Let us pray: O God we wait upon you to show us your way in the midst of many options and choices. May we be able to hear your word for us in the midst of these words which I speak. Amen.

I began downloading software in earnest sometime in the late 80's. My first modem was a large metal Alberta Government Telephones (the forerunner of Telus) castoff. I somehow found out how to purchase one from government surplus. I was pretty proud of it, not just because I built the interface to my computer all by myself, but because this was a 1200 bit-per-second modem, a relative speed demon for its time. The purchase of this modem not only allowed me the opportunity to start participating in online community, it gave me access to more software for my computer.

Not too long after that I left my work as a programmer to attend seminary in Saskatoon. A friend had a fairly new IBM compatible computer with an internal modem. I began helping her and teaching myself how to use the computer that was well on its way to being one of the personal computer standards. I spent a lot of time at her desk downloading software. Downloads in those days of 1200 bit-per-second modems took a long time, compared to these days of high speed internet when data comes flying across the network at speeds at over 700,000 bits per second.

Well, I’m sure we are all familiar with how quickly the world of personal computers has progressed, and how tied we are to the world of the internet as part of daily life for many of us. This reminiscence into the relatively distant past (in computer years) was prompted by my reflection on an issue that came to mind during my consideration of the lections for this morning.

You will hopefully discover as we continue through the season of Lent that there is a unifying theme to worship as we journey towards Easter. The theme is water, and it forms not only a basis for the worship times during Lent, but also the basis for the Lenten study which began this past week. Each year, the publishing house of The United Church of Canada produces a resource for daily study during Lent and it too, has a focus on water. By the end of Lent, many different opportunities to reflect on the issue of water for our lives and in our world will be offered to you. I trust that they will be experienced as a life-giving stream of insight and new perspective and not a flood that overwhelms you.

This morning we heard the story of Abram and Sarai, the octogenarian migrants who left their homeland to establish a new life in a distant land. We heard of the promise made to them by God, that they would be the ancestors of many hundreds of people. This was a promise made to them despite the fact that they were still childless in their advanced years. It was a promise that seemed to hold nothing but comic charm. How could a woman - presumably post-menopausal - ever expect to be a mother? How could this promise from God ever be fulfilled?

Sarai is not the only woman we find in the biblical record that is childless. In fact, it is a pretty common theme in the Hebrew bible. The barren woman is a motif which occurs with some frequency, serving as a situation in which the divine presence is invited to respond. It all starts with Sarai - and not only will she and Abram have a child, but they will be the ancestors of great nations of people. The irony of scarcity and abundance tied so closely together in the story is readily apparent.

And that’s what got me thinking about downloading software in the so-called ancient past compared to the here and now. Software was efficiently small when we only had 1200 bit-per-second modems and 64 kilobyte computers to run it on. It had to be - there was no point in writing software that would take days to retrieve by modem, or that would not fit on a reasonable number of floppy disks or would not fit in the memory of the computer. Now we have fast modems, large memory computers and high speed internet and we have huge downloads to match them.

You see, we often equate God with abundance, and rightly so. Abundance is a gift from God that we often overlook. But it is also a gift that we seek. We want to identify God with abundance - it matches our concept of God as everywhere and in everything. We are not as likely to seek or see God in the opposite - scarcity. But scarcity can also be a gift from God. Scarcity allows us to define efficiency in new ways. It trains us to be good stewards and careful conservationists.

During our first Lenten study session we spent some time reflecting on the season of Lent and the spiritual discipline of giving something up for Lent. A question was asked about why this practice even exists - a kind of self-imposed suffering. Surely there is enough suffering in the world without having to invent our own sufferings. The answer in part lies in the fact that giving something up for Lent allows us a practical experience of the gift of scarcity. Living with less is a lesson we can all learn, and it is an opportunity for us to discern God’s presence and God’s call to us in new ways.

It should be no surprise that Canadians who have one of the largest supplies of freshwater in the world are also some of the greatest users per capita of fresh water. We could well do with the gift of scarcity to teach us to better stewards of what we have. A quick web search revealed this statistic: A person living in Sub-Saharan Africa uses 10-20 litres of water a day; on average, a Canadian uses 326 litres a day.

There is a generation of Canadian citizens which unfortunately time is quickly taking away, but I met many members of this generation during my time in Saskatchewan, and elsewhere. They are the survivors of the dirty-30's, the great depression, when the prairie land was more of a dustbowl than a fertile agricultural resource. These are people that learned to deal with scarcity, and while in some contexts the mind-set that such an experience created for them can be quite frustrating, there are times when their perspective is extremely valuable, when they represent the necessary God-perspective that helps us to see with new eyes and helps us to deal with issues in surprising and helpful ways.

As we are constantly reminded by the biblical story - God is most likely to speak to us in extraordinary and unexpected ways. When things look bleak, we are reminded of God’s abundance, and we are taught to count our blessings in new ways. But then just as we are made aware of the multitude of blessings that God provides for us, we are taught to value the gift of scarcity and what it can teach us about being good stewards of resources and wise servants of God in the ways that those resources are distributed in the world.

May we be open to the presence of God - reminding us of the gift of God’s abundant love - and the gift of living abundantly with less - that we might honour God who made us and who calls us to be faithful stewards of the world in which we live. Amen.