by Rev. Carole Horton-Howe
Please note that the following sermon text was provided prior to the audio recording. The two versions may differ substantially.
John 6:1-21
Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias. A large crowd kept following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick. Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near. When he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do. Philip answered him, “Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.” One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?”
Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.” Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets. When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.”
When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.
When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea, got into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum. It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. The sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing. When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat, and they were terrified. But he said to them, “It is I; do not be afraid.” Then they wanted to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the land toward which they were going.
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As this summer continues, many of us are traveling and some by air. This gospel reminded me that there’s actually something known as The Fishes and Loaves Prayer in, of all places, the airline business. At least there used to be back in the days when airlines served meals. At busy hubs, a plane would come in for a quick turnaround -- 40 minutes to get all the incoming passengers and bags off, clean the plane, get the departing passengers and bags on before they “pulled the blocks.” This 40 minutes also included changing the galley – taking off the old food service items and loading the meals, beverages and supplies for the next leg.
So as soon as all the arriving passengers were off, the crew for the departing flight would rush on to get things set up. For the crew member with the lowest seniority, this meant checking out the galley and counting the meals. Those little ceramic dishes with over-processed chicken were loaded in oven racks and cold boxes. You had to count them. Adding up the numbers in each rack you’d come up with something like 102. Except you know there are 112 seats on the plane. And the flight is full. The catering truck is gone. Your only hope is prayer.
And so The Fishes and Loaves Prayer begins. “Oh dear God, PLEASE let this be enough to get through this flight.” The purpose of the prayer is 2-fold. Of course you want everyone to have a meal and enjoy their flight experience. But you also don’t want to have to go to those passengers in rows 23 and 24 and tell them you have nothing for them. You might even check the ovens and cold boxes again to see if anything has changed, but it hasn’t. Because you’re not Jesus. There will be no miracle of another 10 dishes of lasagna.
The gospel story today is one of the best known of all the miracle stories that we hear. It was so important to the understanding of God through Jesus that it appears in all four of the gospels. There are only two miracle stories that we see reported in each of the gospels. The other is the resurrection. I think this gives a good idea of how important it was to ancient people and how timeless it is. Today we get to hear the one from John.
I’m pretty sure that no one here is hearing it for the first time. Maybe you’ve heard it many times through the years of your life. Maybe the first time was as a child in Sunday school or from your parents or grandparents. I wonder if you can think back to the first time that you might have heard it. Your reaction was likely, “How did he do that?” “How did that happen?” It’s magic! As little ones, the idea of magic is exciting to us. We’re totally on board with magical thinking. If we’re lucky we had someone explain to us the difference between magic and divinity. God’s power is no trick. God’s power is life and life-giving. Hopefully someone pointed to the stars or your own little wiggly fingers and toes and explained the difference.
Then we get older. And our faith matures. But we also get saturated in the way the secular world works and looks at things. We’ve had to navigate through that world and meet its challenges. Magic doesn’t have the same attraction for us. We might still be very entertained by it but now we’re looking elsewhere for answers and explanations. And as we go through our options, the divine power of God doesn’t always come up at the top of our list. We’ve become uneasy with the idea of God’s power and Jesus’ divinity. We’d like to be comfortable with them but we’re always reaching for back-up from a source with which we’re more comfortable like science or our own ability to accomplish tasks.
Over the years there have been attempts to explain the stories about Jesus feeding massive numbers of people in a way that satisfies us. Those attempts go something like this: when the people sat down, Jesus blessed the small amount of food that they had and asked the disciples to distribute it to the crowd. They were moved by what they saw. They knew that Jesus was an extraordinary healer and teacher but now they see his compassion and generosity. So they are inspired to do the same. They begin to reach into their pockets and take out bread that they had been secretly saving for themselves. And they shared it with one another. At the end, because so many had shared what they had, there were 12 baskets of pieces left over. So, this explanation concludes, isn’t that just as miraculous?
Well, no. It isn’t. Such explanations satisfy our drive to understand on our own human and secular terms what happened and how it happened. It reflects some of the personal qualities of Jesus. No doubt he was generous and compassionate. He was surely charismatic and was able to inspire those around him to be their best selves. Sharing what you had with others was a principle tenet of the church then as it is now. All those things may be true -- but it only gives us a watered-down view of what Jesus was and why he was here.
The idea that there was an abundance of food because of massive amounts of sharing rather than an actual miracle of God through God’s son doesn’t jive with the fact that this story is told in each gospel and twice in some. It has too great a role for that. So if we try to explain it away as a nice story of sharing, we do ourselves a disservice. Even harm. We separate ourselves from a sense of awe and wonder and respect for the power of God to do miraculous things in the world, miraculous things for us and miraculous things through us. We lose the chance to live with mystery. And we are poorer for it.
Who can blame us for wanting to take the practical way? We understand where Andrew and Philip are coming from. If Jesus would just let us know how to take that little amount of food and multiply it to feed thousands, we could feed all the poor. We could close down the Soup Hour because everyone would be fed. Pat ourselves on the back and declare “job well done.” If God would just give us the directions, give us the words, give us the actions to be able to do this, we would be able to do what Jesus did.
But logistics are not God’s focus. What matters is what this account teaches us the truth of the powerful divinity of God and Jesus, about the divine nature of Jesus as God on earth.
This story doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Jesus, the teacher, knew people needed to experience God’s truth as well as hear it. They needed to be filled up with experience of what life with God’s truth was all about and the truth about what it truly meant to be his disciples.
Then, like the good teacher he was, Jesus gave them a glimpse of what he was talking about. He fed their spirits and their bodies. He fed them with real food. One of the distinctions in John’s version of this miracle story is that Jesus himself distributes the bread to everyone in the crowd. He gave them himself preparing them for the time when they would carry on after he was gone.
So, what about us? And what are we doing to feed people with more than physical food? Jesus is saying to us, “What are you going to do so these people can eat?”
We are asked to cherish the words of scriptures, examine our lives and take seriously our response to God’s invitation into things we understand and into the mysteries we don’t. But to relax into them just the same. Our lives are bound up with the whole people of God – all of us sitting in a grassy field together. So, in the end we have been given the directions, the words, and the actions to do what Jesus did. We are the inheritors of the apostles’ ministry.
We have abundant examples of the sort of feeding others by which lives are sustained and enhanced. One that always resonates with me of a tiny nun named Agnes in 1946 came face to face with massive crowds of people in Calcutta who were suffering and dying. She experienced what she heard as a “call within a call” which was to serve a discreet group - those who were suffering the most. Certainly Mother Teresa, as she came to be known, did not have an abundance of knowledge, money or wisdom to take on this work. She did have plenty of Andrews and Philips telling her that she couldn’t take care of so many people and anything she did would just be a drop in the bucket, so why even try? But she did have a firm belief that God would accompany her and support her as long as she was serving God’s own children.
Hers is a big story of on-going miracles. We’re not all called to big stories. God can take any small offering that we make – a kind word, a brief visit, a quick apology, a short thank you note or an email, a smile with our eyes from behind a mask – and multiply it.
Jesus has given us enough food to be fully satisfied in body and spirit and to strengthen us as we continue his miraculous work. We only need to open our eyes to the richness of the word and sacrament and allow it to empower us in love and service to others. Amen.