“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.” John 6:11
The Reverend Luther Zeigler
Emmanuel Church
July 29, 2012
At a
conference I attended a few years ago, Parker Palmer, the well-known Quaker
writer, recounted the following experience he once had on an airplane:
Palmer
boarded a plane headed for the Rockies, buckled himself in, opened his
newspaper, and sat waiting for the flight to get underway. The plane pulled away from the gate, but
instead of lining up for take-off, the plane taxied to a far corner of the
runway, and just stopped. Palmer could
hear the engines wind down, and then shut off.
His heart sank.
The pilot
came on the intercom and said, “I have some bad news and some really bad news.
The bad news is there’s a storm front in the west, Denver is socked in with
snow and the airport is shut down. So
we’ll be staying put for a few hours. That’s the bad news. The really bad news
is that we have no food on board and we know it will soon be lunch time.” Everybody groaned. (This was back in the day
when they still served meals on airplanes.)
Immediately, some passengers started to complain; others became visibly
angry. A bad situation was about to get
ugly.
But then one
of the flight attendants did something remarkable. She stood up, grabbed the intercom and said,
“We’re really sorry, folks. We didn’t plan it this way and we really can’t do
much about it. I know for some of you this is a big deal—you are really hungry
or you have a medical condition and need lunch. Some of you might not care one
way or another, and others of you, frankly, could lose a few pounds and ought
to skip lunch. So, this is what we're going to do: I’m going to pass around a couple of
breadbaskets and ask everybody to put something in the basket. Some of you may
have brought a snack, something to tide you over, some of you no doubt have a few
LifeSavers or some chewing gum or mints.
And if you don’t have anything edible, perhaps you have something else
meaningful you'd like to offer: a
picture of your children or spouse or a bookmark or a business card. Once everybody has put something in, then
we’ll reverse the process. We’ll pass the baskets around again and everyone can
take out whatever you need.”
What
happened next, Palmer said, was extraordinary.
The griping stopped. People
started to root around in pockets and handbags, some got up and opened their
suitcases stored in the overhead luggage racks and got out boxes of candy, a
salami, a bottle of wine. People were
laughing and talking and trading stories.
The flight attendant had transformed a group of people who were focused
on need and deprivation into a community of plentiful sharing. A world of scarcity had become a world of
abundance.
When the
plane finally landed, as he was disembarking, Palmer stopped and asked the
flight attendant, “Do you know there’s a story in the Bible about what you did
back there? It’s about Jesus feeding a lot of people with very little food.”
“Yes,” the flight attendant said, “I know that story. That’s why I did what I
did.”
The story of
loaves and fishes, which we hear today from John's Gospel, is the only story
from Jesus' ministry that may be found in all four gospels. That fact is reason enough to stop and pay
attention.
The story,
as John tells it, opens with a large crowd pressing in on Jesus. As the thousands of followers gather around
him, literally hungering for more, the disciples worry that there will not be
enough to feed them. Jesus senses their
fear and rhetorically asks: “Where are
we to buy bread for these people to eat?”
The question only heightens the disciples' anxiety. Philip says:
“Not even six months' wages would be enough to feed this crowd even a
little.” Andrew sees a young boy with
five loaves and two fish, but rightly observes:
“what are they among so many people?”
The disciples are panicked.
Jesus
notices an open space of green grass and tells the crowd, all five thousand of
them, to sit down. He then takes the
five loaves of bread, gives thanks, and distributes the bread to the
crowd. He does the same with the
fish. He feeds the people, John tells
us, and keeps feeding them, as much as they want, until they are satisfied. Not only is the crowd fed, but enough is left
over – twelve baskets – to feed others.
It is
tempting to want to “explain” the story, to try to understand what “really”
happened. How did the bread and fish
multiply? Was this a miraculous event
pure and simple? Or was this more like
the story of our flight attendant, who coaxed the crowd into creatively finding
a way to share what they already had? To
insist upon such “an explanation” of the event is, I think, to ask the wrong
question. The story is less about the
miraculous mechanics of making a little food go a long way than it is about
Jesus' invitation to change the way we see the world – to transform our
worldview from a perception of scarcity to the reality of abundance.
