A Fourth Church Sermon by John Buchanan

August 1, 1999 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

More Than Enough

John Wilkinson
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Matthew 14:13–21

“And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full.”
Matthew 14:20 (NRSV)

Charlie Croker was a man in full. Charlie Croker is the central character in Tom Wolfe’s newest work, A Man in Full. Set primarily in Atlanta, A Man in Full attempts to paint with broad, outrageous strokes a portrait of the late 1990s in much the same way Wolfe’s A Bonfire of the Vanities did for the fabulous 1980s.

So Charlie Croker is a man in full. He is 60 years old, a highly successful real estate developer. A former two-way football player at Georgia Tech, Charlie Croker is a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, good-old-boy from below Georgia’s gnat-line. And he likes “things.” Listen to Tom Wolfe’s description of his plantation, called Turpmtime: “Twenty-nine thousand acres of prime southwest Georgia forest, fields, and swamp! And all of it, every square inch of it, every beast that moved on it, all fifty-nine horses, all twenty-two mules, all forty dogs, all thirty-six buildings that stood upon it, plus a mile-long asphalt landing strip, complete with jet-fuel pumps and a hangar—all of it was his…to do with as he chose.” (p. 4)

And there is more: “three BMW 750:L’s. . . two BMW 540:A’s. . . a Ferrari 355. . . a customized Cadillac Seville STS.“ And there is more: “two Beechnut 400A’s, a Super King Air 350, a Gulfstream Five with a custom cabin interior featuring tupelo maple designed and furnished for $2,845,000.” (p. 51)

Tom Wolfe offers a gross caricature, of course, but not quite a parody. Because there is more for Charlie Croker. His knee aches constantly from a football injury, and vanity prohibits surgery. He drinks too much. His company, Croker Global, is in debt for $800 million dollars; he himself personally liable for $160 million. He misses his wife, whom he has unceremoniously dumped for a woman nearly as young as his son, and now he is an embarrassment to family members, business associates, and, finally, himself. Charlie Croker was a man in full.

Tom Wolfe offers a gross caricature, of course, but not quite a parody. We may relate to Charlie Croker, in part, in totality, maybe not at all. But his issues, even when approached with an economy of scale, are real and human and at the heart of the story, our story.

Acquisition and consumption are easy targets from pulpits. Even in this past week’s warmth, shopping was in peak season along our Magnificent Mile, the land of cows. But this conversation is not about consumption, or acquisition, not really, anyway. It is about much more, about the meaning of finding meaning, about when the things you have control you, or when the things you don’t have control you, about what is missing and what is present, about an alternate way of approaching life’s biggest questions and being transformed by the very simple, very real, very abundant proposition of faith.

Jesus had just heard the news about the beheading of John the Baptist. He retreated to grieve, in a boat, to a deserted place. But the crowds would have nothing of it and tracked him down, and he came ashore, and it was all right. He knew. They knew. He had compassion on them. He healed them.

And the disciples—that great chorus of spin doctors and handlers and rationalizers, among whom might be many Presbyterian ministers, I suspect—the disciples get nervous. They are not in control. They are off away from civilization. Night is falling. There is no food. Their plan, therefore, which they present to Jesus, is to send the people away, to the villages, where they can find something to eat.

Makes sense. Not to Jesus. In response to the practical questions, writes Garret Keizer, “the answer Jesus gives is always the same. ’Let’s see.’” (Christian Century, July 14–21, 1999, p. 707) Jesus says, “Let’s see.” Jesus says, “They don’t need to leave just yet, these people I love so dearly. You give them something to eat.” Oh.

This story is told in each of the gospel accounts. In John’s version, a small boy provides the means of grace, a wonderful illustration about the unlikely vehicles of abundance. Here, a meager bit of food shows up—five loaves of bread and two fish. And hear this: Jesus took the food and blessed it and broke it and gave it to the disciples and they passed it out to the crowd, five thousand men and countless women and children who didn’t count officially but who had hungry bellies nonetheless, and all ate until they were filled, like a never-ending church potluck. They were filled.

And then there is this, what I have always believed to be a lightly comic touch; we are told that there are twelve baskets of bread pieces, twelve divine Tupperware containers of leftovers, just to underscore the point to the disciples and to us who didn’t believe that he could pull it off and to demonstrate with clarity to the disciples and to us the news of incomprehensible abundance. They were filled. There was more than enough.

Like every Jesus story, we want to know how it happened. The story itself does not seem all that interested in the question. It spends much more time on the set-up and the aftermath, the crowd’s hope and the disciples’ doubt, the filled stomachs and the abundant leftovers. Meaning in the face of no meaning. Hope in the face of doubt. Unpredictable blessing in the face of careful strategizing. Abundance in the face of scarcity.

