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Some years ago, a professor on the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara, a man named Garrett Hardin, presented what he called his "national lifeboat ethic." Hardin saw the United States as a kind of lifeboat floating on a sea of international hunger.

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This sea was forever deepening because of the growth of population around the world. He further said that it would be impossible for the lifeboat, this country, to receive any of these starving people into its midst, and indeed it was not even wise to help them, for one was only postponing the inevitable.

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The best thing to do was to let them die now. Now in general, Hardin's idea was rejected for four reasons. First of all, because the poor countries are often not the most densely populated countries. Japan, for example, is one of the most densely populated nations in the world, but there

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is very little poverty there. The second thing to notice is that when one does assist other nations, one finds that the population growth slows significantly. You see, in the poorer parts of the world, many families have children to serve as a

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kind of social security for themselves. But when they have enough money coming in to support themselves through the production of their own products and the like, then they have no need of additional children, and so population growth is slowed.

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Third it was suggested that Mr. Hardin was somewhat naive if he believed that the other nations of the world were going to gladly allow themselves to be submerged in the seas of the world's population and hunger without some kind of fight. India, we know, has nuclear weapons; perhaps Pakistan and other nations do as well.

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Why are we to assume that these nations would do what we would not do, that is, give up without a fight? And finally, and most significantly, the fact is that there is enough food in the world to feed all of the world's population.

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The difficulty is that it is badly distributed. I would suggest that a better picture of our nation is to see it not as a lifeboat, but to see the whole planet as a kind of ocean liner. And this planetary ocean liner is in danger of sinking, not because there are so many

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people on board, but because of the way that the affluent 28 percent at the top of the pile insist upon living. They bring with them all their appliances, their refrigerators, their television sets, their VCRs, their mobile phones, and the like.

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They fill up the storage bases in the great ocean liner with their tin cans, their bottles, and their plastic refuse. They fill up the rest of the storage spaces with cattle and with the grain to feed that cattle so that they can eat better than any other people in the boat.

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On the deck they have crowded this 28 percent of the most affluent people on board the ship. They have crowded all kinds of military hardware in order to protect what is theirs. All the while they are flushing their garbage down the world's toilets. They are using aerosol sprays whenever they desire to do so and with no concern for themselves

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or for others. They make unlimited use of the world's limited supplies of electricity and water, and they occasionally have a brawl, which we call a war, which endangers the life of the entire ship.

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Now, this to me is a far more accurate picture. Our failure is for the affluent not to see the starvation and the disease that their affluence is causing to come to pass. The fact is that the search for superabundance in a world of limited resources leads some

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people to a struggle for life and indeed to the loss of life itself. And the question I would like to ask this morning is, can we survive this kind of extravagance, or are we going to go the same way that great nations before ourselves have gone, choked to death on our own riches?

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Now, the Bible responds to our problem individually and collectively. The Bible says that the problem of such affluent people is not so much one of greed as it is of blindness. It is not so much heart disease as it is eye disease.

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But that makes it nonetheless serious, for the Scriptures say, "If your eye be dark, then your whole body will be filled with darkness." The biblical answer is to be found in a place like Philippians chapter 4, where Paul, writing to Christians, says, "Let your moderation be known of all men," that is, live a moderate

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lifestyle. Now, Paul's model for this is the relationship between God and the children of Israel. It was God's will that all of His people should serve one another. He saw everyone as contributing to the general shalom, to the wholeness of the entire society,

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and he calls us to harmonize, that is, to fit in, to be moderate so that we can forbear and we can restrain ourselves for the common good. In another place, Paul puts the same thought in longer phrases. In the second letter to the Corinthians, chapter 8, he writes, "There is no question of relieving

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others at the cost of hardship to yourself. It is a question of equality. At the moment, your surplus meets their need, but one day your need may be met with their surplus.

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The aim is that all have enough." Now this is not a plea for socialism or communism, because there is no legal restraint behind this. There is no law which absolutely requires it and forbids any contrary behavior.

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This is a call to Christian love, to living a moderate and responsible lifestyle, to be harmonious with the rest of the world, to fit in, to contribute to international shalom or wholeness. Now how does the Bible apply this principle to our way of living?

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How does it apply the theory to our everyday practice? Or better yet, how do we do this, knowing what the Bible says, what kind of lives do we lead that demonstrate our moderation? Let me suggest several principles to you.

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The first one is, "Laugh, and the world laughs with you." Notice that Paul sets these words about moderation in a paragraph which begins, "Rejoice in the Lord, and again I say, rejoice." In other words, he is suggesting that fitting in, shalom, creates an experience of great

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joy. He is calling here for a lighthearted persistence, not for brutal riots, not for the carrying of placards, not for the marching of marches. Instead he calls for a show of the divine contrariness which was typical of Christ.

