Plenty

Scriptures:            2 Kings 4:42-44           Psalm 145:10-18

                              Ephesians 3:14-21       John 6:1-21

The Hunger Games trilogy depicts the fictional country of Panem – named for the Latin word for bread, and set in a post-apocalyptic North America – in which the wealthy Capitol is surrounded by twelve impoverished districts.   Every year, each district sends two children, a boy and a girl, to fight to the death; the winning district is given food, supplies and riches.   While of course the trilogy is futuristic fiction, it provides a commentary on our current situation in which a wealthy few live fantastically privileged lives, while many live with diminished expectations and blighted hopes for their future and that of their children.

For this morning and the month of August, the lectionary takes a detour from Mark’s gospel into the 6^th chapter of John’s Gospel, which begins with the account of Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand, and extends into a meditation on the theme of Jesus as the bread of life.   And so we’ll be reading the 6^th chapter of John’s gospel today and through all of August. We might say that the message of the feeding of the five thousand is the exact opposite of that of the Hunger Games – a message of abundance coming in the midst of apparent scarcity.  It is striking that the feeding of the five thousand is found in all four gospels, a rare occurrence – while many miracles show up in more than one gospel, few show up in all four.  In three of the gospels – all but Luke’s gospel – the feeding of the five thousand is followed by Jesus walking on the water.   Also, in three of the gospels – all but John’s gospel – the feeding of the five thousand is preceded by the banquet of Herod at which orders were given for the beheading of John the Baptist, who was a mentor to Jesus – and we’ll say more about that other banquet later.  So the feeding of the five thousand was seen by all four Gospel writers as crucial to understanding who Jesus is – and in three of the gospels, this feeding was preceded by Herod’s banquet and followed by Jesus walking on the water – again, three of the gospel writers thought that Herod’s banquet helped us understand Jesus’ banquet, and that Jesus walking on water was crucial to understanding who Jesus is.

Our reading begins with Jesus being followed by a large crowd.  Jesus led his disciples up a mountain and sat down with them there.  But as Jesus sat down, the crowd found him, and so….don’t look now, but here come all the people.  Jesus asked Philip a question, to see how he would respond:  “Where are we going to buy bread for these people to eat?”  Philip gave a very practical response – six months’ wages would hardly buy enough bread to give each of them a bite.   Andrew tries to be helpful:  “Well, I found a boy who brought five barley loaves and two fish – but they’re not going to be much help feeding this crowd.”   Jesus told the disciples to have the people sit down – and John’s gospel tells us, as Mark’s does as well, that there was a lot of green grass there, so the people sat down on the grass.  Jesus took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed them to the crowd, as he also did the fish.  When everyone had eaten, Jesus asked the disciples to gather up the leftover fragments, which filled twelve baskets.   And we’re told that there were 5,000 there, the size of a Roman legion.  So  Jesus had taken a boy’s lunch and distributed enough food to feed an army.

I think the question we always want to ask about any of the miracles in the Bible, such as this one, is “How did this happen?  How did Jesus do this?”  And we’re not given any answers, and so the question of “how” remains a mystery.  Perhaps a more helpful question to ask is “Why?”  And, of course, the obvious answer is “because the people were hungry”, and that’s certainly true.  But in John’s gospel, this along with other wondrous acts, such as his healings, are called, not miracles, but signs.  And a sign, of course, is something that points to something beyond itself.  We may see road signs on the way to a tourist attraction, but we’re probably not going to stop and take pictures of the sign itself, unless there’s something unique about it – we just follow the sign, arrive at our destination, and probably don’t give the sign another thought.  And Jesus’ miracles, such as the feeding of the five thousand, are like that.  Of course, for the hungry folks who were there, it had great significance, because for once in their lives there was more than enough food for all of them.  But the miracle also pointed beyond itself to say something about who Jesus was. 

