Letting Go, and Letting God

Today, my itinerant diocesan ministry takes me to Trinity, Milford. The readings appointed for this tenth Sunday after Pentecost can be found here.

The lectionary has taken a sharp turn away from Mark’s Gospel this morning. A little Bible trivia for you, at no extra charge, before we get into today’s gospel reading. The lectionary is a three-year cycle that outlines our readings for each Sunday of the year. Each of the three synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) get their own year. But the fourth gospel gets fitted in where space allows. Since Mark is the shortest of the three gospels, we get some room in the summer of Year B, which is where we are now.

None of this is information required for admittance into heaven or at confirmation. But if it’s ever asked of you on Final Jeopardy and you win big you can send me a percentage of your winnings. Some people find this stuff interesting. Others just show up on Sunday without reflecting much on what was read the week before or what is coming next week and hope the preacher is interesting. But the bottom line is that in a liturgical church like ours, the preacher doesn’t just decide what texts to preach on on Saturday night. We have opportunities to reflect together, including with colleagues, about what will be served up to our congregations today across this country. And not only in the Episcopal Church but in numerous other denominations as well. This could, if we took it seriously, help make us all more biblically literate than we are.

So…we’ve been reading from Mark for a while now, since Trinity Sunday. But today we make a little five-week detour into the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel. Five weeks focused on just one chapter! It’s incredibly important stuff and one of the most carefully crafted chapters in the whole Bible. It’s an outline – or maybe more accurately it’s a crystallization - of John’s Eucharistic theology. The whole chapter is held together by this claim: Jesus is the Bread of Life. Tell Mac when he returns that I suggested you sing that hymn every week from now through Labor Day!

The sixth chapter of John gives us a chance to reflect on what we do here every week when we gather to break the bread and share the cup. And what we do here is to remember that Jesus is the Bread of Life. This journey begins with the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand – our bishop’s very favorite story in the whole Bible. Trust me.

Next week Jesus will be talking about the manna in the wilderness, connecting the Eucharist with the bread of heaven. And then Jesus will say that his flesh is food indeed, that it is the super-manna that will let them live forever. And then that those who eat his flesh abide in him and he in them and that yes, this is a difficult complicated and dense teaching that is fraught with misunderstanding and leads to all kinds of theological arguments. That has proved to be correct and to this day the sermons preached in Presbyterian and Roman Catholic and Episcopal congregations over the next month will be preached from different angles. I’m fine with that, because I think this sixth chapter of John is meant to generate multiple readings.

When you are reading John’s Gospel (not just the sixth chapter but all of John) it’s helpful to recognize that John is not literal. All kinds of confusion arises when people take Jesus literally in John, including when he says that one must be “born anew.” It’s even more than metaphor in John; it’s mystical, sacramental language that invites us to reflect on this notion that we are what we eat, that we are called to become the Body of Christ, broken and shared for the life of the world. As St. Augustine once put it at the fraction when bread and cup are held up before the assembly: behold what you are; may we become what we receive.

So that’s a preview of John 6. But I’m just here for this one portion of this sixth chapter of John today, this story of the feeding of the five thousand. It’s found in all four gospels, which suggests that this miracle occupied a central place in the imagination of first-century Church. (Even the birth of Jesus is told only in half of the gospels – Matthew and Luke!) The gist of it remains the same across all four gospels; it's about God's abundance. It's about how there was enough, and actually more than enough. It's about how everyone was satisfied and still, there were leftovers.

But there are some interesting little differences along the way, as well. And it's in those little details that each gospel writer makes his own theological point-of-view clearer. It's like when someone is telling a story and her spouse or sister or friend interrupts to say, "no, that's not exactly what went down. You are forgetting this bit..." 

In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, for example, the disciples distribute the bread to the crowd. It is as if Jesus is training them for ministry, teaching them how to be servant-leaders. That’s a powerful message. You give them something to eat!

But in John’s Gospel, the one that is before us today, Jesus himself gives the bread because for John, yes, you guessed it: Jesus is the Bread of Life. Jesus gives us his very life, so that we might live. He gives himself to the crowd and week after week he gives himself to us, so that we might behold who we are and become what we receive.

