RVCC Pastor's Sermon

Sermon - August 8, 2008

“Paradigm Shift”

By Rev. Nancy Foran
Matthew 14:13-21

Israel had always been a land of contradictions – a setting where people both loved and wrestled with their God, a place where the land was arid desert until the spring rains came and made the ground fertile for planting once again. Not surprisingly, the demeanor of the Israeli culture could turn on a dime.

It was in that milieu that Jesus emerged as a widely popular rabbi. He was a successful healer, and people swarmed after him – to hear him speak, watch his miracles, and simply be in his presence. It was a time of religious vitality and hope.

It was also a time of tragedy in Israel. It was a mourning time, a grieving time. Edward Markquart writes that “according to the Gospel of Matthew, John the Baptist had just been beheaded. He was the greatest moral force, the greatest spiritual force, the greatest prophet the land of Israel had experienced for four hundred years…. Everyone was stunned by this tragedy, by this enormous loss, including Jesus, who had been baptized by John.”

Perhaps that is why, on this particular day, Jesus desperately wanted to go off to a lonely place, by himself, to try to put the fact of John’s death into the context of his own life. Perhaps that is also why so many men and women followed him. Maybe the people needed more than ever to be close to someone, someone like Jesus, someone who not only brought them shalom but in a way really himself was shalom.

Markquart continues by telling us that “Jesus took a four mile boat ride to a more remote, wilderness area, but the crowds could see from the shore where he was sailing to. And so the people followed along the shoreline, keeping an eye on his boat, and when Jesus’ boat landed, many of the crowd had already arrived.”

And still with compassion, surely sensing their grief and emptiness, Jesus preached a message of comfort to them – until the sun began to set, and the disciples began to get edgy and kept pulling Jesus aside and mumbling about hunger and food and, and – as one of them finally blurted out, “Lord, the hour is late and the people don’t have any food and we are a long way from any villages. Maybe you should send them home now.”

But instead Jesus said, “Look around the crowd and see what you can find.” And a young boy with five loaves of bread and two fish came forward and offered to share his supper. And Jesus took the bread...gave thanks...broke it…gave it to his disciples...who gave it to the crowds. And they all ate and were all satisfied ...and… there were twelve baskets of bread left over. And the number who ate was five thousand men, plus women and children.”

Did you know that this story of the loaves and fishes is told not once, twice, or even three times, but four times in our Biblical narratives of Jesus’ life. It is the only Gospel miracle which is told in its fullness in all four Gospels. What that says to me is that this is a most important story, and it is essential that, as followers and learners of Jesus, we constantly seek its meaning.

Having said that, most of us, I suspect, would say with great confidence that first and foremost, it is a miracle story – and what more needs to be said.

Well, I think that miracles are funny things – and can sometimes distort our perspective. They can lull us into complacency and lead us to believe that we can leave everything up to God. I agree with Barbara Brown Taylor when she wrote that miracles "let us off the hook. They appeal to the part of us that is all too happy to let God feed the crowd, save the world, do it all."

This story may well be a miracle story (if we could determine whether the miracle is Jesus feeding 5000 people or a little boy who offered to share his lunch in the first place), but it is also a story about perspective, our perspective. It is a story about the paradigm or construct we choose to create and in which to live our lives.

Said simply, our choice is this: Do we live in a world of abundance where we believe in our heart of hearts that there is enough to go around – enough food, enough resources, enough love?

Or do we live in a world marked by scarcity, a world where we are really not sure if sharing is such a good idea because it might leave us without enough? It is not that we need a lot more; we just want to have a little more to ensure that we will be satisfied.

“The Wall Street Journal ran an article some months ago describing the fastest growing business in America today: the development and the construction of mini warehouses…small storage facilities (for you and me)…for our possessions. Yet the reality is that in the midst of all this abundance of stuff, we have a mentality of scarcity. We think we need a little more…And if we are honest, almost none of us are free of that yearning…Oh, we don't want to be accused of being greedy. We simply don't quite have enough. "Maybe other people do," we say, “but I don't. I need just a little bit more.” It is like a reporter asking John D. Rockefeller at the height of his career, "Mr. Rockefeller, how much is enough?" And Rockefeller responded, "Just a little more than I have." (Willamon)

Now those of us who do not rent a storage pod for our excess belongings may feel that none of this really applies to us. We really believe that we do not live lives of privilege and abundance. However, I would submit on the basis of what I have read about Cocke and Sevier Counties in Tennessee (which is where our Mission Team will be working next week), most of us need to rethink that paradigm.

In general, as coal mining companies have moved out of Appalachia, often leaving behind economic and environmental havoc, more and more residents find themselves unemployed or working at low wage jobs.

Certainly improvements in Appalachia have been significant. The area’s poverty rate declined from 31% in 1960 to 13.6% in 2000, and the percentage of adults with a high school diploma increased by almost 70%.