Most of the
time most of us tend to see the world through the eyes of scarcity: We're convinced that whatever we have, there
is not enough of it. Not enough
money. Not enough time. Not enough stuff. At bottom, this scarcity mindset is rooted in
fear. Fear that there won't be enough
for us, fear that we will not be provided for, fear that we will be left
out.
This fear of
scarcity then typically leads to the panic of grasping for more. And, when we let that fear take hold of us,
we give in to the lie that it is only through hoarding and accumulating and
looking out for ourselves that we can be saved.
We persuade ourselves that life is a zero-sum game, that there are the
haves and the have-nots, and that grabbing for and storing up more stuff is the
only way we can be sure to end up as one of the haves. The trouble is that once you go down the path
that meaning is to be found in the accumulation of stuff, you can never have
enough of it.
Jesus
invites us to step out of this fear, to set aside our worries and anxieties
about scarcity, and instead to see the world through the eyes of abundance, to
begin to trust in the creative mystery of grace. The paradox that Jesus points us to is this: grasping brings less, while letting go brings
more. Scarcity, we discover, is born out
of fear and isolation, while abundance is born out of cooperation and
community. This is the truth our flight
attendant gleaned so incisively from Jesus' story. The question Jesus poses to us today is: do
we have enough faith to see and feel and fully experience the abundance that is
in our very midst?
One of the
joys I experienced when I served as a school chaplain before I came to Harvard was
taking kids on field trips. An
especially fun trip I used to do is a three-day excursion with eighth graders
to Port Isobel Island in the Chesapeake Bay, a small, uninhabited island of
about 250 acres. In part the purpose of
the trip is teach about the ecology of the Bay.
But in part the purpose of the trip is also to open the kids' eyes to
the abundance of life in their midst once we get them away from the noise of
the city and pry their hands off their cell phones, computers, and ipods.
On the first
night of the trip we initiated the kids into the mysteries of wilderness living
by taking them out on a nightwalk.
Because the island is uninhabited and far from civilization, once the
sun goes down the night can be incredibly black. We take the kids out into the middle of the
wilderness in the pitch-black of night, without any flashlights or candles, and
line them up in single file for a hike around the island. The hike is led by an experienced guide who
knows the island by heart. The kids are
asked to separate themselves by about five feet, to remain silent, and then to
just start walking one behind the other, following the leader.
At first the
experience of being out in the wilderness in the blackness of night is
petrifying. Utterly unable to see and
disoriented by the darkness, you are overwhelmed with a sense of isolation. You
fear getting lost. The task of following
the person in front of you as you stumble your way through the blackness seems
impossible.
After a few
minutes, however, you begin to relax and let go of your fear. Your senses gradually adjust to the
darkness. Your night vision kicks in,
your peripheral vision actually expands, and suddenly you can see things in a
way you've never seen them before. Your
ears also open up and your sense of hearing becomes acutely alert to the noises
of the wild. Your senses of touch and
smell intensify. You develop an
awareness of your surroundings that is like a sixth sense and you quickly
cultivate the skill of following the person in front of you by listening
carefully to their movements and learning to trust your newly attuned instincts.
Every year,
almost to a person, the kids cite their nightwalking experience as the
highlight of the Chesapeake Bay trip.
What starts out as a terrifying, disorienting, and isolating experience
defined by a scarcity of light becomes an amazingly abundant world of new
noises, sights, and smells, accompanied by a feeling of connectedness to the
world and to those around you. It is
startling what is possible when we get our children, and ourselves, away from
our competitive, consuming, and distracting world and open our eyes and ears
and noses to the abundance of this world and to the possibilities of living in
right relationship with nature and each other.
These
stories of abundance tell us something important about who God has created us
to be. Our deepest desire, it turns out,
is not to grasp, and claw, and accumulate our way to the top out of fear that
we will be left behind. Rather, our
deepest desire is to experience the abundance of God in community with others –
the kind of abundance that comes from knowing that we are willing to feed one another
when we are hungry; the kind of abundance that comes from knowing that we are
willing to follow each other into the uncertainty of the night, trusting that
we will look out for each other if we go astray; the kind of abundance that
comes from knowing that we are held together by generative relationships such
that I’m there for you and you’re there for me.
Such generative relationships of mutual love and care are precisely what
the Christian life of abundance is about.
Amen.
