Sermon delivered July 29, 2012 at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Franklin, Tenn.
You may have noticed that we’ve made a little shift this morning in our Gospel reading. For the past seven weeks, we’ve been hearing texts from the Gospel of Mark, but today we switch to the Gospel of John. For the next five weeks, we will read sequentially through chapter 6 of the Gospel of John. (If you want a preview of coming attractions, you might go home and read through all of John 6, which really is one continuous unit, even though we’ll only read short excerpts from it each week in the lectionary.)
So why the switch to John? Well, we’re starting with the story of the feeding of the five thousand today, which is where we had arrived in Mark’s Gospel last week, but the lectionary skipped over that story in Mark and gave it to us this week in John. I suspect the framers of the lectionary preferred John’s version because the story is more robust theologically in John. The feeding of the five thousand and the discourse that follows it about Jesus as the bread of life are at the heart of the message of John’s Gospel.
So what is that message? In order to understand what the author of the Gospel of John is trying to tell us about Jesus, we need to try to hear the story from the perspective of the first-century Jewish Christians who preserved it.
To our modern Western ears, the most striking aspect of this story is probably the “supernatural” element in it, the physical impossibility of five thousand men eating their fill from only five loaves of bread and two fish. I have often heard Christians say that the fact that Jesus performed miracles like the feeding of the five thousand and walking on water distinguishes him from other religious figures and is “proof” that he was God and not just a wise teacher or prophet.
The problem with this argument is that the early Jewish Christian communities who wrote and preserved this story would not have viewed the performance of miracles as evidence that someone was divine. Moses, Elijah, Elisha, and other prophets of the Hebrew tradition all are said to have done things that we modern Westerners would consider “miracles,” and yet Jewish tradition never claimed that they were God. Favored by God and acting on God’s behalf, yes, but not God himself in the flesh, as later Christian tradition came to claim about Jesus.
Miracle stories were common in Jesus’s time about all sorts of religious figures, and miracle stories as such would not have set Jesus apart as any more special than the next holy man. What set him apart was the fact that his followers believed he was the Messiah, the prophet chosen by God to redeem and restore the kingdom of Israel. That is what the author of John’s Gospel is telling us in this story, not that “Jesus must be God because he can break the laws of physics.”
What would have been most striking to the first tellers and hearers of this story would not have been its supernatural elements, but the theological claims it made about Jesus. First-century Jewish Christian hearers of this story would immediately recognize echoes of other sacred stories they knew well: the story of God feeding the Israelites in the wilderness with manna, the bread from heaven; or the story of the widow who shared her last handful of meal and oil with the prophet Elijah and it miraculously lasted until the end of the drought (1 Kings 17:1-16); or the story of the prophet Elisha instructing a servant to share twenty barley loaves and some fresh ears of grain with one hundred men. Though the servant asks, “How can I set this before a hundred people?” somehow they all eat and are filled and yet have some left over (2 Kings 4:42-44).
At the same time as they recognized the similarities to those stories, the first hearers of this story also would have been struck by how much greater the scale was in this story: though Elisha fed one hundred men with twenty barley loaves, Jesus fed five thousand men with only five barley loaves. They would have understood immediately the author’s intent: to convince the hearer that Jesus was even greater than the most highly revered miracle workers and prophets in Israel’s history.
The first hearers of this story also would have noted its setting, near the time of the Jewish religious festival of Passover. Although this story appears in all four Gospels, John is the only one that mentions that detail. For the author of the Gospel of John, Passover is extremely important to the theological claim he is making about Jesus: that Jesus is the Messiah and the new Passover lamb.
Passover was the season of the year when messianic expectation and hope was the strongest: it was believed that the Messiah would come during Passover. Jesus’s actions of blessing the bread, breaking it and then distributing it echo the actions of the host at a Passover meal, and gathering up the leftover fragments was also common at the end of a Passover meal. By telling us that Jesus served as host of a miraculous Passover-like meal, the author of John’s Gospel is calling to mind a banquet of abundance like the messianic banquet foretold by the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 25:6), thus depicting Jesus as the Messiah. The reaction of the crowd acknowledges this claim: “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world” (John 6:14), they say after participating in this meal. But John shows us right away that Jesus will not be the kind of Messiah the people were expecting: a king who would overthrow the Roman political powers who were occupying the land of Israel at that time. Instead, Jesus withdraws to the mountain by himself when he realizes that the people want to make him king (John 6:15). As he will say to Pilate before his execution, Jesus’s kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36).
The claim that Jesus is the new Passover lamb will not be made fully until the end of John’s Gospel, with Jesus’s death, but there are allusions to it in the second half of chapter 6, when Jesus begins talking about himself as the bread of life, but we’ll look at that more carefully in a few weeks.
Finally, I believe that in addition to making theological claims about Jesus’s identity, stories about Jesus’s miracles also offer us a message about how we are to live our lives in faith. The story of the feeding of the five thousand invites us to trust in God’s ability to, as the saying goes, “Make a way where there is no way,” and also calls us to move beyond responding to immediate needs to creating spaces for community.
