We Are The Miracle We’ve Been Waiting For
Matthew 14:13-21
13 Now when Jesus
heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself.
But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. 14 When
he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured
their sick. 15 When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said,
"This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away
so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves." 16
Jesus said to them, "They need not go away; you give them something to
eat." 17 They replied, "We have nothing here but five loaves and two
fish." 18 And he said, "Bring them here to me." 19 Then he
ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two
fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them
to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. 20 And all ate and
were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve
baskets full. 21 And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women
and children.
Many of you have adult children, so maybe you have already had this moment. The moment in which you
realized that the only thing holding your 20-something kid back from being a
fully-fledged adult was your reflexive parental urge to jump in and do for them
what they could do for themselves.
This has been my biggest stumbling block as a parent, and I revisited it
this week while in Boston with Rachel.
We made a frantic pre-vacation trip there on Sunday evening,
driving up her stuff that couldn’t be transported by plane. On Monday, we unloaded the boxes from
my trunk, deposited them in her new apartment, and then set off for IKEA for
some cheap graduate student furniture.
It took hours, but by late afternoon on Monday, we sat on
the floor of her apartment surrounded by a mountain of IKEA boxes filled with
pieces of plywood, nails and -- as
anyone who has built IKEA furniture knows – instructions that may make perfect
sense if you’re building cheap furniture in Sweden, but are almost
incomprehensible in America. And I
knew I had a choice – I could offer to stay up all night and build the
furniture for her. Or, I could go
have a nice dinner, get some sleep, and leave it for her to put together on
Tuesday while I flew back to Pittsburgh for a meeting.
Despite the fact that I was exhausted after a 10 hour drive
and a long day of moving heavy boxes, every impulse in my feeble mom-brain
wanted to put that furniture together for her. My good judgment was almost overwhelmed by visions of collapsing chairs, lamps short
circuiting, and a possible trip to the emergency room. But I resisted. I said, “Rachel, you do it.” I think she thought I was kidding. But I said, no I mean it. You do it.
You’re an adult. It’s your
furniture. You do it.
And she did.
She didn’t like it. Like
her mother, Rachel doesn’t enjoy using tools or reading directions, but she
got it done. And she did an
awesome job. My only contribution
was to bring a power screwdriver in my briefcase when I flew back to Boston so
we could tighten up some troublesome screws on a table.
And I wonder how often God has to hold back from just
putting all the pieces together for us when we struggling to get our lives
together. We pray for God’s help,
but I think what we’re really often asking is for God to just step in and solve
our problems for us in a miraculous way – preferably one that doesn’t involve
too much change or challenge or effort on our part. We secretly want to drop our problems into God’s lap and let
God figure it out. But it hardly
ever works that way, does it? It’s
so annoying. God is just like, “Uh, uh. You do it. You’ve got everything you need. You do it.” And
it must frustrate God beyond belief to watch the people God loves so much get
so many things so very wrong. But
God, like a good parent, doesn’t often step in to save us from ourselves.
Maybe the best way to enter this familiar story of the
loaves and fishes is to remember how Jesus is entering into it. Jesus had just received about the worst
news anyone could receive. His
cousin John was dead, after being beheaded in prison by Herod. We can imagine what Jesus must have
felt after receiving that news.
Shock. Grief. John’s violent death may have also made
clear to Jesus that the work he is doing will likely lead to the very same fate
for him. It’s only a matter of
time. So Jesus withdraws to a
quiet place to be alone and deal with the sorrow, anger, and fear of what’s
next in this difficult ministry.
But the quiet time alone doesn’t last very long. People get wind of where Jesus has
hidden himself. They need
what people always need from Jesus -- healing. And Jesus is able to shake off his sorrow and his anger and
his worry long enough to take care of the people out of his compassion and
love.
He begins to heal and it takes a long time, all day
really. It’s a huge crowd and the
people have a lot of problems and before you know it, it’s evening. As the sun goes down, the crowd
is still hanging around, and has grown from hundreds of people into
thousands. Jesus is entirely
preoccupied and hasn’t noticed the time, but the disciples soon see a big
problem looming. They are in the
middle of nowhere and all of these needy people are going to be very, very
hungry, very, very soon. Time to
shut this thing down and send these people back to wherever they came from
before they become a angry mob demanding food. Jesus may have the energy to keep going all night, but the
disciples barely have enough food to feed themselves, let alone the thousands
of people who keep streaming in to the shoreline.
When the disciples tell Jesus that it’s time to send the
people home for supper, Jesus says:
“Ok. No problem. You do
it. Give them something to
eat.” The disciples look at the
five loaves of bread and two fish, and then they look at Jesus. Jesus must be kidding, right? There’s not enough food here for us,
Jesus. What are we supposed to do?
I can imagine Jesus sighing deeply when he hears the
disciples say, “There’s not enough.”
I can imagine Jesus saying, “Give me that basket, already,” as he sighs
again, lifts his eyes to heaven, thanks God for the fish and bread, and then
says to the disciples, “You do it.
Go give those people something to eat!”
The disciples look at the bread and fishes and see a
disaster brewing.
Jesus looks at the bread and fishes and sees a dinner party
for thousands.
Which view is reality?
Is this really a story about a miracle that only Jesus can perform? Or, maybe, this a story about what
happens when we are finally somehow able to see the world the way Jesus sees
it?
The Kingdom of God is like this: Abundant. There is enough, more than enough. Enough for everyone.
