Living Abundantly

“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.