2025.08.31 | Enough for Everyone
“Enough for Everyone”
A sermon preached at Eden United Church of Christ
in Hayward, California,
on Sunday, August 31, 2025,
by the Rev. Brenda Loreman.
Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture: Exodus 16:2–35 (excerpts)
Copyright © 2025 by Brenda Loreman
The story of manna in the desert is one of the foundational and iconic stories of our faith tradition. Even those who are not especially well-read in Bible stories might have heard of this story of miraculous food falling from heaven, satisfying the hunger of the complaining Israelites. Because of this, it’s a story that begs for amusing church memes.
Haven’t we all been there—either as a kid on a long family trip, or a parent listening to the kids whining on a long family trip? Perhaps one of the lessons of this story is that our technology may have advanced over the last few thousand years, but human nature hasn’t changed much at all.
As a foundational story, it is rich with many possibilities for themes and messages– the kind of story a preacher or Bible study teacher could spend a lifetime mining for possible sermons and lessons. There are issues of trust, as the Israelites learn–or fail to learn– to trust their leaders and in God. There are issues of rest, as they learn to practice the Sabbath. There are issues of gratitude or lack of gratitude. There are issues of how a people is formed in the midst of hardship.
But the theme that called to me this week is one that runs as warp and weft throughout the weaving of biblical narrative—the theme of God’s abundance. As the late, great Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann puts it, “The Bible starts out with a liturgy of abundance. Genesis 1 is a song of praise for God’s generosity. It tells how well the world is ordered. It keeps saying, ‘It is good, it is good, it is good, it is very good.’ It declares that God blesses—that is, endows with vitality—the plants and the animals and the fish and the birds and humankind. And it pictures the creator as saying, ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’” (1)
In this wonderful, abundant fruitfulness, “everything in its kind is to multiply the overflowing goodness that pours from God’s creator spirit. And as [we] know, the creation ends in Sabbath. God is so overrun with fruitfulness that God says, “I’ve got to take a break from all this. I’ve got to get out of the office.” (2)
“Later in Genesis, God blesses Abraham, Sarah and their family. God tells them to be a blessing, to bless the people of all nations. Blessing is the force of well-being active in the world, and faith is the awareness that creation is the gift that keeps on giving.” (3)
This awareness of God’s abundance dominates the book of Genesis all the way through until n we come to the story of Joseph in Egypt. This is the story of how the Israelites get to Egypt in the first place. In Chapter 47, Joseph interprets a dream of Pharaoh, that there will be a hard, long famine in the land:
So Pharaoh gets organized to administer, control and monopolize the food supply. Pharaoh introduces the principle of scarcity into the world economy. For the first time in the Bible, someone says, “There’s not enough. Let’s get everything.”
Because Pharaoh is afraid that there aren’t enough good things to go around, he must try to have them all. Because he is fearful, he is ruthless. Pharaoh hires Joseph to manage the monopoly. When the crops fail and the peasants run out of food, they come to Joseph. And on behalf of Pharaoh, Joseph says, “What’s your collateral?” They give up their land for food, and then, the next year, they give up their cattle. By the third year of the famine they have no collateral but themselves. And that’s how the children of Israel become slaves—through an economic transaction [based on the principle of scarcity].
By the end of Genesis 47, Pharaoh has all the land except that belonging to the priests [...]. The notion of scarcity has been introduced into biblical faith. The Book of Exodus records the contest between the liturgy of generosity and the myth of scarcity—a contest that still tears us apart today. (4)
After generations of slavery, Moses leads the Israelites into freedom after a hard-won struggle with Pharoah. But the children of Israel have been steeped in the scarcity mindset of living under Pharoah. When they are finally beyond the reach of Egypt, surrounded by wilderness, they can’t help but look back and think, “Should we have left at all? Didn’t we always have food to eat in Egypt? Wasn’t all the world’s glory there in Egypt with Pharaoh?” But it is here in the wilderness, where there are no monopolies, that they can turn and look into creation and see the glory of God. It is here, away from the corruption of empire, that the liturgy of God’s abundance can reassert itself.
