Sermons

“Who Can Declare All God’s Praise?”

Psalm 106:1-3; Matthew 14:13-21 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – August 6, 2017

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that we might learn to align our lives with your will and experience your abundant love. In the name of Jesus we pray, Amen.

Last week, the lectionary had us looking at some “kingdom of heaven” parables. For the next three Sundays, it suggests we explore three different miracle stories from Matthew. It’s almost as if the folks putting together the schedule of scripture readings for this summer knew I was going to be teaching a “Bible Basics” Sunday school class, starting August 20^th. Just in case you didn’t know, let me tell you all about it. The truth is that sometimes the Bible is confusing. Sometimes when we’re in church, we assume everyone else knows a lot more about the Bible than we do, so we avoid learning more, because we’re too afraid that if we go to a Bible study, we might say something dumb. When that Bible study is led by a prominent retired theologian, the stakes are even higher.

If that scenario sounds familiar, this class is for you. We will talk about what the Bible is and what it isn’t. We will learn our way around. We will gain basic familiarity with the different parts. By the time we’re done, you’ll be well equipped to join Michael’s regular Bible study when it starts back up on September 10^th. By all accounts, he’s a great teacher and not scary at all, but just in case you need some extra confidence getting started, or even if you’d just like to refresh your brain on the basics, I hope you’ll join me for this 3-week class. With all the talent we’ve got around here, it may be the only time I teach Sunday school for a long while!

And now that we’ve finished our promotional spot, let’s dive right into this miracle story. As I said, we’ll be looking at three different miracles over the next few weeks. So it’s important to figure out how to approach miracle stories most fruitfully. It’s very easy to get hung up on the question of “Did this really happen?” And there are some for whom that is of utmost importance. The gospels themselves often talk about how witnessing the miracles was what convinced a lot of people to believe in Jesus, so we can’t discount the question. But I don’t think “Did this really happen?” is the most fruitful question for us. We’re not there to witness it, so the impact is different. We have a much more scientific world view, so these questions of veracity and what is possible trip us up in ways that simply aren’t helpful. Whether or not it happened simply isn’t the most important thing we can ask about these stories.

What if instead of asking if a miracle really happened, we asked “What is this story telling us about God’s desires for the world?” This is a question with much more potential. It doesn’t seem that likely that we’re going to replicate this miracle, but there are a lot of things we can learn from this story that do apply to what we’re doing in our own day and age, if we step back and look broadly at what God is doing here.

There is, as it so often the case, a most obvious and probably most important point to this story: God wants hungry people to be fed. It’s as simple as that. God wants hungry people fed. And the church has, throughout its history, taken that fairly seriously. Christians have always been pretty attuned to food. I remember a colleague who would tell you that part of the reason he’d gotten into ministry was because of food. He had a lot of brothers and sisters and money was kind of tight at home, so there wasn’t always a lot to eat. But when he went to church, the abundance of God was spread out in front of him, and he was able to eat his fill and no one tried to slow him down. God wants hungry people, especially hungry children, to be fed.

On the other hand, we also have a tendency to dabble in caveats and excuses and limitations and rules when it comes to feeding hungry people. We often act as though we haven’t fully bought into the reality of God’s abundance. We dish out stingy portions, and we hold back the extras just in case, and we wonder whether food stamp recipients ought to be drug tested, as if doing drugs makes people less hungry. God wants hungry people fed. Did you notice how the only thing we know about this crowd is that it included men, women and children? There is no mention of how worthy any of them are, or whether they really are diligently looking for work, or why they didn’t think ahead and bring dinner with them. They came to Jesus for healing, and it took all day and everyone was hungry. He didn’t judge them. He cured them, and then he fed them.

God wants hungry people fed, and what’s more, God wants us to feed them. This may be the best part of the story. The disciples make a pretty solid argument. They describe the situation and all its complications: “This is a deserted place and the hour is now late…” And then they lay out their plan for fixing the problem: “send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” That sounds entirely reasonable, doesn’t it? But what does Jesus say? “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” Had he lost count of how many people he’d cured? Was he not aware of how many bystanders were there too? Did he think the disciples were short order cooks? How do you just say “You give them something to eat”? But that’s what he said. And like us, the disciples were full of excuses and really good reasons why that wasn’t going to work.

You know, for people who worship the Creator of the Universe, church folks tend to have an awfully keen awareness of exactly how much we don’t have. For people who claim to follow the One who told us to consider the lilies of the field, we spend a lot of time worrying about tomorrow. So when Jesus says, “You give them something to eat,” the first words out of our mouths are often just like what the disciples said: “We only have…” We only have so much food. We only have a few people. We only have a tiny budget surplus.

This scarcity mindset is magnified when we’re having the conversation outside of church. So many hungry people in a nation with such wealth. God wants us to feed hungry people. Why are we not using every means at our disposal to do so? Well, you know, we only have so much tax revenue to go around. And at this point, we often forget everything we learned at the beginning. We start to really question why these people didn’t pack a lunch. We brought our loaves and fish. Why didn’t they? Why should my hard-earned resources go to someone as irresponsible as that? Why is it that Jesus seems to attract these free-loaders? Maybe they’d heard how he always makes sure people have enough to eat and they really just showed up for the free lunch. He’s encouraging bad behavior. We probably need to implement some “tough love” so we can break the cycle of dependence, otherwise the system simply won’t be sustainable.

Let’s be honest. If we’re getting swallowed up by judgments like these, we’ve stopped following Jesus and let our fears overtake us. The people are hungry. Jesus says, “You give them something to eat.” As some of the popular memes on Facebook have Jesus saying these days, “Did I stutter?” God wants hungry people to be fed. God wants us to feed them. And here’s what we need to hold onto: God will make that possible. Only five loaves and two fish? No problem. God can work with that. Only three dozen of eggs and four pounds of bacon? God will send someone who can go to the store for more. Only a handful of volunteers from the church? God’s got other people who want to come help out!

The story of the feeding of the – let’s go ahead and count the women and children – TEN thousand is good news for small membership congregations. It cuts through all our anxiety about not being enough, and reminds us that we never have “only” anything. Because we have God on top of whatever paltry resources we may be called to share, and God makes “only” into enough. God takes what is small and makes it into a gracious plenty. Just as Jesus told us last week, it’s like the tiny, little mustard seed that turns into the greatest of shrubs and provides a home for all the birds of the air. We may not think of ourselves as miracle-workers like Jesus. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t witnessed God working miracles. You just have to know how to look at what’s going on so you can see it happening.

There are many important lessons in this miracle story: God wants hungry people fed. God wants us to feed them. God will make that possible. God can take what is small and seemingly not enough and transform it into abundance. And one last word on that last bit before we close. The context of that lesson is vitally important to remember. Because we’re human, we have a tendency to want to remove this blessing that God does from its context, that is, from the need to feed hungry people. We’d like to personalize it and believe that God is going to multiply our own meagerness into riches. You can find plenty of preachers who will tell you that the scriptures promise you exactly that. But they’re liars. That is not what the scriptures promise. God multiplies our resources into abundance when we’re using our resources to fulfill God’s will. God’s will is not that any one individual becomes rich. God wants hungry people to be fed. God wants us to feed them. For goals such as that, God will make all things possible. As it turns out, if we can learn the lesson of this miracle story and let go of our scarcity mentality long enough, we will witness the answer to the question of “Did this really happen?” because we will see it happening before our very eyes. And then we will sing along with the psalmist, asking “Who can declare all God’s praise?” Alleluia and Amen!