This morning, we’re going to do a little time traveling. The year was 1999. It was a hot summer day, much like this one, in a one-bedroom apartment in North Brunswick, NJ. To give you context, in the place where I grew up, we used to say that if you needed something fixed, the landlord would come with one of the three “s’s”: staples, spackle, or super glue. I was 11 years old and was “old enough” not to go to have to go to summer camp anymore. I felt grown up and newly independent, being able to stay at home by myself with my best friend while my mom was at work. Back then, we didn’t have a computer, or the internet, so after a day of watching talk shows that we had no business watching riding our bikes in the street, and playing in the woods, we thought to ourselves, how nice it would be for my mom to come home to a hot meal. So with our new independence, we rolled up our sleeves and we looked in my freezer, and took out a bag of ravioli, pre-made frozen garlic bread, a bag of corn, frozen wings, and ready to roast potatoes. We cooked with excitement- our meal didn’t have to make sense – it was the thought that counted! To come home to a table full of food, made with love by your daughter and your daughter’s best friend, would be a gift after having worked all day, right?
But when my mother came home to that table full of food – about a week’s worth of meals, instead of joy, there was great despair. She asked me “what I had done” to which I replied, not understanding her devastation, “We made you a nice dinner!” And instead of embracing me, she cried, the kind of deep throaty cry you make when you’re at the end of your rope and you think that nothing else can get worse, and then life proves you wrong. Her voice started to rise, and she proceeded to name the prices of every food on the table, throwing her purse at the wall in anger, and sinking into her chair, clearly not hungry. My own mood shifted – from excitement, to fear of my mom’s reaction, and finally to shame, as I saw my friend watching the whole ordeal silently, critiquing our poverty, once skillfully hidden, but now on full display.
You see, on the simplest level, in my youth and ignorance, not fully knowing, I thought I was doing a good thing. An 11-year-old doesn’t always have the capacity to know, except in revelations like this one, that they don’t have enough. They might see hints of struggle every once in a while, but with a roof over your head, good friends, and a lot of good moms around you making sure you don’t go hungry, you are protected from the knowledge of what you might be lacking – of what you would be faced with if there were no good moms in the neighborhood ready to feed you, or two loving grandparents that helped your mom pay her rent every month. At 11, I didn’t know her struggle in that way.
Only later when I grew up did I really get to know her – her chronic exhaustion of living with Multiple Sclerosis, her anxiety over when one temp job would end and another would begin, her fears of what would happen one day if I was home alone and didn’t have anyone to go to in a bad situation– maybe things would have been different. That day, a meal would shift the way we knew each other, and I began to realize that my mother’s “knowing” of her own situation – began and ended with what she could see in front of her, hour to hour.
Today’s texts are about hunger, but they’re also about seeing each other and knowing each other in our circumstances of need and how we come together to address it.
In this passage we see Jesus crossing the Sea of Galilee, escaping a tumultuous altercation in which he was being threatened for healing on the Sabbath. And even in crossing the ocean, there is this huge crowd following him – likely some that have directly witnessed the healing and some that have joined along the way after hearing about what has taken place. So, Jesus, with his disciples, go to the top of a mountain to take a breath and assess the situation, knowing that Passover is near, and Jesus turns to Phillip, and says to him in a way that only Jesus can, “Where are we going to buy bread for these people to eat?” Unbeknownst to Phillip, he is about to undergo what many of us would call a “teaching moment.” The text tells us that Philip is being “tested” – but likely in his own anxiety and overwhelmed by the situation, he looks out into the crowd, and even after witnessing the healing that took place before, he replies, “Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.” Now if Phillip were alive today, I’m sure he would make an excellent treasurer on session, right? He has easily done the math and has determined that they can not even begin to even think of a way to feed these people, right then and there, at least.
