By Reverend Laurie DeMott

But before I tell you what they said, I need to back up a little and set the scene for you.
Last Sunday, I informed the kids that we were going to begin our session together with a little game. I divided them up into two teams of six kids each, placed a dividing line of chairs between the two teams, and then handed out sheets of paper. “When I say go,” I instructed, “everyone crumble your paper into a wad and toss it across the chairs to the other team’s side. And when the other team throws their paper at you, pick it up and throw it back. In other words, try to keep your side free of paper wads, and when I call time, we will count how many paper wads are left on each side and the team with the fewest number of wins.”
Everyone took their positions, I yelled, “Go!” and immediately paper wads started soaring back and forth across the King David Room. I let the chaos last for a minute or two and then began my countdown – “10, 9, 8, 7….” When I yelled, “Stop!” we counted up paper wads and declared the winner.
Now, the kids enjoyed this game so much that they insisted on playing another five rounds, and by the fourth match someone figured out that the best strategy is to hoard all of the paperwads on your side, wait until the last second of my countdown, and then fling them across at the other team, giving them no chance to return the volley. Of course, when both teams figure that out, the result is a boring few minutes of everyone glaring at one another across the median line, hands laden with paperwads, followed by one final second of torrential assault.
Although I have played this game with kids of all ages simply for the fun of it, I did have an object lesson in mind, and so to ensure that they “got the point”, I said, “OK, now we are going to do a variation on the game. This time, instead of paper wads, I want you to push all of the air from your side of the room onto the other team’s side before I call time.” What I love about this youth group is that, even though they knew immediately that this was a ridiculous request, they enthusiastically gave it a try nonetheless, huffing and puffing at one another across the chairs and even waving their jackets to sweep the air into their opponents’ faces. I applauded their efforts but declared it a tie, and then we returned to our chairs to talk about what had just happened.
“Why was pushing air more difficult than throwing paper wads?” I asked.
“Because there is so much of it,” they replied.
They became sidetracked for a moment as they came up with ways of creating airlock chambers and vacuums, but I pushed on.
“So even though we know that air can be moved and displaced, there is so much of it that the amount we can take away from someone else by physically waving our hands is meaningless. The paperwads were limited in number so they were easily hoarded or exchanged, but air is, in our normal experience, essentially limitless. You’d have the same problem,” I pointed out, “if I asked you to take away the sunshine from someone or hoard the sunshine for yourself. What other things can you think of that are unlimited like that?”
One of the kids immediately piped up and said, “God’s love.” My guess is that if her biology teacher had asked the question, her mind wouldn’t have gone instantaneously to God’s love but since the minister was asking, she knew that must be where I was going.
And I was, sort of. But I wasn’t ready to get there yet, so I pressed for more answers, and they came up with beauty, compassion, friendship, and those intangible qualities that make our lives meaningful.
“Beauty, love, honor, respect, acceptance – all of these things are immeasurable and cannot be hoarded or exchanged,” I agreed, “and yet as you think about your own lives, can you see times when we treat them as if there are, in fact, limited resources, as if my having them somehow prevents you from having them?”
And to my surprise, that simple question unlatched the floodgates.

