Abundance

Scripture: The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 17), A.D. 2015 B

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Abundance, that’s the theme from our Scriptures this morning. God gives to us abundantly. There, that’s your sermon, took about 10 seconds. But abundance can be a strange thing. It can prove elusive, because statistically the more material abundance we have the less abundantly we live.

Up until very recently, there was no such thing as a middle class. It’s not that everyone was dirt poor, mind you, but there were effectively two sorts of people: the sort who would go hungry if the harvest went bad, and the elite few who would never have to worry about running out of food no matter what. You could be a skilled craftsman in a nice house with plenty of land, but if war or drought or pestilence came through, your family would begin to starve. The kings wouldn’t. The priests wouldn’t. But pretty much everyone else would.

That’s why food is such a big deal in the Bible, from pretty much the get-go. Eden is a garden of rich fruits in the middle of the desert. Moses calls down manna from heaven and water from the rock in the wilderness. Elijah blesses inexhaustible jars of oil and flour in the midst of a drought. His successor Elisha feeds a hundred grown men with but a single score of little barley loaves. And Jesus, of course, blows them all out of the water by filling the bellies of 5,000 hungry families on just five loaves and two fish, with so much left over that the scraps fill a dozen large baskets.

Abundance in the midst of scarcity is the sign of God’s presence. It’s not about the food. Jesus makes it perfectly clear that the miraculous sign of feeding the 5,000 is so much more than just a free lunch. It’s a revelation of who God is, a powerful one.

I fear, however, that in many ways this sign is completely lost on us. You and I? We’re not normal. We don’t come from the normal world. We come from what people have started to call the WEIRD world. And WEIRD here is an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. We are the people of abundance. We are the elite few who never seriously have to worry about running out of calories. We are outliers not only throughout history but throughout the world today.

Here’s how weird we are. Down through human history, being fat has been a sign of wealth. The Icelandic sagas praise a successful man for growing stout. In medieval Europe, nobles used to hammer false bellies into their armor to make themselves appear more overweight than they truly were. In modern America, however, obesity is associated with poverty. The rich can afford organic produce and personal trainers and gym memberships. The poor make do with root beer, McRibs, and Ramen. That’s just bizarre.

So you can see how perhaps these biblical images of abundance in the midst of scarcity might backfire on us. We often suffer not from too little but from too much. Americans throw out 40% of all our food. We hold annual garage sales and spring cleanings to purge all the clutter from our houses. Having more bread than you need simply doesn’t impress people like us. We’re watching our carbs, after all.

But again, the bread isn’t the point. The Bible uses material abundance as a sign pointing to spiritual abundance. Hungry people will understand this; for them, having all you can eat is a spiritual experience. Well-fed people will have a harder time appreciating what it is, exactly, that we don’t have—what it is, in fact, that we severely lack. We lack spiritual abundance.

Think about it. How many of us wish we had more time? How many of us yearn for a break? How many of us lack sleep, lack peace, lack meaning in our lives? How many of us ache for a deeper spirituality to breathe purpose into the daily grind? Yes, we have abundance—abundance the likes of which our ancestors could hardly dream—but material abundance cannot fill a spiritual void. There is no technological solution for this malady. There is no economic supply for this demand. We cannot buy our way out from a scarcity of the soul.

I am always reminded of this whenever I buy a new book. I can go online and purchase almost any book ever written over more than 5,000 years of recorded human history, and usually I can find a copy used for less than the $4.00 it costs to ship from anywhere in the world. The sum total of human wisdom is at my fingertips. But the one thing I can’t seem to find is the time to read it. Oh, the irony.

Why are religious affiliations collapsing only in the WEIRD world? Why are almost a quarter of our fellow Americans calling themselves “nones”? I believe it’s because we’re trying to use material abundance to satisfy our spiritual hunger. We think that buying enough products or consuming enough entertainment or pursuing enough lifestyle fads can satisfy the God-sized hole in our chests. But it can’t, any more than stuffing your face with Krispy Kreme doughnuts can cure a vitamin deficiency. We’re feeding the wrong need.

That’s why the more we have, the more we want. The higher our household income, the less we give to charity. The more creature comforts we possess, the greater grows our fear of losing them. The things that we buy simply cannot satisfy. Real abundance, the abundance offered to us freely in Christ Jesus, has nothing to do with what’s in your garage or on your itinerary. Real abundance has to do with deep and abiding peace—has to do with generosity and selflessness and meaning and community and forgiveness and all the ways that we find God truly present in everyday life. The holy dwells in humility, not in hubris.

If you have this abundance, you have everything. You know that you are infinitely loved, that you have an infinite inheritance, and that you will enjoy this abundance throughout eternity. Such abundance liberates us from fear, from selfishness, and from the looming specter of death. We are freed now to share our excess with those in true need, freed from the suffocating weight of our things. Let them go. There is no scarcity in God. There is no end to His promises.

When we gather at this Table for the Lord’s Supper, we will not find an all-you-can-eat buffet. We will not fill our bellies and gather up the remainders in baskets. Instead, we shall receive a small, slim wafer and some few drops of wine. In material terms, it is a paucity, a scarcity. But this Bread of Life and Cup of Salvation are nothing other than the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, infusing us with eternal life, purging us of all our sins and all that separates us from God, fusing us with the Risen Lord as thoroughly as the melting wax of two candles fuses into a single form. It is beyond abundance. It is infinite.

When you come up to this altar, it matters not one whit the size of your paycheck or the square footage of your house or the designer label on your clothes. Every seeking soul who comes hungering and thirsting for Christ receives, here and now, eternal life, eternal love, eternal joy, forever. And nothing—not penury, not pain, not frailty nor illness nor any failing of body or soul—nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. You have everything you could ever desire and infinitely more promised to you in this single, simple morsel of bread and wine.

Eat this bread. Drink this cup. Then boldly go to share the abundance of Christ with all those in need.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.