Not Enough

In the DC suburbs where I currently reside, the cost of housing is astronomical. 1000 square foot ranches sell for over half a million dollars. And I regularly receive phone calls at the church from people seeking assistance paying their rent. Their hours have been cut back and work and they can't meet the $1000 per month rent for their small apartment.  I have no idea how working class people of modest incomes manage to live around here.

This situation may be more extreme than in other areas, but most of us have learned all about scarcity, about there not being enough. It is the world we live in. Budgets, whether the family sort or the church sort are about how to allocate scarce resources because there is not enough. Indeed, capitalism and the free market system are predicated on the idea of scarcity, of not enough. That is how to get rich, to have something of which there is not enough to go around. If you have a lot of a scarce commodity, you will be well off.

This is the way of the world, but it is not the way of God. The God of the Bible is a God of abundance and provision, who promises to provide enough, daily bread. According to the book of Acts, the early church lived within this provision and abundance. "There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold." (Acts 4:34) Freed from their fears of not enough, there was plenty for all.

That early church was living out its experience of Jesus, whose self-giving extended even to life itself. Jesus trusted so fully in God's provision and abundance, that he had no need to guard his possessions, even his own life. And Jesus called his followers to discover this radical freedom to love others without worrying about the cost, this freedom to respond even to evil with love.

Unfortunately, as the church became an accepted part of the world, it began to conform to the world. It even began to transform Jesus' message of abundance and provision into one of scarcity. The church possessed a scarce commodity: salvation. And it would provide it for you, at the right price. And in the process, Jesus' ministry of bringing the reign of God and the ways of heaven to the world got displaced. The body of Christ, free to give itself to and for the world, was diminished, often to the point of near invisibility.

But a strange thing has happened in recent decades. The scarce commodity that the church has peddled all these centuries has lost much of its luster. For a myriad of reasons, people are not coming to the church to get some salvation. Perhaps they feel no need of it, at least not the kind the church is selling. Perhaps they feel they have found it elsewhere. Whatever the reasons, we have fewer and fewer customers.

These are anxious times for many churches in America, but they are also times that invite us to recall and rediscover the good news that has been entrusted to us. This good news presents us with a choice, just as it did thousands of years ago. Will we live by the ways of the world, focused on protecting what we have and serving our own? Or will we live into the ways of Jesus, into the promise of abundance and provision, giving ourselves freely to others?

I've mentioned this line from my denomination's Book of Order before, but I think it is a perfect statement of what it means to trust in God's provision, to live in the manner of Jesus and as the body of Christ. "The Church is to be a community of faith, entrusting itself to God alone, even at the risk of losing its life." (F-1.0301)

The promise of Easter is that such entrusting ourselves to God is not foolish, as the world supposes. Indeed it is the way to full and abundant life. Dare we believe that? Dare we live that?