You Feed Them!

Scriptures:
2 Kings 4:42-44                        Isaiah 58:1-14

Ephesians 3:14-21                    Mark 6:34-52

(Note: Because of the baptism on July 26, we're a week behind on the lectionary texts.  We'll catch up on August 9, combining lectionary texts from both Aug 2 and Aug 9.  The photos below are from the "Church of the Multiplication of Loaves and Fishes" located in Tabgha, near the Sea of Galilee, built on the place where the feeding of the 5,000 is said to have taken place.  The last photo is of the Pastor Dave along the shores of the Galilee)

Jesus’ disciples had just returned from their first mission trip.  After getting an underwhelming reception at his hometown synagogue, Jesus had sent his disciples out, two-by-two, to preach and cast out demons.  Now the disciples were returning, eager to tell Jesus about where they’d been and what they’d done.  Meanwhile, while the disciples had been away, Jesus had just gotten the devastating news of Herod’s execution of John the Baptist.  Remember that, according to Luke’s gospel, John the Baptist and Jesus were cousins – so this execution would have hit Jesus hard.  Jesus needed some quality time with his disciples, and they all needed some time away from the crowds, with their endless demands.  So Jesus said, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”  They took a boat to a deserted place….but by the time they got there, it was no longer deserted.  The crowds saw what direction the boat was going, and so by the time the disciples landed, there were the crowds, the same ones they’d left behind.  Deep sigh: No rest for the weary.

We’re told that despite his own weariness and that of the disciples, “He had compassion on them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.”  But they day wore on, and the disciples’ weariness was wearing them down, and so they told Jesus, “Yo, Jesus’, it’s getting late…can we put a wrap on this already.”  Of course, the disciples try to sound compassionate – “Hey Jesus, nobody’s eaten all day….you really ought to wrap up your sermon and send the crowds away to buy food, before they start passing out.”  Sounds compassionate, except that one of the main reasons these people were following Jesus is that they were desperately poor, and had nothing with which to buy food for themselves.  Jesus sees the self-interest at the heart of the disciples’ words – understandable, given that the disciples were themselves exhausted and hungry, but self-interest just the same - but Jesus also knows a teaching moment when he sees one.  So Jesus pushes back at them – “You give them something to eat!”.  Feed them yourselves! And the disciples push back at Jesus – “It would take the better part of a year’s wages to feed this crowd.” – basically throwing up their hands at the impossibility of what Jesus is asking.  But Jesus doesn’t let them off the hook – “How many loaves do you have? Go and see.”   And they come back with five loaves and two fish – John’s gospel tells us that a small boy in the crowd donated them.  Jesus told the disciples to have the people sit in groups of fifties and hundreds, and then he looked up to heaven, blessed the loaves, and broke them, and gave them to the disciples to distribute to the people, and he distributed the two fish among the people. And, we’re told, everyone had enough, and there were twelve baskets of fragments left over.

There’s a lot – a whole lot – going on in what seems like just a miracle story.  I would observe that the account of the feeding of the five thousand is in all four gospels - Matthew 14:13-21, Mark 6:30-44, Luke 9:12-17, John 6:1-14.  While there are differences between the four Gospels, and especially between John’s gospel and the other three Gospels – each Gospel includes stories that the others leave out, and sometimes different Gospels tell the same story in slightly different ways, all four Gospel writers thought that this feeding story was essential to include in their Gospel, essential to knowing and understanding who Jesus is.  Only two Gospels even include the account of Jesus’ birth, but all four Gospels include this story. Why is that?

First of all, some Old Testament connections – for those present at the miracle, and for those first disciples of Jesus and those who first heard the story – this would have reminded them of some favorite stories of the prophets Elijah and Elisha.  They would have been reminded of the story of Elijah’s visit to the widow at Zarephath, when there was drought in the land, at a time when she and her son were about to eat their last bit of food and die – Elijah asked them to share their food with him, and, in words of Scripture, “the jar of flour was not used up and the jug of oil did not run dry, in keeping with the word of the Lord spoken by Elijah”.  And the story of Elisha, the successor of Elijah, was read this morning, in which Elisha took a man’s donation of twenty barley loaves and fresh ears of grain, and fed a hundred people, with food left over.  Jesus’ disciples would have seen that Jesus fed a much bigger crowd with much less food, with much more left over, and made the connection that Jesus was an even greater prophet than Elisha. This would also have reminded people of the prophecy of the messianic banquet, in which there would be more than enough for everyone – a vision that would have been very attractive to peasants who were usually existing on the bare edge of starvation.