John also gives us a liturgical context: it’s Passover, the same liturgical context that the other gospel writers give to the last supper. It’s like code-language. John is saying “pay attention, this is really important, this is Eucharistic language.” And then he speaks about how the “fragments are gathered up” after everyone eats their fill. In one of the earliest Eucharistic prayers of the Church (even before the gospels became written documents) the community gathered and prayed this prayer in the Didache:

As this fragmented bread was scattered upon the mountains, but has been gathered up to become one, so let the Church be gathered up to become your kingdom. 

And then, there is this lad..Personally, this is my very favorite little detail from all four tellings of the story..John is the only one who remembers a boy there who was willing to share his lunch. And that adds a lot to the story for me. Because I think that we, the Church, are a lot like that boy. As we heard in today's Epistle reading, God is able to accomplish far more than we can ask or imagine. But for that to happen, we have to be willing up to open up our lives, our wallets, our lunchboxes. We have to share what we have. And too often what holds us back is fear: fear that there is not enough or worse still, that we are not enough.

The boy shares what he has and that is what you and I are called to do as well. Think of it this way: we have enough bread, today, on this planet, to feed the world. There is enough bread. The problem we have is not that there is not enough. The problem we have is a distribution problem. The problem we have is a sharing problem. Some have more than their daily bread while others go hungry. So I think that this would be an amazing miracle story if "all" it did was to encourage us to leave this place today to become better sharers. If Christians around the world today, hearing this story, would become doers of this word.

But let me also invite you to notice Andrew, the brother of Peter. Because he's the one who spots the kid and asks him to help out. Let me tell you - I say this as someone who gets around - you don't recruit people to ministries by putting up desperate notices on a bulletin board or in the Sunday announcements. You don't equip ministers for ministry that way.

We are not a volunteer organization. We are the Body of Christ. We are living members of Christ's risen body. We need to learn and re-learn how to become better at discerning gifts, in ourselves and in others, and then calling those gifts forth - as Andrew models for us today. We need to walk up to people and call them by name and say, "can you help out by teaching Sunday School, or singing in the choir, or serving with us to build a home with Habitat for Humanity or by helping out with the meal we are serving to those who are hungry?" And we do this best when we get clear on who needs the crayons and who needs the tenor part and who needs a hammer and who needs a frying pan to do the work God has given them to do. 

But when we do share what we have and bless it, then not matter how small or insignificant it may seem to us, God uses it. When we let go and let God, God consistently does God's multiplying thing with it. For real. No matter how stuck we get on focusing on limited resources, God is in the business of multiplying loaves and fishes and turning water into wine and showing up at pot-luck suppers where were always seem to be leftovers. God really is good, all the time. 

It’s possible that John is remembering the old story from II Kings about Elisha and the man who came from Baal-shalishah with twenty loaves of barley bread that we heard about in our first reading today. In that earlier story, Elisha tells the man to give it the crowd to eat, but the man objects: “how can I set this before a hundred men?” Elisha insists that it will be enough and in fact that it will be more than enough, that there will be leftovers. (See II Kings 4:42-44)  

So this bread thing isn’t just a New Testament thing: God has been in the bread business for very a long time, in the abundance business, in the sharing business. In both that Old Testament Elisha story and in John’s inclusion of this boy with the loaves and fishes to offer, the point is that when we offer what we have, God more than makes up the difference.

Too many of us have been taught that what we have to offer isn’t good enough. We may worry about our ability to be a good-enough parent or to be a good-enough friend or to be a good-enough student or musician or artist. We are sometimes almost embarrassed that we seem to have so little to offer. What, this? It’s nothing, really…

I think this vignette about this boy is akin to Jesus’ reminder not to let our light be hidden under a bushel basket, but to let it shine. When we take the risk of sharing what we do have (rather than insisting it is nothing and surely not enough) then God blesses the gift and stretches it in ways that go far beyond what we can imagine. An act of kindness to a stranger, an ice-cream cone for a sad Little Leaguer, a casserole dropped off at a friend’s house whose husband of forty-seven years just died—these are not no-things. They may be little things, but they are something. And those little things change the world.

We are sometimes tempted to say, “what is this in the midst of the enormity of pain and hurt in the world? A few barley loaves and a couple of fish in a starving world? It’s nothing!” But the miracle pushes us back to insist: “just offer it. Just share it and let God bless it and see what happens.” You may just be surprised by how far it goes, and by how far God can stretch it. This story and our Eucharistic life are sacramental reminders – outward and visible signs—that ministry is about doing “mini” things that have the potential, with God’s help, to bring about maximal effects.   

Now, to him who 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.