University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

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Genesis 47:13-26; Mark 6:30-44

A Sermon by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

October 18, 2009

            Over the years, as some of you know, I have been fascinated by an annual study researchers call The Generosity Index.  The Generosity Index, compiled most recently by the Fraser Institute, measures private monetary generosity using two indicators: the percentage of tax filers who donated to charities (that is, the extent of generosity), and the percentage of aggregate personal incomes donated to charity (or the depth of generosity).  Those figures are measured state-by-state and province-by-province to see which U.S. states or Canadian provinces are the most generous.

            Several things are clear from the most recent report: first, Canadians are far less generous than their American counterparts in terms of charitable giving. Second, the top state in the Generosity Index this past year was Utah, with an average charitable giving percentage at 3.8 percent of personal income. Wyoming topped the list of top dollar amount, with average charitable donations of $10,020.  The dubious honor of last place among the American states this year belonged to West Virginia, with less than one percent of income being devoted to charitable giving.  By the way, North Carolina finished eleventh among the 50 states in the most recent index.[1]   

            What is it that makes some folks generous with what they have and others stingy?  Call it culture, if you will.  Call it nurture.  In Utah’s case, call it the deep-seated religious practice of tithing among Mormons. I would argue that fundamentally the difference has to do with how people understand their lives: do they sense that God is gracious and that their abilities and resources are gifts entrusted to them?  Or that life is hard and resources are scarce and that they therefore must scrape and hoard all that they can? 

            I don’t know where you fit along the continuum between those two poles, if anywhere, but this much I know: the Bible begins and ends with “a liturgy of abundance.”[2]  It is very the nature of God, Scripture says, to endow and bless.  In those same Scriptures Jesus Christ models an ethic of abundance and expansive grace and a non-anxious manner of living in his earthly ministry, and calls his followers to do the same.  If we choose to live some other way, that’s our choice. 

The Bible, however, is clear, right from the beginning. As Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann notes: “Genesis 1 is a song of praise for God’s generosity. It tells how 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.”

Later in Genesis, God blesses Abraham and 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 47^th chapter [from which we read a few minutes ago].  In that chapter Pharaoh [becomes concerned about an impending famine].  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.”

Pharaoh hires Joseph to manage the monopoly.  When the crops fail and the peasants run out of food, they come to Joseph.  And on behalf of Pharaoh, Joseph asks, “What’s your collateral?”  They give up their land for food, and then, the next year, they give up their cattle.  By the third year of the famine they have no collateral but themselves.  And [that is] how the children of Israel become slaves – through an economic transaction.[3]

            You remember what happens next… the story of the Exodus… how Pharaoh turns mean and brutal and ugly under the influence of that myth of scarcity, how the Hebrew people chafe and ultimately rebel against Pharaoh’s tyranny, how Pharaoh becomes exasperated by his inability to control them and summons Aaron and Moses and tells them amid plagues and fear to take the Hebrew people out of his land.  The story of the Exodus demonstrates “that the power of the future is not in the hands of those who believe in scarcity…; it’s in the hands of those who trust God’s abundance.”

            The Exodus, though, has its own share of fear and un-trust.  There are those who begin to experience the hardship and hunger of the journey and suggest turning back; but then, in answer to their fears, God does something extraordinary. God’s love begins to rain down upon the people in the form of bread, again demonstrating the gracious provision of a generous God. The liturgy of abundance begins once again. Then a curious thing happens: everyone has enough, but because the children of Israel have learned to believe in scarcity, they start to hoard the bread. Oddly though, when they try to keep it for themselves, it turns sour and rots.  You can’t hoard God’s generosity.[4]

            All through the Hebrew Scriptures the competing visions of abundance and scarcity play themselves out, with an unmistakable current of teaching reminding the people of God’s gracious provision and calling them to celebrate the liturgy of abundance.  It is a theme that continues to develop in the New Testament; everywhere Jesus goes, grace expands and the world is rearranged: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the dead are raised, and the poor are freed from debt. 

            In our reading from Mark’s Gospel today God’s expansiveness is seen once again.  The crowd is large; suppertime is approaching, and the disciples worry that food stuffs are scarce and urge Jesus to send the multitudes away.  Instead, Jesus instructs his disciples to feed the people out of what they have. Jesus takes the small portions of bread and fish, blesses them and breaks them and gives them to the disciples to distribute to the crowd.  And there is enough… in fact, more than enough.  Jesus “demonstrated that the world is filled with abundance and freighted with generosity.  If bread is broken and shared, there is enough for all.”[5]

            Like the story of creation and redemption in the Old Testament, the Christian story is a story of abundance, too. It is the story we are called to believe and to live in our lives.  But too often we buy into the myth of scarcity, which suggests that the past is barren of miracles and the only way to get anywhere is to scramble for whatever we can get. A past without gifts and a future without hope conspire to create a present full of anxiety.[6]

            I think of my own father, who struggled so mightily during the Great Depression and who never got over it.  My father was miserly, stingy, and bitter about life.  We never had much when I was a child, and it greatly troubled my father.  His life was full of anxiety and fretting. He lived by the myth of scarcity and he died still bitter for the raw deal he felt he got in life.  But I think, too, of my mother, who also lived through the Great Depression, and whose experience in that time taught her not bitterness, but that there was more than one way to be rich.  For my mother, being rich meant learning to cultivate very few needs, and rejoicing that, by the grace of God, those needs were met. My mother lived with a steady confidence in the liturgy of abundance and the gracious provision of God.  She nurtured that gift in my brother and me.  In fact, it wasn’t until I was in a sophomore sociology class in college that I realized I had grown up in a household that lived below the poverty level. I had never thought of my family as poor…though I suspect my father rarely thought of anything else.

            I thought of my mother the other evening when I had the opportunity share supper with a group of physicians at UNC Hospitals.  We were talking mostly about competing values in the health care arena these days, but for a while we also spoke of this very concept of scarcity and abundance, and how we help our children think in terms of all we have to share. One of the doctors said that she chose to model abundance with her children, but within limits.  She said, “I often say to my children, you can do anything you want; you just can’t do everything you want.” Or, “You can have whatever you want for your birthday; you just can’t have everything you want.”  She said she wanted her children to focus more on what they could do than on what they couldn’t do, on what was possible more than on what was not possible, but she also didn’t want them to develop into greedy or self-centered people who thought they had to have or do everything.

            In the life of the church in these last twelve months, we have chosen something of the same wisdom.  We have made choices.  We haven’t done everything we might have wanted to do. In small ways we have done some scaling back, but not in what we do for others…for those whose needs have been only compounded by this prolonged and deep recession.  But I don’t think we’ve thought much about what we haven’t able to do; in every respect we have focused more on the things we could do, and we have done them gratefully and joyfully, for we know that what we have (what you help provide) in the life of University Church is always a gracious abundance.

            In these days we are asking you to think thoughtfully and prayerfully about your own “generosity index,” about what you will commit next week to the life of your church. But Christian stewardship at its heart is not about the church’s need for our resources; it is about our need to share those resources as a part of our faithful response to the generous abundance God has provided.  It is the part you and I are given to play in the lively, ongoing liturgy of abundance.  So play it for all that you’re worth, friends, and do so in confidence that if you do, there will always be enough…and plenty to share.