The feeding of the five thousand was a sign that pointed backwards, to God’s saving acts in the history of Israel.  We might think of God providing manna and quails to the children of Israel during their 40 years in the wilderness, and indeed, later in this chapter of John’s gospel, the people in the crowd themselves make this association.  When they say, “this is the prophet that has come into the world,” they are referring to a small section of Deuteronomy 18 :15-18, in which God promises to raise up from among the people a prophet like Moses.  And so when they saw Jesus teaching and feeding the crowds, they made that association.  Later in the chapter they explicitly mention the manna Moses provided in the wilderness, and ask Jesus to do the same, to provide them food every day.  There were other Scriptures in which men of God fed large crowds with small amounts of food, such as in our Old Testament reading today, in which the prophet Elisha fed 100 people with 20 barley loaves and fresh ears of grain, and, as the reading said, they ate, and had some left.  This feeding may also remind us of Isaiah’s vision of the restoration of Israel, when he wrote in Isaiah 55:1, “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.   Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare. “  The feeding of the five thousand connects Jesus to all of these moments in Israel’s history.

For us as Christians, this feeding also points forward to the Last Supper, and to the Eucharist.  It’s notable that, even though John’s gospel devotes several chapters to Jesus’ last supper with his disciples, he doesn’t mention eating bread and drinking wine in his memory, for John, Jesus’ most memorable act at the Last Supper was his washing the disciples’ feet.  But that language about breaking bread is here, at the feeding of the five thousand:  we’re told, “Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had give thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated.”  Wine is not a part of this story….but still, for John, this feeding of the five thousand points ahead toward Eucharist. 

The feeding of the five thousand is a sign of the reign of God breaking into our world, and turning the ways of the world upside down.  The society of Jesus’ day was similar in some ways to that of the Hunger Games, with a few fabulously wealthy people – the Roman emperor and his officers and courtiers, and the various overlords they installed in the colonies they controlled – surrounded by a vast sea of grinding, desperate poverty, with impoverished peasants competing with one another for the scraps that fell from Rome’s table of plenty.  Herod’s banquet, which precedes Jesus’ miracle in three of the gospels, makes explicit the contrast between the world’s ways and the ways of the kingdom.  At Herod’s banquet, only his favored few were invited.  Those favored few ate well, while multitudes outside their banquet hall starved.  There was an unsavory element, when Herod had his daughter dance for his guests, basically throwing a young teen or pre-teen girl in front of a banquet hall of half-drunk, leering men – hashtag #hertoo.   And then, of course, came the request from Herod’s wife, relayed by his daughter, for the head of John the Baptist on a platter.  At Herod’s banquet, gluttony, decadence and debauchery among reigned among a favored few, while multitudes outside the banquet hall starved and the blood of a righteous prophet was spilled on the whim of Herod and his wife.

By contrast, at Jesus’ banquet, the invitation was open to all, regardless of their position in society, regardless of whether they were seen as worthy or unworthy.  There may well have been thieves and bandits among the crowd, but none were barred from the table   And there was plenty enough for everyone and to spare.  Good food, good fellowship – this was Jesus’ vision of the reign of God.  And table fellowship – eating and drinking together – was a distinctive feature of worship in the early church.  Our monthly dinner church, to which all are welcome and at which there’s food left over to take home, may give us a faint, fleeting glimpse of what Jesus had in mind.

We live in a country and in a world that increasingly resemble the Hunger Games, in which a few are wealthy beyond imagining while millions in this country and billions around the globe go to bed hungry.  Three men – Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and investor Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway – hold more wealth than the poorest 50% of our country combined, more wealth than our country’s poorest 160 million people or 63 million households.[1]  Globally, the 42 wealthiest people in the world have more wealth than the poorest 50% of the world’s population combined, more wealth than the world’s poorest 3 or 4 billion – that’s billion with a “b” - people.[2]   And this didn’t just happen; it’s a result of deliberate policies of business and government. It’s not just a shame; it’s a sin, an abomination before God Almighty.  Meanwhile, here at Emanuel Church, we’ve had parishioners bringing jugs to church to take home their water for the week, have parishioners living in shelters or on the street.  Poverty is no stranger to our congregation…..but likewise, love and sharing and caring are no strangers to this congregation either, as we do what we can to feed hungry bellies as well as hungry spirits. 