But then the text tells us that Simon Peter’s brother Andrew has seen this unassuming boy who was carrying just a mere five barley loaves and two fish, which was not much, but was everything he had – possibly a meal he was bringing back to his family; as readers we don’t know. The boy could have kept it for himself – he could have looked at that crowd of 5,000 and logic would have told him to not even let anyone see it, but maybe, just maybe, Andrew sees it because the boy shows it to him, understanding the need in this situation. Andrew goes a step further than Phillip and says, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?” Now if Andrew were here today, he would most certainly be the session member on the mission team trying to hold a last-minute fundraiser. But there’s no fundraiser here, just 5 barley loaves and two fish, and Jesus simply replies, “have the people sit down.” Now if you’re a disciple or if you’re a current day First Pres member and someone that is always inclined to “doing,” you wouldn’t want to admit it, but you’d likely be upset and even a little appalled. I would probably think to myself, “why is he having these people sit down to expect a meal that we can’t give them?” But instead, scripture tells us that Jesus takes the boys’ loaves and “he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted.” The estimated 5,000 people did not eat a meager meal, but actually ate their fill.
And so often times, we read miracle passages like this and wind up unintentionally diminishing them to a magic act of some sort; we spend our time rationalizing it, doubting it, or being literalists about it. But a miracle like this forces us to ask ourselves what knowledge we rely on when we are faced with scarcity and how do we choose to show up? In this story, we observe different kinds of relational “knowing”, and these different kinds of knowing are not at all indicative at of our goodness, but simply our mindset:
In some seasons, we are Phillip – we only know what’s in front of us, or rather what’s not in front of us and consider that the indicator for our future. In some seasons, we might be Andrew – we see how little we have and can’t imagine stretching those resources in a way that work out for ourselves and for those around us– today we call this a scarcity mindset. And if we’re lucky, on our better days, we’re like the unnamed boy – we have a little, but we have a hope that the little we do have, is an indication of what’s to come.
Jesus, then, in his wisdom and in his deep knowing of the 5,000, takes both what is here (those 5 loaves and 2 fish) and not here to create abundance. A lot of people read this passage and they think that the miracle is the feeding of the 5,000 – which it is – but truly the importance of this miracle, that we can still feel and witness to today – is when Jesus transforms Andrew’s and Philip’s and everyone’s very human expectations around scarcity. When Jesus looked down at the crowd from that mountaintop, he didn’t just see people – he saw their need, and he deeply knew their need, knew their heart, and knew their circumstances – this is a knowing of deep relationality and compassion.
The scripture then tells us that when the people were satisfied, he told his disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” And so not only does everyone get their fill, but there are 12 baskets of leftovers, which if we are reading this in a Jewish context, is significant because you are likely making a connection with the 12 tribes of Israel. So here, we both literally and symbolically see that neither the food, nor the people, will be abandoned, discarded, “or lost.” And the people, after being fed, are so moved by everything that has taken place that they, begin to rise to that same relational knowledge that Jesus has of them, and they say, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.”
But still – the worldly idea of being a prophet meant that they wanted him to be king, to liberate their people from Roman control. The people that were sick and needy that Jesus had been healing, they were not just victims to their circumstances, but victims to an empire. And so this scripture ends with Jesus realizing that they wanted to come and take him by force to make him king, and so he retreats to the mountain – this time not with his disciples, but by himself.
Let us imagine for a minute, the kind of sadness that must come paired with this knowledge, this embodied, and experiential knowledge that Jesus has in his ability to see people for who they are, to feel compassion for them, to literally suffer with them. Retreating to the mountain top, even though he is alone, is a commune with God, who he calls Father just a chapter before in John 5. It reminds us of the other prophets who retreated to mountaintops to be with God, like Moses, when he receives the manna from heaven, or Elijah when he makes his offering to God. And so even though Jesus is not truly alone, there is still this despair, this foreshadowing of the sacrifice he will eventually make – which is a stark contrast to the kind of leader-king that the 5,000 imagine him to be.
We are convicted of just how heavy and implicating this contemplation of power is when we read Psalm 14. This is a text that is so raw, so emotional, and abrasive, that even most scholars don’t know how to categorize it. Is it a lament? Is it meant to be prophetic? Or is it just an exasperated prayer and petition for God to be deliverer and judge in the midst of continuous injustice?
The psalmist begins by stating: “that fools say ‘There is no God’, that they are corrupt, they do abominable deeds, that there is no one who does good.” But we must understand that this is not a commentary on not believing in God or on secularism– because those that hear the psalms are believers in God already – but rather this is about having belief in God and being foolish enough not to listen to God’s laws; and not to adhere to God’s sense of justice. This is a calling out of the willful ignorance of those that see need, see poverty, and see brokenness, and shrug their shoulders in apathy.
