“Stewardship Gone Right”

Exodus 16:1-5, 13-20

The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the LORD’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.”

Then the LORD said to Moses, “I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days.”

…That evening quail came and covered the camp, and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. When the dew was gone, thin flakes like frost on the ground appeared on the desert floor. When the Israelites saw it, they said to each other, “What is it?” For they did not know what it was.

Moses said to them, “It is the bread the LORD has given you to eat. This is what the LORD has commanded: ‘Everyone is to gather as much as they need. Take an omer for each person you have in your tent.’”

The Israelites did as they were told; some gathered much, some little. And when they measured it by the omer, the one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little. Everyone had gathered just as much as they needed.

Then Moses said to them, “No one is to keep any of it until morning.” However, some of them paid no attention to Moses; they kept part of it until morning, but it was full of maggots and began to smell. So Moses was angry with them.

This week, as I thought and prayed and studied in preparation for Stewardship Sunday, I came across an old article by theologian Walter Brueggeman. Brueggeman is a scholar of the Old Testament and is one of the best theologians of our day. His article on the “theology of abundance and the myth of scarcity” was so powerful for me that it completely changed how I wanted to talk about stewardship today. It reminded me that the reason we talk about stewardship isn’t so that we can squeeze more dollars out of people. It’s to remember where everything we have comes from and to whom we give it back to.So let's take a journey back, not to Jesus' parables, but to the very beginning of our scripture in the book of Genesis.

The Bible begins 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." Genesis declares that God blesses the plants and the animals and the fish and the birds and humankind. And it pictures the creator as saying, "Be fruitful and multiply." And then, 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."

If we skip a bit 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. This belief dominates Genesis until its 47th chapter. It’s there that things begin to change. Pharaoh dreams that there will be a famine in the land so he 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 is afraid that there aren't enough good things to go around and so he must try to have them all. Because he is fearful, he is ruthless. Pharaoh hires Joseph to manage the monopoly. This is a crucial point that I had never fully understood before until Bruggeman explained it this way. When the crops fail and the peasants run out of food, they come to Joseph. And on behalf of Pharaoh, Joseph says, "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's how the children of Israel become slaves -- through an economic transaction.

By the end of Genesis 47 Pharaoh has all the land except that belonging to the priests, which he never touches because he needs somebody to bless him. But crucially– the notion of scarcity has been introduced into biblical faith. The Book of Exodus records the contest between the liturgy of generosity and the myth of scarcity -- a contest that still tears us apart today.

By the end of Exodus, Pharaoh has been as mean, brutal and ugly as can be -- as the myth of scarcity tends to be. Finally he becomes so exasperated by his inability to control the people of Israel that he calls Moses and Aaron to come to him. Pharaoh tells them, "Take your people and leave. Take your flocks and herds and just get out of here!" After their escape from Egypt, the Hebrew people are reeling from what they just experienced. They have no template, no model, no history to prepare them for the wilderness and from a leader who is nothing like Pharoah. They are afraid, and as we know, fear is a dangerously powerful motivator. They say they’d rather go back to oppression and slavery in Egypt than face the uncertainty of the wilderness. 

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 anything 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 got 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, to save 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 I. 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.

And yet, 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. Soon after, 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 now are the world’s richest nation and are undoubtedly coveters. We never feel that we have enough; we have to have more and more, and this insatiable desire destroys us. It is a problem that bleeds across every party line, demographic, and proclaimed ideology. As Christians, we must confess that a 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.
The gospel story of abundance asserts that we originated in the magnificent, inexplicable love of a God who loved the world into generous being. In our baptism, it was declared that each of us has been miraculously loved into existence by God. And the story of abundance says that our lives will end in God, and that this well-being cannot be taken from us. In the words of  Paul, neither life nor death nor angels nor principalities-- nothing in all creation can separate us from God.

And so, what we know about our beginnings and our endings creates a different kind of “present tense” for us. We can live according to the message of scarcity that our world inundates us with on a daily basis, or we live at peace to care about others as we have been cared for by God.

Joshua 24 puts the choice before us. Joshua begins by reciting the story of God's generosity, and he concludes by saying, "I don't know about you, but I and my house will choose the Lord." To be clear, this is not a church-growth text. Joshua warns the people that this choice will bring them a bunch of trouble. If they want to be in on the story of abundance, they must put away their foreign gods -- the gods of scarcity.

It is so easy to believe the lie of scarcity over God’s abundance. I am just as susceptible to it as the next person. I think that’s why we need a community of faith– to remind each other the truth we say we believe. We need reminding and that’s ok! This is why Moses, after telling the Israelites the 10 commandments, tells the people, “These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”

We need reminders of God’s love, God’s faithfulness, and God’s generosity. We need reminders so that we can choose to be generous instead of afraid. Will there be enough? Enough to keep our families healthy, fed, and safe? Enough to get through retirement? Enough to keep the doors of church open? Enough to go around? I believe the answer is yes. Yes, we believe in a God of abundance who has never failed us yet. How will God provide? That I do not know. I do not know what the future of your families or of our church will look like. It may involve change, adaptation, and inspiration of a new vision for what is possible for us and for Lakewood Presbyterian Church.

I have not been here long, but I have been here long enough to call you friends. I am on this journey with you and I want to practice being a people who believe in God’s abundance. As you turn in your pledges today, I want you to do so with joy. Look how much you are able to give back to God! Look at all the good that your money has done, for the people of this church and of this community. Imagine what God might do next. I, for one, would love to be surprised with the abundant future God has in store for us. I would love to be a part of building that future together with you.