"Means by no means" -- by the Rev. Becca Stevens

A street encounter with Roger Miller's classic song "King of the Road" prompts reflections on the Feeding of the Five Thousand. On scarcity and abundance. Remembering that we are people of means by no means ... and that God provides more than enough. And how she found herself and her community challenged to live the call to joyful faith in the midst of scarcity.





The Rev. Becca Stevens is a priest, author, rector of St. Augustine's Church in Nashville, TN and founder of Magdalene House. She has also worked with St. Augustine's to found a school in Ecuador. Read her bio here.

"Walter Brueggemann on Abundance and Scarcity" -- by Carl Hooker

In my last post I talked about my apparently naive shock at a preaching I saw while flipping through the channels one Sunday morning. It did shock me, and I was quite a bit confused at what I saw. Maybe I need to get out more. I found the following article while researching a sermon and feel as though it nicely places some of the issues raised by what I saw in perspective. The link will take you to the entire article while I have kept just some snips below.

The Liturgy of Abundance, The Myth of Scarcity

by Walter Brueggemann

The majority of the world's resources pour into the United States. And as we Americans grow more and more wealthy, money is becoming a kind of narcotic for us. We hardly notice our own prosperity or the poverty of so many others. The great contradiction is that we have more and more money and less and less generosity--less and less public money for the needy, less charity for the neighbor.

Robert Wuthnow, sociologist of religion at Princeton University, has studied stewardship in the church and discovered that preachers do a good job of promoting stewardship. They study it, think about it, explain it well. But folks don't get it. Though many of us are well intentioned, we have invested our lives in consumerism. We have a love affair with "more"--and we will never have enough. Consumerism is not simply a marketing strategy. It has become a demonic spiritual force among us, and the theological question facing us is whether the gospel has the power to help us withstand it. The Bible starts out with a liturgy of abundance. Genesis 1 is a song of praise for God's generosity. It tells how well the world is ordered. It keeps saying, "It is good, it is good, it is good, it is very good." It declares that God blesses--that is, endows with vitality--the plants and the animals and the fish and the birds and humankind. And it pictures the creator as saying, "Be fruitful and multiply." In an orgy of fruitfulness, everything in its kind is to multiply the overflowing goodness that pours from God's creator spirit. And as you know, the creation ends in Sabbath. God is so overrun with fruitfulness that God says, "I've got to take a break from all this. I've got to get out of the office."

(snip)

Later in Genesis God blesses Abraham, Sarah and their family. God tells them to be a blessing, to bless the people of all nations. Blessing is the force of well-being active in the world, and faith is the awareness that creation is the gift that keeps on giving. That awareness dominates Genesis until its 47th chapter. In that chapter Pharaoh dreams that there will be a famine in the land. So Pharaoh gets organized to administer, control and monopolize the food supply. Pharaoh introduces the principle of scarcity into the world economy. For the first time in the Bible, someone says, "There's not enough. Let's get everything."

(snip)

When the children of Israel are in the wilderness, beyond the reach of Egypt, they still look back and think, "Should we really go? All the world's glory is in Egypt and with Pharaoh." But when they finally turn around and look into the wilderness, where there are no monopolies, they see the glory of Yahweh.

In answer to the people's fears and complaints, something extraordinary happens. God's love comes trickling down in the form of bread. They say, "Manhue?"--Hebrew for "What is it?"--and the word "manna" is born. They had never before received bread as a free gift that they couldn't control, predict, plan for or own. The meaning of this strange narrative is that the gifts of life are indeed given by a generous God. It's a wonder, it's a miracle, it's an embarrassment, it's irrational, but God's abundance transcends the market economy.

Three things happened to this bread in Exodus 16. First, everybody had enough. But because Israel had learned to believe in scarcity in Egypt, people started to hoard the bread. When they tried to bank it, to invest it, it turned sour and rotted, because you cannot store up God's generosity. Finally, Moses said, "You know what we ought to do? We ought to do what God did in Genesis 1. We ought to have a Sabbath." Sabbath means that there's enough bread, that we don't have to hustle every day of our lives. There's no record that Pharaoh ever took a day off. People who think their lives consist of struggling to get more and more can never slow down because they won't ever have enough.

