Background: I had an unexpected preaching weekend last weekend when our Rector came down sick. The Gospel for the lectionary was Matthew 14:13-21, which is the story of Jesus feeding 5,000 people. Following is the text of the sermon I preached.
Being Part of the Miracle
The story of Jesus feeding the 5,000 is a well-known and often-cited story. Of the various Jesus stories that were available to the Gospel writers, this is one that each of the four Gospels made sure to include.
As Matthew tells it, Jesus has just learned about the execution, the beheading of John the Baptist, and Jesus goes off in a boat to be by himself to grieve. But the crowds get wind of where he has gone and they follow him.
Have you ever tried to take some quiet time for yourself, even for something small, and had someone interrupt that time? I’m not always as generous or as hospitable as I want to be when that happens.
Jesus is mourning the death of his mentor, cousin, and friend, the guy who baptized him. Crowds of people Jesus doesn’t even know follow him from the nearby towns. And what is Jesus’s reaction?
He had compassion for them and cured their sick. That’s something we could probably all work on—treating people with compassion regardless of the mood we are in. Jesus becoming human and feeling the full range of human emotions increased his empathy and compassion, it didn’t give him a sense that his feelings were central or more important than anyone else’s.
In the story, it gets to be towards evening, and the disciples come up to Jesus and they are worried, “We are in the middle of nowhere, it’s getting late, there’s no food around here, let’s send these crowds away so they can go to the villages and buy some food.”
Jesus’s response to the disciples is a key to this whole story. He says, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.”
Let’s notice what Jesus DOESN’T say. He doesn’t say, “Have a seat, I’ve got this.” He doesn’t say, “Watch this, you won’t believe this.”
He says, “You give them something to eat.”
We know this is a miracle story. We know that Jesus performs signs and wonders. When he calls on the disciples, he gives them a role in what is going to happen. They are part of the miracle.
Jesus turned water into wine, he healed the sick, he raised Lazarus from the dead. It’s not like he couldn’t feed the crowds by himself.
But Jesus was also a teacher, preparing his disciples to continue his ministry after he leaves his physical body. The disciples need to learn how to be a part of Jesus’s work. We need to learn how to be a part of Jesus’s work.
The disciples come back with an answer that might sound familiar to us: “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.”
We don’t have enough.
Jesus, I’d love to help, but I don’t have enough time.
Jesus, I’d love to help, but I barely have enough money for my own family.
Jesus, I’d love to help, but I’m just one person. I can’t possibly be enough to help. I can’t make a difference.
To this answer—we don’t have enough, we only have a few loaves and a couple fish—Jesus says, “Bring them here to me.”
I know you don’t have much. Bring me what you’ve got. It will be enough.
Jesus tells the crowds to sit down on the grass. He takes the loaves and the fish and he looks up to heaven, and blesses and breaks the loaves, gives them to the disciples, and the disciples give them to the crowds. And everyone eats and is filled.
It sounds so simple, you almost miss the miracle.
In January 2017, Christ Church decided to start up a program called the Alpha Course. Specifically for the youth group.
Rev. Kelsey and I had both just been hired part-time. And it was decided that Saturday evening would be when they would meet. So Youth Group was going to start meeting on Saturdays after the Alive @ 5 service.
We thought, hey, maybe parents of the youth group kids would want something to do while their kids were here, so we said, we’ll offer Alpha for adults at the same time.
Food is a big part of Alpha. You sit and break bread together and get to know each other at the table over the course of several weeks. If you don’t have food, you don’t have Alpha.
Our contemporary music leader, Jana Leslie, knew that parishioner Colin Edgell was a chef and that his two sons were active in youth group. She asked Colin if he would head up the kitchen and handle the food. There might be 30 people or so. Colin said yes.
We promoted the class a bit, opened registrations and more than 90 people, youth and adults signed up.
What do we do now?
Jana put out a call for volunteers. We had a parishioner who owned a restaurant who said he could help us get the food to prepare. From February through May, every Saturday night, almost 100 people, youth and adults, from all walks of life, a number of people in recovery, all gathered in the Parish Hall after the Saturday service, and all sat down at tables and were served salads, dinner, and desserts.
