Abundant Life

The story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand is familiar — but it still has some surprises for us.  For example …

Abundant Life

Ephesians 3:14-21  John 6:1-21 

This is an important story, this tale of Jesus feeding the multitudes with only a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. It appears in all four of the gospels, and it is the only miracle that does.

Although the details differ a little from one account to another, all four evangelists agree on the basics: the large size of the crowd, the small size of the food available, and the miracle of all being filled with leftovers to spare.

The tale is a cautionary tale: it cautions us not to succumb to the reports of scarcity that are all around us. The disciples who were with Jesus were convinced that they did not have the resources to feed the crowds; only Jesus was confident that what they already had would be enough.

His confidence reminds me of a Sunday School song we had one year – it was a “zipper song” that you could “zip in” words of your own. Here’s how one verse might have gone: “ God gives us not just shirts, not just Cheerios, not just baseballs, but everything we need.” It was a lot of fun to sing, and adults as well as children loved to think of incongruous combinations of things to fill in the blanks. But for all the fun, the song has a serious theological message, one that is perhaps especially important for us to hear now, in 2009, in difficult economic times: God gives us everything we need.

I will confess that I often lose sight of this message. It often seems to me that I need a little more than I have: a little more time, a little more energy, a little more self discipline. And it often seems to me that our congregation needs a little bit more of something – a little more commitment, a little more spirituality, a little more openness to change. And while all of those things might be desirable and might make our days pass more easily, the song tells us that there really is already enough.

Even if the math of that statement doesn’t compute for you, I encourage you to adopt it. I encourage you to adopt it because living in a sense of abundance moves us to be generous, to offer aid and assistance to one another. Feeling that we live in abundance reduces our anxieties, interrupts our self-centeredness, and deflates our greed. We are kinder and more open to negotiation and compromise when we are confident that our needs will be met regardless of the outcome.

Living with a sense of abundance does not, of course, mean living beyond the resources that are truly available. It means reckoning up those resources with a particular point of view – a point of view that sees what is present, not what is missing.

All four of the gospel accounts of the feeding of the five thousand reflect this focus on abundance. But the version we heard this morning, the one from the Fourth gospel, has something else – an odd sentence that it is easy to overlook when listening to a familiar tale: “When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.” [John 6:15]

I have been trying to imagine what it would have happened if Jesus had not withdrawn to the mountain by himself. Could the people, I wonder, really force him to be king? They had reasons to expect a king – both their religion and their culture contained promises of a powerful yet benign ruler to come. And they had come to have reasons to suspect that Jesus might be that king, that messiah. One of those reasons was the miracle that we have been considering this morning. So it was not entirely unreasonable for them to come to this conclusion.

But it was clearly not what Jesus had in mind, or what he understood to be his vocation, his calling. He could, I suppose, have accepted the invitation to be king – though the phrase “take him by force” suggests it was not exactly an invitation. Instead, he withdrew from the crowd, and from his disciples, and went off by himself.

Perhaps when we experience Jesus withdrawing from us, it is because we have tried to take him by force and make him be someone that he is not. For some Christians, usually those from conservative and evangelical traditions, the coercion is to make him King – to put him in charge of everything, from curing illness to finding parking spaces. But Jesus withdrew when those demands were about to made on him.

We are more likely to try to force Jesus to be a wisdom teacher and an itinerant preacher. We want to hear him, but we would actually rather that we hear him in a somewhat abstract and metaphorical way. We would like to skip the miracles and supernatural events, and settle in with the human part of his ministry. We like the parables, and wish he would stop talking about the end times and the judgment. But he resists our limits, and refuses to be just a teacher and preacher.

Conversely sometimes we want to force Jesus into being a medical magician. When we are concerned about our own health or the health of someone we love, we offer prayers to Jesus to persuade him to intervene. We want a cure, and we want it now. Yes, yes, it is possible to think about modern medicine as God’s way of healing and restoring, but when it is about us, we are much too impatient to wait for that to happen. So we fervently pray for a miraculous cure, or remission, or rehabilitation. And Jesus continues to heal in his own good time, without much regard to our prayers or our sense of fairness.

