We have all been experiencing shortages lately. While so far there is gasoline to go around, the rapidly accelerating price is making it a more precious commodity and cutting back on our travel plans and our usual ways of doing things. Increased energy costs are rippling through the economy, driving up the price of food and building materials and other commodities, making life and even survival particularly hard for the poor and the disadvantaged. Property values and stock values have fallen, depressing the economy and seriously cutting into people’s assets and their education and retirement plans. Even our water supply is not something we can take for granted any more.

Nor are we Americans the only ones facing such deficits. Despite the weakened dollar, our situation pales in the face of what many around the world are dealing with. Hunger and homelessness and disease remain significant global problems in this twenty-first century.

Our temptation in the face of such deprivation is to withdraw into what might be called a theology of scarcity. We begin to assume that there is not enough for everyone to go around and to hoard what we have and to look out for ourselves at the expense of others. That is not necessarily a conscious decision, but our understandable anxiety becomes a powerful force. We easily lose our sense of gratitude and focus on our deficits rather than on appreciating what we do have. We shrink away from challenges, thinking we do not have the wherewithal to handle them. We begin to trust less in God and more in ourselves and in our limited resources. In our theology of scarcity, we become less generous, less cheerful, less trusting that God does and will provide.

But we have a choice! Rather than sink into this theology of scarcity, we can consciously adopt a theology of abundance. We can choose to focus beyond ourselves and beyond our limitations and to concentrate on God, the continuing source of all that is. We can open our eyes to the abundance that is all around us and to God the very paradigm of overflowing generosity.

Today’s Gospel is one of many scriptural places that speaks of God’s bountifulness to the point of extravagance. Jesus tells us that God is much more like the farmers of first-century Palestine than the careful gardeners of today. For these contemporaries of Jesus, sowing was the first stage of planting and not the last. After scattering the seed generously over the entire area, the farmers would then plow the ground in order to cover the seed and trigger germination. That seems like a waste of seed to us, since much fell on ground too rocky for the plow or on the paths the farmers walked to have access to their crops or among the thorns that lay nearby. But to them that lavishness was necessary to ensure that all the good soil received enough seed. Generosity equaled abundant crops.

Jesus is telling us that God is like that. God is not stingy or measured. Rather the word of God, the seed of faith, is offered to all lavishly and generously, regardless of suitability or track record. God's ways are not our ways. "He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust."

In every way God is generosity itself, exhibited in the extravagance of creation, from the complexity of genes to the infinity of space. Just consider for a moment our sun, something we take completely for granted. In its universe made up of all the planets, their moons, the stars, and comets, it contains 96% to 98% of all matter. It is enormous! The sun creates energy by nuclear fusion. Every second of the day and night, 700 million tons of hydrogen are converted into 695 million tons of helium and 5 million tons of energy, which give life to our planet. Every second! The sun is about 41/2 billion years old, and it contains enough hydrogen to give off 5 millions tons of energy every second for 2 billion more years. So sinner, get ready! Only two billion years left for our small planet!

Or go from the macro to the micro and consider the complexity of the genetic base of matter. The human genome is over “3 billion letters long, and [is] written in a strange and cryptographic four-letter code,” according to Frances Collins, who chaired the herculean task in the last decade of mapping the genome (The Language of God, page 1). He writes, “Such is the amazing complexity of the information carried within each cell of the human body, that a live reading of that code at a rate of one letter per second would take thirty-one years, even if reading continued day and night”!

These two examples, the incomprehensible vastness and power of the sun and the incredible minute complexity of the genome, along with the depths and the riches of the oceans, the mind-boggling diversity of species of animals and birds and fish and insects, and trees and bushes and flowers, and even the multiplicity of human civilizations and languages and cultures, should help us at least glimpse this God of abundance and pull us out of our tendency toward a myopic theology of scarcity.

Scripture consistently paints this vision of a lavish God. In the free gift of creation, in multiplying Abrahams’ descendants to number more than the stars in the heavens, in providing daily manna in the desert to the wandering Jews, an abundant God is revealed. In Jesus’ multiplying the loaves and fish to feed five thousand with twelve baskets left over, and vastly increasing the wine supply for a wedding, and letting the woman extravagantly anoint his feet with expensive ointment, and encouraging us not to bury our talents in the ground, and to sell all, and like the widow to give of our substance, and to forgive others seventy times seven times, and not to be anxious about our life and its necessities, we are showered with images of generosity and impelled toward a theology of abundance.

As God is the extravagant sower, so we who are made in the Divine image are called to be. We are not to let our anxiety about the future control our attitudes and our actions. We are to trust in God that there will be enough, enough to lead happy and productive lives and to help other children of God do the same. We are not to hoard what we have been given, but to share with all as our brothers and sisters. Whether that be our affection or our energy or our commitment or our forgiveness or our hope or our time or our money, perhaps the biggest challenge for us as possessive human beings, we are to be generous and giving like the God in whose image we are made. No matter what shortages we face, now and in the future, we are called to live a theology of abundance.