Enough: Scarcity vs Abundance during Advent

Can the good news of God’s abundance be trusted in the face of the story of scarcity?

In this odd season where our culture simultaneously tells us to produce dispositions of gratitude while also obsessing over shopping for and posturing at holiday gatherings where we feel the opposite…this question whispers a haunting undertone.

The question comes from theologian Walter Brueggemann, in an essay entitled The Liturgy of Abundance, The Myth of Scarcity.¹  He aptly notes about our culture, “We have a love affair with ‘more’ — and we will never have enough.” At the root of it, we don’t trust the story of generous abundance laid out for us in scripture.  Rather, we buy the shadow-story of scarcity, the line that there’s not enough.  It doesn’t matter what “it” is — money, time, prestige, people who care about what we think, kids who show up at youth group — our tendency is to say, “Not enough!”

Brueggemann reminds us that the story of God speaks in opposition to this. He writes, “The Bible starts out with a liturgy of abundance. Genesis 1 is a song of praise for God’s generosity… [it] affirms generosity and denies scarcity.”  From manna in the wilderness to a small lunch feeding thousands, the story goes on to tell 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.”

So the question before us, that we will prove by our actual response this Advent, is…do we trust this story to be true?

1. Later published (2000) in Brueggemann’s Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope: Contested Truth in a Post-Christian World. [↩]

©2009 Fuller Youth Institute