Sermon-of-the-Month for November, 2005: All Ate and Were Filled
First Presbyterian Church of Dutch Neck
October 16, 2005
World Food Day
Rev. Dr. Floyd W. Churn
ALL ATE AND WERE FILLED
Matthew 14:13-21
13 Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. 14 When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. 15 When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, "This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves." 16 Jesus said to them, "They need not go away; you give them something to eat." 17 They replied, "We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish." 18 And he said, "Bring them here to me." 19 Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. 20 And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. 21 And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children
Shortly after I arrived at Dutch Neck in 1982, I was invited to be part of conversations regarding a new ministry that was being established in the Trenton area to address an impending crisis. The Trenton Area Soup Kitchen, known as TASK, was being launched by a number of churches in Trenton and the surrounding communities to feed a growing number of hungry people in the city who were no longer able to count on the government programs that had fed them in the past. My first reaction was one of some alarm; I had associated soup kitchens with the 1920's and 30's, when our nation was struggling through a depression and millions were left jobless, with no safety net to meet basic human needs. A bygone era, I thought. But I came to see the necessity of providing some temporary voluntary program to care for God's precious children of all ages who were going to bed hungry in Trenton. And so I signed on and our congregation began supporting TASK with money and volunteers. Twenty-three years later, there is still a Trenton Area Soup Kitchen. It is marvelous that generous hearts still bring food, contribute money, and give hours of time serving food to the hungry in this essential ministry. It is,however a shameful scandal that there is still a need for this soup kitchen ministry that we all understood in 1982 was in no way a solution to the problem of hunger in an affluent land - only a temporary fix.
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The story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand must have been a central story in the early Christian church, because it is the only miracle story of Jesus that appears in all four Gospels, and in fact appears twice in the Gospel of Matthew, again only a chapter later in a slight variation. The patriarchal nature of this part of the Bible, however, means that the miracle was even greater than we generally assume. The ancient custom was to count only the men in a large group: the feeding of the five thousand was more like the feeding of...what?...the 15 thousand? 20 thousand? - since women and children weren't counted, though their stomachs were of course no less empty. The Bible is always the Word of God's truth in a manger of straw...an eternal treasure in an earthen vessel.
I have no doubt that when this story was read in the early church, as Christians huddled in homes or secret rooms, the people called to mind the times they broke bread together in remembrance of Jesus and in hope of his return, recalling the same words he used at the Last Supper and that they would repeat every time they ate the sacred meal: "He blessed...broke...and gave it to them..." They reclaimed their spiritual nourishment in the Lord's Supper, echoed in Matthew's telling of the great miracle of feeding in a deserted place by the Sea of Galilee. And we still hear those echoes in the story: Christ feeds us with the Bread of Life and the Cup of Salvation.
But while it is one thing to acknowledge the deep spiritual dimensions of this story - Christ filling our hungry souls with the heavenly food - it is quite another thing to completely "spiritualize": the story of the feeding of the many thousands, as I have heard attempted numerous times. Jesus Christ is concerned for the whole person - the physical necessities no less than the essential spiritual needs of men and women...and children. So I have to believe that Jesus' heart is the first to break when one of his beloved brothers or sisters dies of hunger in this world...or is seriously handicapped in health because of malnutrition or a poverty-dictated diet. Jesus saw the great crowds and had compassion for them, says Matthew. He knew they were dealing with the shocking death of John the Baptist, as he himself was, the dashed hopes for a new age of glory; he knew of their physical sickness and their emotional and spiritual wounds. And though Jesus was tired and had hoped to make this time a personal retreat for himself. he healed those wounds of body or spirit. He showed us the way of true compassion. And then, he showed us the way of abundance.
