The Big Question

The Big Question

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

August 27, 2017

Scripture: Matthew 16:13-20

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Hello. I’m not much used to public speaking, so please excuse me if I stick pretty close to my written text here. My name’s Simon, but you probably know me better as Peter. Yes, that Peter. The one you call Saint Peter, although trust me, for most of my life I was no saint. The one they named that enormous church in Rome after. Frankly, I’ve never quite gotten that one. That thing is so majestic, so imperial, and so expensive. Trust me, there’s nothing majestic or imperial about me, and I never had any money. I’m just a poor, simple fisherman from Galilee. A modest chap actually, and not all that bright. I mean, it sure took me a long time to really to get it about who Jesus was. You all know how when he was arrested I denied him three times and ran away from him. I’m not too proud about that one; but I did it, and I have to live with it. Matthew says Jesus told me he would build his church on me. I have to be honest here. I sure don’t remember him ever saying that to me; but maybe he did, and I’ve just forgotten. It has, after all, been a very long time since I knew him and followed him around Galilee and Judea. And you’re probably wondering what I’m doing here in Maltby nearly 2,000 years after I died. Well, suspend your disbelief, and don’t worry about it. I’m here.

I’m here because your pastor Tom asked me to come and talk to you about that time when Jesus asked me and the others who we say that he is. Now, that’s a hard incident to forget. I mean, what a question! Who we say he is? Doesn’t everybody know who he is? He’s Jesus son of Joseph, a carpenter from a tiny town in Galilee called Nazareth. And yes, by the time he asked us that question we’d spent a fair amount of time with him, and it sure seemed like he had to be more than a carpenter’s son from Nowheresville. We’d heard him teach, and boy was hearing him teach something! He taught like no one we or anyone else had ever heard before. He taught about something he called the kingdom of God. Matthew often says he called it the kingdom of heaven, but mostly he called it the kingdom of God. Wow, that sure was something different than we’d heard from our rabbis, our teachers of our Jewish faith. He said life wasn’t about being ritually pure. It wasn’t about following a bunch of ancient rules. It was about love. Love! Can you believe it? He said love God, and love your neighbor as ourselves. Wow! O sure, we’d heard the love God part before. That’s the foundational confession of our Jewish faith: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” That’s from our book of Deuteronomy, so we weren’t too surprised to hear Jesus repeat that one. But love your neighbor as yourself? I guess that one’s in the Torah too, but it sure wasn’t prominent in the teaching of the rabbis in our time. And Jesus said everyone was our neighbor. We thought: Really? Are you serious? Well, yes, he was serious. He even said those miserable Samaritans were our neighbor, and we were supposed to love them too. Man was that a hard one to get your head around. Like I said, listening to Jesus teach was nothing like hearing anyone else teach that we’d ever heard before.

And then there were all those crazy things he did that no one should have been able to do. He fed thousands of people with a little bit of bread and a couple of fish. He calmed a storm on the Sea of Galilee that nearly killed us. He even walked on the water of the Sea. I mean, what was up with that anyway? You can’t walk on the surface of a lake, but Jesus did. He even had me doing it, and he rescued me when I started to sink. He exorcised demons. He healed illness. He even brought dead people back to life. He did all these impossible things.

Then he asked us who we say that he is. Well, that question took be aback at first. He’d first asked who “people” say he is, and while some of my friends were answering that one I tried to figure our who I thought he was. Then he asked who I said he was. Well, there was only one possible answer to that one. Now understand. We first century Jewish people had long been expecting someone we called “the Messiah.” In Greek they called him “the Christ,” which means the same thing. We thought the Messiah would be a new King David who would raise an army and drive the Romans into the sea. Now, that sure wasn’t what Jesus was up to. So far from raising an army and attacking our enemy he said that we should love our enemy and pray for them. Say what? Love those blankety-blank Romans and pray for them? Well, that’s what he said. He said never oppose evil with violence. He said resist evil nonviolently, creatively, even with humor but never with violence. He said don’t drive the Romans out militarily, expel them from your heart through study and prayer. So I thought, well, he can’t be the Messiah, can he? He’s not acting anything like what we thought the Messiah would act. But then again. There was something magical about him. There was something even divine about him. He talked about God in a way we’d never heard before. He did things you’d think only God could do. No one else we knew had ever taught like he did or did the things he did. How was I to understand him? How was I to answer his question of who I say he is?

