Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
July 21, 2024

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor

Psalm 23
Mark 6:30–44

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I spent the past week with eleven junior high youth in St. Louis, where every night, after a day spent serving somewhere in the city and then going to do something fun, we would gather in the community room of the house in which we were staying and hear this story.

But we didn’t hear it all at once. Instead, we heard it in episodes that unfolded day by day. On Sunday night we heard about Jesus inviting the apostles to “come away” for rest. Monday was about the crowds and Jesus’ compassion for them, Tuesday about the disciples telling Jesus to make those crowds go away.

Our students engaged the story enthusiastically, because they could relate to the need for rest and to great crowds of people in need of food. But that all changed on our last night, when we read the last part of the story, where Jesus feeds a crowd of thousands with five loaves of bread and two fish.

As soon as he heard that part of the story, one of our students blurted out, “That’s fake!” Several others chimed in, like, “Yeah, no way. That’s impossible.”

They were paying attention.

They’re not the first people to have that reaction to this story. Maybe that was your reaction. This is perhaps the best-known miracle story of Jesus: some version of it appears six times in the four Gospels. It’s the only miracle story that is in all four, so it must be pretty important.

Put most simply, the miracle is that a mass of hungry people ate until they were full, though it’s odd that neither Mark nor Matthew nor Luke nor John ever makes any attempt to explain how it happened.

It’s almost like the Gospels aren’t interested in the mechanics of the miracle. It’s almost like Mark is much more interested in the symbols than he is in the miracle.

Now, to say that this story is symbolic — to call the bread and the fish and the size of the crowd and the number of baskets symbols — is not to say they aren’t real. Symbols are very real.

In the church we call symbols sacraments. A sacrament is a visible symbol, like water or bread or wine, that communicates an invisible grace. And when we participate in a sacrament, we actually receive the grace the symbol stands for.

The communion we will share in here today is a symbol of God’s presence with us in bread and wine, and in partaking of that symbol, we experience the miracle of God’s presence with us, though none of us can explain how any more than we could explain how Jesus fed the crowd that day. That’s what makes it a miracle, I suppose.

There’s an element of mystery to sacraments and symbols.

God fills those who are hungry. That’s the miracle the symbols all point to. The miracle is more than that everyone got some bread. It’s that they ate until they were full. If you’re among the hungry, that just doesn’t happen.

The miracle is that the hungry were filled with good things.

This is not the first time God has pulled this particular miracle. Over and over again in the story of faith, the hungry are filled with good things.

The ancient Israelites wandered in the desert, and they were hungry. God fed them with manna, mysterious food from heaven, and there was enough for everyone — for forty years!

God fills the hungry with good things. The psalms exclaim that repeatedly.

“God satisfies the thirsty, and the hungry God fills with good things.”

“God executes justice for the oppressed and gives food to the hungry.”

“You prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies.”

God fills the hungry with good things.

Jesus’ mother sang at the news of his coming birth, “God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.”

God fills the hungry with good things.

Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry.”

God fills the hungry with good things.

And we’re all hungry. Someone said, “Christianity is one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.” But some of us are more hungry more often than others of us.

That trip to St. Louis I told you about — a lot of the service work we did last week involved feeding hungry people, people who lack access to affordable, nutritious food on a regular basis.

We served at a food pantry one morning. Another morning we worked at an urban farm that grows fresh produce and gives it away to neighbors. Another day we packed meals at the Greater St. Louis Area Food Bank.

So much of our service was about feeding people because feeding people is a huge part of what it means to be a Christian and to follow Jesus. To be a part of this church means feeding people.

As the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev said, “The question of bread for myself is a material question, but the question of bread for my neighbor is a spiritual question.”

Anyone who wishes to follow Jesus must be concerned about their hungry neighbor as a matter of their Christian spirituality.

Because people of faith’s concern for others’ hunger is the mechanism of the miracle of how God fills the hungry with good things, isn’t it? The disciples come to Jesus with the peoples’ hunger, and Jesus tells them to fix it. “You give them something to eat.”

He takes the bread and the fish, and he gives it to the disciples, for them to distribute to the people.

Could Jesus have waved his arms and made peoples’ hunger disappear? Could he have produced a second coming of that manna from heaven his ancestors ate for forty years in a deserted place like this? Maybe. I don’t know.

But he didn’t do that. Instead he called on his followers to feed people. Jesus satisfies peoples’ hunger through a community that regards hunger as a spiritual issue and so regards our neighbors’ hunger as a moral problem that we are called upon to help solve.

Jesus satisfies the peoples’ hunger, and he does it through other people. Following Jesus means feeding people.

It also means being fed. The disciples in this story hadn’t eaten themselves, and they were looking to get fed.

