Bible study for Michigan stewardship event September 2009



Abundance and Generosity

A Stewardship Bible Study

Preparation:

1. In preparation for this Bible study, the leader-facilitator is encouraged to read the following chapters in two books by Walter Brueggemann:

a. Chapter Nine, “The Truth of Abundance: Relearning Dayenu,” in The Covenanted Self: Explorations in Law and Covenant (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1999).

b. Chapter Six, “The Liturgy of Abundance, the Myth of Scarcity” in Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope: Contested Truth in a Post-Christian World (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2000).

At the end of the study, participants may be encouraged to do the same if they’re interested in deeper exploration of these themes; perhaps the church library could have one or two copies on hand for members to borrow.

2. This Bible study can be used for an entire session of a meeting (45-90 minutes), depending on the pace of the reflection/discussion time. At least 30 minutes should be allotted for the study, although that would reduce the possibility of rich conversation. Taking an hour or more to explore Scripture raises our biblical literacy, grounds our “work” in the Bible, and is a wonderful spiritual practice for discipleship formation.

3. Materials needed for each participant: Bible (NRSV), pen/pencil and paper.

4. Provide each participant with the handout on the last page of this Bible study; there is space between each point to provide an outline for those who want to take notes.

5. Print out one copy of each of the texts from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) of the Bible, one reading to a page; email hueyk@ for an already prepared set of the texts in a Word file. Note: only one copy of each reading should be printed in total, for the readers, not one copy for each participant.

6. Hand out one reading to each participant who’s willing to read aloud. Ask volunteers to read with conviction and at a volume loud enough for all to hear. Participants will not have their own copies of the readings but will hear them proclaimed.

7. If participants need to read along, the text citation should be read slowly enough to allow time for them to find each passage in their Bible.

8. After each passage is read, provide a few moments of quiet, and then ask the participants to share as they are comfortable where they heard “abundance” and “generosity” in the reading. This sharing should be very brief, as in one word, or a short phrase. These words don’t need to be limited to “generous” and “abundant,” but can be words and images that suggest them. This can be a meditative, reflective exercise.

9. Content is provided for the leader-facilitator, which you’re encouraged to use or adapt as you see fit for your own group. In fact, you’re encouraged to adapt the entire Bible study to fit your needs as a stewardship committee, church leadership, or other group.

10. Before the study begins, prepare an opening and closing prayer; a candle could be lit as well.

Introduction

Stewardship is much more than an annual campaign to raise funds for next year’s budget.

It encompasses all of life:

• It’s a year-round practice, not just something we “do” in the fall (or whenever we conduct an annual stewardship campaign).

• Every season is stewardship season: someone once said, “Stewardship is what we do after we say ‘yes’ to God.”

• It’s an everyday spiritual practice that forms us as generous disciples of Jesus.

• Financial wellness (a healthy balance in our approach to money) is one way to practice responsible stewardship; our relationship with money, for better or worse, affects our spiritual well-being.

• Justice is an important expression of the good stewardship of God’s gifts for all of God’s children.

• We exercise good stewardship not only of money but of our relationships, our time, our health, God’s creation, and more.

• A scarcity mindset leads to fear, anxiety, and even greed, rather than generosity.

• Stewardship requires, reinforces, and springs from a theology of abundance.

Seeking the Biblical roots of a theology of abundance

The Bible tells the story of God’s generosity, from beginning to end, from the gift of an abundant creation, an earth overflowing with more than enough for all, to the gift of Jesus himself, the gift of the Spirit, the gift of the church, the vision and promise of a new creation.

As we listen to a series of passages from the Bible, I invite you to write down words or phrases that you hear in the text itself, or perhaps arising in your heart and mind, that suggest God’s abundant generosity. Perhaps you have never noticed them before, or thought of them as related to stewardship and generosity.

We’ll be drawing on the scholarship and poetic writing of the great scholar of the Old Testament, Walter Brueggemann, among others. As you listen to the readings, keep in mind three verbs: remember, trust, and share. If Brueggemann’s writings on abundance and the Bible had to be summed up in only three words, these three might be good choices.

The Bible: The Story of Abundance

1. “In the beginning….” From the very beginning, God lavished an abundance of good gifts on us. Genesis, our founding story, our story of origin, is unlike the stories other cultures told in those days. Where others saw conflict and wars between gods, our ancestors in faith remembered that one good and loving God created all that is, including humankind, blessing it all and pronouncing it “good.”

Read: Genesis 1:26-31

(Share words of abundance and generosity.)

Notes:

Genesis describes the abundance of God’s generosity and the way God intended things to be. To “have dominion over” can be defined not as having control or the right to use something but instead “to be responsible for its well-being.” The Inclusive Bible translates Genesis 1:28: “God blessed them and said, ‘Bear fruit, increase your numbers, and fill the earth – and be responsible for it! Watch over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things on earth!”

