RVCC Pastor's Sermon

Sermon - July 26, 2009

“Bless – Break - Share”

By Rev. Nancy Foran
John 6:1-21

(SKIT)

Well, maybe it didn’t really happen that way! Scripture tells us that Jesus just wanted a bit of time to himself – a moment to catch his breath, and that is why he crossed Lake Tiberius in the late morning and climbed the mountain. He only wanted to get away from the crowds for a while. However, when he turned around and sat down, he could not believe it – nor could his disciples.

You see, they were being followed – followed by the most ragtag assortment of folk you could imagine. How could that have happened? Did the people walk around the lake? Surely they had not rented little dinghies and boats to carry them.

As United Methodist minister, Grace Imathiu, writes, “Following hard after Jesus…here they come scrambling up the mountain - men, women, children, young, old, middle-aged, healthy, the sick, the lonely, the confused, the ones struggling with addictions of various kinds. Some come for a touch. Some come for a word. Some come skipping along. Some come limping along. Some carry others, and all of them climbing up the mountainside to be with Jesus.”

It was not as if they were devout followers of the rabbi either. Hardly! They were just checking Jesus out, for the stories of his healings and signs had swirled about the City of Tiberius long before he himself had made an appearance.

They were the blind, the deaf, and the lame. They were the ones who lived on the wrong side of the tracks – which really was just about every Jew unfortunate enough to have taken up residence in this city built by King Herod, the puppet-ruler of Galilee.

Built on a Jewish burial ground to honor the Roman Emperor, Tiberius was consequently an unclean place by Pharisaic law and so only the very dregs of Jewish society populated its slums. The ancient historian, Josephus, described the inhabitants as “a promiscuous rabble, made up of poverty-stricken people from any and all places of origin.” It was even said that when Herod sensed the masses readying for a revolt, he would set up temporary bread-distribution centers to pacify the hungry multitude.

These were the people who followed Jesus up the mountain that morning, looking for a word of hope in a hopeless world, a glimpse of light in their darkened lives – all 5000 of them, not including the women and children. Was it any wonder then that even though it was noontime, it looked like no one had even brought a sandwich for lunch?

But do you know what Jesus did? He looked out at the whole sorry lot of them and said, “Let’s have a picnic!” What an opportunity, he must have figured, to show the abundance of God’s grace in a visceral way that surely everyone present would understand.

However, as Grace Imathiu goes on to say, “The disciples hardly thought it was an opportunity. It was a problem - a big problem. Phillip was the first one to speak up. He did some quick calculations in his head and when he multiplied the half sandwich he had in his back pocket by 5,000 and then looked at the budget, his eyes nearly popped out of his head.

It would cost six months of paychecks. Truth of the matter, a picnic was WAY out of the budget. "Imagine the precedence we would be setting,” he thought. “Imagine if word gets out that at these Jesus revivals they serve a free meal. Well, next thing we know, everybody will come expecting a freebie dinner. If you ask me, that is a recipe for disaster – no pun intended.” And so Phillip says, “Jesus, it is a bad idea. No way is it gonna work." And Phillip shrugs his shoulders and gives up.

Then there is Andrew. Andrew goes a bit further than Phillip and does the practical thing of looking around to see what is available outside of the budget. He starts soliciting contributions, a go-the-extra-mile campaign. He begins working the crowd.

"Does anybody have extra lunch to share? Hey, folks, if you have brought something to eat and can share, please raise your hand. Jesus wants to have a picnic, and we need your help."

Well, Andrew’s idea scarcely brought even mediocre results. He got only one response- from a child, a little boy, who was willing to share his lunch - five slices of barley bread (the bread of the poor) and two fish sticks. However, I imagine he was a little boy so happy that he had something he could give that Jesus could use. "Here's my lunch. Give this to Jesus."

And guess what Jesus did with that lunch? He gave thanks. He gave God thanks for 2 fish sticks and 5 slices of hard bread small enough for a child to hold in one hand, bread that felt more like flattened stones than anything else – for that he gave thanks.

And then he began to break the bread into good sized portions, and he himself started giving away the food, walking among the people serving lunch, and yes, we all know what happened.

Bless – Break – Share. Those dregs of Jewish society sitting on the hillside – well, they never had such a meal in their lives – and when all was said and done, there were 12 baskets of leftovers for the Soup Kitchen down in the City Center.

Now that is a pretty amazing story, isn’t it? However, don’t get all caught up in trying to figure out the mathematics and mechanics of this miracle story, this tale that is so important in understanding who Jesus is and what God is like that it is the only miracle story included in all four of our Gospels. The algebra of it all is hardly the point.

The point of the story, I think, is to clearly and unequivocally remind us that, particularly in the Gospel of John, God is all about abundance. After all, in John’s narrative we find water that is turned into not just wine, but excellent wine. We find the Samaritan woman at the well who learns that gushing up all around her is not just water, but living water.

And we – you and I – find ourselves claimed by a God who offers us grace heaped upon grace as the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us. In the Gospel of John, there is always more than enough to go around because our God is a God of extravagant generosity and grace.

And a most important corollary to that point is the challenge we face because this God of abundance never ceases to hang around us. Believing and even more so living our lives as if we believed in such abundance is really for all of us a huge leap of faith. As Charles Hoffman wrote in “The Christian Century,” “Much of the time our faith mirrors that of Philip and Andrew, who could not see past the six months’ wages or the meager five loaves and two fish.

We tend to base our living on our own scarcity or even on our own fears of insufficiency. So we hoard and save and worry and end up living life in small and safe measures. We pull back when we should push forward. We give in to our fear of a shortfall rather than exercising faith in God's abundance. But Christians are constantly on call to go places where we have never been, to do things that we have never attempted and to be things we have never envisioned.”

This story of abundance challenges us to move from a spirituality based on subtraction to one grounded in multiplication. It has the potential to empower us to trust that the latter will create a world where there are no winners and losers, but rather only winners – winners abiding in a community strengthened by the sharing, communities where there is always enough to go around. This story of abundance dares us to do what Jesus did: bless – break – share.

Someone once said that God will give you as much as you can see with the eyes of faith. That little boy in the crowd on the hillside saw something that the other 4999 not including women and children could not see, something that the disciples – even after all the time they had spent with Jesus - could not see either.

And that is this: if Jesus can work miracles with five loaves and two fish, then Jesus can work with whatever we offer him too. A little boy did not let 4999 people shaking their heads at his stupid naivete stand in the way of his offering his meager gifts to Jesus. Break – bless – share - and watch what mighty miracles God can do.

I heard a story about a man who received a special pre-Christmas gift from his brother. It was a beautiful new car - fully loaded and ready to go. On Christmas Eve, when the man came out of his office, a street kid was walking around the shiny new car, admiring it.

"Is this your car, mister?" the kid asked. When the man replied that it was and that his brother had given it to him for Christmas, the boy said, "You mean your brother gave it to you, and it didn't cost you anything? Free? For nothing? Gosh, I wish..."

The boy hesitated, and the man knew what he was about to say. He had heard it many times over the past few days. He was going to wish he had a brother like that. But what the boy said shocked the man.

"I wish", the boy said, "I wish I could be a brother like that."

It will be people like that street kid, people like that little boy on the hillside who will change our world into one solidly grounded in an attitude of abundance rather than a presumption of scarcity. God can work with people like that. We can be people like that. It is as simple as bless –break – share.

Sermon - July 26, 2009

“Bless – Break - Share”

By Rev. Nancy Foran John 6:1-21

By Rev. Nancy Foran
John 6:1-21