When the people of Israel cross the Jordan River into the promised land the manna stops coming. Now they can and will have to grow their food. Very soon Israel suffers a terrible defeat in battle and Joshua conducts an investigation to find out who or what undermined the war effort. He finally traces their defeat to a man called A'chan, who stole some of the spoils of battle and withheld them from the community. Possessing land, property and wealth makes people covetous, the Bible warns. We who are now the richest nation are today's main coveters. We never feel that we have enough; we have to have more and more, and this insatiable desire destroys us.

Whether we are liberal or conservative Christians, we must confess that the central problem of our lives is that we are torn apart by the conflict between our attraction to the good news of God's abundance and the power of our belief in scarcity--a belief that makes us greedy, mean and unneighborly. We spend our lives trying to sort out that ambiguity.

(snip)

But if you are like me, while you read the Bible you keep looking over at the screen to see how the market is doing. If you are like me, you read the Bible on a good day, but you watch Nike ads every day. And the Nike story says that our beginnings are in our achievements, and that we must create ourselves. My wife and I have some young friends who have a four-year-old son. Recently the mother told us that she was about to make a crucial decision. She had to get her son into the right kindergarten because if she didn't, then he wouldn't get into the right prep school. And that would mean not being able to get into Davidson College. And if he didn't go to school there he wouldn't be connected to the bankers in Charlotte and be able to get the kind of job where he would make a lot of money. Our friends' story is a kind of a parable of our notion that we must position ourselves because we must achieve and build our own lives.

(snip)

Wouldn't it be wonderful if liberal and conservative church people, who love to quarrel with each other, came to a common realization that the real issue confronting us is whether the news of God's abundance can be trusted in the face of the story of scarcity? What we know in the secret recesses of our hearts is that the story of scarcity is a tale of death. And the people of God counter this tale by witnessing to the manna. There is a more excellent bread than crass materialism. It is the bread of life and you don't have to bake it. As we walk into the new millennium, we must decide where our trust is placed.

The great question now facing the church is whether our faith allows us to live in a new way. If we choose the story of death, we will lose the land--to excessive chemical fertilizer, or by pumping out the water table for irrigation, perhaps. Or maybe we'll only lose it at night, as going out after dark becomes more and more dangerous.

(snip)

The feeding of the multitudes, recorded in Mark's Gospel, is an example of the new world coming into being through God. When the disciples, charged with feeding the hungry crowd, found a child with five loaves and two fishes, Jesus took, blessed ,broke and gave the bread. These are the four decisive verbs of our sacramental existence. Jesus conducted a Eucharist, a gratitude. He demonstrated that the world is filled with abundance and freighted with generosity. If bread is broken and shared, there is enough for all. Jesus is engaged in the sacramental, subversive reordering of public reality.

The profane is the opposite of the sacramental. "Profane" means flat, empty, one-dimensional, exhausted. The market ideology wants us to believe that the world is profane--life consists of buying and selling, weighing, measuring and trading, and then finally sinking down into death and nothingness. But Jesus presents an entirely different kind of economy, one infused with the mystery of abundance and a cruciform kind of generosity. Five thousand are fed and 12 baskets of food are left over--one for every tribe of Israel. Jesus transforms the economy by blessing it and breaking it beyond self-interest. From broken Friday bread comes Sunday abundance. In this and in the following account of a miraculous feeding in Mark, people do not grasp, hoard, resent, or act selfishly; they watch as the juices of heaven multiply the bread of earth. Jesus reaffirms Genesis 1.

When people forget that Jesus is the bread of the world, they start eating junk food--the food of the Pharisees and of Herod, the bread of moralism and of power. Too often the church forgets the true bread and is tempted by junk food. Our faith is not just about spiritual matters; it is about the transformation of the world. The closer we stay to Jesus, the more we will bring a new economy of abundance to the world. The disciples often don't get what Jesus is about because they keep trying to fit him into old patterns--and to do so it to make him innocuous, irrelevant and boring. But Paul gets it.

(snip)

In 2 Corinthians 8, Paul directs a stewardship campaign for the early church and presents Jesus as the new economist. Though Jesus was rich, Paul says, "yet for your sakes he became poor, that by his poverty you might become rich." We say it takes money to make money. Paul says it takes poverty to produce abundance. Jesus gave himself to enrich others, and we should do the same. Our abundance and the poverty of others need to be brought into a new balance. Paul ends his stewardship letter by quoting Exodus 16: "And the one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little." The citation is from the story of the manna that transformed the wilderness into abundance.

