Deacon Leah Sandwell-Weiss

And since the famine had spread over all the land, Joseph opened all the storehouses, and sold to the Egyptians, for the famine was severe in the land of Egypt. Genesis 41:56

Friends,

The works of one author have been formative in my spiritual and theological life:  Dr. Walter Brueggemann. His article, The Liturgy of Abundance, The Myth of Scarcity, available at https://www.religion-online.org/article/the-liturgy-of-abundance-the-myth-of-scarcity/ and later his book, Journey to the Common Good, helped guide my understanding that Jesus talked about the economy and politics. And much of this starts with the story of Joseph in Egypt.

Now most of us remember that Joseph was a dreamer and the favorite son of his father, Isaac. We remember the story of how his brothers were upset at what they perceived as his lording it over them. So they captured him and sold him to slavers who took him to Egypt. After several adventures there, Joseph and his ability to interpret dreams came to the attention of Pharoah, who’s had some disturbing dreams about not having enough. Joseph tells him there will be 7 years of plenty and then 7 years of famine. Pharoah picks Joseph to be the man in charge of controlling the food supply. The reading for Morning Prayer today, Genesis 41:46-47, tells how Joseph gathered up all the surplus grain, which was beyond measure, and stored it. Then, when the famine began, instead of giving this amazing abundance to the people, he sold it to the starving Egyptians. Chapter 47 tells us that he continued to sell grain, taking all the silver from the peasants, then their livestock. Then, when the people have nothing else to sell, they sell their land in exchange for food and seed, agreeing to be slaves. Genesis 47:19-25.

The first time I read this, I was shocked – I had never heard that the people of Egypt had sold themselves into slavery. We are taught about the escape of Joseph, the reunion with his family, and how the family is saved by his personal generosity to them in Genesis. But we don’t pay attention to this manipulation of the economy to benefit Pharoah and the rich at the people’s expense. Brueggemann reaches a tentative conclusion in this section of Journey to the Common Good:  “Those who are living in anxiety and fear, most especially fear of scarcity, have no time or energy for the common good.”

I think we could safely say that we have been spending the last few years in anxiety and fear, not just of scarcity, but also of disease and loneliness and isolation. And we’ve seen folks react to this anxiety by insisting people must continue working at low-paying jobs; that we must stop paying extra unemployment insurance, people will returning to work; that freedom to refuse vaccinations and to wear masks is more important than the safety of the community. We made it nearly impossible to get money to subsidize both landlords and tenants so folks didn’t lose their homes and income. And now we see fuel prices rising while oil companies make record profits.

But God started out with abundance, not just in the Genesis stories of creation, but also in Psalms. One of the Psalms for today, Psalm 65, notes:

You crown the year with your goodness,
and your paths overflow with plenty.
May the fields of the wilderness be rich for grazing,
and the hills be clothed with joy.
May the meadows cover themselves with flocks,
and the valleys cloak themselves with grain;
let them shout for joy and sing.

Jesus also showed us in his feeding miracles, his healing of the blind, the lame, the deaf that there was more to the world than market forces. As Brueggemann explains, Jesus breaks the ideology of scarcity, especially in the feeding miracles, where instead of only a few loaves of bread and fish, multiple baskets of food are left over. Jesus provides a narrative of abundance where we practice neighborhood and commit to the common good,  which allows us to leave the “system of anxious scarcity” to provide for all.

Deacon Leah Sandwell-Weiss