Since the Gospels do not tell us that the crowds that Jesus fed were starving or unable to buy their own food, it seems that the message in this story is not as simple as “feed people when they are hungry or in need,” because we don’t know for sure that these people were hungry or in need. That fact, to me, makes it all the more significant that Jesus chooses to feed them all, and together. In doing so, Jesus broke down barriers in a culture where, under normal circumstances, your place in society determined who you were allowed to eat with. Some of the other versions of this story tell us that disciples assume that it would be reasonable to send the people back to town to take care of their own needs, but Jesus resists what would have been the natural inclination of the people to go about their separate ways, eating only with those who were considered socially appropriate, and instead creates a space for community between unlikely parties, right there on the hillside. Before the disciples knew what was happening, strangers were breaking bread with strangers and beginning to form a community together over a shared meal.
The deeper miracle in the feeding of the five thousand, I would suggest, was not the fact that people were fed, but that they ate together, and in doing so were offered a living glimpse of the kingdom of God: a community where society’s divisions are broken down and God’s love is more than enough to meet everyone’s needs. So the message for us, I think, is that as those who seek to follow Christ, we are called not just to respond to immediate needs, but to offer this world a similar glimpse of that kingdom where faith in God’s abundance frees us for a loving embrace of all.
Showing posts with label feeding of the five thousand. Show all posts
Showing posts with label feeding of the five thousand. Show all posts
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Superfluous miracles and community-building
Today I preached in my Advanced Homiletics class. The assignment was to preach on a miracle text, and I chose the Gospel passage for Proper 13, Year A -- Matthew's account of the Feeding of the Five Thousand (Matthew 14:13-21).
This was a text I'd preached on before, at my sending parish, and I took that sermon and edited and re-shaped it for a slightly different and more focused approach. (You can compare the original sermon here.) It was an interesting exercise to re-visit a sermon text (even though that wasn't part of the assignment) and attempt to tighten it up for what I hope was a more effective presentation. We've been reading David Buttrick's Homiletic in class, with his emphasis on "moves" rather than "points" in a sermon. I realized that the original sermon had too many "moves" -- it tried to do too much with its dual focus of the community-building of the miracle and the Eucharistic foreshadowing. (This is a common mistake I made in my earliest sermons, I'm realizing.) I also realized that I'd put way too many personal details in that Eucharist section (in the original sermon) about how I got to the quotation that I used. Ultimately I decided to cut the entire Eucharist section and just more fully develop the concept of the "deeper miracle" in the feeding of the five thousand being about creating community.
Our professor says the goal is to get to where we go through this kind of editing process on our sermons before we ever deliver them the first time... and I hope this exercise has helped me to think more clearly about what the "end goal" is for a sermon as I'm writing it the first time. I've also noticed (from watching the video) that the manuscript is a real hindrance to eye contact, even when I've practiced the sermon aloud multiple times before delivery. I think for my next sermon for this class, I'll try preaching without notes and see how that goes!!
Here's a video and the text of the sermon from today:
It sounded like a reasonable request:
"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."
I mean, wouldn't you have said the same thing? You're standing there looking at a crowd of over five thousand people, realizing that they're going to be getting hungry pretty soon... and all you have is five loaves of bread and two fish... so you figure it's time to wrap up this healing ministry and let them go on their way.
After all, Jesus has already been somewhat “put out” by these people. When the crowds heard that Jesus had withdrawn to a deserted place by himself, “they followed him on foot from the towns.” Although Jesus often invites people to follow him, in this case, he is followed without invitation! Despite his desire for stillness and contemplation, he graciously responds to the crowds and heals their sick. So the disciples must have figured, “Ok, the show's over. We've tended to these people's needs, it's late, Jesus wants to pray already, so let's send these people on back to town.”
An entirely reasonable request, right? But Jesus wasn't done yet. “They need not go away,” he says. Jesus resists the natural human impulse to leave people to tend to their own needs. “You give them something to eat,” he says. In other words, “we will take care of them here.” And then he proceeds to take the disciples' small ration of food and somehow make it more than enough to feed the entire crowd.
So why did Jesus do it? The scripture doesn't say that the crowds were starving or unable to afford their own food - in fact, the disciples’ comments seem to assume that the people are perfectly capable of going back into town and providing for their own needs. Unlike the stories of Jesus healing people who have been suffering for years from physical maladies that no one else has been able to heal, this miracle is, in practical terms, a bit superfluous. Jesus doesn’t have to provide food for the entire crowd. So why does he do it?
Some may say that Jesus multiplies the loaves and fishes merely as a show of his divine power, that the reason Jesus performs miracles is to prove that he is God. Other religious leaders may have been inspiring teachers, but they didn’t break the “laws of physics” by magically multiplying food, this argument goes. Only God himself could do that, so Jesus must have been God.
The only problem is that this argument would not have made much sense to the first-century people who wrote this story and preserved it for subsequent generations. Miracles were common among religious leaders and holy men in Jesus’s day, and things we would consider to be “supernatural occurrences” showed up in stories from many different traditions. The early Christian community who preserved this story would not have seen it as evidence of Jesus’s uniqueness.
