarter of a million dollars.
After the tour Deb and I compared notes and found that we had the same reaction: We couldn't figure out why we weren't excited about the prospect of buying this place. It took several days and a lot of long talks, but eventually the reason dawned on us: Neither of us really had any interest in upgrading our lifestyle. We were happy living the way we lived.
That realization gave us another mystery: Where had the idea of buying some nice place come from to begin with? Why had we thought we wanted to do that? Why hadn't we realized that we had--in the words of the second reading--enough? After several more days and a few more long talks we had the answer to that too. Over the past year or two, all of our best friends had moved into places much nicer than our apartment. And a very subtle thing had happened: We continued to visit them, but we had stopped inviting them to visit us. Because our place wasn't nice enough. The reason we had wanted to buy a nicer place was so that we could invite people over again.
This is the kind of thing that once you say it out loud you realize how silly it is. No one had ever refused to come over or said, "Oh, we can't go there, it's not nice enough." We had just stopped inviting them. So we realized what we had to do: We threw a party for all of our friends with nice houses. They all came, they all had a good time, and we haven't thought about buying a house or a condo since.
Now what's the point of that story? Not that people shouldn't buy houses. There are situations where it's just the thing to do. What I want to call attention to is just how crazy the whole impulse was: We were prepared to spend a quarter of a million dollars for something that neither of us really wanted. And more than that: when you count interest and heat and maintenance and insurance and new appliances, and all the other things that an upgraded lifestyle means, we're probably talking half a million or more. That's not just a lot of money, it's a lot of surplus. A lot of years of hard work. A lot of trips to New Zealand. A lot of red sports cars. And we were going to blow it all on something that we didn't want. Just so that we could stop being ashamed of how we lived. Just so that we could hold our heads up in front of the rest of you.
That's just one example, but there are many others. Last spring vacation I was talking to a teen-ager who was stuck here in Lexington while his friends were all off skiing or scuba-diving or touring Europe. It wasn't that there was someplace he really wanted to go, it was just embarrassing to be here. I once spoke to someone who was embarrassed about the Ivy League college he got into--because his friends got into better Ivy League colleges. Or think of all the time and effort we put into self-improvement of one form or another. Is our unimproved state really so miserable, or are we just keeping up with each other?
Do you see what I'm getting at? We could have taken our surplus in time. We could have taken it in money. We could have taken it in pleasure or luxury. But we didn't. All we did was raise the standards. We spend all our time and our energy and our money not to make our lives better, but just to be able to hold our heads up. We strive and work and spend like this just so that we can look each other in the eye.
But what's my alternative? I could drop out of the race entirely like the Wizard or the cynics. Give up everything but "earth and heaven and one poor cloak". But there is so much that I like about my life as it is. I could return to a congregation like the one I grew up in, where the people aren't quite so impressive, the standards aren't quite so high, and it's easier to feel like you're doing OK in life. But there is so much that I like about this community and the people in it. I don't want to give it all up.
But I also know that I don't want to spend my whole life working for things that I don't want. Or to achieve things that are meaningless to me. So I've come up with another option: I've decided to ask for an exemption. I've decided to stand up here in front of everyone and announce that I'm not going to have a nice house, I'm not going to rise to the top of my profession, and I'm not going to send kids to Princeton. I'm not going to do a single impressive thing in the rest of my life unless it pleases me to do so. So it's not my little secret any more--you've all been warned. And if there is no move to throw me out, I'm going to take that as a sign that my exemption has been granted. That I have the permission of this community to live life on a smaller scale.
If I get away with this, if people continue to talk to me and associate with me and accept me into their homes, some of the rest of you may want to seek your own exemptions. Can you imagine what it would be like to have permission to live more simply? Each of us could root through our lives like a cluttered attic. We could look at each expenditure of time and effort and money and ask ourselves "What are we getting out of this? Who's benefitting from this?" And if the answers didn't satisfy us, we could toss it out. And not be ashamed.
If you're like me you probably don't like to think of yourself needing permission to live the way you want to live. But Deb and I needed our friends' permission not to buy a house. If no one had come to our party, we probably would have had to move. It's humbling to have to admit that about myself, but there it is.
I have a feeling I'm not the only person like this. And so I want to close this sermon by challenging you to ask yourself some questions. Do you need permission from someone in order to live a simpler life? From your friends? Your spouse? Your parents? Your children? Someone who died many years ago but whose voice is still speaking inside your head? How can you ask for that permission? And if you got it, could you accept it? Are you ready to admit that this life, just the way it is, is enough?
Think it over. If you can bring yourself to ask for the permission you need, you just might get it. And then all the time you spend feeling ashamed of the way you live--that becomes free time. And all the time and money and energy that you put into compensating for feeling ashamed of the way you live--that all becomes available for whatever you want. It can be quite a surplus.