In a wonderful essay in our favorite magazine, Christian Century, Walter Brueggemann writes that “The conflict between the narratives of abundance and of scarcity is the defining problem confronting us at the turn of the millennium. . . Whether we are liberal or conservative Christians,” Brueggemann writes, “we must confess that the central problem in our lives is that we are torn apart by the conflict between our attraction to the good news of God’s abundance and the power of our belief in scarcity. . .” (Christian Century, March 24–21, 1999, p. 342–347)

Consumerism and acquisition are easy targets. This is more, much more, what Brueggemann calls the “liturgy of abundance and the myth of scarcity.” I love that. The liturgy of abundance. It is not about “stuff.” It is about who we are, whose we are, how we are, why we are. And to put the question in that context, the gospel context, the faith context, is to say, simply, that there is enough; there is more than enough. We will be filled.

The biblical story is clear, though never easy, about what we used to call providence, God’s intention to provide—in the face of our attempts to stock-pile—God’s habit to provide, from the very moment of creation to the gift of the promised land to the birth of the little baby to the empty tomb to the whirlwind of the church; God’s project is to gauge real human need and to provide out of abundant generosity. So that we will be filled. Because there is more than enough.

There is more than enough hospitality to heal the world’s estrangement.

There is more than enough hope to restore the world’s despair.

There is more than enough wisdom to redress the deepest of our culture’s challenges.

There is more than enough compassion to mend broken hearts in Columbine, in Skokie, now, in Atlanta, but it would seem to me as well, more than enough character to say enough to senseless and random and easy and now nearly acceptable violence.

There is more than enough political elbow room for Protestant and Catholic voices to be heard in Northern Ireland, more than enough space for grace for liberal and conservative Presbyterians to seek common ground and shared vision.

There is more than enough time.

We were away when John F. Kennedy Jr.’s Piper Saratoga crashed into the sea. We followed the story closely on CNN, and when I returned home I devoured every word, not quite knowing why. Unable to pronounce wise opinions on things like the “curse of the Kennedys” and America’s uncrowned prince, I was struck, though, that this brief life—ending at the age of many of us in this room—had more than enough time to exercise public service, community commitment, voluntarism, something like what our Fourth Dimension is launching this month. More than enough time to devise creative solutions, to use notoriety beyond self-promotion. Certainly, there were expectations, but many expectations go unfulfilled, so this young man’s right stewardship of privilege, money, time, name, seem somehow notable.

There are more than enough resources, honestly, financial, physical, resources, to do what we need to do, what God is calling us to do.

There is more than enough “stuff,” even.

Dorothy Day, whose wonderful book called Loaves and Fishes chronicled the founding of the Catholic Worker Movement, wrote: “When we were first starting to publish our paper, in an effort to achieve a little of the destitution of our neighbors we gave away our furniture and sat on boxes. But as fast as we gave things away people brought more. We gave blankets to needy families, and when we started our first house of hospitality people gathered together all the blankets we needed. We gave away food, and more food came in: exotic food, some of it—a haunch of venison from the Canadian Northwest, a can of oysters from Maryland, a container of honey from Illinois. . . We’ve even had salmon from Seattle, flown across the continent.” (p. 84)

More than enough. Yet we cling to scarcity, hold onto fear and anxiety, abide in distrust. We consume and acquire because we are convinced such living gives us meaning. Like the disciples, we ask “where’s the food,” and then set off on our own devices to provide the answer, control the outcome, manage the product, unwilling to let go of the myth of scarcity, unwilling to live into, lean into, the generosity that is promised to us, unwilling to leap into the abundance that the very heart of our story.

Walter Brueggemann reminds us that “Jesus presents an entirely different kind of economy, one infused with the mystery of abundance and a cruciform kind of generosity. Jesus transforms the economy by blessing it and breaking it beyond self-interest.” (p. 346)

This is not conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat. There is no program, no plan. Either it’s an entirely new brand of politics, or no politics at all. It is a new direction for a new community, calling us to re-organize, re-orient, re-create, re-form, to think more like the crowds who followed Jesus and gave with their hearts and less like the disciples who became so limited by their very human desire to contain.

There is more than enough grace, grace which we treat as a commodity to be earned and traded, rather than the gift freely given, like manna from heaven, that we can’t predict or plan for, only receive.

How? No plan this morning. Simply a story.

A group of Fourth Church members and friends traveled to Scotland and Northern Ireland this past month. On a Thursday morning, a few of us walked a bit to St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh’s Old Town, the high Kirk of the Church of Scotland, in many ways the seat of Presbyterianism, for morning communion. In a side chapel, flanked by the crypts of Montrose and Argyll, just to the side of the pulpit where our founder John Knox preached stern and fiery sermons, a handful of us gathered.

An old Scottish man, unclean, unkempt, unclear; a group of American tourists with cameras dangling from their necks, a young Scottish minister, her voice rich with the cadences of the tradition and clear with the words we will share at this table in a moment.

Guests, all of us, guests, hungry guests, privileged guests, where there was more than enough room at the table, more than enough love, more than enough bread, more than enough wine, more than enough.

The meal never tasted so good, until the next one, this one. And all will be filled. And God only knows what we might do with the abundance of leftovers. Amen.