The story of the feeding of the five thousand is followed by the story of Jesus walking on the water – Jesus had sent his disciples out on a boat to the other side of the lake, while he went on a mountain to pray, and as the disciples struggle against an adverse wind, Jesus comes to them walking on the water, gets into the boat, saying “Take heart, It is I, do not be afraid”, and the adverse wind stops.  Mark ends this story with an odd comment: “They were utterly astounded, for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened.”

“For they did not understand about the loaves” – what does the story of Jesus walking on the water and calming the sea have to do with the loaves?  All are pointing to the same thing – that the Jesus who had the power to use a tiny bit of food to feed thousands is the Jesus who has the power to calm the wind and waves.  When Jesus says ‘It is I’ – the Greek words are “ego eimi” – I am – the Greek equivalent to the divine name given to Moses at the burning bush, which translates to English as “I am that I am” or “I will be what I will be”.  Mark does not explicitly beat his readers over the head with the conclusion – “Watch closely; Jesus is now demonstrating that he is God” – but the implications are pretty clear.

“They did not understand about the loaves.”  What can we learn from the loaves?  As I said earlier, there’s a lot going on in our Gospel reading.  What can we learn about God from watching Jesus in action? 

In response to the disciples telling Jesus that they couldn’t possibly feed the crowd with the little food available, Jesus asked them to show them what they did have – and he used it to feed them, with plenty left over.   God is not stingy.  The God we worship is a God of abundance.  News flash: our planet has plenty of food to feed everyone. Hunger, thirst, homelessness – none of these are God’s will, not for one moment.  Every one of them is the result of human sin, the sin of greedy individuals, and the systemic evil of a system – what Paul called powers and principalities, and spiritual wickedness in high places - that elevates to power those so wealthy they can’t even keep track of many houses they own, while thousands starve on the streets in this country and millions around the globe.  The constant story we hear, that we can’t feed everyone, that there isn’t enough, that while it’s a shame, some people just have to go hungry, is a lie from the bottom of the pit of hell.  The problem is one of distribution – the few hoarding, and the many starving – and then the few who are hoarding diverting attention by pointing fingers and telling stories about the many who are starving – “they don’t deserve to eat; they use drugs/are here illegally/are cheating the system” - to pit those who are starving against one another.  Divide and conquer, the oldest trick in the world to maintaining power.  Divide and conquer is how powers and principalities and spiritual wickedness stay in high places.  Indeed, to quote one billionaire who shall be nameless – though you can look up the quote easily enough, “Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game.”  And when “the excitement of playing the game” for one person means starvation for millions, then that quote is quite literally the voice of someone under the demonic control, one who has given over one’s life to the control of money. And so whenever somebody – some talking head on Fox news, or some meme on Facebook - brings up this idea that some poor people are deserving and other poor people are undeserving, I’d ask us to remember Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand – did Jesus ask people to show their papers to prove that they were legal citizens, or have them fill out a form and show pay stubs to demonstrate their need, or ask them to pee in a cup so that the disciples could test for drugs? – NO!  Not because all the people in the crowd were saintly – there were assuredly thieves and addicts and hustlers and con artists among them – but because there were human beings created in God’s image, and Jesus fed them all, good, bad, and indifferent.  The way Jesus demonstrates how to fight the lie of scarcity, that lie that comes from the people who accumulate billions while others starve in order to keep score, that lie of Satan from the bottom of the pit of hell, is to share what we have, be it ever so little, to put our loaves and fish into God’s hands, and watch them bless people beyond anything we ever could have imagined. 

Here I’ll mention our food cupboard.  Every Thursday at 5 pm, Michael opens up the church, and some of our struggling families and friends of the congregation find some food – milk, eggs, butter, usually bacon or sausage, breakfast cereal, pasta, maybe some frozen burgers or some chicken, maybe some canned soup.  The food doesn’t drop down out of the sky, doesn’t appear miraculously from heaven – two members of our church donate 90% or more of the food from their own personal funds – not one nickel, not one penny for the cupboard comes out of church funds, it costs the church nothing beyond having the lights on in the kitchen for half an hour or so - and other members donate what they can when they can.  And so, because of the cupboard, a few of our families, members of our community, our sisters and brothers, are a little less hungry than they’d otherwise be.

