We've also got a lovely music program, a solid and regularly updated website and media presence, and competent livestreaming. As a congregation, we punch waaaay above our weight, if blessings and community engagement were jabs and uppercuts. I delight in the gifts and graces of our mutually supportive and Spirit-filled fellowship.
But we're small, and there's only so much resource available when you're small.
So I ask, consistently, only for that which I know I need. Even though I'm just a half-timer, I'm still the single largest expense for my congregation. This, in large part, is because they've been providing me and my family with health insurance, the costs of which have risen more than twenty percent in the last five years. I'm both grateful for that care, but also attentive to how it drains material resource from the ministry efforts I value. With that in mind, taking more than I require wouldn't honor my deep personal commitment to the success of our mutual efforts as a congregation. Just as meaningfully, it wouldn't reflect how my labors as a pastor reflect the values that define me as a soul.
This is one of the many, many ways in which I and Elon Musk are different people.
Despite our nontrivial distinctions, he and I both love the hard science fiction of Ian M. Banks, which would be the most engaging line of conversation in the unlikely event we ever crossed paths. Other topics, like politics, the Gospel, or the integrity of our relational commitments? Well, there we've got fundamentally different understandings of value. That extends, rather deeply, to our understanding of vocation.
A trillion dollars? Really? One trillion dollars is what a soul needs to be motivated enough to do their job, and to bring something of value into the world?
I mean, sure, if we were deep into a Weimar-style hyperinflationary cycle, and a six inch at Subway was going for fifty grand, I could see that. But now, it's literally an embarrassment of riches. One trillion dollars? I don't even desire that.
I mean, one might argue it's a multi-year contract. But how many years? That literally insane amount of lucre would support my pastoral salary for the next sixteen million years, for two thousand times the entire span of written human history.
More deeply, what does that say about how one works and views one's labor?
I do what I do because I love it and understand its intrinsic value. I understand my needs, and the needs of those who rely on me. I grasp the scale and span of my existence, and am satisfied with it. Wealth? Wealth is just a social proxy for power. It is not power itself. Because it is interlaced with the structures of coercive power, it's repugnant to my anarcholibertarian sensibilities.
The hunger for wealth is an imposed system of valuation, extrinsic to my existential purpose. This is, of course, because of my commitment to the Gospel, but making an argument against excessive compensation from the teachings of Jesus would be meaningless to Elon. It's not a value framework we share.
Instead, perhaps it would be useful for him to consider it this way: In Ian M. Banks Culture novels, set in an abundant future where human beings live in a gloriously expansive universe, why do human beings work? Do they work for social status or material reward?
They do not, not the healthy ones, anyway. Work is for the joy of creating, period. It is, as Banks wrote in his 1994 essay A Few Notes on the Culture, "...indistinguishable from play, or a hobby."
How necessary is a trillion dollars, if one is at play doing what one loves? How necessary is the approval of others, or one's social standing?
That someone would suggest that our delight has a price seems faintly insulting.
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