Pentecost 9B (lectionary 17)
Text: John 6:1-14
sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
July 25, 2021
Abundance
I was embarrassed. This was last year, I’d guess about a month into the pandemic lockdown. I was grocery shopping at Walt’s and the cashier pointed at my stuff at the checkout and challenged me: “Didn’t you see the sign?”
I had not. She told me: “There’s a sign up in the meat department: only one package of chicken per customer.” My sin was, I was trying to buy two.
I apologized. As she pulled off one of my chicken packages to be returned to the meat department and made available to another customer, she waved my apology away: “Oh, you’re not the problem. Before we put the sign up I had people coming through here with carts piled high with every package of meat in the butcher shop. These people are afraid of shortage, and then they go and create the shortage for the rest of us.”
Remember the shortages? I understood the ones about chicken, and bread flour; hand sanitizer and cleaning supplies, face masks, bleach. I never did get the thing about toilet paper, even though I read everything I could on it to try to understand. As far as I could tell, factories were turning out just as much TP as ever, but with the new hunker-down, bunkered-up mentality everybody was buying 8 or 10 times what we needed, whenever we could. We weren’t really short on toilet paper; we were short on the kind of imagination that could show us that we could get through this, together. The imagination that could show us a world in which we serve not ourselves first, but in our decisions and our behavior we owe it to others to think bigger than only about ourselves.
The Gospel story this morning is about groceries, and what it teaches about groceries must be an important part of the Good News Gospel, for this is the only miracle story that appears in all four, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It’s as if the Gospel writers want to tell us, you can’t understand the Good News of Jesus Christ without knowing the lesson of the feeding of the multitude.
A crowd follows Jesus to the place where he’s gone with his disciples. There are so many of them, and Jesus looks at Philip and says, “Where are we to buy bread for all these people? They’re hungry. So what are we going to do?” It’s interesting that in John’s version Jesus asks the disciples, while in Matthew and Mark and Luke it’s the other way around; the disciples ask him! But in our story from John this morning, Jesus looks at his followers, looks at the likes of you and me and says, “So what are we gonna do here? How are we going to deal with this problem of hunger?”
You can think of Jesus asking us this, in terms of pandemic, too: Jesus turning to us to say, “So what are we gonna do here? How is it that we’ll handle this, deal with this challenge?”
Philip responds on our behalf, and he reaches for the usual kinds of categories and expectations. All right, let’s calculate the money: how much to buy supper for all these folks? Isn’t that the human way to respond, to begin to work on how little we have, with little imaginations? Heck, says Philip, half a year’s paychecks wouldn’t even do the trick. Our budget just isn’t big enough. Our resources are just too few. But Jesus knows that conventional answers aren’t what’s called for here. Aren’t what’s really needed.
So Philip sits down and the disciples send up a pinch-hitter: Andrew. “Well, there is someone here,” he says. “There’s this kid with some barley loaves and a couple of fish.” Andrew looks at who’s around. Who’s on hand? Looks at what’s available. And what’s available is the lunch of a boy who is clearly not a power broker, clearly not someone with rank. Because barley flour is the flour that poor folks used for their loaves, not what the rich folks used. It’s a little detail that only John mentions. Andrew sees that perhaps real needs aren’t necessarily filled by the folks that we’ve often looked to, to meet them.
I cannot explain to you what happened next, the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. And I know: if I could explain it, then it wouldn’t be miracle, right?
But I do know that the first part of the miracle begins with one human being who knows that the blessings he’s received from God are not his alone: the boy shares his food. And then I strongly suspect the next part of the miracle is people making do with less – dividing and dividing again those few loaves and fishes – because this was not a time to hoard more toilet paper, but a time to make do with less for the sake of the others. And I further suspect that the biggest part of the miracle occurred when other loaves and other fishes – the ones that had been stashed into a bag or hidden under someone’s cloak – now miraculously appeared, like magic, inspired by the magic of a young boy who shared, and by the vision of a Godly leader who acts with all the confidence that if we do this together, then there will be enough. “What is so little food among so many people?” Andrew asks him. And Jesus replies, “Oh, yeah? Just make the people sit down, and watch what happens now.”
Do you think that by suggesting such things I am explaining away the miracle, making it not a miracle but something merely human, something pedestrian? No such thing. What could be more of a holy miracle, than when human beings behave like that? For when we behave for the good of all God’s people, the Kingdom of God has come near, and God is with us. Miracle, indeed.
This lesson is so important that it is the only miracle story told in four Gospels; it’s that much of a core learning for people of God. And I suggest it’s a lesson we have all learned once again in this time of pandemic. Fear sometimes brings a spirit of selfish individualism that disregards the needs of others and ignores the connections among us. But when we think of the bigger picture – 5,000 people on the grass; Seven-and-a-half billion people in the world – and act with those bigger interests than our own in mind, well, we find that God provides, enough and to spare. A mind-set of scarcity brings anxiety and competition; living instead into the abundance of the Lord brings us generosity and hope. Blessings abound.
Last weekend Arlene Krause, the oldest member of our congregation, died at age 98, and I want to finish this sermon today with a bit of faith witness on this score that Arlene once shared with me. This was part of a conversation eight years ago, when her 90th birthday was approaching and some people who knew her in the church suggested recognizing that as part of our Sunday worship and I called her up only to find she was going to be away that weekend; her family was gathering in central Illinois for the celebration of that birthday.
But she and I got to talking then on the phone about what it meant to attain such great age, and she told me something so great that I wrote it down and have kept it all these years.
“I’m OK,” she told me. “Really, I am. I’m not asking the Lord for anything more than I’ve already had in my life. On my 90th birthday, that’s a good thing, to be able to say that.”
Arlene Krause, throughout all her very long life, actually knew many difficulties and times of scarcity. But concerning this matter of blessings from the Lord, Arlene Krause, like those 5,000 people sitting on the grass, received enough, and to spare. So have you. So have we all.