They also did not tell and re-tell this story to communities of faithful Christians simply because it showed Jesus performing a magic trick. In discerning which of the many stories circulating about Jesus's life would be included in what became our sacred scriptures, the early church always rejected stories about Jesus performing miracles for miracles’ sake – and there were plenty of them out there. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, for instance, includes stories of Jesus as a child, zapping his friends with lightning when they disagree with him, or making birds out of clay and then bringing them to life, just for fun. But the church rejected these depictions of Jesus as a reckless superhero.
In the stories they did include in our scriptures, Jesus's miracles are always more than just showy displays of power. In fact, Jesus often tells the disciples not to tell anyone about the miracles he performs, especially in the Gospel of Mark. The Jesus of the New Testament is not an exhibitionist, performing miracles and squealing, "Woooo, look what I can do!!!" Jesus's miracles always have a deeper significance, a meaning and implication for how we are to live our lives in faith.
So what is the significance of the story of the feeding of the five thousand, the only miracle story that appears in all four Gospels in the New Testament? What is the meaning of this “unnecessary” miracle, if not just to show Jesus's power?
Jesus's feeding of the five thousand says something deeply profound about the way we are to approach others in our Christian ministry. We are called not just to respond to immediate needs, but to go the extra mile in creating a space for community. In a culture where your place in society determined who you could eat with, Jesus resists what would have been the natural inclination of the people to go about their separate ways, eating only with those who were considered socially appropriate, and instead creates a space for community between unlikely parties, right there on the hillside. Before the disciples knew what was happening, strangers were breaking bread with strangers, probably sharing stories about how grateful they were that their friend or relative had finally been healed of such-and-such a disease, and beginning to form a community together over a shared meal.
The deeper miracle of the feeding of the five thousand is in Jesus's rejection of the patterns of disconnection in society that say, “let them go off and buy food for themselves” and insisting instead, “They need not go away. We will take care of them here.”
Who are the people our church serves that we might invite into community with us instead of assuming they will go away and take care of themselves after we meet their immediate needs? Who is Jesus calling us to feed, both physically and spiritually?
Imagine something with me, if you will. You’re standing in the food pantry downstairs, sorting and labeling piles of donations. Canned goods on this shelf, cereal on that one. You and the other volunteers brush past one another as you hurry around, getting things ready for the morning’s guests to arrive. At 9 a.m. you open the door to a long line of people, some pushy, some with that end-of-the-month desperation in their eyes. As you begin to hand out bags of groceries, you look each person in the eye. You ask them about how they’re doing and listen to a small part of their story. Instead of just nodding sympathetically, you let them know that there is a community of faith here who will support them in their journey. You promise to pray for them, and invite them to join us for worship on Sunday mornings.
A few weeks later, one of the people from the food pantry shows up on Sunday morning. She attends the 10:30 service and finds you afterwards to let you know how much your invitation meant to her. “The other food pantries in town see me as a number,” she says, “and they assume once I’ve gotten what I need, I’ll go away and deal with the rest of my life myself. But you saw me as a person and you cared about my struggles. So I thought, ok, I’ll see what your church is all about.”
Like Jesus’s feeding of the five thousand, your invitation to this woman to come to church wasn’t necessary. It didn’t meet a physical need that she had. It was, in all practical terms, a bit superfluous. But like that first century Galilean miracle, it saw past practicality and meeting immediate needs to address a deeper need – a need for belonging and spiritual nurture. Your invitation went the extra mile to create a space for community, a community that says unreservedly to all, “You need not go away. We will take care of you here.”
This was a text I'd preached on before, at my sending parish, and I took that sermon and edited and re-shaped it for a slightly different and more focused approach. (You can compare the original sermon here.) It was an interesting exercise to re-visit a sermon text (even though that wasn't part of the assignment) and attempt to tighten it up for what I hope was a more effective presentation. We've been reading David Buttrick's Homiletic in class, with his emphasis on "moves" rather than "points" in a sermon. I realized that the original sermon had too many "moves" -- it tried to do too much with its dual focus of the community-building of the miracle and the Eucharistic foreshadowing. (This is a common mistake I made in my earliest sermons, I'm realizing.) I also realized that I'd put way too many personal details in that Eucharist section (in the original sermon) about how I got to the quotation that I used. Ultimately I decided to cut the entire Eucharist section and just more fully develop the concept of the "deeper miracle" in the feeding of the five thousand being about creating community.
Our professor says the goal is to get to where we go through this kind of editing process on our sermons before we ever deliver them the first time... and I hope this exercise has helped me to think more clearly about what the "end goal" is for a sermon as I'm writing it the first time. I've also noticed (from watching the video) that the manuscript is a real hindrance to eye contact, even when I've practiced the sermon aloud multiple times before delivery. I think for my next sermon for this class, I'll try preaching without notes and see how that goes!!
Here's a video and the text of the sermon from today:
It sounded like a reasonable request:
"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."
I mean, wouldn't you have said the same thing? You're standing there looking at a crowd of over five thousand people, realizing that they're going to be getting hungry pretty soon... and all you have is five loaves of bread and two fish... so you figure it's time to wrap up this healing ministry and let them go on their way.