I’d actually been pondering the question of who he really is for quite some time. I mean, how could I not given everything I’d seen and heard from him? It had started to dawn on me. He wasn’t anything like the Messiah we’d expected, but what if? What if we’d been wrong all along about the kind of Messiah God would really send us? I couldn’t deny that Jesus was totally unlike anyone else I’d ever known. No one else had ever known anyone like him before either. Who did I say he was? I could answer he was Jesus of Nazareth. I could have answered he was a great rabbi, a great teacher. I could have agreed with people we’d heard who said he must be Elijah returned to earth or the reincarnation of one of the prophets. All of those answers sounded true in ways, but none of them really got to who this Jesus of mine really was. So I gave him the only answer I could that didn’t sound inadequate. I said “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Now that really was quite a confession on my part. You all probably take it for granted that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. After all, you grew up hearing that he was precisely that. You are products of a two millennia long tradition that says he is precisely that, but we weren’t. Not back then. We didn’t know the Messiah, the Christ, would come in our lifetimes. We didn’t know that we would become his disciples. We didn’t know that he would be a friend of ours. Yet I couldn’t deny that he had come. I couldn’t deny that I was his friend and perhaps his closest disciple. I mean, Wow! When I finally got it that Jesus was the Christ it sure changed my life. Yes, I betrayed him at the end of his life, but he forgave me for that after he had risen from the grave. He said to me Peter, feed my sheep. So that’s what I tried to do. It cost me my life like it cost Jesus his, but that was such a small price to pay for the privilege, the honor, of being a disciple of the Christ, the Son of the living God.

Do you folks really get it what great good news it is that precisely Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God and not someone else? Jesus as the Christ turns our world upside down, but it does it in the most awesome ways. The Messiah, the Christ, we were expecting would have been a very worldly figure, a worldly king with a worldly army. The Messiah, the Christ, we got was a prophet not of war but of peace. He was a prophet not of hatred but of love. He was a Savior not only for the rich and powerful but most of all for people like you and me, good folks basically but people of no great account in the world. He didn’t say to us join my army and kill or be killed. He said join my movement and find a meaning, a purpose, a joy you never knew you could have. He said yes, you’ve made mistakes; but none of your mistakes can or ever will separate you from God’s love. He said follow me, and you will become God’s tools on earth working to build nothing less than the kingdom of God. He said follow me, and you will come to know an eternal life you never thought was possible. He said follow me, and nothing in your life will ever be the same. It will be so much better than you ever thought it could be. Not because you’ll be rich by the world’s standards but because you will be rich in spirit, rich in the knowledge and love of God; and that’s the only kind of riches really worth having. He said follow me and you will be born again. You will become new people, people living the way God created you to live, not for yourselves only but for all of God’s people and all of God’s creation.

Do you folks living so long after Jesus and I lived really get that? I hope you do, but here’s the thing. The only way you can really get it is by living into it. Don’t convince yourselves it’s true, then live it. Live it, and you will come to know its truth not with your mind only but with you whole being, mind, heart, and spirit. Live it, and you will know that there is no other way worth living. I hope you get that. I really do, for it is the greatest good news there ever was or ever will be.

Well, that’s what I have to say to you. I thank Pastor Tom for asking me to come talk to you. I don’t suppose you ever thought you’d meet me in person. After all, I died a long time ago; but as they say, nothing is impossible for God. As I leave you I pray that you will truly know Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Know it with you minds, but know it too with your hearts. Give your spirits to him, and you will find life like you never knew life was possible, both in this life and beyond this life. Thanks for listening, and God bless. Amen.

Really?

