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If you have ever spent time around a two- or three-year-old child, you have witnessed one of the most fascinating stages of human development. As children grow, they work fiercely to distinguish themselves from their parents. You start hearing words like “No!” and “Mine!” and, most famously, “I can do it myself!” They are trying to figure out where their parents end and where they begin. And as a parent, part of the holy, exhausting work of raising a child is encouraging that healthy distinction, while simultaneously teaching them a different kind of connection—nurturing empathy, sharing, and the lifelong beauty of interdependence.

But somewhere along the way, as we move into adulthood and step into our broader culture, that necessary childhood developmental phase gets hijacked.

We are handed a story that tells us our primary job in this world is to take “I can do it myself” to its absolute extreme. We are told that our worth is measured by our productivity, our security is built on how high we can pile our resources, and our safety depends on how effectively we can insulate ourselves from the chaos around us.

And so, we buy things. We plan. We secure.

And if we are honest, we use our resources to try to buy our way out of what we might call the web of interdependence—that delicate, messy reality where we actually have to rely on other people to survive.

If we have enough, we don’t have to borrow our neighbor’s tools. If we have enough, we don’t have to ask for help when we are sick or lonely. We use our resources to buy convenience, but the hidden tax on that convenience is isolation. We build a fortress of self-sufficiency, only to look around and realize we have successfully bought our way out of the very relationships that make us human.

But the ancient writer of the letter to Timothy wants us to know a deep and challenging truth: No one actually escapes the web.

We breathe the same air. We drink the same water. We rely on the quiet, often invisible labor of thousands of hands we will never meet. We are knotted together. What wealth actually buys is not independence; it buys *complacency*. It buys the luxury of turning a blind eye to the tears we are leaving in the shared web of creation—the toll our comfort takes on the earth and on those living at the margins.

This is why the author of 1 Timothy writes with such urgency. To help us hear this ancient text freshly, we are listening to a few different modern translations today. Sometimes the well-worn words of older translations can slide right off our backs, but shifting the vocabulary forces us to look scripture squarely in the eye.

Listen to the way the Common English Bible renders this warning:

“But people who are trying to get rich fall into temptation. They are trapped by many foolish and hurtful desires. The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. Some have wandered away from the faith and have impaled themselves with a lot of pain because they made money their goal.” (1 Timothy 6:9-10 CEB)

This is where that totally famous and often misquoted line comes from. Do you see it? It doesn’t say money itself is evil; it is the love of money. The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition takes it a step farther by reminding us that the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil—not the only root, but a deeply toxic one. The trap is the desire to get rich, the insatiable pull of “just a little more.”

In a recent theological interview, the speaker shared a striking evolutionary biology study that illustrates this trap perfectly. Researchers wanted to see if they could maximize egg production in chickens, so they created two coops. In the first, they put a flock of average, normal-producing chickens. In the second, they gathered the “super-chickens”—the individual, highest-producing hens, selected for their peak individual performance, and put them all together.

A few generations later, they checked on the coops. The average flock was thriving, fully feathered, and their egg production had skyrocketed together. But the super-chicken coop was a disaster. Only three chickens were left alive; the others had been pecked to death. The super-chickens had achieved their individual high output by suppressing, attacking, and dominating the others.

Our culture trains us to be super-chickens. It tells us to peck our way to the top, to secure our own individual nests, and to view the neighbor in the next pew not as kin, but as a competitor for scarce resources. But the CEB exposes the truth: the super-chicken mentality is a cage. It traps us in a cycle of constant anxiety, pedaling faster and faster just to keep from falling over, terrified of what will happen if we ever stop.

Now, it is very easy for us to sit in these pews, point our fingers at the billionaires, the corporate tech moguls, and the literal super-chickens of our economy and say, “Yes! There is the problem.” It feels good to have a villain who is far away.

But if we only point the finger outward, we miss the quiet, tender whisper of this text to our own hearts.

Because we know what it feels like to worry. We watch the prices rise at the grocery store. We see how quickly a twenty-dollar bill disappears. We feel the pinch of utility bills and medical co-pays that seem to grow while our resources stay exactly the same. And we carry a deep, quiet anxiety for our children and our grandchildren, wondering how they are going to navigate an increasingly precarious world.

