Across the street from
our home, beneath the winter-bare sprawl of a maple tree, there stands a holly
tree. It is no taller than fifteen feet,
but its branches are lush, thick with prickly, deep green leaves. And until last Tuesday afternoon the branches
sagged under the weight of thousands of bright red holly
berries.
Last Tuesday it snowed
all day long. By mid-afternoon the
ground, and any fodder it had to offer, lay covered by three or four inches of
brilliant white but icy cold powder. So
when a flock of robins discovered the holly tree decked with its abundance,
these creatures who must eat at least half their own weight per day did not
gather around the feast like debutantes in an aristocrat's tea room. They descended on it with all the ravenous
delirium of reporters around some disgraced celebrity.
It was quite literally a
feeding frenzy, and the little holly tree trembled and swayed as hundreds of
panicked wings beat furiously against leaf and branch and competing feather. Within thirty squawking minutes the holly
tree was just one more green tree. Not a
single red berry remains on that holly tree.
Almost every human
economic and political system seems to be based on the fundamental theory of
scarcity – the idea that there are too few resources to meet demand. When we found our institutions on the
principle of scarcity, we necessarily create highly competitive cultures in
which those few resources become the property and privilege of a very few.
The church has jumped on
that angst-driven train, as well. And so
even we who claim to follow Jesus help to strip our environment down to the
nub, squawking and fluttering like a flock of famished robins ravaging what
appear to be the scarce remnants of a winter-bound landscape. And so, we are pleased with God, and right
with God only when we get not just enough, but excess. For some reason we have decided that we need
more than our share in order to avoid feeling the cold creep of scarcity in our
own lives. And in that economy even
God’s grace is a scarce commodity to be saved only for a righteous few.
It must have been the
same in Jesus’ day. “Therefore I tell you,” he says, “do
not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your
body, what you will wear. Is not life
more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither
sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds
them. Are you not of more value than
they? And can any of you by worrying add
a single hour to your span of life?” (Mt. 6:25-27)
It’s a leap of faith to
trust these words, and I will never suggest to anyone that it’s an easy
leap. I will say, though, when we make
the leap, when we recognize the mysterious truth of God’s economy of grace, the
world becomes a place of startling abundance, possibility and hope – a place in
which we will gratefully celebrate the blessings of enough.
Robin redbreasts are beautiful birds,
in some places the beloved heralds of spring.
But are we created in the image of robins, or in the the image of God?There is a difference.
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