St. Paul Lutheran Church, Albuquerque, July 30, 2006
Pentecost 8 (Proper 12B)
Texts: 2 Kings 4:42-44, Ephesians 3:14-21, John 6:1-21
Pastor Harold Nilsson
I have to be honest with you. I’ve come to worship and these texts this morning with a heavy heart. The news coming out of the Middle East the last few days has been terribly depressing. So many civilians, so many children in northern Israel and southern Lebanon have been hurt or killed, or have fled as their homes and livelihoods were destroyed. The people of Gaza have been dealing with the same crisis, except that they have nowhere to flee. All this on top of the steady stream of difficult stories from Iraq and Afghanistan. Regardless of our political views, I suspect the images of death and destruction weigh heavily on us. Brian Williams remarked to Tim Russert on camera the other evening that “it’s hard to watch some of our own news stories.” For several of us in this room, the stories are hard to watch not only because our sense of justice and morality is offended, but because we’ve spent time in the region and have friends and acquaintances and even family who are directly affected by the fighting. We see their frightened faces in our mind’s eye, and worry for their well-being.
We come to worship bringing these concerns and countless others. We come, hoping perhaps that we can forget all those issues for an hour and focus on something more upbeat and positive. Or maybe we come hoping there will be a word from God, some text or prayer or line in a hymn that will help us to keep faith for another week in the midst of more bad news from the Middle East and elsewhere. That’s how I’ve come to today. That’s what I’ve sought from the texts for this week. What I want to do this morning is simply take you on my journey through these readings, searching for that word, that sliver of hope, that encouragement for faith.
The readings seem primarily to be about food. Lots of it. Elisha, the prophet from the 800s BC, takes the small amount of food brought by a man from the hill country and feeds a hundred people with it, with some left over. (Apparently those barley loaves were pretty small; it took at least three to make a meal.) It’s obvious why this story has been paired with the gospel reading. Jesus wasn’t the first to take a small offering of food and multiply its impact. Actually, the story about Elisha is the fourth in a series of stories about him designed to show that he acted and spoke with God’s authority and power.
We could try to explain or explain away this miracle of bread, as well as the one in the gospel, but that doesn’t help my faith and probably not yours. We should probably see the story for what it is—a witness to God’s compassion for hungry people, and of God’s ability to do more than we can imagine with the little we offer. But I confess I didn’t find in the Elisha story the word that speaks to the hunger of my heart today.
The gospel also is about miraculously feeding the hungry, this time on a much bigger scale: 5000 instead of a hundred. And with even less to start with: five loaves and two fish. This is a popular story in the New Testament, of course. It appears six times in various forms in all four gospels. And in John it becomes the basis for an extended amount of Jesus’ teaching. In fact, we’re going to hear readings from the 6th chapter of John for five weeks straight. As Elisha, Jesus bears the power and authority of God. He demonstrates the compassion of God, and teaches that our meager offerings can be transformed into an abundance. Those transforming offerings can come from the least likely places, even children. And for us waste-prone Americans, there is the detail that nothing is to be thrown out. Even leftovers can help fill the stomachs of hungry people. The account of the feeding of the 5000 is encouraging. Surely what is needed in the chaos of the Middle East is God’s compassion demonstrated with power and authority.
The last part of the gospel reading wants to tell us even more strongly that Jesus embodies God’s compassion. He comes walking to the terrified disciples out on the sea, a place and symbol of chaos in ancient Semitic thinking. “It is I, don’t be afraid.” Don’t be afraid. Is that the word you need to hear this weekend? Don’t be afraid of the increasing chaos in parts of the world, or in your own world, for Jesus will walk (or sail) with you. That’s certainly a message you can take from the reading.
I found something that speaks even more to me, however, in the seemingly incidental verse that comes when the meal on the mountainside is over: “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.” Come to make him king. Well, think about it. Wouldn’t we back a candidate who could assure us that we always would not only have food on our tables but would be secure and safe from harm’s way? Wouldn’t we draft the person who keeps us from the chaos of impaired health or climate changes or crime? Someone who would guarantee our freedom (as we define it, of course)? Someone who would step in and stop all terrorism and war?
Karen Armstrong writes about this urge in her book, The Battle for God. It is the same urge that drove those Jesus fed, to force him into a role:
“During the middle of the 20th century, fundamentalists in all three of the monotheistic faiths were beginning to retreat from mainstream society, to create countercultures that reflected the way they thought things ought to be. They were not simply withdrawing out of pique, but were often impelled to do so by horror and fear. It is important that we understand the dread and anxiety that is at the heart of the fundamentalist vision, because only then will we begin to comprehend its passionate rage, its frantic desire to fill the void with certainty, and its conviction of ever-encroaching evil.”1
I would love to fill the voids with absolute certainty, but that is not the way of Jesus, and for that reason Jesus withdrew from those who wanted to force him to be king. He will be king, but he redefined that leadership on his terms. That’s documented several chapters later in John, in a story you know well, the story of the cross. Jesus leads by being vulnerable. He demonstrates power in a way that those who fire rockets and carry out air strikes do not understand. He reigns by letting those powers that were so anxious and so certain they were right do their worst to him. But God declared that Jesus’ way is the right way, the true way. That’s what Easter is about—the vindication of Jesus’ decision to flee from those who would make him king. This Jesus, the crucified and living one, is now our food, our daily bread for the journey.
God doesn’t give us absolute certainty, but God doesn’t leave us in the lurch. God offers an alternative to certitude. It’s called trust. Jesus shows us that God may be trusted. That trust, that faith helps give courage to go on despite our vulnerability, our limitations.
I heard this story from a friend of mine here in New Mexico who knew William Sloane Coffin very well. Bill Coffin, the former activist chaplain of Yale and pastor of the Riverside Church in New York City died earlier this year. A couple of years before his death, Coffin went to his doctor complaining of a loss of energy and enthusiasm. After doing a series of tests, the doctor told Coffin, I have some bad news. You have cancer, and have only about six months to live. Instead of going into shock, Coffin smiled and said, “This is good news. I thought I was depressed.” (Cancer he could handle, which he did, much longer than the doctor predicted; the thought that he might be losing faith was more devastating.)
In his Credo that he compiled during the months of his illness, Coffin said
“If we misconceive God as Father Protector, as one, so to speak, in charge of all the uncontrolled contingencies along the way, then each disappointment reduces what may confidently be affirmed about God. And this is how most people lose their faith.”2
Because Jesus refused to be the king who controls all the contingencies, he could become the servant savior, the real living bread who feeds our faith. So day after day in our thinking and praying, and week after week around this table, Jesus lifts the heaviness from our hearts and gives us the courage to act on our faith. Instead of reacting in fear to chaos, we can be proactive in hope by living the compassionate way of Jesus.
That we might have this kind of faith is precisely what Paul eloquently prayed in the Ephesians reading: that we may be strengthened in our inner beings with power through the Spirit, that we may comprehend what is the breadth and length and height and depth, that we may know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.
In the midst of our chaotic world, I pray this for you as well as for myself.
1 Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God (New York: Knopf, 2000), 201; quoted by Douglas John Hall, Bound and Free (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 100-101.
2 William Sloane Coffin, Credo (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 16.