The cupboard is meant as a blessing.  But I’d also invite us to see it as an example that points beyond itself, to challenge us to a way of life of giving, a way of life of being generous without counting the cost.  “Freely you have received; freely give.”  Certainly I’d invite those who haven’t supported the cupboard thus far to consider it, but I’d invite all of us, even those being helped by the cupboard, to look for opportunities to share what we have, even if it’s very little, with others, to share our resources, be they ever so little, with the church through our tithes – the giving of a percentage of our income to the church, traditionally 10% of income – and offerings, and to trust that God will multiply them to meet our needs, the needs of our church, and the needs of the world.   I’ll say it again:  “Freely you have received; freely give.”

This may be unfamiliar language, uncomfortable language.  Many of us, particularly in our Reformed tradition, have been taught to think of faith purely as a matter of believing certain ideas about God, about believing the creeds, or about praying a little prayer, in order to be saved. “Salvation by grace through faith” is how the formula goes, and it’s true, so far as it goes – but as understood or rather misunderstood by many, it doesn’t go far enough.  As misunderstood by many, it’s not transformative enough.  The letter of James reminds us that even the demons believe in God, so much so that they tremble – but clearly their faith not a saving faith, and that faith without works is dead.  And Jesus spoke of those who cry, “Lord, Lord” but don’t do what Jesus taught.  In Matthew 25, Jesus speaks of those who fed, clothed, housed, and visited the poor as having served Jesus himself, while those who didn’t went away into eternal damnation. I’ll be blunt, as in upside the head with a 2x4 blunt:  if our faith in God does not lead us into concrete acts of helping others – feeding them, clothing them, housing them, visiting them in prison, even at a sacrifice to our finances or our free time or our reputations – we have cause to question whether our faith is a saving faith, whether our faith in God is really faith at all, or just wishful thinking.  This isn’t about working our way into heaven – there’s that old bugaboo accusation which Protestants are always making toward Catholics – but about whether Christ has truly transformed our lives, or not.  “A tree is known by its fruits”, Jesus said, and Jesus also said of the religious leaders of his day that “By their fruits you shall know them.”  If we don’t produce fruit, we’re not a fruit tree. It’s just that simple. Going to church, in and of itself, doesn’t make us Christians, any more than walking into a garage will turn me into a car or walking into a furniture store will turn me into a Barcalounger.  Becoming a Christian is not about making us comfortable with who and what we are, but about transforming us, often with considerable discomfort, into people we could never have imagined becoming.  Being a disciple of Christ is not an hour or two on Sunday, but a way of life every second of every minute of every day.  The hour or two on Sunday, crucial as it is, is intended to reconnect us with God and renew us and transform us for the other six days of the week. 

That’s a challenging message of the loaves.  A more comforting message from the loaves is that, in Jesus’ hands, the loaves and fish were enough.  In Jesus’ hands, what we have is enough.  In Jesus’ hands, we are enough. Broken and sinful as we are, if we put ourselves in Jesus’ hands, Jesus can transform us, and use us to transform others, and to transform the world.  So I don’t have to be a bazillionaire to be able to give an amount worthy of sacrifice to Jesus; ten percent of my income, my own limited resources, put in God’s hands, is enough.  I don’t have to preach like Billy Graham or sing like Pavarotti or play guitar like Jimi Hendrix in order to be worthy to share my gifts in worship; while this church deserves better and God knows that I wish I had better to offer, my sermons and my so-so singing and lousy guitar playing, put in God’s hands, are enough. Emanuel Church doesn’t have to be big enough to move into the former stadium of the Houston Rockets in order to be worthy to be called a Christian church – while I hope we will continue to grow, our small congregation in this small building on this small side street of this small neighborhood of Bridesburg is enough, more than enough, for God to use to transform our neighborhood, our city, our country, our world.  In God’s hands, as individuals and as a congregation, we are enough – not necessarily “just as we are” but rather “just as we will be” when transformed – lifted up to heaven, blessed, broken open, and distributed – by God.

“Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke them, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people.”  Christians throughout the centuries have seen these words in our Gospel reading and been reminded of the Last Supper, when Jesus again lifted up the bread and wine, blessed them, broke them, distributed them, and said, “This do in remembrance of me.”  In a few minutes, we, too, will be breaking bread together, joining Christians around the world to eat bread and drink wine, to meet Jesus in the breaking of the bread.  It’s a sign of the heavenly banquet to which Christ invites us, where we will be welcome, where God will feed and none will hoard and all will share, and where there will finally at long last be enough.  Amen.