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Some years ago, Mother Teresa, that great woman from Calcutta, India, who has started more than 150 organizations to minister to the poor and has been the recipient of the Templeton Prize, was making her first television appearance. She was being interviewed by a noted English Christian named Malcolm Muggeridge, who is

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now deceased. He tells about this in one of the last books he wrote, Christ and the Media. She noticed that they had to repeatedly interrupt their conversation in order that commercials could be shown.

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She also noted that these commercials almost invariably concerned food. And then she noticed one other thing, that most of these commercials about food carried with them the additional suggestion that you could eat them without gaining any weight. Now here is a woman who is devoting her whole life and everything she has to getting food

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to people so that they can put on some weight, so that they can put some skin on their bones. That's her whole reason for living. And now she sees advertised every few minutes in the course of this first telecast of hers the suggestion that you purchase food which really doesn't do you any good.

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She got a gentle smile on her face and said, "Live on nationwide television, I can see there is a real need for Christ in the world of television." This was so shocking to the television people who were producing the show that Muggeridge wrote later he expected all the lights to fall out of their sockets and for the floor

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manager to drop dead right before their eyes. She did it with a gentle smile, but she made her point. Luther said that the one thing the devil can't stand is to be laughed at. And that's the first thing we need to do, to laugh at the selfish, to those who wrap

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themselves in the red, white, and blue and claim that because those colors are theirs they can permit other people to starve while they themselves live beyond their means. The real joy is to be like Jesus who says, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

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Now a second thought for our thinking is this. We should be fools for Christ's sake, but not fools for the sake of anyone else. Paul also says in this same pericope, "The Lord is at hand." In other words, what he is writing, he is writing in the context of the imminent return

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of Christ. Now to me when I read these words, when I think about the return of Christ and when I think about the fact that we are not to be fools for Christ's sake, but we are to live moderately, my mind goes immediately to the world of advertising.

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We spend more on advertising in this country every year than we spend on all education, public and private, at every level in the entire nation. And we need to beware of advertising. I remember an advertisement which appeared in the New York Times a few years ago of an

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advertising company, and it cited as its goal to create more desire. Is that really what we need, to create more desire? I really wonder sometimes, should we believe any of the advertising that we see? I mean when there's a sale, do you really think that the things are on sale or were

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they priced too high in the first place and then brought down to a price announced as a sale in the understanding that we will be suckered in and will buy what is only worth what we're paying for? Do we really think that everybody who enjoys Budweiser has a beautiful slim body and a

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gorgeous tan and lovely blonde hair and all the other accoutrements of physical attractiveness? Do we really think that that is true? You know, advertising companies sometimes today actually own competing products. The same company owning two different products, they'll advertise back to back.

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One mouthwash says it's better than the other mouthwash, and this mouthwash says it's owned better than this mouthwash, and both mouthwash companies are owned by the same company. That is a deliberate attempt to deceive. And then of course there are these television commercials that attempt to gain trust by

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showing the simplicity of the commercial and therefore the trustworthiness of it. You know, it's interesting that survey after survey has shown that the most amateurish thing on television gets the greatest response. Why?

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Why because people think, well, they don't spend much on advertising, so they're evidently a very, very careful, frugal company, and that's where I'll invest my money. Don't think that Aunt Penny is on there trying to get you to buy used cars just because she likes to do TV.

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No, there's far more to it than that. There's downright fakery. Have you seen these ads of a dirty kitchen floor and then there's this magic mixture put on the mop and it is swished across the floor and there is a great swath of absolute

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cleanliness that gleans? Do you know there's no dirt on that floor? That floor has been covered with ground graphite. You could take any rag, any wet rag, whatever.

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It doesn't have to have anything on it but wet, and drag it through that kind of graphite and you would leave exactly the same mark on the floor that is advertised as the fruit of this particular product. Everything is designed to get us to buy.

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Highly paid professionals sit in skyscrapers on Madison Avenue to think of ways to talk us into buying things that we do not need with money we do not have. We need to be alert to this. We need to be alert that we're not sucked into a gluttonous cycle which can mean not

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only tragedy to ourselves but also tragedy to the rest of the world. I would suggest that with regards to advertising, one should assume in the first place that all of it is a lie. One should assume in the second place that you never go to the store without a list.

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Never trust the music, never trust the announcements, never trust the colors and the pictures and the way in which the shelves are arranged. All of that stuff has been scientifically measured to get you. Why do you think they put the candy down where the kids can see it?

