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The Rev. Canon Mary Sulerud Ephesians 3:14–21; John 6:1–21 IN THE NAME OF GOD THE FATHER, THE SON AND THE HOLY SPIRIT. AMEN. In a recent book entitled A New and Right Spirit: Creating an Authentic Church in a Consumer Culture, Pastor Rick Barger once asked some first time visitors to the congregation he serves what it was that brought them there on a Sunday. The young couple spoke of the abundance in their lives, their excellent educations and professions, their ability to send their children to prestigious schools and of an income that provided many activities for them. They exuded health and happiness. It was on the whole nearly the perfect life, except for one thing. The couple sensed that “something was missing” from their lives and they were seeking a “spiritual community” that would be the “icing on the cake” of their terrific lives. The pastor then went on to report that the couple came to church a few more times and then drifted away. Much as the pastor desired to deepen the conversation it didn’t happen and there was no clear indication of what did or didn’t happen to the couple that led them to conclude that no icing on the cake was to be found there. One thing was clear to the pastor: many folks come to church the first time in a consumer frame of mind and it is equally true that being part of a congregation is not at all like joining a health club. One of the reasons why matters of faith are such a fault line in conflicts that vary from the enduring conflicts in Iraq and Lebanon and Israel to what gets taught in a public school classroom about the origin of human existence is that of a belief that most, if not all, postmodern people share, of all religious and non-religious stripes. It is the belief that the religion as we knew and the world it shaped has disintegrated. This is the apocalyptic news that Christian fundamentalists have been trumpeting since the early 20th century. When you add this to the sense that we have that all social, political and economic norms are also up for grabs you have a very chaotic world in which consumerism is deeply appealing because it gives us some way of measuring success in our lives through the stuff we own, the places we go, the houses we live in, the schools our kids attend, the positions of authority we have. Yet every clergy person and lay leader I know has had at least one conversation with a person who outwardly and visibly is a manifestation of success and inwardly struggles with an abiding spiritual hunger. Perhaps the rise of fundamentalism in all faith traditions in its worst manifestations could be attributed in part to the ease with which it provides almost measurable rules and patterns for living a successful spiritual life. We live in a deeply hungry world, literally and spiritually. We enter the first of five sequential readings from the Gospel of John today that have at their center the feeding of the multitudes by Jesus. It is a story of such power and importance that it is found in all of the gospels. The ministry of Jesus, teaching, healing, preaching and casting out demons attracted crowds of enthusiastic followers. While there often aren’t many parallels between first century Palestine and the 21st century USA in which we live, there are a number of them here. Jesus was born and raised in a faith community in which all of the usual religious, social, political and economic norms were disintegrating. His own religious community was at odds about what it meant to be faithful to God. Palestine was ruled by an outside power and the poor were even more impoverished. The crowds who followed Jesus had very little in the way of a good life, and yet their longing was very like ours. People were hungry literally and spiritually. What is so extraordinary about this story is how very ordinary it is. At the end of a long day of teaching and healing Jesus tells Philip along with the other disciples in response to their anxious worry about their presence to feed the crowds. The response is one of those great realistic answers that we think are the mark of successful people in a results-oriented culture: there isn’t enough food and there isn’t enough money to do this. Philip is profoundly aware of the magnitude of the task that Jesus has put before him. Yet, his inability to see beyond what he knows and what he can do with limited resources not only makes him reluctant to act, it becomes its own sort of blindness. So Jesus does what he always does in the gospels, he shifts the whole way we see things. Jesus moves from a focus around that great fuel of consumerism, scarcity, and acts out of a vision of abundance, proceeding to relate to the crowds as though five loaves and two fish were plenty. He tells everyone to sit down and he takes the bread of the poor, barley loaves and the fish, and after giving thanks distributes to everyone who wants some. Wonder of wonders there are twelve baskets remaining. Like the crowds we all want to jump into speculation about how Jesus did that and make him the king of our lives for all of the wrong reasons. The problem with signs and wonders and our dependence upon them as we will hear in the next several Sundays is that they lead away from God and right back to a life in which the values of our success and expediency dominate. Instead Jesus is showing us God’s great compassion for the hungering need of the world. Within our most primal urge to eat is the place where God meets us abundantly. Faith in God is not some airy-fairy experience or icing on the cake of our lives because God permeates our ordinary lives at their most tangible and concrete. What Jesus was doing then and is doing now in this meal that we will soon share is offering us an opportunity to be shareholders in a life of God given abundance of what it really takes to live. In this little morsel of bread we are given today we receive the same gift that was blessed, broken and offered two thousand years ago. Today God bestows upon us the possibility to see ourselves as a part of a whole with so much more in common than not. Today we are given the capacity to know how much God loves us and in the experience of that abundant love we are able both to deepen our communion with God and with one another. We are given the ability to take this essential food to a world in such desperate need of it. The meal that we share is never a closed door. It is always food for a journey of discipleship. As Philip and the disciples failed to see there is no one God can’t use. There is no one God’s love can’t change. In this feeding Jesus extends a vision of the world that God imagines and to which we are invited to belong. Today’s gospel plunges us into a meal that can never be just “the icing on the cake” of our lives. This is perhaps the most profound misunderstanding of God at work in the world that we bring to the table as postmodern people. As theologian Frederick Schmidt notes, persisting in the belief that faith is one more thing to add to complete our successful lives as consumers will give us a life without self-giving, a life without adventure, a life without reflection and most tragically a life without love and a God without grace. In the horrifying conflicts that unfold daily in which faith is the agonizing tie that binds an outcome that can be life-sustaining, rather than life-destroying, is dependent upon the ability of all of us to claim and be claimed by a God of abundance and compassion for the true needs of the whole world. This is why what we are offered today by Jesus is no less than a complete reorienting of our lives, changing what we see, what we hear, what we think and know, what we feel, how we love. To paraphrase a prayer it is “the bread of wisdom to recognize the hand of God in our lives, the bread of justice to see the hungers around us, the bread of prayer to recover from our craving for all that is not God, the bread of gratitude to entrust our lives to the God of mercy, the bread of discipleship to share our sorrows and our joys.” Take and eat. AMEN. |