Really?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

August 20, 2017

Scripture: Genesis 45:1-15

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

This is not the sermon I had intended to give this morning, but sometimes things happen that tell me I have to do something different than I had planned. Sometimes that’s something that happens in the life of the congregation. Sometimes it’s something that happens in my life. Most frequently it’s something that has happened in the world. Something we hear about on the news or read about in the paper or on line. That’s what happened this week. I had intended to give a sermon about God’s relationship with evil. That, after all, is basically what the story we just heard about Joseph and his brothers is about. Not that it gives the right answer to that question. I am convinced that it doesn’t. This is still a sermon about God’s relationship to evil. It is also a sermon about what God tells us our relationship to evil should be.

We have seen a lot of evil in the news in last couple of weeks. White supremacists, people filled with anger and hatred who blame people who don’t look like them for the problems in their lives, bring violence to the streets of a lovely university town in Virginia. One of them drives his car into a crowd of peaceful counter-protesters, injuring several and killing one of them, a women who was just trying to cross the street. These hate filled American fascists chant anti-Jewish slogans and want to return us to the days of Jim Crow if not actually to the days of slavery. Some of them claim to be Christians, but they actually are anything but. Then President Trump blames the violence perpetrated by the racists on both sides. He praises what he calls “beautiful Confederate monuments.” He seems utterly unaware that during the Civil War the Confederacy was treasonous toward the United States and was fighting to preserve the brutal, sinful institution of slavery. He seems utterly unaware that most of those Confederate monuments weren’t put up until decades after the Civil War and that they were put up precisely as symbols of white supremacy. He seems utterly unaware that Robert E. Lee, the traitor from Virginia, opposed putting up such monuments after the war. In his remarks after the terror of Charlottesville President Trump gave succor to racists and fascists. In those remarks he violated virtually every moral principal that our nation claims to espouse.

The evil we have seen in recent days is not limited to the US. North Korea threatens to strike Guam, an American possession, with nuclear weapons. President Trump responds with bellicose talk that could only make the situation worse. North Korea seems to have backed down on that threat, but it is still a rogue nation with nuclear weapons, an unmitigated evil in the world. On Thursday someone drove a van onto a crowded sidewalk in Barcelona, Spain, and killed 14 people and wounded dozens more. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack. Terrorist attacks like this one have tragically become a common part of the life of the world, indeed even a normal one. Many of the people who perpetrate them claim to be Muslims. They claim to be acting in the name of Allah, that is, in the name of God. Islam actually condemns their actions unequivocally, but never mind. Terror is part of our world, and various kinds of people commit it.

Folks, the evil around us feels frankly overwhelming. In times like these so many people ask, or rather cry out the question, where is God in all this? Is God doing it? Is God causing people to do it? Why doesn’t God stop it? If God is Almighty like we always say God is, why doesn’t God stop all the evil that occurs in the world? If I had really good answers to those questions I’d be rich and famous. People of faith have been seeking answers to questions like that for millennia, and at least in the monotheistic traditions we’ve never really found any. We don’t have good answers, but we sure have some bad ones. Our story of Joseph and his brothers gives one of the bad ones. As we wrestle with the question of evil in our world it will be worthwhile, I hope, to look closely at that story and what it says about how God relates to evil.

In that story Joseph is the youngest, or one of the two youngest, sons of the patriarch Jacob. He is the son of the wife Jacob really loved, Rachel. Jacob loves him more than he loves any of his other children, and he had a lot of children. Although Joseph becomes the hero of the story, he could be quite the jerk. In part of the story that the lectionary doesn’t give us he keeps telling his brothers about dreams that he has had that suggest that one day he will rule over his brothers, and they would bow down to him. Perhaps understandably, the older brothers don’t take kindly to this kind of arrogance on the part of their younger brother. So while they are all out in the field tending the sheep they plot to kill Joseph. They throw him into a dry cistern, probably an underground vat for holding water, or maybe just a dry well. When they see a caravan of traders headed for Egypt pass by they pull Joseph out of the cistern and sell him to the traders as a slave. The traders take Joseph to Egypt, where they sell him. Joseph ends up on the household of the pharaoh, and, rather unbelievably actually, pharaoh eventually puts him in charge of the whole kingdom of Egypt. Joseph stores up a vast amount of grain against a future famine. Famine hits back in Canaan, and Joseph’s family end up in Egypt seeking food. Joseph feeds them, and eventually he reveals himself to them. They all make up with hugs and tears.

