Scarcity Truthers
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.religion-online.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;the-liturgy-of-abundance-the-myth-of-scarcity&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.religion-online.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;the-liturgy-of-abund...</a><p><i>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.<p>Jesus said it more succinctly. You cannot serve God and mammon. You cannot serve God and do what you please with your money or your sex or your land. And then he says, &quot;Don&#x27;t be anxious, because everything you need will be given to you.&quot; But you must decide. Christians have a long history of trying to squeeze Jesus out of public life and reduce him to a private little Savior. But to do this is to ignore what the Bible really says. Jesus talks a great deal about the kingdom of God -- and what he means by that is a public life reorganized toward neighborliness.<p>As a little child Jesus must often have heard his mother, Mary, singing. And as we know, the sang a revolutionary song, the Magnificat--the anthem of Luke&#x27;s Gospel. She sang about neighborliness: about how God brings down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly; about how God fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty. Mary did not make up this dangerous song. She took it from another mother, Hannah, who sang it much earlier to little Samuel, who became one of ancient Israel&#x27;s greatest revolutionaries. Hannah, Mary, and their little boys imagined a great social transformation. Jesus enacted his mother&#x27;s song well. Everywhere he went he broke the vicious cycles of poverty, bondage, fear and death; he healed, transformed, empowered and brought new life. Jesus&#x27; example gives us the mandate to transform our public life.<p>Telling parables was one of Jesus&#x27; revolutionary activities, for parables are subversive re-imagining of reality. The ideology devoted to encouraging consumption wants to shrivel our imaginations so that we cannot conceive of living in any way that would be less profitable for the dominant corporate structures. But Jesus tells us that we can change the world. The Christian community performs a vital service by keeping the parables alive. These stories haunt us and push us in directions we never thought we would go.</i><p>Walter Bruggemann, 1999