Throughout the history of human existence, people have competed with one another for limited resources. If there are 20 apples for sale at the farm market and you buy 17 of them, there will only be 3 left for me to buy. It won’t matter if I was planning on making apple pies that night. Because you decided to cook up a huge batch of applesauce and got to the market first, I have to give up my plan for pies because there are only a limited number of apples to be had. Game theorists have termed this “Zero sum competition”: every tally marked on your side takes away from the tally on mine. Your loss is my gain; my gain is your loss, and all of those losses and gains balance one another for a zero sum.
We accept the reality of zero sum competition in many facets of our lives – I won’t throw a fit over the lack of apples at the market but you can bet I’ll get up a little earlier next week to beat you to the store. The problem comes, however, when we transfer that same thinking to other human interactions, acting as if everything in life is a limited resource – apples and honor, cantelopes and compassion, bananas and beauty. This was exactly what happened in first century Judea, in the culture in which Jesus lived and preached. There, everything was seen as a limited resource to be gained or lost through competition with one another. And the most vital of these limited resources was honor. Sociologists call Judean society an “Honor-shame culture.” In other words, personal honor was seen as a precious commodity, as important to a person as the balance in their bank account. A good reputation could open doors for you and move you up the ranks in society because the rich and the powerful would only engage in business deals with those of appropriate status. Today, banks will give credit only to those who have proven they are financially solvent (or at least that’s what they are doing now) but in first century Judea, your credit rating was determined by your honor rating – how good was your family name? How upright were you? Moreover, honor was seen as a limited resource – the more you had, the less that was available for me – and so like dogs wrestling for dominance, every interaction with another person became a testing of their rank. If someone struck you on the cheek, you would have to immediately strike them back because if you didn’t, they would win the honor competition and you would lose status in the eyes of others. Your loss of rank could have personal and economic consequences as other people now chose to avoid you, afraid that they might in turn be sullied by your lowered status. In a zero sum competition, you cannot afford to let the other person win because if there is a winner, there will be a loser, and the loser will be you.
When we understand how ingrained this thinking was in first century Judea, we see Jesus’ teachings in a very new light. Over and over again his teachings challenged the assumptions of zero sum competition. “If God chooses to invite sinners and prostitutes to the table with you, why does their presence take away from your meal?” Jesus would ask. “If God chooses to be generous to the last worker to come to the field, does God’s generosity to them change what you have received? If God chooses to forgive the errant son and even rejoice in his return, does that take away God’s love and joy from you?” The obvious answer, of course, for those first century people was, “Of course it does! If God gives honor to the sinner, there is less honor available to me, the righteous one,” but Jesus insisted that that thinking is wrong-headed. “Honor is not a limited commodity,” he said, “it is an unlimited resource, as available as sunlight. If God shines favor upon the sinner, there is still an infinite amount of favor left to shine upon the righteous as well.”
“Let go of your competition with your brother,” the father said to his eldest son. “His restoration does not take away from your standing in my eyes. There is enough love and honor for both of you.”

Of course, we don’t live in first century Judea, so we, of course, have a much more sophisticated understanding of life than they did. We understand that beauty, and compassion, and honor, and respect, and success, and joy are unlimited and that we are not in competition with one another for these things, don’t we?
Ask your kids if we understand it.

The floodgates opened and our youth poured out their frustrations. Every aspect of their lives is a competition. If they get a 95 on a test, and everyone else gets in the 70s, they are deemed brilliant; but if they get a 95 and someone else gets a 98, their star dims and the 95 turns to dust. Academic ranking is a limited commodity to be won and lost in the space of one exam. Do they love to sing or play the trumpet? That love of music is only taken seriously if they prove that they can sing better or play better than their classmates, and heaven forbid that someone else might come along with a little more talent than theirs. “I thought you were good,” classmates might say, “but boy, that new guy is awesome,” and they disappear. They are measured by their performances on the soccer field or in the pool, evaluated for their beauty or the charm of their personality and by the resulting number of people they can count as friends. They are constantly vying with one another for the favor of their community, and every time one person rises, another must necessarily fall. This is the world our kids live in and they know it. They struggle to believe in themselves simply for who they are but the rest of society insists on evaluating them only by how they compare to others.
And we feed it. We pester them about grades and hammer away at the need to get into a good college. We brag about their athletic successes and we pour money into lessons so that they will rise above their peers, thinking that this will build in them the self-esteem they need to equip them for life. We do this partly because we know that while this competition is at its fiercest when we are young, it never fully goes away. We, too, as adults have difficulty rejoicing in other people’s successes because we are afraid that those successes somehow dim our lights in comparison. We get angry when the government decides to bail out struggling homeowners because such generosity feels like it takes away from the honor of the financially frugal. I can just hear Jesus saying, “But you still have your home. How does giving another person the opportunity to stay in their’s take away from you?” And we mumble something about rewarding bad choices and it not seeming fair but underneath it all is that zero sum assumption – if they receive grace, it makes the grace that I enjoy less valuable. The sinner cannot rise without the righteous feeling as if he or she has fallen in comparison.
And as a consequence of this zero sum thinking, we are all miserable. We are not the prodigal son, we are the older brother -- the killjoy, the party pooper, the crank.
Jesus said, “Hear this good news. The cure to your misery is simple. God’s love is unlimited. God’s grace is unlimited. Joy, and beauty, and acceptance, and honor – there is enough to go around for everyone.”

Every now and then, I catch the light of transformation shining in someone’s eyes and I think I saw it last week on the faces of our youth. They considered the possibility of imagining their worth to be self-contained and constant, based simply on the fact of God’s unlimited love for them and not based on how they might compare to others, and the idea felt freeing. There was peace for them in that promise.

There is peace for all of us in that promise. Life is not a zero sum game, Jesus said. Learn to rejoice in the good fortunes of every person, strive to raise others around you to the same level of dignity and honor that you enjoy, trust that the light of God’s love is infinite and inexhaustible so that you too can be thankful when the sinner is restored and not miss out on the party.