A footnote in that same translation reminds us that we are created in God’s image, “so surely the idea of stewardship and caretaking, not violation and destruction, is inherent in that calling.”[1]

2. Israel’s song of praise for God’s abundance: Israel noticed the abundance around them (how often do we miss it?) and remembered where it came from: a good God who found creation “good.”

Psalm 104: 1a, 10-28

(Share words of abundance and generosity.)

3. In the wilderness: After God delivered the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt, they spent time in the wilderness on their way to the land flowing with milk and honey. When things got tough, the people failed to remember the goodness of God and even longed for the “comfort” of the captivity they had left behind in Egypt. Moses and God reminded them, but instructed them to trust the goodness of the Giver to provide for them again the next day – that is, do not hoard.

Read: Exodus 16:11-21

(Share words of abundance and generosity.)

REMEMBER the giver, and TRUST the goodness of the one who provides: there will be enough.

Walter Brueggemann writes about the clear choice Joshua puts before the people as they enter the Promised Land flowing with milk and honey:

“Joshua 24: 15b puts the choice before us. Joshua begins by reciting the story of God's generosity, and he concludes by saying, "I don't know about you, but I and my house will choose the Lord." This is not a church-growth text. Joshua warns the people that this choice will bring them a bunch of trouble. If they want to be in on the story of abundance, they must put away their foreign gods -- I would identify them as the gods of scarcity.”[2]

Reflection questions: How would you define idolatry, and false gods, in our own day?

What messages do “the gods of scarcity” send us today?

4. In the Promised Land: When things were going well and the people prospered, God told them to remember the source of their abundance:

Read: Deuteronomy 8:12-18 (a great stewardship text that’s not often used in the church)

(Share words of abundance and generosity.)

Reflection question: How does such a message sound in a self-sufficient culture like ours?

5. Remember, trust and then share: God sends prophets to remind us when we forget that there is more than enough for all, and that God expects us to share that abundance with one another.

Read: Isaiah 1:10-17

Notes:

This is one of the core themes of the Old Testament prophets and of Jesus’ teaching as well. Today, Christians spend a lot of time and energy worrying (and arguing) about the importance of the sin of Sodom, and that’s a good thing. What, after all, was the sin of Sodom? Let’s listen to one of the prophets:

Read: Ezekiel 16:49

Again:

This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.

Reflection question: What is the Stillspeaking God saying to us today in these words?

Turning now to the New Testament:

6. “In the beginning…” John begins his Gospel with the same words that began the entire Bible, and the story of abundance, in order to remind us of God’s great generosity from the very beginning:

Here are two versions taken from that early part of John’s Gospel:

Read these excerpts from John 1

Reader #1 – NRSV:

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth….From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.

Reader #2 – The Message:

The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood…one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, Generous inside and out, true from start to finish….We all live off his generous bounty, gift after gift after gift. We got the basics from Moses, and then this exuberant giving and receiving, this endless knowing and understanding — all this came through Jesus, the Messiah. No one has ever seen God, not so much as a glimpse. This one-of-a-kind God-Expression, who exists at the very heart of the Father, has made him plain as day.

(Share words of abundance and generosity.)

7. What did Jesus do? We learn as much about Jesus from what he did as what he said. In the Gospel of Mark, there are two stories about feeding large crowds from a small amount of food, with an abundance left over.

Read: Mark 6:34-44

(Share words of abundance and generosity.)

According to Walter Brueggemann, Jesus “demonstrated that the world is filled with abundance and freighted with generosity. If bread is broken and shared, there is enough for all. Jesus is engaged in the sacramental, subversive reordering of public reality.”[3] (emphasis added)

Note:

When the disciples (despite everything they had seen already) saw scarcity, Jesus saw abundance.

Reflection question: How do you respond to the word “Eucharist” as “a gratitude”?

8. What did Jesus say?

Read: Matthew 6:19-21, 24-33 and Mark 10:17-22

Note:

When Jesus told the man to share, he said it with love. God tells us to share the way we teach our children to share with one another and the world – with love.

Invite participants to spend a few quiet moments remembering a time that they had to trust that there would be “enough” in order to share with others.

9. The early church: How did the Body of Christ – the church – organize itself and live out the gospel? The early church organized itself around sharing, and experienced its life transformed.

Read: Acts 2:43-47

Reflection question: How does such an image for the life of the church – and for society – sound to most of us in the church in North America today?