After all, Jesus has already been somewhat “put out” by these people. When the crowds heard that Jesus had withdrawn to a deserted place by himself, “they followed him on foot from the towns.” Although Jesus often invites people to follow him, in this case, he is followed without invitation! Despite his desire for stillness and contemplation, he graciously responds to the crowds and heals their sick. So the disciples must have figured, “Ok, the show's over. We've tended to these people's needs, it's late, Jesus wants to pray already, so let's send these people on back to town.”
An entirely reasonable request, right? But Jesus wasn't done yet. “They need not go away,” he says. Jesus resists the natural human impulse to leave people to tend to their own needs. “You give them something to eat,” he says. In other words, “we will take care of them here.” And then he proceeds to take the disciples' small ration of food and somehow make it more than enough to feed the entire crowd.
So why did Jesus do it? The scripture doesn't say that the crowds were starving or unable to afford their own food - in fact, the disciples’ comments seem to assume that the people are perfectly capable of going back into town and providing for their own needs. Unlike the stories of Jesus healing people who have been suffering for years from physical maladies that no one else has been able to heal, this miracle is, in practical terms, a bit superfluous. Jesus doesn’t have to provide food for the entire crowd. So why does he do it?
Some may say that Jesus multiplies the loaves and fishes merely as a show of his divine power, that the reason Jesus performs miracles is to prove that he is God. Other religious leaders may have been inspiring teachers, but they didn’t break the “laws of physics” by magically multiplying food, this argument goes. Only God himself could do that, so Jesus must have been God.
The only problem is that this argument would not have made much sense to the first-century people who wrote this story and preserved it for subsequent generations. Miracles were common among religious leaders and holy men in Jesus’s day, and things we would consider to be “supernatural occurrences” showed up in stories from many different traditions. The early Christian community who preserved this story would not have seen it as evidence of Jesus’s uniqueness.
They also did not tell and re-tell this story to communities of faithful Christians simply because it showed Jesus performing a magic trick. In discerning which of the many stories circulating about Jesus's life would be included in what became our sacred scriptures, the early church always rejected stories about Jesus performing miracles for miracles’ sake – and there were plenty of them out there. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, for instance, includes stories of Jesus as a child, zapping his friends with lightning when they disagree with him, or making birds out of clay and then bringing them to life, just for fun. But the church rejected these depictions of Jesus as a reckless superhero.
In the stories they did include in our scriptures, Jesus's miracles are always more than just showy displays of power. In fact, Jesus often tells the disciples not to tell anyone about the miracles he performs, especially in the Gospel of Mark. The Jesus of the New Testament is not an exhibitionist, performing miracles and squealing, "Woooo, look what I can do!!!" Jesus's miracles always have a deeper significance, a meaning and implication for how we are to live our lives in faith.
So what is the significance of the story of the feeding of the five thousand, the only miracle story that appears in all four Gospels in the New Testament? What is the meaning of this “unnecessary” miracle, if not just to show Jesus's power?
Jesus's feeding of the five thousand says something deeply profound about the way we are to approach others in our Christian ministry. We are called not just to respond to immediate needs, but to go the extra mile in creating a space for community. In a culture where your place in society determined who you could eat with, Jesus resists what would have been the natural inclination of the people to go about their separate ways, eating only with those who were considered socially appropriate, and instead creates a space for community between unlikely parties, right there on the hillside. Before the disciples knew what was happening, strangers were breaking bread with strangers, probably sharing stories about how grateful they were that their friend or relative had finally been healed of such-and-such a disease, and beginning to form a community together over a shared meal.
The deeper miracle of the feeding of the five thousand is in Jesus's rejection of the patterns of disconnection in society that say, “let them go off and buy food for themselves” and insisting instead, “They need not go away. We will take care of them here.”
Who are the people our church serves that we might invite into community with us instead of assuming they will go away and take care of themselves after we meet their immediate needs? Who is Jesus calling us to feed, both physically and spiritually?
Imagine something with me, if you will. You’re standing in the food pantry downstairs, sorting and labeling piles of donations. Canned goods on this shelf, cereal on that one. You and the other volunteers brush past one another as you hurry around, getting things ready for the morning’s guests to arrive. At 9 a.m. you open the door to a long line of people, some pushy, some with that end-of-the-month desperation in their eyes. As you begin to hand out bags of groceries, you look each person in the eye. You ask them about how they’re doing and listen to a small part of their story. Instead of just nodding sympathetically, you let them know that there is a community of faith here who will support them in their journey. You promise to pray for them, and invite them to join us for worship on Sunday mornings.
A few weeks later, one of the people from the food pantry shows up on Sunday morning. She attends the 10:30 service and finds you afterwards to let you know how much your invitation meant to her. “The other food pantries in town see me as a number,” she says, “and they assume once I’ve gotten what I need, I’ll go away and deal with the rest of my life myself. But you saw me as a person and you cared about my struggles. So I thought, ok, I’ll see what your church is all about.”
Like Jesus’s feeding of the five thousand, your invitation to this woman to come to church wasn’t necessary. It didn’t meet a physical need that she had. It was, in all practical terms, a bit superfluous. But like that first century Galilean miracle, it saw past practicality and meeting immediate needs to address a deeper need – a need for belonging and spiritual nurture. Your invitation went the extra mile to create a space for community, a community that says unreservedly to all, “You need not go away. We will take care of you here.”
