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October 2007
A theologian has written about what he calls “the great contradiction” in
American life today: the fact that Americans have more and more money and less
and less generosity -- less and less public money for the needy, less individual
charity for the neighbor. At the heart of this contradiction he says, is the
conflict between “the liturgy of abundance” and “the myth of scarcity.” And what
he says is well worth thinking about.
The Bible starts out with the liturgy
of abundance and continues through Jesus and Paul with the story of God’s
generosity. The creation story in Genesis is the story of an overflowing
goodness that pours from God’s creative spirit -- a regular “orgy of
fruitfulness.” and throughout the old testament this abundance of God, God’s
gracious providing, is experienced and celebrated again and again, and worry and
anxiety and greed are rejected. In the New Testament the ministry of Jesus
itself is the story of God’s abundant and overflowing grace -- a story that
invites us to see reality in a new way and live in a new way. We are invited to
trust God's abundance, the generous, helped transform the world by making bread
abound, hope abound for all.
But in the Biblical story the myth of
scarcity is also at work among the people. It is seen in the story of the manna
in the wilderness. God provided all the bread the people needed, but the people
wanted more. They wouldn’t trust God’s abundance and began gathering more manna
than they needed and hording it and refusing to share it. The people were
convinced they would never have enough, that scarcity was the reality, and soon
the story became a story of greed and meanness and un-neighborliness and it
destroyed many of them. And this is the story, the conflict, that continues to
the present day.
This conflict is the defining problem
of our time. Will we trust God's abundance or believe the myth of scarcity? Will
we recognize the reality of God's overflowing goodness or continue our love
affair with “more” and be driven by the anxiety of never having enough?
Biblically, it is a matter of life and death. The tale of scarcity is finally a
tale of despair and death: it leads to fear, worry, indifference to others,
looking out for yourself alone, divisions between people, even brutality and
war. The liturgy of abundance is a tale of hope and life: it leads to the peace
of trusting God’s gracious love, sharing bread, giving life by rearranging
structures to allow more and more to enjoy abundance.
Really, it’s what the gospel is all
about. The gospel “asserts that we originated in the magnificent, inexplicable
love of a God who love the world into generous being.” And our baptismal service
“declares that each of us has been miraculously loved into existence by God.”
And this gospel story of abundance “says that our lives will end in God, and
that this well-being cannot be taken from us.” And thus what the gospel does is
create a different kind of present for us: we can live in a way in which “we are
not driven, controlled, anxious, frantic or greedy, precisely because we are
sufficiently at home and at peace to care about others as we have been cared
for.”
Of course actually living this way is
not easy, so powerful is the myth of scarcity, so much do people believe that
they will never have enough. But there is something more powerful, and that is
the gospel. To trust it, to live according to the reality of God's abundance, to
add more and more practices of generosity and graciousness to our lives, to work
for a more generous public life in this country, is to discover the power and
truth of it and the life and peace it gives.
And in a real sense, this is what
dedications Sunday, October 7th is about. When we bring to the altar our pledges
of time and talent and money, we’re saying that we do trust God's abundance and
that we want our story to be a story of life.
God be with you,
Jeff
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