In this story Joseph’s brothers committed unspeakable evil against their brother. There appears to be nothing good at all about what they did to him. First they tried to kill him. Then they sold him into slavery in a foreign land instead. Their actions are pure evil. There’s no excusing what the brothers did to Joseph no matter how much Joseph annoyed them. Yet something very good came out of it. Joseph was able to save his family from famine only because his brothers had sold him into slavery in Egypt. Yes, he made the most out of his tragic fate, but he was able to save his family only because he had been sold as a slave in that foreign land.

In this story the Bible wrestles with the question of where God was in all that happened. Did God have a role in what happened, and if so what was it? The answer to these questions it comes up with is that God was the real actor in the story all along. This story has Joseph say to his brothers after he reveals himself to them “do not be distressed, and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God send me ahead of you.” And “God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance.” And “So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God.” The story says that the apparent evil the brothers perpetrated against Joseph really wasn’t evil at all because it wasn’t even really them doing it. God did it, and God did it for a good purpose that has now been fulfilled. The story doesn’t deny that what the brothers did sure looks like evil. It can’t, because by any decent standard what they did was evil. But the story says it wasn’t really evil. It was the providential work of God. This story has it that God engaged in an act of profound evil in order to bring about a beneficial result.

And I have to be honest here. Every time I hear the Bible saying that God has perpetrated some evil, even if it be for a good purpose, I say: Really? God really did that? I mean, did God really cause a group of young men to, as far as they knew, destroy their brother’s life just because they didn’t like him? We can ask the same questions today. Is God causing the rise of neo-Nazism among us? Is God behind the rise of racist white nationalism? It God behind our President’s wholly inadequate and even damaging response to what’s going on? Is God causing people who claim to be Muslims to kill innocent people? The story of Joseph suggests that the answer to those questions is or at least could be yes. Yes, God did it. Maybe God did it for some good ulterior purpose, but God did it. That’s what the story of Joseph wants us to believe.

Well, I don’t. To accept the Bible’s interpretation of the events here is to say that an ethic we were all taught as kids is just wrong is actually OK, at least if God’s the one doing it. The justification of God’s actions in the story of Joseph and his brothers basically comes down to “the ends justify the means.” God’s end, the preservation of Jacob’s family, justifies God’s means, the evil acts Joseph’s brothers perpetrated against him. Well, maybe in the ancient world that produced this story that kind of thinking was acceptable. Today, to me at least, it isn’t. Beyond that, I just can’t believe that the God I know and love and seek to serve would perpetrate such evil even if God had a very good end in mind. I mean, if God wanted Joseph to end up ruling Egypt so he could save his family when famine hit, surely God could have done it without inflicting great evil on him. So as for me, I cannot accept that God really was the active force behind the brothers’ brutal treatment of Joseph.

Like I said at the beginning of this sermon, all kinds of bad things are happening. I do not and cannot believe that God is inflicting those bad things on us. I do however see God working in and through those bad things in a couple of ways. First of all, God acts in the bad things that happen in our lives simply by being present in them with us. That’s one really important and powerful way that God acts in the bad things that happen to us. Yet perhaps even more important and more powerful than that is the way God has of bringing good things out of bad things. God often seems to see the bad things that happen on earth as occasions for bringing something good to life. That’s how I understand the story of Joseph and his brothers. Given that Joseph’s brothers acted so sinfully toward him, God used the bad that had happened to Joseph to bring about something good. I understand this story to say that God used the evil and brutality of Joseph’s brothers to set up the family’s salvation in Egypt when famine hit at home. I have no idea how God is able to do that, but I have no doubt that God does.