The kingdom of the anxious disciples is like this: Scarcity. We don’t have enough for ourselves, so how can we feed
anyone else? Better to hold on to
what we have.
There’s a stark difference between the world that we see,
and the Kingdom of God. When we
drop our scarcity blinders, if only for a moment, and look a little more
closely at what we are holding in our hands, maybe we can see how abundantly
God has already blessed us. Maybe
we could see the world the way Jesus sees it.
I thought about this text on Tuesday night when the
community gathered to hear about Holy Family Institute’s plans to care for up
to 3-dozen children who have arrived in America from Central America without
family or parents accompanying them.
One of the arguments made in opposition to Holy Family’s plans was that
money spent to care for children from Central America would result in not
enough money left to care for American children. People spoke as if compassion for children is a zero sum
game and there’s only so much of it to go around. I think Sister Linda Yankoski said it best when she answered
the question about why they were welcoming the Central American children when
she said this: “There’s a child
sleeping on a floor in Texas. I
have an empty bed.” Taking care of
36 children from Central America will not result in less care for the more than
11,000 American children and families that Holy Family Institute serves each
year. Holy Family simply
believes that they can do more. They believe their compassion can extend even
further, because they follow Jesus of deep compassion, and they trust in a God
of astonishing abundance.
This scarcity mindset extends, unfortunately, even into
churches. I recently heard about a
church that decided to reach out to their neighborhood by holding a summer
festival on their lawn, including food booths run by the deacons to raise money
for local mission. One of the
deacons suggested giving free tickets for the food booths to the local food
pantry to distribute to clients so that they could come to the festival free of
charge. One of the deacons said,
“We can’t possibly do that. How
could we figure out how much food to buy?
What if we don’t have enough food for the people who are paying?” Another objected saying, “We can’t give
out free food! We’re raising money
for mission!” It may not surprise
you to hear that most of the people who attended the festival were church
members, which is probably what most of church people wanted anyway. They really weren’t interested in
getting to know their community.
See, that’s the real danger of scarcity thinking -- it lets
us off the hook and excuses us from doing those things that make us
uncomfortable or are just plain hard to do. Unglamorous.
Scary even. If we say we
don’t have enough, then we don’t have to do anything and we can send people
away. And yet, this is exactly the
opposite of what Jesus would have us do.
In fact, you could almost say that Jesus is daring us to act. People are hungry? You
feed them. People are in pain and
suffering? You take care of them.
The world is falling apart?
You get involved to make it
better. With whatever you have, even if it looks like very
little or even nothing. Help in
whatever way you can help, even if
you feel completely helpless.
This story isn’t about an inexplicable miracle of magically
expanding loaves finding their way into empty bellies or amazingly multiplying
fishes jumping out of baskets into hungry mouths, all thanks to a little Jesus
hocus pocus. It’s a story about
the people of God trusting that the deepest needs of this world can be met by God’s people in the world
right now. That’s not a miracle.
That is gospel truth, as plain as the nose on your face. We
are the miracle. We are the miracle. We
are the miracle we’ve been waiting for. Right here. The
miracle is sitting right here in this church. And the miracle is sitting in the church up the road and
across the county and across the ocean and around the world. 2 billion Christians. You want to tell me we can’t get
something done with 2 billion Christians, even if each of us has just a couple
loaves and a couple fish? And if
we invited the Jews and the Muslims and the Hindus and the Buddhists and even non-believers
of good will to come along side of us, we might just get something done.
I’ve come to the conclusion that it is not that our problems
as a church, or a country, or even as a world have so big, but that our
expectations and aspirations have become so small. Part of that is understandable in most parts of the world
where merely scratching out a daily existence is a minor miracle. But most of us walk around thinking we
only have a couple of loaves of bread and a few tiny fish when, in fact, we
have many more resources than we imagine.
For the next six weeks, beginning this Sunday, we will be
engaging in conversation with each other about the future of our church and the
possibilities that exist for vital ministry here in this community. You’ll be talking about what we already
do well as a community of faith – what excites us about ministry here. What challenges us? What do we need to learn about the
community around us? How are their
needs? How deeply do we understand
the way in which people will engage in church into the 21st century?
What has God already given us to do the ministry that needs to be done here and
now, not 20 or 30 years ago? What
is Jesus already up to? Where is
Jesus already at work and how can we get in on that kingdom building
action? After those conversations,
there will be more conversations, more dreaming, more praying, more asking of
questions and looking for answers as we talk about adapting to a new reality.
What we will become is entirely up for grabs. But I promise you, we will be changed. And God has already given us
everything we need.
The disciples could have hidden the small amount of food
they had. They could have kept it
in their satchels and made sure that they would have something for themselves
at the end of the day. But they
didn’t. They took what little they
had and gave everything to Jesus.
He blessed it, and blessed them, and then he told them to go get
busy. Feed my people. There’s enough for everyone.
So here’s what we’ll do. Take what little you have and hold it in your
hands. That small holy gift you’ve
been holding back for such a time as this although you didn’t know it. Now that you’re looking at it more
closely, you are almost embarrassed.
It doesn’t like very much, does it? Hardly worth mentioning, really. But hold it out anyway. Trust him. Wait
for him. And you will hear his
voice that says, “Oh yes.
This. This. This is what I’ve been waiting for you
to discover while you’ve been fussing about your fears and your failures and
all those things you though mattered so much to me. This.
This. This, I can work
with.”
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