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Why do you think they put the milk and the bread all the way at the back of the store? So you have to walk past all the other products in order to get those basic staples of our lives. And remember this, too, that Christ's people are on the move, and that means that they

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travel light. Happiness does not come through things. We need to feed our souls more than we need to feed our larders. John Wesley put it this way, "I work as hard as I can to earn as much as I can to give

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as much as I can." We are to fit in. We are to be moderate. We are, in everything that we can possibly influence, to be thinking about the whole

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world in our purchases and the impact of what we do on others. We are to be fools for Christ's sake, but not fools for the sake of anybody else. And one last principle. We need to remember that we are part of a cast of thousands. I think of a young man today who is working on the mission field with his wife and his

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children. He's in Indonesia. They have had some very difficult times there, yet he loves the world of mission. He is particularly engaged in literacy, in teaching these people to read so that they can begin to fend for themselves. I think of a seminarian out of Pittsburgh who is taking his training right now to prepare

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himself for the mission field. I say to seminarians every time I get an opportunity to talk with them, "The first thing that you should be considering is the call to the mission field." There may have been a time when you thought about things at home, and then if you got a special call, you went to the mission field. Today it's just the opposite. The great need

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is on the mission field, and you should only stay here if you receive a special call to do that. On Thursday of this week, I was in Springfield, Illinois, giving some lectures, and I met a wonderful roly-poly grandmother-type lady who told me she'd been up to build a church

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in Alaska two summers ago, and she had helped to build a school in Appalachia this last summer, and now she was trying to decide what she was going to be doing in the coming summer. She is what is called VIM, a volunteer in mission. It is a sorry thing that we have never had a member of this congregation go out for a year as a volunteer in mission.

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That could mean such a life-transforming experience for the one who saw it and for what that one says when they come back into our midst to tell us what they've seen. I think of a college student I had, a brilliant young man who was very much of a libertarian. He was opposed to Social Security. "If you don't save enough money, then you ought to

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die poor." And then he got out into the world of the law, and he became convinced, as he saw case after case, that he should become involved in the defense of people who were not being adequately represented in their struggles for Social Security, and that has become the center of his legal practice. Do we aim for a revolution of values within our

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own families by teaching our children what is right and what is wrong, and why it is right and why it is wrong? How much good will we all do by doing this? I have no idea whatever, but I do know that we will become a part of that union who, in the name of Christ, serve those who are suffering.

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A few years ago, a young man went down to the Dominican Republic. He was a friend of mine, and there he was taken under the tutelage of a Roman Catholic priest, Father Morero. Morero was just a little fellow, Cuban, but brilliant, graduate degrees from both Oxford and the Sorbonne, speaks, reads, and writes seven different languages, and here he is

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working in the slums of the Dominican Republic. Now, it happened one day that they were going to see the worst slum in the city of Santiago, Coahuputa, and this young Cuban priest said, "I don't want to take you to this slum, and I don't want you to go by yourself, so I'm going to put you in the hands of a young communist, and let him take you and show you what he

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wants to show you." So they started off, this young man in the hands of this young red, and they hadn't gone very far into the Coahuputa when a little boy ran up and wanted to give the young man I know a shoeshine. Well, he just wanted to give the kid money, not require a shoeshine, but the communist said he would rather work for it. So he let

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him give him a shoeshine, and then the red said, "Give him the equivalent of 25 cents." So he gave him the equivalent of 25 cents, whereupon this seven-year-old boy ran across the street into a bakery and came out with the biggest loaf of bread that this young American man had ever seen, and he yelled, "Ayo! Ayo!" And with that, youngsters came

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running from everywhere, and they sat down on the curb, and he proceeded to break that loaf of bread and to give a piece of it to every single one of the youngsters that were there. And when he came to the last piece, he popped it in his mouth with the words, "Por mio," "For me." And this young American boy was so astonished at this example of generosity

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in the face of crushing poverty that he said to this young communist, "How do you teach your young communist to share like this? How do you teach them to care? How do you teach them to be so generous?" And the young red was honest enough to answer, "We don't. Our kids don't act like that. That little boy is queer in the head. He spends too much time

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with Father Marrero." Not communism, not socialism, but Christ in a seven-year-old boy put there by a brilliant servant of Christ who has settled himself into a ministry of astonishing poverty. What difference will each one of us make whether we're working toward this goal at home or abroad? I do not know. I do know there's a lot of talk about the starving of the world

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today, and that is good. But when the house next door is on fire, it does not do much good to sit around and debate who started it. It is urgent that lives be saved, and we can do that with a lifestyle that the Scripture calls us to. Moderation, shalom, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

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Blaise Pascal, the great French mathematician, philosopher, and Christian, put it very simply. He said, "In the end, humankind has one of three choices, the fist, the phallus, or the cross." We might add to that Nietzsche, Sartre, or Paul. Megalomania, erotomania, or loving for the sake of Jesus Christ. Hitler, D. H. Lawrence, or a little boy taught by a young

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Cuban priest and a roly-poly lady in Springfield, Illinois, and a youth who is busy laboring on the field in Indonesia, and a young lawyer who spends his professional career in seeing that the poor get what is legitimately theirs under the laws of this land. God grant that we choose to fit in while there is still time.

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