There is Always More

Posted on by tbuegler

Last week was quite the adventure!  I got to spend the week at the ELCA Youth Gathering in New Orleans. It was an event with 16,500 young people and adult leaders, including around 30 from Trinity.

The Gathering was an incredible event where our young people and their leaders experienced worship, service, accompaniment, new relationships, resources for life and faith, a ton of amazing speakers, dancing, singing, concerts by recording artists, community life activities in the evening and a lot, lot more.

Getting home from New Orleans during a global internet outage was definitely a part of the adventure…but I think I’ll save that story for another sermon…maybe one when I’m preaching about nightmares.

But my observation was this:  Over the five days of the event…there was so much…so much…and every time you turned a corner…you discovered something else…something more…something to do, something to see, something to learn, something to experience.  There was always more.

  • And I love the fact that we are a part of a church…a denomination…that is gutsy enough to dream up an event so large that we’d need to rent an NBA arena to hold it.  
  • I love being a part of a community that dreams up activities so huge that it takes the entire New Orleans convention center to hold them.  
  • I love being a part of an event of such scope, that they had to use something like 40 hotels to hold all the participants.  

I love that for that week, our young people experienced the abundance of God…the sheer, vast, immeasurable abundance of God’s love and grace.  I love that when they thought they’d seen it all…there was always more.  God was always leading them to what was next…to more.  

These experiences of God’s abundance resonate with our Gospel story today.

It is one of the more well-known and widely told stories from the scriptures…the feeding of the 5,000.  

The crowds were hungry, and so Jesus tells the disciples to find some food.  In my imagination, it went down like this:  The disciples went from one person to another asking, “Do you have any food? Excuse me, do you have any food?  What about you?” 

Can you imagine? Being in that crowd of thousands, having some hungry looking disciple approach you like a beggar, asking for food? Even if you had some, would you give it to him? Probably not. 

I’m not surprised that they didn’t fill their baskets with donations of food. In fact, I’m surprised that they came back with anything at all. But they did come back with something.  A little kid, who had a basket, with five small loaves and a few fish. That was it.  The disciple, Andrew, looks at the kid…looks at the basket…and then looks at the kid again, and says to the other disciples: “you’re kidding me, right?”

But Jesus sees the boy, with his five loaves and the few fish and his face lights up!  “Make the people sit down,” he says eagerly, and then, in my imagination, he squats down at this boy’s eye level, and holds out his hands.

Now, this boy, I’m sure, was just as hungry as everyone else. He might’ve held on tightly to the food. But in an act of radical generosity, he handed his lunch over to Jesus. And in an act of radical faith Jesus held up these five small loaves and two fish and said something like, “Thank you father, for providing enough food for all of us to eat.” And then he begins to give away the food.

We know that a miracle happened that day. All four of the Gospels agree on this, and on the fact that after everyone had eaten, 12 baskets of leftovers were gathered up. There was plenty, Matthew says, and Mark, and Luke, and John. 

There was more…more than they could eat…more than they needed… more than they ever dreamed of.  We know it was a miracle. What we don’t know is what kind of miracle it was. How did this happen? That much, at least, is left up to our imaginations.

In most of the Jesus movies I have seen it is presented as a miracle of multiplication. Jesus puts the loaves into a basket, raises it over his head, and when he brings it down again the nearly empty basket is brimming over with bread. He does the same with the fish, so that a few small fish become a feast for thousands. 

And maybe it happened that way.  It certainly could have.  We have no way of knowing for sure.  Maybe it was a miracle of multiplication.

Or just maybe it was a miracle of addition…a miracle of sharing.  Maybe the people had been holding back…hoarding their food for themselves.  Maybe it was hidden under their coats, or in their knapsacks.  

Maybe lots of people had brought food…but maybe it was only this little boy who was willing to share.   Did this kid’s radical act of generosity coupled with Jesus’ radical act of faith transform hearts that day, and inspire a miracle of addition, where people simply added what they had to what the boy had given until everyone had enough and there were still 12 baskets left over?  Like a giant potluck?

It’s not the traditional take on the story, and while I wouldn’t want to suggest for a moment that this is the way it actually happened…no one knows.  But I do want you to understand that a miracle of addition…where people are moved by the boy’s generosity to share, is no less a miracle than one of multiplication.  In some ways, maybe it would be more of a miracle. 

For while the heart of God has always wanted to provide bread for the world, too often, the human hearthas cared only about bread for itself. We all get anxious about if we have enough, and so we struggle to release our grip on the little we have and to place it into the hands of Jesus.  Changing the human heart, it takes a miracle.

But in our world today, our split, polarized, divided and self-interested world, this is just the kind of miracle we need. This story…it speaks directly to our world, and our hearts.

When I teach the Bible, one of my favorite parts of the scriptures to teach about is Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, especially the part where he says, “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sew, nor reap, nor gather into barns, yet your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not far more valuable than they?” 

And then someone in the Bible study or the confirmation class will ask the question every pastor loves…and dreads at the same time; the hard question, the good question: “So if God provides enough, then why are there so many hungry people…so many starving people in the world?”  

There is an answer to this question.  Though it’s an answer we don’t particularly like to hear: It’s not that there isn’t enough food to feed the world; in fact, there is more than enough.  It’s just that we don’t share it.  We are like the crowd of people on that grassy Galilean hillside, who may have had for lunch bags of their own but were afraid to share. God, in his goodness, has provided enough for everyone, but God doesn’t force our behavior. God has made us free to decide what we do with what we have.

Free to share, or free to keep. Too often, we choose to keep.  The problem of hunger in the world is not a reflection of God’s stinginess, but rather a reflection of our brokenness…our sinfulness. What we need is a radical act of generosity to inspire us. What we need is a radical act of faith to empower us. 

Once upon a time, there was a little child, a girl, who refused to eat broccoli. Every time her mother served it the girl would push it to one side of her plate. And every time she did she heard the sagive,me speech: “You should eat your broccoli, Jane. There are children starving in other parts of the world. Children in Africa, who would love to have your broccoli.” So, her mother shouldn’t have been too surprised when she got a phone call from the post office one day telling her that she had provided insufficient postage for a heavy, rather greasy shoe box wrapped in brown paper, and addressed in crayon to “The children of Africa.” You know what was in the box, right?

But isn’t that the kind of example we may need, where we stop clinging to what we have, and start sending packages? 

We need miracles of addition.  And there are good ways to do that. 

There are charities everywhere that feed the hungry. But none of that will last until we can follow the example of that boy from John six, who took all that he had and placed it into the hands of Jesus. “Here,” he might have said, “take that and see what you can do with it.”  

And “Here,” we might say, “take this and see what you can do with it. Take my fear of not having enough.” Because that is the real problem, isn’t it? It is certainly the problem Jesus addresses in the Sermon on the Mount. When he talks about the birds of the air it’s not a problem of food, but a problem of fear that he’s after: “Don’t worry about your life, what you will eat,” he says. “Worry makes you hold on too tight, to too little. Instead, trust God. 

Trust in the God of abundance.  Trust that God gives, and then gives more.  Believe in God’s ability to provide. Know that there is enough…more than enough.  You are children of God. He longs to give you every good gift. In a radical act of trust; like the boy in today’s Gospel story, put your lunch…and your life…and your very faith…into the hands of Jesus…and ask him to do more.

And then, stand back, and see what Jesus can do with it.

Thanks be to God!

Amen.

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