It is, of course, easier to talk about these things than to live them. Many people both inside and outside of the church haven't a clue that Jesus is talking about the economy. We haven't taught them that he is. But we must begin to do so now, no matter how economically compromised we may feel. Our world absolutely requires this news. It has nothing to do with being Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives, socialists or capitalists. It is much more elemental: the creation is infused with the Creator's generosity, and we can find practices, procedures and institutions that allow that generosity to work. Like the rich young man in Mark 10, we all have many possessions. Sharing our abundance may, as Jesus says, be impossible for mortals, but nothing is impossible for God. None of us knows what risks God's spirit may empower us to take. Our faith, ministry and hope at the turn of the millennium are that the Creator will empower us to trust his generosity, so that bread may abound.

Walter Brueggermann is professor emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. This article appeared in The Christian Century, March 24-31, 1999. Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation and used by permission. This text was prepared for Religion Online by John C. Purdy.

Editor's Note: For more information about consumerism and What One Can Do to embrace the liturgy of abundance and jump fearlessly away from the myth of scarcity go to

www.giveit4good.org
www.storyof stuff.com

Please leave your comments below about how we can do this work together!

Carl Hooker is an economist employed in an academic healthcare system. He is an EGR diocese coordinator in the Diocese of Missouri, and currently studying in the diocesan school for ministry.

"Abundance" - by Dr. Christiana Russ

These past few weeks I have been thinking a good deal about abundance. In my last blog I had written some about the culture shock of returning to the United States during the Christmas season, and the incredible and overwhelming abundance of material things that we are blessed with. Lately I have been thinking about God’s abundance instead.

We are used to working with models of scarcity. We talk a lot in development about ‘sustainability’. In the church the catch phrases such as ‘good stewardship’ might have us thinking along the same lines. I recently was talking with an HIV committee at a church group and heard the quote ‘Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.’ spoken by Theodore Roosevelt.

So that is a very good and reasonable way to approach economics – distributing scarce resources. I think the quandary faced by those of us who claim to believe in a God of abundance is that we sometimes get trapped into believing our resources are scarcer than they are.

Let me explain a bit further. I work part of each year as a pediatrician in Kenya, and one of the most frustrating problems I face is the overwhelming numbers of people who just absolutely can not afford health care for their children. The hard part is that the mission hospital is already limping along – charging minimal fees for services. Those minimal fees still amount to $10 a day for an admission plus additional fees for lab services and medications. Parents are so worried about hospital charges that they don’t bring their children in to hospital at all, or if they do bring them it is often in very late stages of illness when appropriate care is decidedly more complicated and expensive than it might have been several days prior.

Our current economic models don’t offer really great solutions to this dilemma. Insurance would perhaps give people a safety net that would bring them in sooner for care, but the national health insurance in Kenya is too expensive for most poor rural families. The only conclusion I can come to is that at least right now, while the general populace in rural western Kenya is so impoverished (we all hope that will change some day), an external source of funds needs to exist to subsidize or pay for health care. The economists among us might disagree but that was the solution I kept bumping up against.

And that idea would stick like a big lump in the back of my throat. My prayers filled with phrases such as, ‘God – I don’t have that kind of money. God – I don’t KNOW anyone with that kind of money. God -- I know I can find money for the 30 or so kids who come to the hospital each month for care now but once this plan works and more children are brought in for care, I’ll be entirely up a creek.’

God fortunately is pretty clear with me in these situations. I sent out an email asking for money for a de-worming program for our kids in Maseno. The response resulted in about five times as much money as I had hoped to raise. I wrote my initial blog describing my frustration at the lack of funds for healthcare. There were additional generous responses with funds sent to Maseno Hospital. Friends from home also offered money to be used as a sort of discretionary fund. Gradually I began to get the idea – our God is a God of abundance. He says, ‘Ask and you shall receive.’

This doesn’t mean don’t be careful with money. I do believe in good stewardship and stretching your every donated Kenyan schilling as far as it will go. But I also am learning that sometimes you have to dream a little bit bigger than you might otherwise be comfortable with. Sometimes you have to have a little faith that God is backing you up and has sent you to this work and will not abandon you.

So I continue to seek that balance between realism and sustainability and faith in God’s wonderful abundance. How else can we move towards God’s Kingdom come? Please keep Kenya in your prayers.

Dr. Christiana Russ is a pediatrician on faculty at Boston Children's Hospital. She spends half the year at an Anglican mission hospital in Kenya through a joint arrangement with Children's and the Diocese of Massachusetts. Christiana is chair of the Executive Council Standing Commission on HIV/AIDS.