Neither poverty nor extreme wealth are part of God’s will.  Jesus’ feeding the 5000 reminds us that, though we see a world of scarcity, a zero-sum world in which one person’s abundance means the poverty of many others, God sees a world of abundance.  There is enough – God has provided enough - to satisfy everyone’s need, though not enough to satisfy everyone’s greed. 

There’s also a message, a very hopeful message, for each of us as individuals and for us as a congregation – not only do we have enough, we are enough.  We are enough.  We may feel like that boy’s lunch of five loaves and two fish, like we have little to offer God and the world.  We may feel like we’re a dime a dozen, that our lives are of little value, that our lives are too small to be noticed by God or to make a difference to those around us.   We may feel that as a congregation, we’re too small to have any impact in our community.  But when our lives are put in God’s hands, blessed by Jesus, and broken open for the world, our lives are abundant and life-giving and powerful beyond imagining.  Even in our brokenness and even with our human limitations, placed in God’s hands, we are enough, as individuals and as the gathered community of Emanuel Church – we are enough.

A young boy entrusted Jesus with his lunch of five loaves and two fish, and multitudes were fed.  May we entrust our lives to Jesus, put our lives into the hands of Jesus, to be lifted up, blessed, and broken open to meet the needs of the world.  May we see in ourselves and in our sister and brother Christians what we see at the communion table – the Body of Christ, broken and distributed for the world’s salvation. Amen.

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[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2017/11/09/the-3-richest-americans-hold-more-wealth-than-bottom-50-of-country-study-finds/#33faa193cf86

[2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5295743/Worlds-42-richest-worth-poorest-50-combined.html

Walls Broken Down

Scriptures:            Jeremiah 23:1-6           Psalm 23

                              Ephesians 2:11-22       Mark 6:30-34; 53-56

The American poet Robert Frost is famous for his poem “Mending Wall”, which opens with the line “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”  He speaks of how the winter elements always create gaps in the wall between Frost’s property and that of his neighbor large enough for two to walk through side by side – and so every spring, he and his neighbor agree on a day on which to come out, walk together the property line and replace the stone that have fallen out of the wall onto each side of the property line.  Frost again repeats the line for emphasis, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.” He reflects that since his neighbor’s property has pine trees while he has apple trees on his property, the wall is hardly needed to protect the trees – Frosts apples won’t eat his neighbor’s pine cones.  But the neighbor says only “Good fences make good neighbors.”  Frost muses, “Why do they make good neighbors…Before I built a wall I'd ask to know  What I was walling in or walling out,And to whom I was like to give offence.. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down."  But at the end of the poem, Frost’s neighbor only repeats the line, which had been handed down to him from his father, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.”  In his letter to the Ephesians, the Apostle Paul is also questioning the value of walls.  He’s writing to a congregation in which there are many Gentile believers, perhaps even a majority of Gentile believers.  We know from the book of Acts and from Paul’s other letters that there were tensions between the Jewish followers of the way of Jesus, which would have included Jesus’ first disciples along with those converted by their ministry – tensions between these believers and the Gentile believers converted largely through Paul’s efforts.  There were questions within the church as to whether Gentiles first had to convert to Judaism, be circumcised, and obey the Jewish ceremonial laws before becoming Christians, or whether Gentiles were free from these requirements.  There actually had been a council of the church, called the Jerusalem Council, described in Acts 15, in which the apostles agreed that Gentiles were not subject to the full requirements of the Jewish law…..and yet questions persisted as to how Jewish and Gentile believers should relate to God and to one another.