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Parker Palmer, in reflecting on this story, says that the quality of life depends heavily on whether we assume a world of scarcity or a world of abundance, and that Jesus is making a dramatic attempt to break people out of the scarcity habit by revealing the reality of abundance. The disciples are working out of the scarcity assumption, and suggest that the hungry crowd of people should be dispersed to nearby villages to buy dinner for themselves, since food is scarce in this deserted place. And how are they to procure their food? With money. Some people have a lot of money and some have scarcely anything; some people will eat and some will go hungry. Not only are they to buy their food, they are to feed themselves separately and individually...they're to go out on their own and compete for whatever food can be bought with whatever amount of money they have. What sort of system is that? Some get fed...some go hungry, and it all has to do with money and competition.
Jesus, as always, shows the more excellent way: if we stay together in community and share whatever there is, abundance is generated and everyone is fed. And furthermore, Jesus says to his followers, "You are the ones to implement this: "they needn't go away and fend for themselves; you give them something to eat." Hungry people are never someone else's responsibility.
And the miracle happens. It is much more than a miracle of a magician Jesus suspending the laws of nature and doing this "trick" with loaves and fishes. It is rather a story of abundance: people sharing whatever there is, however much or little, and, with the food to be shared blessed by Christ, realizing that there is more than enough to feed a hungry gathering...or a hungry world. "They all ate and were filled." Faith bids us believe that this miracle is present possibility. not past history.
(See Parker Palmer, The Active Life, chapter 7, "'Loaves and Fishes': Acts of Scarcity or Abundance")
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It will take more than soup kitchens and food pantries, important as these are for critical emergencies. But the best thing that could happen would be for soup kitchens and food pantries to go out of business for lack of clientele. Adequate food for everyone should not be dependent upon charity but rather justice. Charity can be withdrawn, can be dependent upon whether the giver deems the receiver "worthy," and perpetuates the whole dehumanizing distinction between "giver" and "receiver." When money and competition decide who eats adequately, food becomes charity-dependent, not an entitlement, a basic human right. Charity, in fact, can easily seduce us into thinking we are solving the problem of hunger when we are merely addressing some of the most visible symptoms. Now charity springs from love; the two words are often used interchangeably. And love desires... wills the well-being of the neighbor. The two greatest commands: love God...love neighbor. But how do we love people we do not know by name and never meet face-to-face? Here is where love takes the form of justice; justice is love spread far and wide, for all people. You certainly can love people you never meet. And justice, where the life-sustaining issue of food is concerned, calls for the creation of a more level playing field so that, rather than each one needing to disperse and fend for themselves, some with much money to spend on food, others with little or none...rather than this competition-based, money-based approach to feeding hungry people, predicated on the assumption of scarcity, there is the way of abundance-in-community, where "all are fed and have enough to eat."
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You can, and I hope will, read some of the statistics in our inserts on this World Food Day - not to foster guilt, because unredeemed guilt is a dead-end that helps no one....but because there are things than can be done to foster more just structures of our society. And what does the Lord require of us but "to act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." (Micah 8:6) There is information there about a bill providing voluntary tax check-off for the Community Food Pantry Fund...about the protection of food stamp and child nutrition programs in the face of threatened government cuts...there's website for Bread for the World, one of the great organizations in our country advocating for the hungry not only in the U.S.A. but worldwide. While we address hunger at home, we remember that our God has a whole world on his heart. You can also find links to your state and national legislators from this website, by typing in your ZIP code, for writing letters advocating justice in the sharing of food. In 2004 twelve anti-hunger organizations bound together to issue "A Blueprint to End Hunger"; there are copies in the narthex and I commend it as an extension of our Gospel story today, which includes a call to discipleship:"They need not go away; you give them something to eat." .
Is all of this far-removed from Jesus feeding hungry people at the seaside with meager resources and hopelessly idealistic? No, absolutely not, because what Jesus showed us what is real: the addressing of hunger through community, not individual competition - and we are bound in the community of "we the people" by our national covenant. We who participate in that national covenant as people of faith know the deepest truth about scarcity and abundance: there is not too little - there is enough for all to be filled with good food. And beyond that: "they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full!" Abundance! Amen.
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