When
the Bible speaks of abundance it is exclusively not in the terms of wealth
stored up in the bank so that I can live a more than comfortable life doing
things I want to do. In the Bible
abundance is a feast, a full table to be shared in celebration with
others. Abundance is the feast that
comes at the end of the harvest when the owner of the fields and the workers
sit together around a huge table filled with food and gratefully celebrate
God’s goodness towards them.
Abundance is an open table to which all are welcome.
My
grandmother, we called her Mawmaw, she knew abundance. She came from a farming family, the youngest
of sixteen. She said they came in two
waves of eight, but the siblings in the second wave were the only ones she ever
talked about. Being the youngest girl, I
suppose, meant she spent a lot of time in the kitchen and you could tell. Mawmaw could cook. A meal at her house was always a semblance of
a feast spread out. There was always a
little of this and a little of that, some were leftovers, and some made that
day and it all amounted to a lot.
Sometimes it seemed there was so much food on the table, it was hard to
find a place to set a plate. This was every
evening meal. My grandparents didn’t
have a lot, but they had abundance.
My
best friend growing up, his mother, Mom Landis, she knew abundance as
well. There was always a place at her
table and lots to eat. There were always
people, family and friends coming and going at their house and if you were there at dinnertime
you ate. Sometimes there would just be a
pot of something going on the stove and it didn’t matter what time it was you
just grabbed a bowl and ate. She made
the best chicken and dumplings, oyster stew, and spaghetti sauce.
In
the Bible abundance, God’s abundance, is that there is always enough, more than
enough for people to gather around a table and be well fed and enjoy each
other. There’s always a pot of something
for anyone and everyone to draw on. In
God’s abundance nothing keeps forever so share what you’ve got now.
That
being said we have to stand under the conviction that there is something
fundamentally un-Kingdom of God-like with a lifestyle that demands we work for
a number of years putting aside whatever we can so that we have something to
live on when we can’t work anymore.
Moreover, this idea we have that abundance is a big bank account
and a productive stock portfolio is foolish.
Take that barn-building rich fool in the parable for example. Hoarding is not what God has in mind for
humanity. There is and can be abundance
in this world, God’s abundance, for everybody to share in and have enough. Yet, when people start stockpiling it means a
few start getting it all while most everybody else ceases to have enough; and,
the resources that the earth has to give us become polluted and depleted.
Our
passage from Isaiah begins with “On this mountain the Lord Almighty will
prepare a feast” and there also the Lord will destroy death. With that prophecy Isaiah was pointing
forwards to the day of the end times that began in Jerusalem (Mt. Zion) with
Jesus’ resurrection. A feast began back
then in the early church in Jerusalem.
The first Christians began to share what they had. Those who owned fields that they didn’t need
sold them and gave to others in the church who had need. Widows and orphans, the most vulnerable in
that day, were well taken care of. In
effect, the early Christians eliminated poverty among themselves there in Jerusalem by living in
God’s abundance.
Paul
tried to extend this practice to the church on a more global scale. The collection he speaks of in 2 Corinthians
was an effort at this. The Jerusalem
churches had suffered a great famine and so Paul was getting the churches in
Turkey and Greece to help them out. He
was trying to enact God’s abundance.
Unfortunately,
he found a bit of reluctance in Corinth, which was a very wealthy area. When he first asked them to help, they were
very willing. But, a year had past and he was finally coming to them to collect the
money and he was hearing that they hadn’t been saving anything up for him.
Paul
reminds them that in God’s abundance, those who sow generously reap
generously. This is not a TV ministry
ploy where the TV preacher says send me $1,000 and God will reward you 100 fold
duping you to think that $100,000 is headed your way. One doesn’t give generously expecting a
reward back in money, but rather a reward in righteousness. The more we share the abundance we have the
more God fills our lives with what I would call the joy of feast-fellowship and
the certainty that we will never want. I
can truly say I felt joy around Mawmaw’s and Mom Landis' tables and that’s the way it is to be
around the table of God’s abundance.
This
is why churches need to potluck as much as they can and, if they can find a
way, feed the community around them. On
this mountain, inside the walls of this church and in our homes the Lord
Almighty is preparing that end of times feast where he swallows up the pall of
death and wipes away tears. Christians
potlucking is a powerful sign to what God is up to in history.
Sharing
in God’s abundance requires that we exercise two qualities of character that
God has given to everyone in Christ Jesus by his Spirit: hospitality and
generosity. Hospitality, God has opened
up and welcomed us into his very life, the loving communion of the Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit. So also, when we open
up our churches and our homes to share meals with neighbours and friends in
Jesus name, he is in our midst and he makes himself and his abundance known.
Generosity,
Paul says God loves a cheerful giver.
The Greek word for cheerful is hilarios
from which we get our word "hilarious".
God loves it when we are generous to the point of what the world would
call "joyfully ridiculous". God the Father
gave the Son who gave himself over to death that we might have life filled with
the Holy Spirit. I'm not going to call that joyfully ridiculous, but it is the extent that God went to destroy death for us. The least we can do is
discover the joy of not hoarding and rather being ridiculously generous knowing God will
always meet our every need.
We
Christians have an acute responsibility to model hospitality and generosity as
a way of life. God’s abundance is
available in this world and we are those whom he has called and made able to be
the living testimony to this Kingdom of God reality. The first Christians did it to the extent
that they eliminated poverty in their midst.
Are we up to the challenge? Or,
maybe I should ask that question in a different way: Would you like to know the abundant joy of
the Lord? Amen.
