The Fourth Sunday in Lent Year B, March 26, 2006
2 Chronicles 36:14-23, Psalm 122, Ephesians 2:4-10, John 6:4-15

Loaves and Fishes for Dinner Again?

A Sermon by Deborah Pender Hutchison

St David's Episcopal Church, Bean Blossom, Indiana

I have to confess that when I consulted the lectionary in preparation for preaching, and discovered that the appointed gospel was the loaves and fishes story, the first thing I did was roll my eyes. Then I sighed. Then I groaned, “Not again!”

How many times have I heard this scripture? How many times have I preached on it? How many times have I seen Biblical bathrobe epics which included this miracle -- Jesus with his lovely hair and spotless robes, the crowd seated decoratively on a nicely manicured lawn, the crescendo of meaningful music as it becomes apparent that all will be fed?

Enough times that the story has become burnished in my consciousness to a nice pious sheen. Nothing sticks out. Nothing grabs me. Nothing challenges me, except the seeming impossibility of finding in my preaching self any passion about, what has become for me, a tired tale.

As a child, I had a book of Bible stories that told this one from the perspective of the boy whose lunch became the raw material for Jesus’ miracle. It was really a little morality tale about the importance of sharing. “What would have happened if little Eli hadn’t offered to share his meal?” “Everyone would have gone hungry,” I dutifully answered in 1957. Now, I’d be more likely to say, “I wouldn’t be struggling to come up with something meaningful to say, if he’d just kept his dang lunch to himself!”

But, he didn’t. And so I have to engage somehow with this passage. Of course, I could simply avoid the gospel, preach on any or all of the other readings. But who- or what- ever sits on my mental shoulder when I’m digging in to work on a sermon…that creature which is, I hope, of God…the one who says, “Uh, uh! not that way!” when I try to take the easy route. That one has kept dragging me back and plunking me down in front of the passage I’m trying to avoid, while whispering in my imaginary ear something like, “Scripture is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. There’s always something more there. Just keep looking.”

So I’ve looked. Not expecting much, since I was convinced there was nothing in this scripture for me, I tried the African Bible Study method of reading the passage while attending to any word or phrase that stood out. Well, what do you know. I kept tripping over the gospel’s little aside – the part after Jesus asks Philip, "Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?"—the part where the writer of the gospel turns to the audience and discloses that Jesus “…said this to test him...”

…Said this to test him. What is Jesus looking for, I wonder. What sort of response would pass this test? When Philip answers, “Six months' wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.", Jesus doesn’t exactly shout, “Wrong!”. But we get the sense that Philip’s passive resignation is not what Jesus was hoping for.

Frustratingly, we’re not really ever told what Jesus does want, what the correct response is, not directly anyway. We’re told at the beginning that Jesus knows what he is going to do. The outcome is never really in question. He’s going to make sure everyone is fed. But, at the end of the story, Jesus withdraws to the mountain by himself when he realizes the crowd is going to try to force him to be their king. So it’s clear that he’s not about trying to impress people with his power. There must be some other purpose for this miracle of hunger satisfied.

So what is Jesus up to? What’s the test? What is Jesus’ trying to elicit from his followers? Maybe the answer lies hidden in the narrative. Maybe it requires some work on our part to ferret it out, because the idea here is not to figure out the right response in order to maintain our spiritual grade-point average, but rather to actually learn something that might be applied to the way we live our lives as followers of Christ.

Well…I seem to have become engaged with this scripture, in spite of myself. Stepping back, looking at the shape of the story as a whole, I see that inertia changes to forward momentum when Andrew shows up with the boy’s five barley loaves and two fish. Andrew clearly has his doubts -- “…what are they among so many people?" – but at least he’s moved off of square one. He’s not stuck. He’s acted.

And maybe that’s the answer to the test – action, instead of passivity – response-ability. A willingness to move forward, no matter how incrementally. Now this story begins to speak to me, to speak itself into the convolutions of my own life.

I remember a time of extreme stuck-ness recently. Mother Hutchison had just died. There were arrangements to be made, memorial services to be planned, lists of people to be notified. Dad was quietly shattered by the loss of his partner of 58 years. Always in the past very much the head of the family, he was suddenly leaning on us. And Jonathan and I began to realize that, in this situation, we each were being called to step up and assume what was, for us in that family system, the unfamiliar role of grown-up.

I recall feeling terribly overwhelmed – so many things to think about, so many potential feet upon which to step, an infinite number of mistakes that could be made. I was at least as paralyzed as Philip in our gospel. Then, somehow, we got unstuck, the first decision got made, and the forward momentum began to accelerate until everything that needed to be done got done, sometimes in what seemed to be miraculous ways.

That first incremental movement was made with a good will, a desire to do the right thing. It was birthed in the basic prayer form of “ God help me!” And it was as if it set in motion a beautiful complex graceful pattern of responses from the universe. Things just began to fall into place – some of it intentionally choreographed by us, much of it seemingly composed by some larger wisdom and intention. When really difficult moments arrived where we were asked to deal with situations in which we’d never imagined finding ourselves, the ability to respond creatively and compassionately came from…..Somewhere. Our little offering, our incremental action, activated – with God’s help – a flood of support.

It was very much a “loaves and fishes” sort of thing – much arising out of very little. As I look back into our gospel through the window of this recent experience, I see that Jesus presided over all that happened around our observance of Mother Hutchison’s passage, just as he presided over the multiplication and distribution of those five loaves and two fish. “…[H]e himself knew what he was going to do.”

But, in our gospel, he didn’t make food appear out of thin air. His wasn’t a magic trick. It was a miracle, and miracles seem to require some raw material, a human factor as well as a divine. In our gospel, the human factor was a boy’s generosity and a disciple’s willingness to look foolish by bringing that seemingly insignificant offering forward. In Pennsylvania a few weeks ago, it was our willing and active offering of ourselves, our tentative and doubt-filled attempts to do something … anything…no matter how incremental, that was the catalyst -- a necessary part of the process. We pass the test, I think, when we simply attempt to respond to a perceived need with a willing and compassionate spirit.

It’s not like this is new information. But, my awareness of the cooperative nature of Jesus’ work in the world, the reality that nothing happens unless we allow ourselves to be the vehicles for its happening, this had all gotten to be sort of rote for me, had taken on that slippery sheen of burnished piety that works against any real engagement, that I talked about earlier in reference to the gospel story.

The terrible weight of the world’s suffering, the impossible measure of the world’s need – it’s all been pressing down on me lately in a way that has made me feel defeated, helpless, stuck. What’s the point of doing anything? What difference would my poor contribution make?

It occurs to me that little Eli, or whatever was the name of the boy in our story, had a distinct advantage over me in this respect. He was blessedly free of that practical and uniquely adult perspective that sees the big picture with all its potential limitations. Food was needed? Well, he had some. Truth be told, probably most every person in that crowd had some. After all, they were all on their way to observe the Passover in Jerusalem, and nobody in his right mind would travel those dusty McDonald-less byways without bringing along some sustenance.

But the adults there were limited by their ability to see, quite correctly in the world’s terms, that whatever each of them had to share, it could never be enough. Little Eli had the small limitless perspective of a child. It freed him to offer what he had. And that was the answer Jesus was looking for.

Both the giving and what was given were the catalyst, the raw material Jesus required for the manifestation of his miracle – whether that miracle was a mysterious multiplication of five loaves and two fish, or perhaps the even more holy offering of all those little meals, all the little “not enoughs” of all those pilgrims, combining to become more than enough, a banquet of the heavenly sort, right here on earth, with twelve basketsful of leftovers, and no one, no one whose hunger was not satisfied. AMEN.