So as we face all the really bad stuff that’s happening in the world, let’s look for the ways God may be bringing good out of them. Charlottesville has brought a great many Americans to an awareness of an evil among us that we didn’t see before, and a great many people have stood up and spoken up against racism. Perhaps our President’s moral failings in facing that crisis will lead our country to reevaluate the Presidency and to think harder than we usually do about what sort of person we want in the post. I can’t foresee all the ways in which something good might come from all the evil we see, but I know God is looking for them. God is hatching plans. God is moving as God always does, quietly, gently, behind the scenes, to move God’s people toward the good.

And of course God calls all of us to action. This is not a time when Christians can be silent. This is not a time when we can sit inside the walls of our church and be concerned only about our personal needs. Yes, we have personal needs. And yes, our faith can meet those needs. But these days call for a larger vision. These days call the church into the world and the world into the church. That’s because justice is under attack, and Christianity is all about justice. Jesus was about justice for the poor, the weak, the marginalized, the excluded; and Christians must be about justice too. That is especially true in days like these. So speak up. Write your Senators and Congressional representatives. Demand that our government stand up for justice in a way it is certainly not doing today. Join a demonstration. Talk to your friends about God’s justice for all people. If we will do things like that we can part of God’s work in bringing something good out of all the evil we see. Can God do that? Yes, God can. Really. Amen.

God's Gentle Whisper

God’s Gentle Whisper

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

August 13, 2017

Scripture: 1 Kings 19: 9-14

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Hush. Be still. Be silent. Listen. Do you hear it? You have to listen hard. You have to focus. You have to pay attention. Hush. Be still. Be silent. Listen. Do you hear it? It’s not loud. It’s not shouting at you. It’s easy to miss. It’s easy to ignore. What is it? Who is it? Shhh. Listen. Do you hear it? It’s the gentle whisper of God. It’s not forceful. It’s gentle. It’s not a shout. It’s a whisper. God is whispering to you. God is whispering to me. God is whispering to us. Hush. Be still. Be silent. Listen. Do you hear it? Elijah heard it. There in his cave on a mountain. He saw and felt other things. A violent wind. An earthquake. Fire. He saw those big impressive things, but he learned that that’s not where God was. Elijah heard it. He heard God’s gentle whisper. Hush. Be still. Be silent. Do you hear it? Do I? Do we?

The Bible has the story we just heard of God being present in a gentle whisper, but the Bible also has lots of stories full of what the Germans call Sturm und Drang, storm and stress. Storm and drive. Lots of action. Lot’s of drama. Lots of noise. God floods the whole world because God has had it with the sinfulness of God’s humans. God parts the Red Sea so the Israelites can escape the pursuing Egyptians, then closes the sea over the Egyptians and drowns them all. Joshua leads the people across the Jordan River, and the walls of Jericho come atumbalin’ down. The shepherd boy David slays the Philistine champion Goliath with a rock thrown from a sling. The Babylonians besiege Jerusalem, conquer it, and haul the people off into exile in Babylon. The Persians conquer the Babylonians and send the people back home. The Bible has these and many other stories of Sturm und Drang, of storm and stress, storm and drive. Lots of action. Lots of drama. Lots of noise.

Some of those biblical stories of Sturm und Drang are among the best-known stories in the Bible. We turn the story of Noah and the flood from a story of divine vengeance against a sinful world into a nice story about a grandfatherly Noah and boat full of charming animals, but everyone who’s ever been to Sunday school knows that story. When I see depictions of it on Sunday school walls I always wonder where the floating corpses are, but never mind. Stories like the parting of the Red Sea have entered Western culture so that even people with no religious affiliation or experience know them. Growing up a lot of us learned to sing “Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho. Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, and the walls come a tumbalin’ down.” And everyone knows the story of David and Goliath. These are great stories apart from whatever spiritual meaning they may or may not have, and we all know them.