Alpha was designed to be a free program, where anyone could come. As people in our congregation heard about the program, some donated money to help cover the costs.
Everyone brought what they had: their time to volunteer, their money if they wanted to donate, themselves if they wanted to participate.
One of the miracles that happened through Alpha was that people who might not have given each other the time of day on the sidewalk became close friends who ate together, prayed for each other, and took an interest in each other’s lives. There were 11-year-old kids who would search the pews or the Parish Hall for big, scary-looking tattooed guys, who became for one another, part of what it meant to be a church.
A few loaves and a couple fish. More people coming out than we thought we could feed.
Jesus, what are we supposed to do? You give them something to eat.
We don’t have enough. Bring me what you have. It will be enough.
Our tendency as a church and as a society is to seek our induvial and collective comfort. To do a little bit until we find that sweet, comfortable space and then stay there.
Picture the disciples: “Well, this has been a great day. Big crowds of people came out, Jesus cured the people who were sick. It’s getting to be dinner time. We’ve got enough food for the 12 of us, but certainly not all these people. Jesus, send the people away to go get something to eat.”
We fill the church for Christmas and Easter and special occasions. Have you seen how many people we feed and how much money we raise for the community during Waterfowl Festival?
Do we really need to run an Alpha Course? Or start a food ministry? Or train more Stephen Ministers? Or have a concert with five church choirs? We’re doing good work in the community, I see my friends each weekend at church. Do we need to try new ideas and feed more people?
Earlier this summer, we did a small group study of J.I. Packer’s book, “Keep in Step with the Spirit,” which is about how to align our lives and open our eyes to see and experience the Holy Spirit at work.
Packer talks about revival in the church, restoring life, and fellowship with God. He says the Holy Spirit is the architect and agent of that work, which is not just an individual experience, but a social and corporate thing, which touches and transforms communities.
He writes: “God revives his church, and then new life overflows from the church for the conversion of outsiders and the renovation of society.”
The loaves and fish come from the church and go to the crowds.
“Revival is God stirring the hearts of his people.
“Times of revival bring deep sense of being always in God’s sight; spiritual things become overwhelmingly real, and God’s truth becomes overwhelmingly powerful, both to wound and to heal; conviction of sin becomes intolerable; repentance goes deep; faith springs up strong and assured; spiritual understanding grows quick and keen; and converts mature in a very short time. Christians become fearless in witness and tireless in their Savior’s service. They recognize their new experience as a real forestate of the life of heaven, where Christ will disclose himself to them so fully that they will never be able to rest day or night from singing his praises and doing his will. Joy overflows and loving generosity abounds.”
That’s what it feels like to have the Holy Spirit working in and through us, the Advocate Jesus sent us. What would it feel like to be a part of the miracle of feeding 5,000 people? To have your hands on and in the work that Jesus was doing? It was work the disciples didn’t see coming or think they could do. Would it help you trust God and encourage you to offer what you have?
The Holy Spirit moves us out of our comfort zone. It nudges us to say that sitting on the sidelines, or in the pews of the church isn’t the goal, it’s how we recharge and restore ourselves. The Spirit has been working in people this way since the Book of Acts.
Continuing the work that Jesus did, pushing new disciples, changing our lives and our expectations.
Miracles come from God, through Jesus in the story, and through the Spirit within us and around us. As disciples, we are asked to be a part of these miracles.
As with the disciples and Jesus feeding 5,000 people, the miracles that unfold before us and around us, that we get to be a part of, might not be miracles that we prayed for, or expected, or in some cases even wanted. The disciples may have wanted to put their feet up after a long day.
God’s primary way of operating in the world is through people, through those who open their lives to the Spirit. Miracles aren’t meant to let us off the hook, to say God’s got this, but to encourage in our faith, so that we can help.
We begin by bringing what we have to Jesus. Whatever you have, however much, it may not seem like enough, but it’s enough to start.
Bring your loaves, bring your fish, bring your time, bring your compassion, bring your heart, bring your gifts. And don’t be surprised when Jesus breaks and blesses what you bring, and the Spirit multiplies it and blesses you and those around you.
* The featured image at the top of the page is “The Church of the Multiplication” by Alfred Muller licensed under Creative Commons.