Read: 2 Corinthians 8:7, 9, 13-15

[Footnote from the New Oxford Study Bible: “A fair balance or equality is stressed. ‘Your abundance’ suggests that the Corinthian church was in better economic condition than some of Paul’s other churches….”[4]]

Again, Walter Brueggemann: “In 2 Corinthians 8, Paul directs a stewardship campaign for the early church and presents Jesus as the new economist….Paul ends his stewardship letter by quoting Exodus 16: ‘And the one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little.’ The citation is from the story of the manna that transformed the wilderness into abundancy.”[5]

Reflection question: How do you think Jesus would fit in at a meeting of economists today?

An Invitation to Ongoing Reflection

The facilitator-leader may bring this study to a conclusion by using all or part of the following material for reflection, or simply call for a time of quiet prayer and an invitation to reflect further on our practice of remembering, trusting and sharing.

The situation we find ourselves in today:

A wealthy but struggling nation, a wealthy but struggling church.

A world that has many more people much worse off than we are: the problem of poverty persists: where is that “fair balance”?

The changes in our culture that caused this have been happening for a long time – more of us are feeling them in this economic crisis, and for many the results are intensified.

In one way or another, every crisis is a blessing: will we “remember, trust, and share”?

A powerful tension: Abundance/Excess/Enough: Check out online sources that tell us that most Americans are in the top 1% in income in the world: a sobering statistic:

Today, many scholars recognize that the church in many ways has been marginalized, even exiled, and like ancient Israel always living in the shadow of one empire or another: Egypt, Babylon, Rome.[6] From the margins, people of faith struggle to be heard above the din of the empires of materialism, militarism, globalization, corporate greed, and incessant electronic noise.

Walter Brueggemann on scarcity v. abundance:

“The myth of scarcity both produces and justifies violence against the neighbor….[It] will never generate ‘bread for the world,’ but only bread for us and for ours….

“The claim of creation faith is that there is more than enough to share, and where there is sharing there is generativity of more, because as the fruitful instruments of creation notice the shalom of God enacted as sharing, they do in fact produce more.”[7]

Another serious question to complicate a theology of abundance: the tension between sustainability and population growth. How do we interpret God’s command in Genesis 1:28, “Go forth and multiply”?

Justice as shalom – as the fullness of good for all of God’s children, that is, not just enough for everyone, but an abundance (not an excess for a few) of healing, wholeness, peace: remember, trust, and share.

Sources

Brueggemann, Walter. The Covenanted Self: Explorations in Law and Covenant. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1999.

_________________. Deep Memory Exuberant Hope: Contested Truth in a Post-Christian World. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2000.

Crossan, John Dominic. God and Empire: Jesus against Rome, Then and Now. (New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

The Inclusive Bible: The First Egalitarian Translation. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.

THE MESSAGE REMIX: The Bible in Contemporary Language. Translated by Eugene H. Peterson. Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2003, 2006.

The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Edited by Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy. New York: Oxford, 1994.

Handout:

An Overview of the Bible as God’s Generosity and Abundance

Points for discussion and reflection

1. A good and abundant creation: we are responsible for its well-being.

2. Our ancestors in faith praised God for a creation overflowing with good gifts.

3. In the wilderness, when things were the worst they’d ever been, God provided enough – but not an excess – in order to teach us to trust and to share.

4. During good times, when abundance is obvious (the land of milk and honey), God reminds the people not to be arrogant, not to forget the source of the abundance, not to create false sources of abundance (idols): remember/trust the one who provides and then share.

5. When we don’t listen, God sends prophets to remind us to trust God and to share.

6. God’s ultimate gift of grace is Jesus himself (John 1) – “gift upon gift.”

7. Jesus demonstrated God’s abundance in works of wonder like the feedings of the masses.

8. What did Jesus say? He taught us to remember, trust, and share.

9. As followers of Jesus, when we organize ourselves around abundance, we see our lives, individually and communally, transformed.

List of readings:

Old Testament:

Genesis 1:26-31

Psalm 104: 1a, 10-28

Exodus 16:11-21

Deuteronomy 8:12-18

Isaiah 1:10-17

Ezekiel 16:49

New Testament:

Excerpts from John 1 (NRSV and The Message)

Mark 6:34-44

Matthew 6:19-21, 24-33

Mark 10:17-22

Acts 2:43-47

2 Corinthians 8:7, 9, 13-15

-----------------------

[1] The Inclusive Bible: The First Egalitarian Translation (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 5.

[2] Walter Brueggemann, Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope: Contested Truth in a Post-Christian World (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2000), 73.

[3] Ibid., 74.

[4] The New Oxford Annotated Bible, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy (New York: Oxford, 1994), 256.

[5] Brueggemann, Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope, 74.

[6] For example, see the work of John Dominic Crossan about the contrast between “the empire of Caesar” and “the reign of God” in God and Empire: Jesus against Rome, Then and Now (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).

[7] Walter Brueggemann, The Covenanted Self: Explorations in Law and Covenant (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1999), 113.

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