Scarcity, Abundance, and the the Broken Pieces

Men's Lenten Breakfast 2016
John 6:5-14

            You can only make everybody happy if you’re Jesus. We are scarcity people, by which I mean we are people worried about what might come who store up what they already have. Some of this comes from being part of an agricultural community who is very much aware our dependence on the weather and various things outside of our control. Some of it is fiscal conservatism. Some of it is that ol’ Scandinavian tendency to put something away for a rainy day.

            Whatever it is, my great uncle Walt had it in spades. My great-uncle Walt spent his life farming the same plot of land near Blacktail Dam, north of Williston, North Dakota, up until his death at 95 years old around a decade ago. When he died, his family (meaning our extended family) discovered he had an account in a Williston bank with six figures just sitting in a checking account from which it appeared he never made a withdrawal. And no, for those of you who just got the brilliant idea that this pastor doesn’t need to be paid quite so much, no, I didn’t see any of that money, though my mom did, split about forty ways.

            There is something about my great-uncle Walt that is symbolic for me of a life of scarcity. Here was a man who spent his childhood in the dust bowl, who knew real poverty, who valued money so much that he never spent it, and here he was at the end of his life, in completely different circumstances, keeping the exact same philosophy even to his death. There’s something noble about that. There’s also something foolish about that. Maybe both in equal measure.

            When Jesus is presented with a moment of scarcity.—look, Jesus, we only have five barley loaves and two fish!—he turns scarcity into abundance. What they expected: To be out of food, to struggle to make people happy, to have a bunch of grouchy people stranded on a hillside, ended up being the very stage needed for Jesus to demonstrate what the kingdom of God looks like. It looks like abundance.

            You know scarcity well in this community. For this month’s newsletter article here at Grace I spent some time researching worship attendance numbers for the hey-days of the 1960s, because I always hear about how many people there were, how full it was, how much more was happening, etc. etc. So, I looked it up, and the average worship attendance here at Grace peaked in 1965. Every Sunday. That’s a little more than four times what we have today. There are reasons for this that you all know. Some of it is less people living in the area. Much of it is also that religion is no longer the center of our community, as it once was, so there are fewer people going to church generally. All of this leads to a feeling of scarcity and fear and tightening the belt, and putting aside more and more for a rainy day, because things today feel worse than they were once upon a time—and it’s only getting sparser and sparser.

            It is to places like these that Jesus appears. In fact, I’m going to suggest something that isn’t really radical but it might sound that way. Our problem is not that we don’t have enough people or time or resources or money. Our problem is that we still have too much. A few loaves and fish? Jesus can work with that. God is always working with very little. It’s those that have much—and have much stored up—that Jesus passes by. Why do those who have much need a Savior?

            But, actually, it doesn’t stop there. You see, after miraculously feeding the five thousand Jesus gives a command that is easy to overlook. He tells the disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” This is scarcity and abundance wrapped up in one small action. Jesus is telling us to trust in the absence of what we need, but he is also telling us to value every little fragment that we have. He’s telling us that all that little stuff matters because God does something with little things, with little people even. God doesn’t discard the remnants; he values them above and beyond the really good looking, new stuff.

            God can do something with the broken pieces. We see death, God sees new life. We see decline, God sees opportunity. We are people broken and given to the tendency to store away just in case, but Jesus shows us how patently unnecessary it is, because even our brokenness is of use in the kingdom of God. Every little thing, and nothing, is something that God can and will use.

            Every bit of you—the parts you like, the parts you don’t—and everything you have. That’s what God will use.