Earlier this summer, I was in Youngstown, New York, with eleven of our high school students for their mission trip. We were invited and hosted by the youth group of the First Presbyterian Church of Youngstown, and I’m here to tell you that they fed us.

We stayed in the church building all week, and volunteers came in and provided three meals a day for us. Church members invited us to their homes for bonfires and s’mores and to swim. We were there to feed others, and we did. But we also were fed. They showered us with grace and hospitality.

I think the disciples are looking to be fed like that. After all, Jesus invited them out here because there was no time for them to eat. He invited them to rest. So they’re concerned about the hungry crowd, but they mostly seem concerned for them to go away so they can get the alone time to eat with Jesus.

The disciples are here to get fed.

I’ve often heard people describe going to church as being fed. More to the point, I’ve heard people describe leaving church because they say they aren’t being fed. What I take them to mean is that the worship and programs of their church aren’t nourishing them spiritually. Maybe there’s some conflict in the church, or some of their really good church friends have moved away, or they’re not finding the preaching compelling.

And that’s a shame. Because the community of faith is meant for our nourishment and sustenance. Personally, I have been profoundly fed by things I’ve been taught in church. I have been profoundly fed by the music of worship. I have been profoundly fed, time and again, by the community that gathers around this table to receive the bread and the cup.

And I have been most profoundly fed by my experiences of feeding others. What the disciples will know by the end of this impromptu banquet is that, with Jesus, we never receive so much as when we give, we are never as comforted as when we comfort others, and our hunger is never so satisfied as it is when we feed our neighbors.

For faith, to be fed and to feed others are inseparable.

And yet we can never feed enough, can we? We can never comfort enough or give enough or care enough, can we?

The needs of the world are so great, the problems of the world so entrenched and complicated and intractable, we know that they will not be solved as a result of anything that we do.

So it’s easy to understand the disciples’ answer to Jesus’ suggestion that they might give this crowd their dinner. “What, are we supposed to go buy eight months’ pay worth of bread and start handing it out?” They clearly don’t have that kind of money. Actually, when Jesus sent them out to preach and teach a bit ago, he told them to not take any money at all!

So what have they got? Five loaves and two fish?

No, they just don’t have what it would take to meet this need.

We don’t have the tools or the resources to eradicate hunger or, it seems, to even make a dent in most of the problems that bedevil the world we live in.

In St. Louis we worked one morning cleaning some apartments at a transitional domestic violence shelter. They have two apartment complexes that can house up to fifty women and eighty-five children.

One hundred and thirty-five people sheltered from imminent harm for two years is a lot, and yet you know as well as I do that the need is much, much greater than can be met by a single organization with two old apartment buildings.

The person who maintains those buildings is Janelle. She’s pushing seventy, and the one maintenance guy she had got sick in December and she hasn’t been able to hire a replacement. So she’s doing it all herself.

Like so many goodhearted people trying to do the good that is theirs to do, Jenelle doesn’t have enough, not for what’s needed.

But she has something, and she brings what she has. I asked her privately last week how much longer she thought she might do this, and she said, “Well, my boss keeps reminding me of my age, but I don’t plan to quit, ever.”

She is going to show up with her five loaves and two fish every day until she literally can’t anymore.

What do you have? That’s Jesus’ question to his disciples. What do you have? Not “What do you need?” Not “What will it take?” Not “What’s wrong?”

What do you have?

The question makes me think about Asset Based Community Development. I learned about this when I worked for the YMCA twenty-five years ago. I came to Chicago in 1999 and learned about the work of John Kretzman and John McKnight at DePaul University. They pioneered an approach to solving community problems by focusing first on that community’s assets.

Thus, faced with problems like hunger or poverty or violence, their first question was not “What’s wrong?” but “What’s right?” In other words, what do we have? They interviewed neighbors to find out what skills and relationships people had, and then they built problem-solving strategies based on the community’s capacities rather than on its deficiencies.

Maybe Jesus is a community organizer, because his first question to his disciples is about what they have. And though they, like many of us, must think that what they have is not enough, Jesus takes it and thanks God for it. Then, through some mysterious alchemy of grace and abundance, that deserted place becomes the setting for a banquet.

All God asks is that we bring what we have and entrust it to God’s good purpose.

This is the spirit in which we receive an offering when we come to worship. People are fed in all kinds of ways through the ministry of this church as Jesus’ followers show up, pitch in, and give to enable fruitful ministry: meals, showers, mission trips, and who knows whatever else.

We give what we have — a couple of hours per week? the change in our pockets? — and we entrust it to God’s good purpose, because we know that God will use it to fill the hungry with good things, as God always does.

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Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church