At Christmas time, we want to force Jesus to remain a sweet infant. We love the story of the manger and the shepherds and the wise men (we like it so well that we embellish it with lots of other characters who aren’t in the bible). We love the angels and the nativity scenes. We would be perfectly happy if he stayed a baby, and didn’t grow up to challenge the whole Roman Empire. But Jesus refuses remain helpless and naïve, and he confronts the religious authorities, breaks the Sabbath and food laws, and makes friends with the outcasts of his time.

And at Easter, we sometimes secretly wish that he would stay in the tomb, safely dead – mourned, but gone. We are mystified by the fact of the Resurrection, confused by its power, and uneasy in its presence. If we could, we would force him to stay in the Garden, and not enter fully into our world. But Jesus refuses to remain in death, and instead he moves with power and authority even in our own time.

One of the hardest spiritual disciplines of the Christian faith is to let Jesus be Jesus. We have to give up our simple summations of his life that portray him as a simple man. Whatever else he may have been, he was not simple. He showed a wide range of human emotions, including the ones that make us uneasy, like anger and sadness. He was sometimes confrontational with his followers and sometimes gentle. He spent all his life among the Jews, but sometimes acted as if his ministry was more truly to the rest of the world.

Our job as Christians is not to force Jesus to be the king – or the cruise director or the choir director. Our job as Christians is to listen to and watch Jesus, and then to follow him. That means we follow him when he says there is enough food and we think that there are just five loaves and two fishes. That means we follow him when he walks to our boat across an angry sea. That means we question him when he speaks in riddles or parables, and follow him anyway.

The attempt to tame Jesus is always futile, because Jesus is not tame. He is the living, active incarnation of God, who has walked with humans through all times and in all places. And if we try to make him into something that he is not, we ought not to be surprised when he walks away for a time.

But (and here’s the big “but” for today’s sermon) – But, if we pay attention to Jesus and who he really is, then we discover that of all the things that are abundant in this world, life is the most abundant of all. Or as St. Paul writes: “Now to him by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.” [Ephesians 3:20-21].

Prayer for July 26, 2009

Almighty and everlasting God, creator of all things seen and unseen, hear now our silent prayers, as we open our hearts to you in the sacred quietness.

God of faith and hope, we bring before you our prayers for those we have named this morning – we especially remember … Bring to each of them the gifts of mercy and grace that are most needed, according to your wisdom and love.

Holy One, who formed humanity in your own image, we pray today in thanksgiving and hope for our hands.

We begin in thanksgiving, grateful for the marvelous complexity, dexterity, and flexibility of our hands. They remind us that we are, indeed, fearfully and wonderfully made. We marvel at the words of St. Teresa of Avila, that you have no body now but ours, no hands on earth except our hands.

And so we ask your blessing on the many accomplishments of human hands: for the hard works of farming and manufacturing, for the gentle works of touching and caring, for the intricate works of music and art, and for the quiet works of prayer.

We dare to ask, too, for your blessing for the work of our own hands. Keep us mindful of the many small tasks that we do every day: from cooking and driving to speaking and writing. Wake us up to the wonder of all the movements that hands can make, and all the ways they can shape our world and our lives.

We confess, of course, that we sometimes use our hands for ill purposes. We are capable of violence to ourselves, to others, and to the objects and living beings around us. We are prone to carelessness, and we fall into laziness. Forgive us for these errors, and nudge us back into good stewardship of the gifts of our hands.

Creator of all, we pray that our hands may be instruments of your work: of healing and reconciling, of justice and peace. Strengthen our resolve to be your servants in the service of the world, and set our hands to the tasks that are most urgently needed.

All these things we pray, in the name of the one whose hands were instruments of healing and peace, even Jesus the Christ, and we pray together now in the words that he taught us …;