August 3, 2008
The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost (Year A)
Genesis32:22-31; Psalm 17:1-7, 16; Romans 9:1-5;
Matthew 14:13-21
The Gospel lesson this morning is one that is very familiar to most Christians. Recorded in each of the four Gospel accounts, it's the story of the miracle in which Jesus (through the hands of his disciples) fed five thousand plus men, women and children with a meager supply of five loaves and two fish.
With regard to the meaning of this miracle, scholars have several interpretations. The first is to accept the story at face value believing it to be true as it is told in the Gospel; a miracle story. Can God do this sort of thing? Why not? Actually this is not the first time that something like this is recorded in Scripture. The crowd of Jews that surrounded Jesus would have been familiar with the story from 2 Kings that tells how the prophet Elisha once fed a hundred people with “twenty loaves of barley and fresh ears of grain” and had some left over. The account attribute to Jesus' is far more dramatic, as we would expect.
The second approach is to hear the story as being sacramental where everyone was fed a morsel of bread as a kind of foretaste of the messianic banquet to come and found themselves fulfilled spiritually though not necessarily physically. Given the language that Jesus used: taking the bread, looking up to heaven, blessing the bread, breaking it and giving it to the disciples is the language of the Sacrament of the Lord's Table and therefore serves to remind us of the bread of life which we share in the body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ in our weekly Eucharistic meal.
The third interpretation is marked by the belief that when Jesus and the disciples shared their meager offering of food, others in the crowd were so moved to shared whatever bits and bites they had brought, so that at the end of the day, everyone was fed and no one went without. The miracle in this case being that selfish hearts were broken open to the joy of sharing all that they had.
Quite frankly, any one of these interpretations is valid. You must decide for yourself which one speaks to you. And it's possible that all three versions will speak to you at different times in your life.
The point of the story however is not to determine how Jesus accomplished this miracle, that's part of the mystery of God. In fact, to get hung up on this aspect of the story can be a distraction that keeps us from asking how God is working in this text. What is God asking of me as an individual, and of us as a community of faith?
I had a seminary professor who favorite line was “context is king.” In other words, to fully appreciate God's word in scripture, always consider the context of the story. If we look at the text that immediately precedes this morning's Gospel lesson, we see a distinct contrast of two kings: Herod, the tyrannical ruler of
On the one hand, King Herod hosted for himself a lavish birthday party with many guests in the grand halls of his palace where the finest foods and wines available in the land were served. Jesus on the other hand, gathered with the peasants of Galilee in the grass on the eastern shore of the
It is in that wrestling that we confront ourselves, and face those things about ourselves that we find least appealing and especially disappointing. Everyone has some secret that they hope no one else ever finds out about. But in confronting those secrets, we allow the Light of Christ to shine on them and their power is dispersed, and they can no longer cripple us, but instead serve to strengthen us for the journey of faith to come. This is the reason that people find support groups so effective. There's something about the telling of our story and speaking the truth of our experiences painful as they may be, that brings healing to ourselves, and enables healing among others as well.
Confronting his past is in essence what happened to Jacob as we read in the Genesis text of his encounter with a mysterious stranger who wrestled with him throughout the night. Jacob, you know by now was the rascal of Isaac and Rebekah's twin sons who cheated his brother Esau out of his birthright (that is the right of the eldest son to lead the family and receive a double share of the inheritance). And then, he tricked his father into thinking he was Esau and stole his brother's blessing which basically put Jacob, the younger son, in charge over Esau, the elder.
With his mother's help, Jacob escaped his brother's murderous threats and ran away to his mother's family in
After twenty years of service to Laban, Jacob had had enough, and he longed to return to the land of his father Isaac in
It was in traveling onward to
It was the night before his reunion with Esau that Jacob sent his family ahead to cross the River Jabbok, and he stayed alone on the opposite shore. That night he wrestled in his mind with his shadowy past as he tried to reconcile his deceitful behavior toward his brother with the abundant blessings he received from God. In that mental struggle, Jacob was met by the mysterious stranger who physically wrestled with him until dawn. Because of Jacob's incredible physical strength, the wrestling match ended only after the mystery man touched Jacob's hip and dislocated it, giving Jacob a physical sign that he was not dreaming. When he was told that he would no longer be called Jacob, the cheater, but that
In that restless night, Jacob made peace with his past and was able to move forward to face his brother Esau in the knowledge that God was with him always. And in the joyful reunion with Esau, Jacob, now named
In reflecting on both of these seemingly disparate stories, we come to see the transformational power of God's compassion and love for even the most unsavory character. In each story, God's people were faced with situations that seemed insurmountable to them given their limited resources. Jacob didn't have the fortitude to face his twin brother, and the disciples couldn't imagine how they could feed the enormous crowd with five loaves and two fish. And in order to move on, they each had to be open to a new perspective on the situation, so that instead of seeing a lack of resources, God showed them that what they had was more than enough.
