Everything We Need

Luke 14:25-33 and Sufi poem by Hazrat Inayat Khan

September 7, 2025

By Nicole M. Lamarche

Welcome again! It’s beautiful to see you! I remind you now to take some

deeper breathes. Let us never get too far from our breath.

As you are moved join me in a spirit of prayer. God of many names, force

of Love between us and among us, grounding of our being, we are grateful

for this day and this place, for this community of faith. Help us all to hear

whatever we need to. Open us, soften us, change us. May the words of my

mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our

Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked or take the

path that sinners tread or sit in the seat of scoffers, but their delight is in the

law of the LORD.

This is how Psalm 1 begins and it is one of the texts in the assigned lection

today. Happy are those that do not follow the advice of the wicked. It is

paired with the story you heard in the Gospel of Luke where Jesus is

teaching about the cost of discipleship; painting a picture of what it could

look like to be faithful to Love and righteousness and living right, even in

the face of an Empire. And the whole thing ends with what might feel to us

a bit harsh. It’s a command that might seems a bit beyond the scope of

what is possible that our only choice is to ignore it. I see that is what many

do. He didn’t mean that really?

I suspect that we post-modern followers in the teachings of Jesus just

aren’t quite sure what to do with texts like these. Surely Jesus didn’t really

mean that to be faithful we needed to give up all that we own?

In its original language of Greek the word possession isn’t there, it’s just

implied, with the phrase pas hyparchousin which is "all he has". So a more

accurate way to read this phrase is, "Whoever among you does not give

up/give away/send away all he has is not able to be my disciple";

I wonder if what Jesus is getting at is that if you are the sort of person that

is really attached to getting things, to owning things, if your worth is

connected to what you have, if your status comes from treasure or land or

things, you will have a hard time getting the message.

Because we know from some of the other earlier Christian writings, like

what we find in the Acts of the Apostles, that the earliest Christian

communities really did have very little in the way of wealth and what they

did have, they shared, they put together, they held in common. In the book

of Acts, it says they “put their lot in common.”

In other places in the Bible in this Gospel and in others, Jesus says that no

one can serve two masters. He also says that where your heart is, there

your treasure is, meaning we must pay attention to what has our hearts. He

said that it’s hard for rich people to experience heaven here because

money blocks us, stops us from paying attention to what really matters. It

blinds us to the fact that we already have what we need.

I am convinced that whether we like it or not, whether some want to believe

it or not, one of the pillars of the Jesus way of this spiritual path that we are

simply limited if we are attached to what is on the material plain. What I

mean is that God provided everything we need, and the notion that there

isn’t enough is an illusion, scarcity is a lie but playing the game of the

wicked asks us to believe this lie, of thinking that if I have enough you won’t

be able. The lie of unending growth and consumption. But this lie is

separating us from what is good and from one another.

There’s so much in American culture that doesn’t want us to live from a

paradigm of abundance. We are trained from an early age to see one

another as competition in this field where everything is scarce. If everyone

is having their needs met, we are told it’s bad, it’s socialism, it’s fill in the

blank. Growing up in the rural Pacific Northwest, I got the sense that it

wasn’t just Jesus on the altar, it wasn’t just Jesus we were worshiping, but

right there with him was capitalism.

As a people of freedom, we were told we were also supposed to love the

so-called free market. But then I went to college and read what Jesus said

for myself. I became very confused. It is so much easier to make a case

that before Jesus even knew about our kind of unbridled capitalism, he was

against it.

From the perspective of our tradition, I am convinced that an economic

system that requires unending growth is immoral, one that requires

extraction and exploitation is against God’s vision, one that prioritizes profit

over everything else is a sin.

In some parts of our life together I suspect that we have become so

accustomed to our destructive, wasteful, rat race grind, that we conflate

what is normal with what is moral, but in a time when so much is being

uncovered, perhaps this is yet another thing where we might as well lean

into telling the truth: our economic system as it is and must take it off the

altar right there with Jesus.

For the month of September as you might have seen, I am preaching on

healing from toxic Christianity. I asked the wider community on social

media to share what we should explore under that umbrella and wow there

is a long list! OMG!