And here’s a thing about all of those stories. The Bible sees the hand of God at work in all of them. In these stories God acts sometimes as a warrior destroying Israel’s enemies. Sometimes as a judge, letting a foreign power conquer God’s people because of the people’s faithlessness. Sometimes as a redeemer, freeing the people from slavery and foreign exile. The ancient world that produced the Bible thought that God controlled everything that happens on earth, so it saw God at work in all of these big, dramatic stories. In so many of these stories God acts violently. In these stories God is big and strong, a force no earthly power can overcome.

I think these big, violent Bible stories have had an unfortunate effect on a great many people. They train us to look for God in big, noisy, dramatic events. They set the framework for books like Revelation, in which God is even more violent that God is in any of the other stories, in which the end of the world comes with massive violence and the death of a great deal of humanity. Even today we hear preachers like Pat Robertson claiming to see the work of God in big, violent events like hurricanes, in which of course he always see God doing just what he wants God to do whether God would ever really do it or not. There is a lot in our Christian tradition that can condition us to see God as big, strong, noisy, even violent. To see God at work in the big things of human history, the macro events that we read about but rarely experience ourselves.

Yes, all of those stories are in the Bible, but then there’s the story we just heard about the prophet Elijah. The lectionary selection for today doesn’t give us the background of that story or explain just why Elijah is holed up in a cave on a mountain, so let me set the scene for you. Elijah is perhaps the greatest prophet of ancient Israel, or at least the Jewish tradition treats him as such. He’s the only person in the Bible who never dies. Even Jesus dies before he rises again, but Elijah doesn’t. He’s taken up into heaven still very much alive. Throughout his ministry Elijah is in conflict with the evil King Ahab of Israel and his Canaanite wife Jezebel. Elijah’s biggest issue with Ahab is that Ahab worships Baal, his wife’s chief god, rather than Yahweh, the god of the Hebrew people. Just before we encounter Elijah in his cave he has had a dramatic confrontation with the prophets of Baal, 450 of them we’re told. He bests them in what is essentially a miracle contest in which Yahweh proves real and powerful and Baal turns out to be either impotent or not to exist at all. Elijah than rounds up the 450 prophets of Baal and kills them all. We don’t often think of Elijah as a mass murderer, but he is; and the Bible has no problem at all with him being one. That it doesn’t raises lots of questions, but never mind for now. Elijah massacring her prophets angers Jezebel and her husband Ahab, and they swear to get him for it. So he flees into the desert of Sinai and holes up in a cave on a mountain. That’s where the part of the story we just heard begins.

Elijah is holed up in his cave hiding from the murderous Ahab and Jezebel when the Lord, that is, Elijah’s god, finds him and says: “What are you doing here Elijah?” Elijah apparently is feeling pretty sorry for himself, for he complains that the Israelites are trying to kill him as they have killed others of Yahweh’s prophets. It’s not too hard to understand why Ahab and Jezebel would want to kill Elijah after what he did to their prophets of Baal, but the Bible wants us to understand Elijah as the hero of the story and Ahab and Jezebel as the villains, so I guess we’re supposed to feel sorry for Elijah too. In any event, God isn’t too impressed with Elijah’s complaint. God says something rather cryptic to Elijah: “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Our story doesn’t tell us why Yahweh is about to pass by Elijah on the mountain, it just says that that’s what Yahweh is going to do.

Then comes the part of the story that I think is really interesting and important. That part of the story goes like this:

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. NIV

Given the way God appears in big, noisy, dramatic scenes in other stories in the Bible we perhaps find it surprising that God is not in the big, noisy, dramatic events in this story. After all, things like winds strong enough to shatter rocks, earthquakes, and fire are big, powerful things. They’re the kinds of things Hollywood loves to depict. Things like that grab our attention. We’re afraid of them, but we’re also in awe of them; and awe is a reaction to God that is actually quite appropriate. Still, in this story God isn’t in any of those big, dramatic things. No, in this story God is in the “gentle whisper.” A more traditional translation of the Hebrew original there that has passed into our culture is “a still small voice.” God is in the still small voice. In the gentle whisper.

