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.