July 31, 2011
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
This miracle is important to us is because we all have to eat and we all like to eat. Some of us live to eat! After Jesus finished teaching the people and healing the sick at this deserted, out of the way place, it was late. The disciples urged Jesus to send the hungry people away so that they can buy food. But Jesus orders them to have the people seated in groups. Then he takes five loaves and two fish and wonder of wonders, there’s enough. The whole multitude is fed.
Matthew mentioned that there were 5000 men so we can safely assume that there were at least 10,000 to 20,000 people when we count the women and children who must have been there. After they were fed, there were also leftovers! Twelve baskets full of leftovers!
Jesus doesn’t simply feed the hungry with enough to keep them going. He gives them more than enough. There are leftovers. It’s like after we have served a Friday Night School dinner, we packed up leftovers for the students to take home.
God gives us all more than enough.
Assumption of Lacking
But isn’t it interesting that most sermons focus on the idea that we are lacking something? We pastors talk about our need for more giving and that we should raise our pledges. Pastor Lee challenges you to donate more of your time because we still have work to do.
And as a preacher, I can see all of my own inadequacies and shortcomings. A few Sundays ago when we visited another church, I heard this great sermon delivered by the pastor. I was feeling totally inadequate!
But according to the miracle of feeding the 5000, we have more than enough. The church cannot exhaust the resources of the kingdom. We have all we need in leadership, finances, time and gifts right here and now. And I need to believe that I have all the gifts and abilities to preach adequately enough in God’s sight to be faithful.
Jesus told stories about divine abundance—a seed that though much of it was lost in the sowing, produced a miraculous 100-fold harvest (Mk. 4:26-29). There was the tiny, seemingly insignificant mustard seed that grew to be a large bird-supporting shrub (Mk. 4:30-32). When the wedding banquet wine ran out in Cana, Jesus produced 180 gallons of great tasting wine (Jn. 2). And in today’s gospel when Jesus fed the hungry multitude, not only was everyone satisfied but that there were large amounts of leftovers.
God promised us that he will give us all that we need to be faithful to the commands of God. The church can never find itself without enough gifts; never find itself without enough of the right people to do the work of the church. When we think that we have exhausted our resources, that we have done all that we can do, that we are scraping the bottom of the barrel in talent, that is probably more a commentary on our limited vision than it is on the abundance of God.
Feeding the World
According to the Bread for the World website, 925 million people are hungry. Every day, almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes. That’s one child every five seconds. There were 1.4 billion people in extreme poverty in 2005. And the wide-ranging drought in Africa is already producing skeleton-looking Somalis and dying children by the thousands.
In the feeding of the 5000, Jesus revealed both the reality of God’s reign and the nature of God as creator whose act of creation is not a one-time event. God is continuing to recreate the world and invites his co-creators, you and me to sustain and nourish every creature. If God would cloth the lilies of the field and feed the birds of the air, God would clothe and feed human beings. When we are living in the right harmony in God’s will, the web of life would nourish us all.
Yet, the ugly reality is that there are millions of people whose basic needs are hardly met, and many are dying before their time. Instead of a web of life, many are trapped in a web of death. While we certainly need to look into the earth’s capacity to feed the world, there’s another factor that is more crucial. Gandhi once said, “The earth provides enough for everyone’s needs, but not for everyone’s greed.”
We have an obvious disparity between the “haves” and the “have-nots” in our world, nation, and local communities. As Christians, we are committed to the needs of the neighbor over the greed of personal or corporate profits. When we ignore, marginalize and judge those who are not “people of privilege” like many of us are, we have an ethical challenge in a society where money seems to take precedence over people.
All Were Fed
As far as we can read, no one was discriminated from receiving some of the bread and fish. “And all ate and were filled.” Those fed were inclusive of “men, women, and children” (v. 21). There was no hierarchical social standing of who should eat first—all were fed!
There was more than enough for everyone there. There is more than enough to feed the world today because God is a God of abundance. We need to practice radical hospitality to meet the totality of human need for food, clothing, shelter, care, concern and community. The increasing numbers of people throughout the world who daily starve to death is staggering, and the legions of people often within our own communities who do not have sufficient food is in calculable.