Folks, that I think is the great truth of this story. We so want God to display God’s power in the world through big, dramatic, noisy action. We want lightning and thunder. We want trumpets blaring and cymbals clashing. We want God to sweep us off our feet with big actions that we can’t possibly overlook. That’s the God that so many people want, but this story gives us a very different image of God. Here big impressive things happen, but they aren’t where God is. They’re just natural phenomena, and story says don’t look for God in them. No, this story says listen for God in silence. God’s not going to speak to us in peals of thunder or mighty gales. God will speak to us in a whisper so gentle that it almost amounts to silence. To hear it we must be silent. To hear God we must not look out at powerful events, we must look inward in silence lest we miss God’s still small voice.

And maybe that’s not how we want it to be. God’s presence would be a whole lot easier to discern if God were in the wind, the earthquake, and the fire. We so struggle with being silent that we’re more likely than not to miss God’s gentle whisper, to miss God coming to us softly, gently, and so quietly that we hardly notice God coming at all. Well, I can’t speak for you; but as for me, that’s mostly how I experience God. God doesn’t overwhelm us. At least most of the time God doesn’t. God doesn’t force God’s presence on us. At least most of the time God doesn’t.

Both as a church and as individuals we need to discern who God is calling us to be and what God is calling us to do too. We need the truth of the story of Elijah on the mountain to do that. We need to listen not for a big dramatic voice yelling at us but for a still, small voice whispering to us. Sure. It would be easier if we didn’t have to do that, but the reality is that we do have to do that. How God comes to us is up to God, not up to us. My experience and the experience of a lot of other people tell us that our story of Elijah and God on the mountain gets it right. God comes to us in a gentle whisper, in a still small voice.

So hush. Be still. Be silent. Listen. Do you hear it? You have to listen hard. You have to focus. You have to pay attention. Hush. Be still. Be silent. Listen. Do you hear it? It’s not loud. It’s not shouting at you. It’s easy to miss. It’s easy to ignore. What is it? Who is it? Shhh. Listen. Do you hear it? It’s the gentle whisper of God. Elijah heard it. There in his cave on a mountain. Hush. Be still. Be silent. Do you hear it? Do I? Do we? Amen.

Enough!

Enough!

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

August 6, 2017

Scripture: Matthew 14:13-21

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

They thought they didn’t have enough. Jesus told them to feed a crowd of thousands of people, and not just the 5,000 we always hear about. The story says there were 5,000 men there, but it also says that there was a unspecified number of women and children there as well. If each man had one wife and one child the crowd would come to 15,000, and there may have been more there than that. They thought they couldn’t do it. First they told Jesus to send the people away to get their own food. At that stage of the story it certainly hadn’t occurred to them that they could feed the people themselves. Jesus’ reply to their suggestion of sending the people away must have surprised and puzzled them. “They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.” Maybe they thought he was joking. Surely he knew that they hadn’t brought enough food with them to feed such an enormous throng. How could they have? It would take a wagon train full of food to feed that many. I suppose they didn’t want to tell Jesus he was nuts to suggest that they feed all those people. All they said to him was “We have only five loaves of bread and two fish.” Surely it was obvious that 5 loaves and two fish were hardly enough to feed just Jesus and the Disciples. It wouldn’t make the smallest dent in the hunger of thousands. Offering so little might even start fights among the crowd over who would get the little bit of food, for surely nowhere near all of them could. Jesus, in typical Jesus fashion, was unimpressed. “Bring them here to me,” he said, meaning bring the loaves and the fish. He prayed over the paltry bit of food the disciples had given him.

Now listen to what happens next in this story. We always hear of Jesus feeding the huge crowd with so little food. But actually in this story Jesus doesn’t feed the crowd, not directly anyway. Our text says that after he had prayed over the food and broken the bread he gives the food not directly to the crowd but back to the disciples. We read: “Then he gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people.” It’s not Jesus who actually gives the food to the crowd, it’s the disciples. It wasn’t nearly enough for the crowd, and then somehow it was enough. More than enough actually, for the story says that there was a lot of bread left over after everyone had eaten and was satisfied. Jesus sent the disciples to the crowd with nowhere near enough food, and they fed everyone with plenty of food to spare.