However, according to the New Standard newspaper, for people like Larry and Iva Barkley, little has changed. Larry has been on disability for two years and needs a heart transplant. His wife, Iva, who was severely burned in a fire as a child, cannot get a job because she fears losing her husband’s government-funded health coverage. Once their youngest son graduates from high school, their monthly income -- in the form of a Social Security check -- will be $810.

The family survives by hunting and eating deer and pheasants. “If it wasn’t for shooting a deer and a few pheasants, we wouldn’t have any red meat except for maybe a piece of beef once in a while,” Larry told the Associated Press. Iva cans food from the garden for the family to eat during the winter. The couple spends about $45 a month at the grocery store. Local officials admitted that they have known families who melt snow for water, live with chickens in their homes or still use outhouses.

In Cocke County, Tennessee, where we will be working, a quarter of the residents and a third of the children under 5 live in poverty. The unemployment rate is 9%. Most people who do work are employed in part time and minimum wage positions, such as Walmart and MacDonald’s, and so frequently carry no health insurance. Though there are people in the county who are the social poor, that is, those who have given up looking for a job, the majority are the working poor, an increasingly significant minority of the U.S. population.

That is where 14 of us from RVCC will be spending next week. During the day we will be fixing up mobile homes, tar paper shacks, and houses. We will be cooking and gardening, painting and constructing. During the evening, we will be worshipping with groups from two other churches and being facilitated in discussions about economic justice and the roots of poverty in our own home states.

Though each of us is participating for a number of different reasons, I think all of us are participating to see first hand what happens when our cultural paradigm is one of scarcity and not one of abundance – and to do a little bit to change that – or at least to express a solidarity on behalf of RVCC with those who live in the midst of it.

Representing each one of you, we are testing out the Gospel message to share what we have (our gifts and our time), to advocate for the poor among us, and to shift that paradigm for needing a little bit more to giving a little bit more. All of us going on the Mission Trip have thought about – and written about – why we are going, what we hope to accomplish, and how Scripture might be relevant to the trip. I would like to share some of these reflections with you.

I think we won’t know why we are called because we aren’t supposed to know. We are just meant to do it graciously with no questions asked.

I want to become more aware of and committed to social and economic justice and to give back to others as we have been given to.

I think everyone is obligated to share and give something of what they have whether or not they know the recipient - and no matter what their means. That is true whether it is convenient to do so or not.

Everyone, everything suffers. I’d like to be able to lessen that a little bit.

I want to learn about poverty in Appalachia and apply that to poverty in Maine.

I want to make a difference, however small, for someone needy.

I want this trip to build community within RVCC.

I want to help others outside of my local area and go outside my “comfort zone.”

I want to learn from being with others in a different environment and culture. I want to help others and work side by side with people of a different work status.

I want to interact with the locals and learn their ways of life. I want to help them and to hopefully build a friendship out of this.

I hope to reflect on what it means to be a servant. It is people with kind hearts that make this world special and provide our support network as we navigate life journeys. Immersing myself into this mission trip - spending a full week offering my time and talents to be utilized in ways not fully known to me, I hope to learn more about myself and grow in service to others.

To share our gifts and know that we each have something special to give. Hopefully, this mission trip will result in many gifts - from our work and our interactions... material gifts and most importantly love and caring.

I wanted to support my church's mission work, and to help those who have less than we do.

I hope to learn the value of friendship and family, and how people can come together and center their lives around God.

God is teaching us to serve others, and to do it for God not for yourself.

To give our family a better understanding of the wider mission needs in the United States.

I wanted to go on this mission trip initially because I wanted my children to understand how important service should be in their lives. I wanted us to experience this "lesson" as a family, and to have a focused amount of time to devote to service (as opposed to our typical manner of serving, which is more episodic - two hours here, two hours there). My desire has evolved to an even greater desire for me to explore how much more a role service should be playing in my life.

I have no idea what I will learn, but expect to be visibly confronted with a level of poverty that is perhaps unfathomable in our comfortable existence. I hope to learn about the root causes of this poverty, but also hope to be exposed to the hopefulness and brightness of life that can still exist even where hardship and poverty are present.

I think that by serving families in this region, we are serving God and living the way Jesus prescribed. I want to model the behavior for my children, and I want my children to feel how important service to others is in their lives - we who have abundant blessings in our lives have a duty to share those blessings with others - sometimes that is monetarily, sometimes it is with work, and sometimes it is only spending time.

With those thoughts in mind this coming week, I ask that all of you pray for us on our journey. Know that we travel in your shoes as well as in ours. We work with your hands in addition to ours. Please do not pray for astounding miracles like Jesus when he fed 5000 people and ended up with 12 baskets of leftovers – but rather pray that we will be like the little boy who shared what he had and made a difference.

Sermon - August 8, 2008

“Paradigm Shift”

By Rev. Nancy Foran Matthew 14:13-21

By Rev. Nancy Foran
Matthew 14:13-21