Now comes our turn to wrestle with these lessons. After all, part of walking in faith is struggling with the Living Word of God as it comes to us in Christ Jesus, the Lord, and in the written word of Scripture. There are plenty of instances from our own situations when we feel as overwhelmed as those early disciples, particularly when we are presented with the needs of the Church both locally and in the Anglican Communion as a whole. We perceive these needs to be far beyond what we think we can give. But we too, must wrestle with ourselves and our God and get a good look at who we are as God's creatures, people who have been given an abundance of resources so that no one has to go without the basic necessities of life.
Slowly, this realization is coming to light in the industrialized West. As the world becomes an even smaller place and we are able to see through mission trips and media outlets, the levels of extreme poverty in which people throughout the world are trying just to survive, one could hardly consider these conditions as living. You have delegations from Good Shepherd that have visited and one that is currently visiting El Ocotillo, El Salvador, who will surely have stories to share when they return having experienced the transformational compassion of God. After participating in such visits, one's eyes are opened and can no longer look the other way from the pain and suffering of our brothers and sisters of the human race wherever they may be.
One of the signs of this realization coming to light particularly in the
The eight goals call for:
the end of extreme poverty and hunger in the world;
the achievement of universal primary education for girls and boys;
the promotion of gender equality and empowerment of women;
the reduction of child mortality;
the improvement of maternal health;
a concerted fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases;
the promotion of environmentally sustainable practices for agriculture and manufacturing; and
the development of a global partnership that promotes fair trade, not so called free trade which allows corporate giants to dominate over lesser industrialized nations.
It will come as no surprise to anyone that based on the current pace of attack, these goals will not be achieved in the time outlined. However, it is not for a lack of the means to do so. It is instead because of the lack of will on the part of those whose lives are far too comfortable to worry about extreme poverty and hunger.
I'd like to draw your attention to the counting prayer, as it is called, that someone usually prays just before the dismissal at the 9:30 service. It goes like this: “THE WORLD NOW HAS THE MEANS TO END EXTREME POVERTY. WE PRAY WE WILL HAVE THE WILL.”
I heard this prayer for the first time a couple months ago here in this congregation. I thought it was so insightful, and I think it can have a profound effect on us as a community of faith. First of all, it's true. We have the technology, the resources, the capability, all that is physically necessary to eliminate hunger and poverty in this world. What we're missing is the emotional will and spiritual commitment to make it happen. We're all in this together and there's no one person or group of persons to blame.
I'd like to suggest that if we're going to pray this as a congregation, I think we should do it in a way that says we're serious about it. Pray it in a way that calls us to wrestle with the words.
The idea behind the prayer is that it will awaken people's conscience about extreme poverty and will lead people to take action: to pray, write to senators and congressional leaders, write letters to the editors of local papers, whatever it takes to hold our government accountable to meet these eight Millennium Development Goal's, which they helped to establish.
I would like to invite the congregation to really enter into the spirit of this prayer when we pray it. But praying the counting prayer requires a change in our perspective from one that sees not enough, to one that sees how much we've been given from God's abundant supply. It's a scary transformation because it means we have to change some things about the way we live, and we are creatures of habit who don't like change, especially when it means giving up something.
Perhaps we, like Jacob, are being called by God in this time to wrestle with ourselves, asking ourselves the hard questions like, “What makes us think we don't have enough?” “What makes us think we need more than we already have?” or “What makes it all right for us in the northern hemisphere to have things in abundance, while our neighbors to the South live in unimaginable poverty?” “Why do we continue to live as though that's okay?” THESE are the kinds of questions that God compels us to answer by and with our faith.
In closing, I would like to invite you this morning to pray the counting prayer with me. I encourage you to look up www.countingprayers.org on the web and consider making a pledge to pray this prayer daily with others across the globe. This morning, as we are sent out into the world from worship, someone will lead the opening petition as usual, “The world now has the means to end extreme poverty,” and the congregation is invited to respond together, “We pray we will have the will.” Can we give it a try now?
The world now has the means to end extreme poverty.
We pray we will have the will. Amen.
Amen.
The Rev. Melissa Buono
Church of the Good Shepherd