On weekdays during Advent we are posting the daily reflection from our Abundance Advent booklet here on our blog. You can download the booklet in its entirety here.
I grew up in the church. My mother was a pastor’s daughter, my uncle was a pastor, we went to church every Sunday. On schoolday mornings when my parents were feeling particularly vigorous, we had 6:00 a.m. Bible study, we children huddling together on the couches under blankets, trying to escape the winter chill. In all this exposure to Christianity, to the Bible, to the amalgamation of disparate stories and parables and teachings and proverbs and random occurrences that make up this faith, my least favorite passage was when Jesus told the story of the pearl of great value.
It’s a short story. Jesus says, in Matthew 13:45-46, "Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it." That’s it. But like a grain of sand under a contact lens, or a splinter that sticks straight up and down, this parable was both irritating and unignorable. What a stupid merchant. Doesn’t he know that he needs to eat? What’s he going to do for the rest of his life—just look at his pearl like Gollum and then die? Most of the rest of the Bible seemed to at least have an understandable message, if not an applicable life lesson, but this one was so nonsensical and irritating: the Yoko Ono of the Bible.
And then conversion, and the realization that God is the end-all and be-all of existence and the universe, and the hope that I might one day be with him fully. And with conversion, the revelation that the things around us aren’t the whole story, that there is value elsewhere, and that the tangible cares and worries of my ordinary life don’t make up the complete balance sheet. The best part is off the books; the pearl really is all you need.
Which brings us to abundance. The paint’s peeling on my car. I’ve been somewhat stymied in the professional context. I’ve been wanting a nice flatscreen to put in my living room, but money’s been too tight. I’m not really sure what I’m doing in the relationship side of my life. Can my life be characterized as abundant? Yes.
As the Israelites wandered their forty years in the desert, God provided for them manna: an otherworldly substance that would decompose after a single day, unless the next day was the Sabbath, in which case it would last two. Israelites could not bank it up. God could have given them the aggregate manna quantity the first day of their wanderings, just a massive mountain of manna that would’ve anchored them to a spot for 40 years as they watched the manna mountain dwindle and their fellows die of old age. This would’ve transformed the Israelites’ worship of him into worry over their pile of food. That's not what God did. He gave them enough for a day, maybe two, and they had to keep their eyes on him.
A similar story is seen with Elijah and the widow. The land is gripped by famine. A woman is about to make her last meal. Wait, says the prophet, make me some bread first. She does, and her little jar of flour and her little jug of oil last the whole famine long. She isn't given a mansion and a mountain of produce. She’s given what she needs, for as long as she needs it, and no more. [Yet another story, perhaps not from the Protestant canon, concerns a certain holy menorah for which God provided sacred oil for as long as it took to make more.]
Do I have everything I’ve desired? No. But I do have everything I’ve required. And I do have the most important thing: the abundant ability to call on God, and the abundant hope that I will know him fully, just as I have been fully known.
"Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen."