Isaiah 7: 13,14,15; Luke 2: 1, 3-7

Scarcity

In the summer of 1980 I was working as a fulltime youth director at a church in one of the wealthiest part of the Silicon Valley.  I had an advanced degree already but I was making $400 a month and house and dog sitting the villas and canines of vacationing church members.  One time I was overhearing a conversation between two male church members, talking about a business venture and heard one of them say:” if I just had a million dollars.”  Now everyone says this at least once during their lifetime perhaps, but it was the way he said it that caught my attention.  It was this expression of deeply felt scarcity that made my head turn: if I just had a million dollars.  Even a million dollars he didn’t have.

I found four books about scarcity on the Amazon website.  First there is a play by Lucy Thurber entitled “scarcity.” Set in rural western Massachusetts, Scarcity tells the tale of two siblings [Meredith Brandt and Jesse Eisenberg] whose aspirations to escape the confines of poverty and small town life come into direct conflict with their sense of family responsibility.  It exposes the behavior people will engage in to get out of poverty.  Sechil Millanaithan and Elder Shafir wrote the book “Scarcity-why having too little means so much.” They tell the story of a food deprivation experiment in Minnesota during World War I and how the subjects of the study lost interest in anything in life other than food.  Christopher Clugson published a food on natural resources: “Scarcity, humanity’s final chapter?” And then there is a book by Victoria Castle by the title” The Trance of Scarcity.”  She talks about how we are totally used by scarcity thinking in our personal lives: “we are not good enough , smart enough, stylish enough, worthy enough….There is never enough of anything.  So when we consider these books we can conclude that scarcity is a real issue in our world: there is the scarcity of real hunger and poverty and of natural resources we are depleting way too fast. But there is also unhelpful, self-destructive scarcity thinking.

Friends, it occurred to me that so much of life is about scarcity or in the case of the two rich men in the Silicon family about the perception of scarcity.  The words “not enough” are always on our lips.  It occurred to me a while ago that the story of the birth of the Christ child is all about scarcity.  Mary and Joseph are Nazareth people, from the north country, considered by many not to be not sophisticated enough; Mary is pregnant and it isn’t Joseph’s child so they are not respectable enough.  Joseph does not know what to think at first so there is not trust enough.  Then they have to go to Bethlehem to be counted as subjects because the Roman Emperor feels he doesn’t have subjects enough.  Then there is not lodging enough, because there is no room in the inn.  Then Herod wants to kill the baby and they flee so there is not security enough.  It appears the authors of those books on scarcity are on to something.  The baby is born into scarcity, but later on in John 10 verse 10 the adult Jesus says:”I came so you might have life and have it abundantly.”  Jesus was addressing the scarcity of hope and the scarcity of faith and the scarcity of joy.

The scarcity of Christmas is so often made to look pretty with angels and well dressed shepherds and wildly clothes kings and stars shining brightly.  Then we have the Christmas ornaments and the lights and the presents and the food and we cover up all the bleak scarcity of the moment of the birth of Christ.  But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.

I was listening to some of the men in our church talking about how their experience of this church has a way of filling a void they have sometimes felt.  By saying that, they admitted to the scarcity of something in their lives, but also that that scarcity can be healed.  You know, friends, a lot of times churches and pastors will ask: what can we do to make more people come to our church? So they come up with things to attract more people. But maybe that really is the wrong question.  The question should be: how can we heal people’ s experience and sense of scarcity, how can we help make their life abundant, how can we help make them whole?  Then just wait and see what happens.  I do, believe, friends, that a community such as this has something to say about the scarcity in people’s life: of love and support and togetherness and friendship and hope and meaning and yes of food.  And that a community such as this can help heal the suffering of those beyond our walls where people are starving and languishing in jails without trial and facing sorrow that no human can or could or should bear.  The child was born into scarcity to bring life and love and meaning and hope abundant. Thanks be to God.