So there is definite movement in this story. It’s the movement of the disciples and of the food. The disciples come to Jesus with the little bit of food they have. They are sure it isn’t enough. Jesus takes it from them, prays over it, then gives it back to them. Then the disciples give it to the people. So the movement in the story for both the disciples and the food is: Come to Jesus with nowhere near enough, give yourselves and what you have to Jesus, take what you have given him to the people. That movement multiplies the little bit the disciples have and makes it more than enough for a huge throng.

Folks, this story is of course about Jesus somehow miraculously multiplying an little bit of food into a whole bunch of food, but it’s about more than that. And when see the story as being about more than something that happened a long time ago in a place far away we see that it is a story about us. People in little churches like ours always think they don’t have enough. In many small churches what they think they don’t have enough of is money. Fortunately that one isn’t too big a problem here at the moment, but the other thing small churches think they don’t have enough of is people. That one is big with us. Nearly every time I hear you talking about the church I hear you say that what we need is more people. And sure, it would be great if we had more people, but consider with me for a moment how the famous story of Jesus feeding the crowd from nearly nothing can speak to our situation.

Jesus calls all of God’s people to feed the crowd. Now, our call to feed people may be a call to feed people physically. It may be a call to take care of people’s physical needs. Certainly the church of Christ’s disciples is called to do what it can to care for people in physical need. Some zealots to the contrary notwithstanding, the church can hardly solve all of the social problems that we have in the world; but we are called to do what we can.

However, a call to address people’s physical needs is not the only call Christ makes to his present-day disciples. He also calls us to address people’s spiritual needs. Our Gospel story this morning speaks of physical food—bread and fish. But the meaning of the great Bible stories is never exhausted by their literal meaning. The story gets deeper and richer, I think, if we see the bread and fish in the story as metaphors. They are metaphors for everything that people need. Literally they are about physical need, as metaphors they are about a lot more than that. They are about spiritual need. Jesus sends his disciples to the people to address all needs, spiritual ones perhaps most of all.

We say we are Christ’s disciples, and like the disciples in the story of the feeding of the 5000 plus we say we don’t have enough. We say there are so few of us. We say so few of us are young. We say we have lives that are full of people, activities, and responsibilities. We say yes Lord, we hear your call, but don’t have enough people, time, energy, resources, ideas, solutions. We protest. Yes, Lord, but we don’t have enough.

And Jesus says to us as he said to the disciples so long ago bring what you have to me. When we bring whatever we have—our time, resources, ideas, and most of all ourselves—to him he takes them, blessed them,, and gives them back to us. Then he says take them and go to the people. If we will, then somehow they will become enough and more than enough, just like the five loaves and two fish became more than enough to feed thousands. We won’t understand how it can be, just like we don’t understand how five loaves and two fish can feed thousands. We’ll still have all our objections, all of our “we don’t have enough.” And of course on one level all of our objections are true. We didn’t make them up out of whole cloth. But Jesus says to us your objections may be true, but they’re also irrelevant. They are useless information. Jesus says my call is still my call, so get on with answering it.

Now of course there is the question that one of my people asked me last Wednesday at the lectionary study I do at Brookdale in Monroe every week. Enough for what? Aye, now there’s a good question for you. It is a question that takes a lot of prayerful consideration to answer. Who we are and what our resources are do matter. We’re not going to do a vacation Bible school for a thousand kids, to use an absurd example. But we can do more than we think we can. Our resources will reach farther than we think they will. They’ll reach farther if we take them to Jesus before we do anything else with them. He will bless them, and he will multiply them.

So let’s stop saying we don’t have enough—enough of anything. Let’s stop focusing as much as we sometimes do on what we don’t have. Let’s take what we do have to Jesus. Let’s ask him to bless us and the gifts we bring. Then let’s listen to his call to take those gifts to the people. As long as we keep going back to Jesus, relying on him, and working in his name what we have will be enough. Thanks be to God. Amen.