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Religious Sites or Tourist Traps?
None of these sites are historically verifiable as the places where these events occurred (with the exception perhaps of Capernaum, which in all likelihood is the remains of ancient Capernaum), and the Gospel accounts themselves do not even agree about where these things took place: Luke has the feeding of the five thousand in Bethsaida (Luke 9:10), which is on the north end of the Sea of Galilee, not the West side, where Tabgha is. Matthew recounts the "sermon on the mount" ("When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain…" Matt. 5;1), but in Luke it is a "sermon on the plain" ("He came down with them and stood on a level place…" Luke 6:17). In my initial planning for this trip, I had written in my itinerary for my time at the Sea of Galilee: "Spend the weekend around the Sea of Galilee. Enjoy just 'be-ing' in this space rather than trying to visit all the 'historic sites.'"
In some sense I am glad I visited these places, particularly Capernaum, but in some sense I could have done without ever having been to these spots. Just knowing that I am in the general region where Jesus spent much of his time teaching is significant enough for me. The sites themselves did not add anything to my "religious experience" of being in this place.
Most disappointing was Tabgha, which was a rather plain church centered around a large rock underneath the altar -- supposedly the rock on which Jesus performed the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand. As I stood there staring at this rock and watching the spectacle of people climbing over the chains that were supposed to keep people out of the area and going up to the rock to have their picture taken with it, I felt nothing. No sense of awe that Jesus fed five thousand people with five loaves and two fish at this spot -- because I didn't really believe that it happened AT THIS SPOT, on THAT ROCK. (I don't even remember there being a mention of a rock in the Gospel accounts of the story!) And the obsession with which these people disregarded rules of proper decorum just to get their picture taken with this ROCK seemed nearly idolatrous to me. Are all these people who are so anxious to get next to this rock and have their picture taken also just as anxious to get next to the poor and feed them, to perform their own 'feeding of the five thousand?" I wondered.
 |
| This lady climbed over the chains to get her picture taken with the rock. |
As was the case at many of these Sea of Galilee sites, the gift shop was a bigger deal at Tabgha than the actual "religious site." The mosaic of the loaves and fishes that is on the floor in front of the rock was for sale as a t-shirt, a cup, a mug, a pin, a magnet, and anything else you could imagine at the gift shop just outside the exit to the church -- and had been prevalent in souvenir shops all over Israel. You could also buy shiny jewelry in the shape of crosses that had been "blessed" by placing it "on the rock where our Lord fed the five thousand." To take home such a piece of holiness with you will cost you 45 U.S. dollars. I started to understand Jesus's outrage at those who were selling things in the temple: "My house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers." (Luke 20:46).
Something about the fact that the prices were listed in dollars or euros instead of shekels in many of these gift shops bothered me as well. It was like, we're not even going to TRY to make these people realize they're in another country; we'll just cater to their every need and make them feel right at home, right down to making sure they don't even have to exchange their money for the local currency.
These sites were the first sites I'd visited so far on this trip that actually charged an admission fee as well. The Greek Orthodox church at Capernaum did not charge, but the archeological site of Capernaum where the Roman Catholic church was located did, as did the Mount of Beatitudes. Granted, these were not huge fees (the equivalent of about 85 cents at Capernaum and $2.80 at the Mount of Beatitudes), but there was still something off-putting about charging admission to a place of prayer. (I could understand Capernaum charging an entrance fee, being an archeological site and all, but the Mount of Beatitudes had nothing archeological about it.) The charge (and the guards sitting at the gates to collect money) certainly discouraged me from wanting to return another day to just sit and pray.
No, I felt more embraced in a sense of the presence of Jesus and his ministry in the Galilee region as I sat at dinner with the geologists staying at my guesthouse who are examining a fault line near the Sea of Galilee, or as I watched my hostess Yael make breakfast in the morning, scurrying about and making sure everyone ate well. It is in community that I find the presence of Christ, and the flow of tourists in and out of these largely abandoned sites seemed to lack a feeling of community -- at least for me, since I wasn't part of any of the groups.
Today I decided to stay put, spending the day in this retreat-like spot that is the guesthouse where I am staying, sitting in a hammock with a gorgeous view of the Sea of Galilee and reading the entirety of the Gospel of Luke. This feels more like a pilgrimage than the hecticness and commercialism of yesterday's "pilgrimage sites."
(Despite all the negativity here, I did get some decent artistic shots at some of these places... see my Picasa albums for more photos from the Sea of Galilee sites: http://picasaweb.google.com/twellsmiller/IsraelTrip)
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Sermon - Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost, Year A, Proper 13
Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost, Year A, Proper 13
Matthew 14:13-21
Holy Trinity Parish (Episcopal), Decatur, Ga.
It sounded like a reasonable request:
"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."
I mean, wouldn't you have said the same thing? You're standing there looking at a crowd of over five thousand people, realizing that they're going to be getting hungry pretty soon... and all you have is five loaves of bread and two fish... so you figure it's time to wrap up this healing ministry and let them go on their way.