In his letter, Paul takes a strong stand.  He reminds the Gentile believers that at one time they were far off from God’s promises.  But, Paul writes, “For he” – that is, Christ – “is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”   It may be important to remember that when Paul wrote of a dividing wall, he may have been thinking of the Temple in Jerusalem, which actually had physical walls dividing different groups of worshippers, with a large space for the Gentiles in the outer perimeters of the Temple, a separate space for Jewish women closer to the center, and another separate space for Jewish men still closer to the center – and of course, at the center was the Holy of Holies, where the priests offered their sacrifices.  So at the Temple in Jerusalem, there were literally physical walls separating Gentiles from Jews, separating women from men, separating ordinary believers from the priesthood – walls upon walls upon walls.   These physical walls reflected the spiritual values of those who decided that for God to be properly worshipped, Gentiles should be separated from Jews, women from men, priests from ordinary worshippers, and so forth – a case of architecture mirroring attitudes.  Paul is calling for an end to all that, as he goes on to write, “He” – that is, Christ – “has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it.  He concludes, “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.  In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.”  So instead of a physical temple with lots of dividing walls, Paul saw the believers at Ephesus as a living temple among whom no divisions should exist, among whom and within whom God would dwell.  It is because of Paul’s attitude of openness that we are here at Emanuel Church worshipping today; without Paul’s outreach to the Gentiles, Christianity might have remained a minor sect within Judaism or perhaps broken with Judaism to become a fringe religious sect such as the Mandaeans, who to this day revere the teachings of John the Baptist.

The questions as to whether Jewish and Gentile believers could coexist have long been resolved.  And yet, throughout church history, over and over, there have been questions about the limits of inclusion – of racial minorities, of women in leadership position, of LGBTQ persons – and different faith communities have resolved these questions in different ways.  At every stage, there have always been those calling for walls and for limits – and these calls for walls and limits have usually been grounded in fear, fear that terrible things will befall us if we let them in – whoever we define as “them”.  But, eventually, the Gospel truth that perfect love casts out fear, the gospel truth of God’s radically inclusive love wins out. 

Our little congregation has its own story about inclusion.  We were founded in 1861 as a German Reformed church, and this congregation had a strong ethnic German character.   According to the church’s history, it was not until after World War I that Emanuel Church offered services in English, and not until roughly the beginning of World War II that services in German were discontinued.  And we were hardly unique in that respect; on Allegheny Avenue you can see Irish, Polish, and German Catholic churches located within a block or two of one another.  But, eventually, while our church treasures its German heritage, we opened our doors to the wider community.  Had we not, our doors might not be open at all.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”  These days, our country seems to be taking up the response of Frost’s neighbor, who said, “Good fences make good neighbors.”    In our country today many call for walls, walls of brick and stone reflecting walls of spirit.  But we might also consider Frost’s comment, “Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence.”  It’s an important question to ask, because walls that keep others out also keep us in, and might the walls we build for defense eventually be transformed into prison walls, as the Berlin Wall kept so many imprisoned and apart even from fellow family members for the nearly 30 years from its erection in 1961 until it came down in 1989.  Meanwhile our bridges nationwide are crumbling – here in Pennsylvania, of the state’s roughly 23,000 bridges, 5,200 are considered structurally deficient and 4,300 are considered functionally obsolete – and I wonder if this isn’t another case of architecture mirroring attitudes, that we no longer care for our bridges, at least in part, because they’re not as important to us, because we are also becoming increasingly isolated, less willing than we once were to build bridges of friendship, to extend ourselves beyond our comfort zones.   Physical bridges crumble if not maintained.  Bridges of friendship and relationship likewise crumble if not maintained.

I’d imagine it was difficult for the church at Ephesus to act on Paul’s words, to break down the walls of misunderstanding between Jewish and Gentile believers. It’s easy to take shelter in a holy huddle of like-minded true believers.  It’s much harder to work together across lines of difference.   It takes leadership to make it happen, leadership such as that of Paul, leadership such as that of Jesus, who proclaimed himself the Good Shepherd, and then said, “I have other sheep not of this flock. I must bring them also, and they will hear my voice, and there will be one flock, one shepherd.”  Our Old Testament reading from Jeremiah gives us a warning of what can happen when that quality of leadership is not present; as Jeremiah wrote, because the shepherds didn’t care for the people and only served themselves, the people were like sheep who were scattered and destroyed.  Jeremiah wrote this in the runup to the exile of the Jews to Babylon, and in that exile the flock of Israel was scattered indeed for decades, until they were at last allowed to return home.   Bad leadership drives people apart, drives wedges between people, but good leadership brings people together.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”  We know from Paul’s words that God doesn’t like walls that divide, but does want his people built into a spiritual house in which he can dwell.  May Emanuel Church be that spiritual house, with our members joined together, with no daylight between us, into a holy sanctuary in which God dwells.  Amen.