Radical hospitality requires us to unconditionally include everyone, so that our faith community shines forth as a beacon of welcoming light and hope for the marginalized, dispossessed, invisible, ignored, forgotten, excluded, abused and downtrodden of the world.
Know Enough about Jesus
Besides the fact that we have sufficient food to feed the whole world, we also know enough about Jesus to believe in miracles. I hear frequently from people that we just don’t have enough information about Jesus in the Gospels to make a firm judgment about who Jesus is and what he wants from us. We only have, in the gospels, a report of about three years of Jesus’ life. What about the times when he was a child, a youth? We don’t know enough about his family to believe.
But some of you who have been trying to follow Jesus during your life might testify that there is, in the gospels, more than enough about Jesus, more than you’ll ever be able to be faithful to or respond to Jesus! Jesus gave us more commands, more wonderful words, a more expansive vision than we’ll ever be able to fully process. God gives us more than enough about Jesus that sometimes it takes a whole lifetime to know him.
And for me as a preacher, I read and study every week but I always feel that I haven’t read enough to begin my sermon. From every Scriptural passage, there are numerous points to preach on. By the grace of God, there is a treasure trove of sermon material. I will never fully exhaust the possibilities. As a preacher, Dr. Chuck preached for 40 years and he still has something to say today. As a preacher, I literally could go on forever.
The church can never find itself without enough gifts, never find itself without enough of the right people to do the work of the church, never find itself without enough challenging Scriptures to preach on. We have more than enough.
There was a church in the heart of a large city. It once was a large, thriving downtown church. Over the past two decades it has shrunk to nearly nothing. A young woman went to be the pastor at the church. In a sermon one Sunday she noted how impressed she was by all the children who walked past the church each afternoon after school, all the children who played in the church playground in the afternoons.
She told the congregation, “Few of those children have parents at home in the afternoon, that means that most of them go home to an empty house or else hang out on the streets on their own, and you know what that can lead to. I wonder if God is calling somebody here, this morning, to respond to this. I look out and I see experienced, wise people who, in their day, were masters at raising children. Is this your day to step up and raise someone’s child?”
The next week, six of her members, among them one of the oldest people in the congregation, volunteered to begin an after school ministry at the church. Soon, a dozen others who provided recreation, homework tutoring, and refreshments for the children every afternoon from four to six joined them.
Out of that ministry there has arisen a new church. That congregation is now thriving with an influx of families and people from the neighborhood.
The pastor said, “You don’t have to be a great church to have a great ministry, all you need is an abundance of older people.” God always gives us more than enough.
Are You Hungry?
I suspect that you are here today because you feel that you are lacking something in your life. There’s something missing that you want to fill. You have this hunger in you that you can’t seem to fill on your own. You might have tried to fill that hunger with houses, gadgets, careers, and cars.
Most of us know the feeling of a midlife crisis that shows up early and stays late. It’s like standing in front of the refrigerator, knowing you want something, but not sure what it is.
We feel empty even when we have everything we thought we needed. We are, at this deepest level of our being, longing for more. This desire that never completely goes away is a gift from God.
We are at church today, because we are hungry. If you turn to the person next to you and ask, “Are you here because you hunger for God?” they may smile nervously and say, “No, it’s just too hot to play golf today.” Ask a visitor, “Are you hungry for the grace of God?” “We were just passing by, and we have seen your church before, and we figured, well, we have nothing better to do on a Sunday morning.” It’s difficult to admit that we long for something that can satisfy our need.
We are here at church because we have heard that God feeds the hungry and fills the soul. We are at church because we want to be fully accepted and included into God’s family. We are at church because we can see all the hungry and dying people around the world and we need to partner with many others to live out our discipleship to restore balance and a life-giving web of life back on earth in the way that God intends it to be. We are here because we are hungry for the grace of Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit to be in us.
In the miracle of the feeding of the 5000, God tells us that you have more than enough and there were twelve baskets of leftovers.
Let us pray.
Lord, open our eyes to see all the gifts that you give us. Help us to see the talent in people right in our congregation. Help us to call forth the gifts in others and to equip people to be faithful to your claim upon their lives. Push us out into the world in your name, eyes open to see this world as your world to feed all your children in hunger. Give us the faith to see that you have given us all we need and more. Amen.