After all, Jesus has already been somewhat "put out" by these people. This morning's gospel reading tells us that when the crowds heard that Jesus had withdrawn to a deserted place by himself, "they followed him on foot from the towns." Although we often see Jesus inviting people to follow him, in this case, he is followed without invitation! Despite his desire for stillness and contemplation, he graciously responds to the crowds and heals their sick. So the disciples must have figured, "Ok, the show's over. We've tended to these people's needs, it's late, Jesus wants to pray already, so let's send these people on back to town."
An entirely reasonable request, right? But Jesus wasn't done yet. "They need not go away," he says. Jesus resists the natural human impulse to leave people to tend to their own needs. "You give them something to eat," he says. In other words, "we will take care of them here." And then he proceeds to take the disciples' small ration of food and somehow make it more than enough to feed the entire crowd.
So why did Jesus do it? The scripture doesn't say that the crowds were starving or unable to afford their own food - in fact, the disciples' comments seem to assume that the people are perfectly capable of going back into town and providing for their own needs. Unlike the stories of Jesus healing people who have been suffering from physical maladies for years that no one else has been able to heal, this miracle is, in practical terms, a bit superfluous. Jesus didn't have to provide food for the entire crowd. So why does he do it?
Some may say that Jesus multiplies the loaves and fishes merely as a show of his divine power. The theology of the evangelical youth groups I was a part of in late high school and early college tended to hold this kind of view - always talking about Jesus's miracles as important because of the "proof" they gave that Jesus was divine. These miracles, they said, set Jesus apart from other people who were simply great teachers. But that argument alone was unconvincing to me in encouraging me to place my faith in Jesus. Upon any comparative study of world religions, one can find stories of miraculous happenings surrounding the founders of many religions. And how are we to know for sure whether any of these things really happened, anyway, I wondered?
Simply being told that Jesus's miracles were significant as miracles didn't do much for me. Maybe it should have been impressive -- and I'm sure if we ran out of communion and Fr. Allan started multiplying wafers here at the altar in a few minutes, I'd be pretty darned impressed -- but as an event in the distant past of which I have little to no objective evidence, the feeding of the five thousand as a mere show of divine power has little relevance for me.
And I don't think that's all the early Christian community was trying to say about Jesus in this story, either. In discerning which of the many stories circulating about Jesus's life would be included in what became our sacred scriptures, the early church always rejected stories about Jesus performing miracles simply for miracles' sake. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, for instance, includes stories of Jesus as a child, zapping his friends with lightning when they get into arguments with him, or making birds out of clay and then bringing them to life, just for fun. It is significant that none of these stories that depict Jesus as a reckless superhero were canonized by the church.
In the four accounts of Jesus's life included in our New Testament, the texts the church deemed authoritative for teaching about the life of Jesus to future generations, Jesus's miracles are always more than just showy displays of power. In fact, Jesus is often telling the disciples not to tell anyone about the miracles he performs, especially in the Gospel of Mark. The Jesus of the canonical Gospels is not an exhibitionist, performing miracles and squealing, "Woooo, look what I can do!!!" Jesus's miracles always have a deeper significance, a meaning and implication for how we are to live our lives in faith.
So what are we to make of this story of the feeding of the five thousand - a story which, significantly, is included in all four Gospels in the New Testament? What is the meaning of this "unnecessary" miracle, if not just to show Jesus's power?
Jesus's feeding of the five thousand says something deeply profound about the way we are to approach others in our Christian ministry. We are called not just to respond to immediate needs but to go the extra mile in creating a space for community. In a culture where who you ate with was of utmost importance to your place in the society, Jesus resists what would have been the natural inclination of the people to go about their separate ways, eating only with those who were considered socially appropriate, and instead creates a space for a radically open community, right there on the hillside. Before the disciples knew what was happening, strangers were breaking bread with strangers, probably sharing stories about how grateful they were that their friend or relative had finally been healed of such-and-such disease, and beginning to form a community together over a shared meal.
The deeper miracle of the feeding of the five thousand is in Jesus's rejection of the patterns of disconnection in society that say "let them go off and buy food for themselves" and insisting instead,"they need not go away. We will provide for them here." And the miracle is in the disciples' discovery of the simple but profound truth that if we share what little we have in faith, it will be more than enough.
The story is also a powerful foreshadowing of the Eucharist: "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." Matthew's account of Jesus's last supper with the disciples echoes this language almost exactly: "While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, 'Take and eat, this is my body'..." (Matthew 26:26). And in John's Gospel, not too long after the feeding of the five thousand, Jesus makes the link even more explicit: "I am the bread of life," he tells the disciples. "I am the living bread that comes down from heaven" (John 6:48, 51). Each week, in our celebration of the Eucharist, we hear these same words -
"He took the bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to his disciples..."
"The body of Christ, the bread of heaven."
And in our Eucharistic celebration, we recall not just the death and resurrection of Jesus, but his entire healing and feeding ministry. Last week I was in San Francisco for the annual conference of the North American Interfaith Network, a conference that brings together grassroots interfaith organizations and initiatives across North America. While in San Francisco, I had an opportunity to visit Grace Cathedral, the seat of the Episcopal Diocese of California, perhaps most famous for the replica of the Chartes Cathedral labyrinth that is found on the floor of its nave. While browsing in the Cathedral bookstore, I came across a bookmark with a quote written on it that stopped me in my tracks. It said:
Be what you see.