The psalmist says that there is “no one who does good” and that “all have gone astray” and all are “perverse.” This all-inclusive language expresses exhaustion, disappointment, and the heaviness of the knowledge that we live in a world with sin and corruption, of people taking advantage of each other, all the time. The psalmist questions if the evildoers, the ones that “eat up God’s people as they eat bread” have any knowledge since they do not call upon the Lord – implying that – someone who knows God – not intellectually, but relationally– would never take advantage of the powerless.
And so there is a strong juxtaposition here – this is not the ignorance of a young girl making all the food in her freezer for her mother that works so hard for her, or the shortsightedness of a mother who is so overcome by grief and poverty that all she sees is waste. This is not a commentary on the Phillips or Andrews of the world – no – this is about people that see the need and not only turn away, but directly benefit off of those that are in powerless positions. The image of eating God’s people like bread is a violent picture of gluttony and taking advantage of others – in comparison to Jesus who we saw just before – never wasting bread and fish, and never abandoning people in need.
In today’s world, we seem to be consistently inundated by hunger- not just hunger for food, but hunger for justice. Psalm 14 beckons us to look deeper at our own complicity in keeping people powerless on a systemic level. It asks us if we know God, and by knowing God, if we know each other. Oppression continues to exist when we grow distant from each other, when we stop seeking to know the other, and when we turn our heads thinking someone else will help. Last week Pastor Taylor, said that when we divide our best selves from our worst selves, when we put a wall up, it causes us to hurt others – and unless we surrender all of ourselves to Christ – the righteous and the unrighteous parts of us, we will continue to hurt each other. This text goes a step further and says, not only must we reconcile our full selves to God, but we must be reconciled to each other, through knowing and addressing the need, regardless of what we think we have or don’t.
So by truly knowing ourselves, knowing the other, and knowing Christ, we come to know true love – and Love’s knowledge multiplies meager resources and makes a way forward when our rational knowledge comes to an end (Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 3, pg. 289). It is daunting, and it is lonely, and it is hard, when everything we see on the news is war, political upheaval, environmental crisis and the threatening of policies that protect life affirming care for women, the disabled, and LGBTQIA+ folks. But in deeply knowing each other, we overcome our biases, our own ideas of what we don’t have, and we can pool our resources and voices together for the common good.
And what does this look like? It can look like much of what our churches are already doing in structured ministries – responding to literal hunger and homelessness, teaching the Word of God and inviting people into intentional relationship with each other. But it can also look like systems change, based on deepening relationships with those in power. And just how do you do that?
You do it by knowing that you have a role to play and refusing to turn away to the need, even if it is daunting, even if it looks like what you have to offer isn’t enough. If I’m disturbed by the shooting of Sonya Massey, I might not be able to change what happened in Illinois, for her and her family, but perhaps I can ask for a conversation with my own law enforcement officials about their policies or ask for a communal learning opportunity so we can address the trauma together. If I see there are hotspots in my city where trash piles up and there are areas that I think that “someone else will take care of” but “someone” never does – maybe you can talk to your city officials about what’s being done and address it as a community. If I’m concerned about homeless encampments, and the wellbeing of my unhoused neighbor, and I feel saddened with the lack of housing opportunities in my neighborhood, perhaps I can see what resources are being offered, and see how I might be able to help contribute.
Psalm 14 ends with this image of the LORD restoring fortunes to God’s people. It is a hopeful end– a similar hope that you and I and the 5,000 see in Jesus. In the weeks to come, when you see a need and you question if it’s reasonable for you to address it and you don’t know whether you are the right person to find venues for tangible action, you need to know that you are. In the weeks to come, when you will be inevitably faced with the anxiety that you don’t have enough to get you through, you need to know that in community, with God’s people and God’s help, you do. When you will undoubtedly feel that you don’t have enough subject matter expertise, or that someone else might be more equipped to help in a situation that disturbs you, you need to know that you do. When you feel like isolating yourself out of anger for “the other,” – and you don’t feel that you have the strength to reconcile with them or be a peacemaker – you need to know that you do.
Everyone say I know I do!
Say it again – “I know I do!”
One more time!: “I know I do!”
As you all continue to practice justice, love mercy and walking humbly with God, may Jesus, who is the bread of life, give you sustenance for the journey.
In Jesus name we pray, Amen!
