Sermon from Sunday, August 3, 2014

Scripture:  Matthew 14:13-21

How does it happen? 

 

Jesus and his followers have only 5 loaves and 2 fish to offer, and by the time 5000 men and who knows how many women and children have had their fill there is food left over – 12  baskets full – a basket still full for each of the 12 tribes of God’s people.  How is it that everyone around them is fed and all of God’s people still have more to share?  It’s the kingdom of God come-alive in the world, and it’s good to wonder how it happens.  

 

This week I came across a few answers.

 

 

Maybe the disciples ordered pizza – a tradition maintained to this day by youth groups across the country, making pizza a sacrament of the kingdom as good as bread and wine, and reinforcing the way we sometimes assume we need to order something in – that in ourselves we don’t have what it takes to meet the needs of others around us.

Or maybe there was something extraordinary about the loaves and the fish that were available that day.

 

Sometimes we think if only we had better gifts, bigger resources of some kind then maybe we could be of more use, offer something worthwhile to the world and to people around us.

 

Or there’s also this suggestion of super-natural help from above:

 

We believe in prayer and sometimes it seems all we can do is pray for God and the angels somehow to intervene – to do something miraculous or magical to meet the need – somehow to change things or change people or change the world for the better.

 

And there are elements of truth in all of these answers.  There are resources we can order or bring in from outside to add to what we have already, to make ourselves stronger and more faithful as a congregation.  There are also sometimes extraordinary gifts and resources that land in our lap that allow us to do extraordinary things.  And there is power in intercessory prayer, and an effect that heaven has on earth.

 

But none of these things are mentioned in the story.  When it comes to feeding the crowd around the disciples – when it comes to meeting the needs of others around us, three things happen that make this a story of the kingdom of God coming-to-be in the life of the world.

 

One is that when the need becomes apparent – when it’s obvious there’s a hunger and something needs to be done to meet it, Jesus asks his disciples – asks us, “What do you have?  They need not go away or elsewhere; you can give them something to eat.  What do you have?”

 

 

Five loaves and two fish.  Ordinary bread, common fish.  The kind of ordinary stuff everyone has every day of their lives.  “Nothing but these things,” the disciples say – meaning “only” this.  Except Jesus doesn’t see it as “only.”  Jesus sees it as exactly what’s needed, and as enough.

In response to the needs of the world around us – as close as next door and in our own city, or around the world, what do we have?  What is it we carry with us?  What is it we have within us?

Some of us find this easy to answer.  For Jesus it is easy and immediate.  At the very start of the story, when Jesus sees the great crowd that has gathered around him, he has compassion on them, and because he knows it he lets it guide his actions and his response.  

Some of us are as aware as he is of what we carry and feel inside; our feelings rise easily and we know them by name.  Others of us find it harder; we bury what we feel – for a variety of reasons, and we need to learn to scratch the surface a bit, dig a little into ourselves to really know what we feel and le to express it.  But regardless of who and how we are, we have feelings, thoughts and ideas in response to the needs of others.  It’s the way God has made us – to be capable of sympathy with someone else’s sorrow; capable of tears in the face of another’s pain and loss; of anger against ignorance, abuse or hurt; of both fear and anger  when we see someone’s well-being in peril; of shared joy with someone else’s happiness.

So “what do you have, what’s really deep-down inside you when you see the needs of the world, when you see the hunger of others?”  Jesus asks us to take the time to know what it is – to name and identify what is stirred up within us by what we see and hear around us.

Then, “bring it to me,” Jesus says. 

This is the second thing, and it’s important because a lot of what we feel and think in response to what we see in the world and in others’ lives is often not in and of itself the answer – not what will help the kingdom of God to come.

For Jesus it is easier.  As like us as he is in his humanity, he is also more open to the mind and heart of God than we are, more in tune with the spirit and vision of God.  So when he responds from his heart, it is a holy, healing and life-giving response.  It’s redemptive.

We are more mixed in how we feel and respond – there’s a little more of self and selfishness, a greater longing for quick and simple answers that will make things easier for us, a quicker tendency to judge and close the book than Jesus shows.

So Jesus says “bring it to me,” and he lifts what we have to God.  He connects what we feel and think to the mind and heart of God, to God’s truth and good will.  And in this way, what we feel and think is refined, purified, sanctified, maybe changed or enlarged.  The rough and selfish edges are knocked off.  Maybe one way to think about it is that the dirt and mold of our humanness is scraped off the bread of our feelings, and the bones of self-centredness are taken out of the fish of our thoughts and ideas.

And then, thus purified and blessed, he tells us to give and offer what we have to the crowd – bearing in mind what we have heard him say previous to this: that what we have to give may seem as tiny and insignificant as a mustard seed, and it may seem to disappear into the life of the world like a little bit of yeast in a big lump of dough.

But that’s the good news – that sometimes from our little mustard seed there grows exactly the plant that others need for refuge and life; that just a little yeast that we add into the mix gives rise to a lot of new life; and that just a few loaves and fishes – ordinary loaves and common fish – the ordinary stuff we all have within us every day of our lives, is exactly what’s needed and is enough, when we bring it to Jesus and let him guide us in offering it.