Receive who you are.
These words, the back of the bookmark explained, are often used when the consecrated bread is offered to the people during the Eucharist at Grace Cathedral. I was struck by the deep power of those simple words.
Be what you see.
Receive who you are.
In the Eucharist, we both see and become the body of Christ. We see and receive the body of Christ both in the bread and wine and in the powerful sense of community we experience as we share this holy meal with our brothers and sisters. As on that first-century Galilean hillside, the miracle is not complete until we have broken bread together as a community.
Let me ask you all to do something for me for a minute. If you would, please close your eyes. Now imagine that you are sitting on a dusty hillside by a large lake, in the midst of thousands of people. Maybe it's like an open-air music festival you've been to, or a large football game. There are blankets, chairs, makeshift sun shade structures all over the hillside. Imagine that you've been working there all day, perhaps on a medical mission trip like the Holy Trinity parishioners who just returned from Honduras on Saturday. You've been distributing medications, hearing story after story of suffering. You're tired and dirty. You're getting hungry. You're ready to call it a day. So you say to the leader of your group, "Ok, that's enough, let's let these people go and find some dinner for themselves back in town." Our work here is done, you think, or at least as done as it's going to be for today.
But the leader of your group looks at you and says calmly, "They need not go away." And as you watch, he takes the few granola bars and dried fruit trail mix you had packed away in your backpack and begins to distribute it to the people around you. You watch as people look up in amazement as the food keeps coming, somehow enough to feed the entire crowd. You watch the suffering in their eyes lessen a little as they receive this gesture of hospitality. You watch as they begin to smile and greet one another and share what they have with each other. Soak in the feeling of that community, of the connection you feel with the others on the hill in that moment. As you look on this scene, you hear a voice that says to you:
Be what you see.
Receive who you are.
Now open your eyes and look around. Seriously, I mean it, look around at each other, look into the faces of your neighbors. Look at this community who will eat and be filled by Jesus at this altar today, and remember also the community who ate and were filled by Jesus on that hillside in the first century - and receive who you are - receive who you are called to be by virtue of your baptism - the body of Christ. The body of Christ, a community who says unreservedly to all - "You need not go away. We will feed you here."
Amen.
Matthew 14:13-21
Holy Trinity Parish (Episcopal), Decatur, Ga.
It sounded like a reasonable request:
"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."
I mean, wouldn't you have said the same thing? You're standing there looking at a crowd of over five thousand people, realizing that they're going to be getting hungry pretty soon... and all you have is five loaves of bread and two fish... so you figure it's time to wrap up this healing ministry and let them go on their way.
After all, Jesus has already been somewhat "put out" by these people. This morning's gospel reading tells us that when the crowds heard that Jesus had withdrawn to a deserted place by himself, "they followed him on foot from the towns." Although we often see Jesus inviting people to follow him, in this case, he is followed without invitation! Despite his desire for stillness and contemplation, he graciously responds to the crowds and heals their sick. So the disciples must have figured, "Ok, the show's over. We've tended to these people's needs, it's late, Jesus wants to pray already, so let's send these people on back to town."
An entirely reasonable request, right? But Jesus wasn't done yet. "They need not go away," he says. Jesus resists the natural human impulse to leave people to tend to their own needs. "You give them something to eat," he says. In other words, "we will take care of them here." And then he proceeds to take the disciples' small ration of food and somehow make it more than enough to feed the entire crowd.
So why did Jesus do it? The scripture doesn't say that the crowds were starving or unable to afford their own food - in fact, the disciples' comments seem to assume that the people are perfectly capable of going back into town and providing for their own needs. Unlike the stories of Jesus healing people who have been suffering from physical maladies for years that no one else has been able to heal, this miracle is, in practical terms, a bit superfluous. Jesus didn't have to provide food for the entire crowd. So why does he do it?
Some may say that Jesus multiplies the loaves and fishes merely as a show of his divine power. The theology of the evangelical youth groups I was a part of in late high school and early college tended to hold this kind of view - always talking about Jesus's miracles as important because of the "proof" they gave that Jesus was divine. These miracles, they said, set Jesus apart from other people who were simply great teachers. But that argument alone was unconvincing to me in encouraging me to place my faith in Jesus. Upon any comparative study of world religions, one can find stories of miraculous happenings surrounding the founders of many religions. And how are we to know for sure whether any of these things really happened, anyway, I wondered?
Simply being told that Jesus's miracles were significant as miracles didn't do much for me. Maybe it should have been impressive -- and I'm sure if we ran out of communion and Fr. Allan started multiplying wafers here at the altar in a few minutes, I'd be pretty darned impressed -- but as an event in the distant past of which I have little to no objective evidence, the feeding of the five thousand as a mere show of divine power has little relevance for me.
And I don't think that's all the early Christian community was trying to say about Jesus in this story, either. In discerning which of the many stories circulating about Jesus's life would be included in what became our sacred scriptures, the early church always rejected stories about Jesus performing miracles simply for miracles' sake. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, for instance, includes stories of Jesus as a child, zapping his friends with lightning when they get into arguments with him, or making birds out of clay and then bringing them to life, just for fun. It is significant that none of these stories that depict Jesus as a reckless superhero were canonized by the church.