Because greed is driving decision making and causing harm, I wanted to

start right here, with money. When a love of money is infused with a certain

form of Christianity, it is super toxic. It sees material wealth as God’s

reward- prosperity Gospel says that material wealth is God’s blessing. The

only way to heal from what is toxic is to be honest about what has ails us.

We can begin by unraveling the myth that material wealth is the same thing

as worthiness. We must challenge the notion that greed is good. We can

more openly call hoarding wealth a sin because it is. Getting rich while

people go bankrupt seeking healthcare is a sin. Getting tax cuts while kids

go hungry is a sin. Getting short term political gain while saddling younger

generations with mountains of debt is a sin. Shame on those who are

taking and taking and taking, while creation groans.

Jesus warned what would happen if we were guided by money or if we are

led or influenced by those who are attached it, because the fact is that

money compels us to treat others as part of an equation. That’s the part I

want to highlight today. The fact that relationships are reduced to a

transaction.

A think tank called the Hampton Institute noted that one of the defining

characteristics of a culture infused with and defined by our form of

capitalism is “determining how well to treat other people based solely on

what you can gain from them. This vulturistic mentality, which is often not

conscious, is hardwired into us during the socialization process in a profit-

based society.”

I have noticed that some are so conformed to this culture that people

simply don’t know what a relationship grounded in mutuality and trust might

look like.

In an essay this summer, Cameron Trimble wrote, “What we’re seeing now

is not just economic inequality—it is spiritual dislocation. Greed demands

that we view other people not as neighbors, but as obstacles or tools. It

trains us to accumulate without regard for consequence…We are

worshipping the wrong god.”

In a place like Boulder, I suspect that a message like this is beyond radical,

but my vision is that our church must be right now wildly countercultural in

this way and in many others. I think it is going to get hard for a while and I

think maybe a recession is coming. We might need one another more than

we have before? What would it look like to be more of a refuge for each

other? What if we vowed that no one in our church would go hungry?

Dr. Walter Brueggemann, a biblical scholar and theologian who died not

long ago argued that greed is a violation of relationships with our

neighbors. To him, it was a refusal of a covenantal obligation, and “a

repudiation of divine generosity.” 

Greed is sort of like turning our back on God’s gift of abundance. What if

our call as people of faith and conscience right now is to remind one

another of the lie of scarcity and to instead live from a place of abundance?

There is enough. We are enough. We have enough. What if we saw it as

our responsibility to care for one another like we haven’t before? No one in

our church went hungry! What if we saw it as our task to challenge the

ideology that unending consumption is not progressive at all? What if we

challenged the idea that this economic system belongs on the altar with

Jesus? It is time.

We have received everything we need. We must now boldly live this truth. I

will end with this poem called On Generosity by Walter Brueggemann

“On our own, we conclude: there is not enough to go around we are going to run short

of money

of love

of grades

of publications

of sex

of beer

of members

of years

of life

we should seize the day

seize our goods

seize our neighbours goods

because there is not enough to go around

and in the midst of our perceived deficit

you come

you come giving bread in the wilderness

you come giving children at the 11th hour

you come giving homes to exiles

you come giving futures to the shut down

you come giving easter joy to the dead

you come – fleshed in Jesus.

and we watch while

the blind receive their sight

the lame walk

the lepers are cleansed

the deaf hear

the dead are raised

the poor dance and sing

we watch

and we take food we did not grow and

life we did not invent and

future that is gift and gift and gift and

families and neighbours who sustain us

when we did not deserve it.

It dawns on us – late rather than soon-

that you “give food in due season

you open your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing.”

By your giving, break our cycles of imagined scarcity

override our presumed deficits…

Sink your generosity deep into our lives…

Finish your creation, in wonder, love and praise. Amen.” 

Communal Reflection

How do you live abundance in a culture that tells us we aren’t enough and

that we don’t have enough?

Beloved of God, Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the

wicked. Happy are those who give it away, who live in abundance. We have

everything we need. May it be so. Amen.