Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost
Year A RCL
August 3, 2008
All Saints’ Bentonville
Gospel:
Jesus withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. 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." Jesus said to them, "They need not go away; you give them something to eat." They replied, "We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish." And he said, "Bring them here to me." 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. And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.
My mother was something of a miracle worker. As a teenage boy I had the habit of unexpectedly bringing home friends at mealtime. After football or basketball practice, my hungry teammates would follow me home, confident that Ms Joslin would feed them. And somehow, she always did. In the days before cell phones, it wasn’t particularly convenient for me to call ahead and announce that I was bringing my buddies home for dinner, and as a teenager, I didn’t do a lot that wasn’t convenient for me. So I didn’t give Mom the option of preparing for unexpected guests, but it didn’t seem to matter. There were always leftovers in the fridge, always potatoes to fry or mash and usually a pot of beans on the stove. She was always ready to feed the crowds and ready to make a meal out of the abundance that a lesser Mom might have called scarcity.
I remember once, when I was about eight, opening the refrigerator door and yelling to no one in particular and to anyone who might hear, “There is nothing to eat in the fridge.” My older brother Robert, who had learned from Mom about creativity in the kitchen, climbed down from his perch on the sofa in the den, turned off the TV and ambled into the kitchen. “Let me show you something, kid,” he said.
Robert, the second son in our family, the brother who thought he was Elvis Presley, had dark curly hair, long sideburns, and a sweet melodic voice. He knelt down in front of the fridge and peered inside its cool darkness. “No problem,” he said. He opened the hydrator and found half a head of iceberg lettuce, pulled a jar of French’s mustard from the shelf beside the ketchup and set them on the counter. Opening the pantry he retrieved a half-empty jar of Skippy peanut butter and a loaf of white bread. He methodically spread the mustard on one side of the bread, the peanut butter on the other and crowned each side with a thick leaf of lettuce. He carefully lifted one side of the sandwich and lowered onto the other, crunching it down firmly. He cut the sandwich in triangles, placed it on a saucer, poured us each a glass of cold milk and said, “Here you go, kid.”
I took a bite and pronounced it good. And Robert, in his best Elvis voice said, “Thank you, thank you very much.”
These last few Sundays, in parables, Jesus has described what the kingdom of heaven is like. In this Gospel reading, through the parable of the loaves and fishes, we are shown. We are shown a world where there is no want. Where there is plenty for all. A world where everyone has enough and no one has too much.
This parable of the loaves and fishes is the only story included in all four Gospels at least once. And there is a similar story in II Kings where the prophet Elisha fed a hundred hungry men with twenty small loaves of barley. And there was bread left over. And we can’t forget the story of manna falling from heaven on the Israelites as they crossed the wilderness. These bread stories, abundance in the midst of scarcity, must be important. I think they are important because they remind us of the compassion of Christ, the bountiful love God has for us, and the connection we have to our neighbors.
It reminds us that shared bread is the best bread of all - offering us a foretaste of the kingdom of heaven.
As a child I wondered about the mechanics of this miracle of loaves and fishes. When Jesus blessed the two small loaves and broke them, did the loaves suddenly start to multiply until there was a huge pile of bread and an equally enormous pile of fish beside them? Or did a miracle of multiplication take place as the disciples moved among the crowd, each basket of fish and bread remaining bottomless until all were fed?
The noted Episcopal preacher, Barbara Brown Taylor, paints a verbal picture of how the baskets containing the meager loaves and fishes began to be passed among the crowd. How some members of the crowd took small bites, but others who happened to have little morsels of food in their bags and pockets, began to place them in the baskets. Others who saw Jesus’ quite confidence in the abundance of God’s blessing that day, contributed bits of bread and fish, the sandwich they had prepared for the journey, the fruit they had bought along the way. The traveler who had more than he could eat, and the beggar who really had nothing to spare, all put something in the baskets to share. These were people who wanted Jesus to succeed in the crazy enterprise he had begun and so they participated in the miracle. Until, as Barbara Brown Taylor says, “at the end there were 12 baskets full of bread – wheat bread, sourdough, pumpernickel, rye, raisin bread, pita, bagels, and maybe even an oat bran muffin or two.”
When is it that we stop waiting for a miracle and decide to become part of one? How badly do we want God to succeed in God’s enterprise? When will we really listen to the words of Jesus telling us, “"They need not go away; you give them something to eat."
It really seems rather miraculous that we are here together. A year ago, most of us didn’t know one another. Many of you didn’t even know what an Episcopalian was. And now, here we are, seeking God together, in community. We are surrounded by abundance at All Saints. A new high school youth program is forming, hospitality guilds are taking shape, and today, for the first time we have a deacon (I can’t believe we have a deacon!). New people are showing up most every Sunday – coming to All Saints’ because they have heard that we have an abundance of love to share.
Last week I spoke with a gay couple who were looking for a church in which to raise their daughter without recrimination. They spoke with the pastor of a church affiliated with the denomination of their youth about joining the church. The pastor told them that they could visit, but they needed to keep a low profile and not reveal the nature of their relationship. He suggested a six month probationary period, to see if they would be accepted by the congregation. They were sent away – hungry. Their story made me want to weep.
May we never become a church that parcels out its love – offering it to some and withholding it to others. When Jesus and the disciples fed the 5000, he didn’t instruct the disciples to give bread to those who seemed to deserve it or that met particular cultural, theological or sociological conditions. He simple broke the bread, blessed it and fed them.
That was, in fact, part of the miracle – that all these different people sat down together and shared the broken bread. And it is the miracle of All Saints’ that we are gathered here – this collection of strangers, forming community, learning to love.
Jesus could have told his disciples, “Let’s garner our resources. We don’t really have enough to feed our own. Send the crowd away and let them fend for themselves.” But no, Jesus said, "They need not go away; you give them something to eat." May no one ever leave All Saints’ hungry.
You and I are part of the miracle of this place. The identity of this parish, its personality, its sense of self, is being formed by you and me. My prayer is that because of the work we are doing today, that 50 years from now, All Saints’ will be known as a place where no one leaves hungry - a place where everyone is fed, a place where God’s love is shared with everyone who walk through its doors.
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