It is here in the wilderness that they learn to be a people again, to have their story woven again with the stories of their ancestors and with God’s generosity. Freed from the cruel, transactional, scarcity economy of Pharaoh, they relearn how to trust in God’s abundance, how to practice the Sabbath—something they wouldn’t have been able to do as slaves—and how to listen for God's voice moving and guiding their community.
But it’s a hard process! They grumble and complain and whine. And God is listening. In answer to the fears and complaints, something extraordinary happens: God’s love comes floating down in the form of an usual bread-like food. It’s a sort of Divine trickle-down economics—the only sort of trickle-down economics that actually offers something to the poor and hungry. “They had never before received bread as a free gift that they couldn’t control, predict, plan for or own. They learn that the gifts of life are indeed given by a generous God.” (5)
Through this wondrous miracle of bread from heaven, the Israelites relearn the lessons of abundance from Genesis. They learn that God is generous and that the food comes every day except the seventh day. They learn that there is always enough for everyone—that everyone has enough, and no one has too much.When they gathered the manna, those who gathered much had no more than they needed, and those who gathered a little had enough, too. This is in direct contrast to the economy of Pharaoh—and our modern economy as well, which tolerates vast wealth and vast poverty and rewards the wealthy with more wealth and treats the poor as undeserving of any reward at all. But in God’s economy of abundance, there is such a thing as too much and too little. And God makes sure to even it all out, because all are deserving of enough.
They also learn that they need not—indeed must not—try to hoard or monopolize or codify or monetize God’s generosity. When some tried to bank the manna, returning to a scarcity mindset, it turned sour and rotted. The wealth of Pharaoh in Egypt had been built by hoarding and storing up and removing resources from circulation. God’s abundant economy keeps resources circulating through redistribution, rather than concentrating wealth through accumulation.
Finally, the Israelites also relearn the restorative practice of Sabbath. The only time they were to gather extra manna was the day before taking a rest. “Sabbath means that there’s enough bread, that we don’t have to hustle every day of our lives. There’s no record that Pharaoh ever took a day off. People who think their lives consist of struggling to get more and more can never slow down because they won’t ever have enough.” (6)
The lessons learned by the Israelites about God’s abundant generosity is a thread that is woven throughout the Bible, and is especially apparent in the teachings of Jesus. Remember how he fed the multitudes with a few loaves and fish—an echo of the miraculous manna, and a story so foundational that the four gospels tell it six times. Remember how often he urged the wealthy to give up their possessions in order to follow him. Remember how often he taught that the least will be exalted and the mighty will be brought down. Remember how—as God blessed creation and blessed Abraham and Sarah—Jesus blessed the poor, the gentle, the hungry, the grieving, the persecuted. Remember how he taught his disciples to pray: Give us today our daily bread. / And forgive us our debts, / as we also have forgiven our debtors. (7)
By many measures, we live in the wealthiest nation on earth. And most of that wealth has been accumulated the Pharaoh’s way—by hoarding and storing up and removing resources from circulation, and by depleting, rather than renewing, God’s abundant creation. We have bought into the mindset of scarcity that was introduced in the 47th chapter of Genesis. We never feel that we have enough; we have to have more and more, and this insatiable desire destroys us. It destroys us as individuals, and it destroys us as a community. Even those of us who profess a faith in God are often torn apart by the conflict between our attraction to the good news of God’s abundance and the power of our belief in scarcity—a belief that makes us greedy, mean and unneighborly, that tears at the fabric of our communities.
Just as the Israelites had to unlearn the scarcity culture of Pharaoh, so too must we. Let us learn to be a people again, to have our story woven again with the stories of our spiritual ancestors, knitted together with God’s generosity. Let us be freed from the cruel, transactional, scarcity economy of today’s Pharaohs, to relearn how to trust in God’s abundance, how to practice the rest and restoration of the Sabbath, and how to listen for God’s voice moving in and guiding our community. Amen.
Walter Brueggemann, in an essay posted by MaryAnn McKibben Dana on The Blue Room, June 6, 2025 <https://substack.com/@maryannmckibbendana/p-165287793> Accessed on August 25, 2025
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Matthew 6:11-12 (NRSVUE)