And when we feel that fragility, fear, and anxiety, our natural human instinct is to pull inward. We clench our fists. We think, “I have to protect what is mine. I have to secure my own future first, because no one else is going to do it.”

The “love of money” is not just a sin of the ultra-rich. It is a survival strategy that tempts all of us. It is the seductive whisper that our ultimate safety lies in what we can accumulate and protect on our own.

And this is true not just for us as individuals, but for us as a congregation. When we look at our church budget, when we talk about the future, when we feel the precarity of being a small community of faith, the temptation is to freeze. The institutional survival instinct tells us to clench our fists, to protect our resources, and to focus entirely on making sure we still exist next year.

But we have to ask ourselves: Why do we exist if we aren’t using what we have to love people?

What good is a secure, surviving fortress if we have clenched our hands so tightly to keep it alive that we have squeezed the holy mission right out of it? If we stop the flow of grace to save the water, the river just becomes a stagnant pond.

The First Nations Version of the Bible—which translates the New Testament using the traditional, relational thought-patterns of Indigenous languages—offers us a beautiful pathway out of this freeze. It translates the Greek word for “contentment” not as individual self-sufficiency, but as “a satisfied heart.”

“There is great gain in walking the path of respect with a satisfied heart.” (1 Timothy 6:6 FNV)

In the Indigenous tradition, a satisfied heart is not a passive shrug. It is an active spiritual posture of trust. It is the moment you look at your life, your home, your relationships, and this congregation, and you say: “We are held. We have enough to do what God is calling us to do today. The Great Spirit, God, is our provider.”

A satisfied heart is the ultimate act of resistance in a consumer culture. It is the only thing that allows our clenched fists to finally open.

I recently heard a story about a retired man living alone in Dayton, Ohio. His wife had passed away, his kids were grown and lived far away, and his house was far too quiet. He admits he was just going to work, coming home, watching TV, and using up his remaining time. He was holding onto his quiet safety, but he wasn’t really living.

One cold November night, he heard someone forcing open his kitchen window.

Every voice in our culture—and every survival instinct in his body—told him what to do. Protect yourself. Clench your fists. Grab a bat or a shotgun. Call the police. Defend the fortress.

But instead, he walked into the kitchen, saw a terrified twenty-three-year-old kid named Josh, shivering and stuck halfway through the window, and said: “You want to come in and close that? It’s cold.”

And then he made him a chicken sandwich.

They sat at the kitchen table for two hours. He didn’t call the police. He listened. He learned that Josh had a fourteen-month-old daughter, had just lost his job, and was completely desperate. The man made a phone call to a friend of his who owned a mechanical company to vouch for Josh. He wrote down the contact info, gave Josh sixty dollars from his wallet, and sent him on his way.

Years later, reflecting on that night, the man realized something profound. He wrote:

“That night was the first night in a long time that I felt like someone who had something to offer. And it took a kid with frozen hands coming through my kitchen window for me to remember that.”

He thought he was helping a desperate kid, but the truth was, he needed the kid just as much as the kid needed him. The man wrote that after that night, his world cracked open. He started calling his daughter every week. He finally went to the storage room and took his late wife’s coffee mug off the shelf where it had been sitting untouched, and he started using it. He took the mug off the shelf of safety and put it back into the messy, vulnerable flow of daily life.

That, my friends, is what the NRSVue means when it calls us to:

“…take hold of the life that really is life.” (1 Timothy 6:19 NRSVue)

The First Nations Version calls it “the true life of the world to come that begins right now.”

The life that is truly life is not a life where we finally accumulate enough safety to never need anyone again. It is a life lived with open hands.

Open hands are vulnerable. They can’t hold a weapon, and they can’t lock a fortress. But open hands are the only hands that can receive daily bread. They are the only hands that can hold the hand of a neighbor on the margins. They are the only hands that can welcome and feed the stranger. They are the only hands that can take the cup of grace off the shelf and share it.

May we, as individuals, as a church, as a community, refuse the freeze of scarcity. May we have the courage to trust the web of community over the illusion of the fortress. May we walk the path of respect with a satisfied heart, open our hands, and take hold of the life that really is life.