In the four accounts of Jesus's life included in our New Testament, the texts the church deemed authoritative for teaching about the life of Jesus to future generations, Jesus's miracles are always more than just showy displays of power. In fact, Jesus is often telling the disciples not to tell anyone about the miracles he performs, especially in the Gospel of Mark. The Jesus of the canonical Gospels is not an exhibitionist, performing miracles and squealing, "Woooo, look what I can do!!!" Jesus's miracles always have a deeper significance, a meaning and implication for how we are to live our lives in faith.
So what are we to make of this story of the feeding of the five thousand - a story which, significantly, is included in all four Gospels in the New Testament? What is the meaning of this "unnecessary" miracle, if not just to show Jesus's power?
Jesus's feeding of the five thousand says something deeply profound about the way we are to approach others in our Christian ministry. We are called not just to respond to immediate needs but to go the extra mile in creating a space for community. In a culture where who you ate with was of utmost importance to your place in the society, Jesus resists what would have been the natural inclination of the people to go about their separate ways, eating only with those who were considered socially appropriate, and instead creates a space for a radically open community, right there on the hillside. Before the disciples knew what was happening, strangers were breaking bread with strangers, probably sharing stories about how grateful they were that their friend or relative had finally been healed of such-and-such disease, and beginning to form a community together over a shared meal.
The deeper miracle of the feeding of the five thousand is in Jesus's rejection of the patterns of disconnection in society that say "let them go off and buy food for themselves" and insisting instead,"they need not go away. We will provide for them here." And the miracle is in the disciples' discovery of the simple but profound truth that if we share what little we have in faith, it will be more than enough.
The story is also a powerful foreshadowing of the Eucharist: "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." Matthew's account of Jesus's last supper with the disciples echoes this language almost exactly: "While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, 'Take and eat, this is my body'..." (Matthew 26:26). And in John's Gospel, not too long after the feeding of the five thousand, Jesus makes the link even more explicit: "I am the bread of life," he tells the disciples. "I am the living bread that comes down from heaven" (John 6:48, 51). Each week, in our celebration of the Eucharist, we hear these same words -
"He took the bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to his disciples..."
"The body of Christ, the bread of heaven."
And in our Eucharistic celebration, we recall not just the death and resurrection of Jesus, but his entire healing and feeding ministry. Last week I was in San Francisco for the annual conference of the North American Interfaith Network, a conference that brings together grassroots interfaith organizations and initiatives across North America. While in San Francisco, I had an opportunity to visit Grace Cathedral, the seat of the Episcopal Diocese of California, perhaps most famous for the replica of the Chartes Cathedral labyrinth that is found on the floor of its nave. While browsing in the Cathedral bookstore, I came across a bookmark with a quote written on it that stopped me in my tracks. It said:
Be what you see.
Receive who you are.
These words, the back of the bookmark explained, are often used when the consecrated bread is offered to the people during the Eucharist at Grace Cathedral. I was struck by the deep power of those simple words.
Be what you see.
Receive who you are.
In the Eucharist, we both see and become the body of Christ. We see and receive the body of Christ both in the bread and wine and in the powerful sense of community we experience as we share this holy meal with our brothers and sisters. As on that first-century Galilean hillside, the miracle is not complete until we have broken bread together as a community.
Let me ask you all to do something for me for a minute. If you would, please close your eyes. Now imagine that you are sitting on a dusty hillside by a large lake, in the midst of thousands of people. Maybe it's like an open-air music festival you've been to, or a large football game. There are blankets, chairs, makeshift sun shade structures all over the hillside. Imagine that you've been working there all day, perhaps on a medical mission trip like the Holy Trinity parishioners who just returned from Honduras on Saturday. You've been distributing medications, hearing story after story of suffering. You're tired and dirty. You're getting hungry. You're ready to call it a day. So you say to the leader of your group, "Ok, that's enough, let's let these people go and find some dinner for themselves back in town." Our work here is done, you think, or at least as done as it's going to be for today.
But the leader of your group looks at you and says calmly, "They need not go away." And as you watch, he takes the few granola bars and dried fruit trail mix you had packed away in your backpack and begins to distribute it to the people around you. You watch as people look up in amazement as the food keeps coming, somehow enough to feed the entire crowd. You watch the suffering in their eyes lessen a little as they receive this gesture of hospitality. You watch as they begin to smile and greet one another and share what they have with each other. Soak in the feeling of that community, of the connection you feel with the others on the hill in that moment. As you look on this scene, you hear a voice that says to you:
Be what you see.
Receive who you are.
Now open your eyes and look around. Seriously, I mean it, look around at each other, look into the faces of your neighbors. Look at this community who will eat and be filled by Jesus at this altar today, and remember also the community who ate and were filled by Jesus on that hillside in the first century - and receive who you are - receive who you are called to be by virtue of your baptism - the body of Christ. The body of Christ, a community who says unreservedly to all - "You need not go away. We will feed you here."
Amen.
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