Tag Archives: Feeding of 5000

Leftovers

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A Sermon for the Salem United Church of Christ

by Rev. James Eaton ©2024

Tenth Sunday After Pentecost/B • July 28, 2024

John 6:1-21

This text includes two stories: Jesus feeding more than 5,000 people and Jesus walking to his disciples across the water. Because of the constraints of time, I’ve chosen to deal only with the first story in this sermon.

Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz. Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has brought forth bread from the earth.
– The Jewish prayer over bread, also used by Muslims.

Give us today our daily bread.
– The Lord’s Prayer

Good food, good meat, good God, let’s eat
– Table grace at Michigan State Youth camp

Every culture has a way to say thank you at the beginning of a meal. In our home, May and I usually cook, but it’s Jacquelyn who offers the prayer: “Heavenly Father, thank you for this food and the person who prepared it.” We say grace because we know, deep down, we are not of ourselves enough: we need to be sustained, every day, by our daily bread.

Bread is interesting stuff. Sometime about 14,000 years ago, someone somewhere figured out that if you ground up grains, mixed them with water, and put them near a fire, the grains turned into something good to eat. Later, they discovered if you added something bubbly like beer, which we know is over 5,000 years old, the result was even better. Ever since, bread has been the common food of common people, and it weaves in and out of the whole Bible story. 

What to Do When 5,000 Show Up?

At the beginning of the story we read in John, Jesus has gone off to a mountain to meet with his disciples in private. Remember that geography is theology in the Bible: “The mountain” is frequently where God encounters prophets, from Moses at Mt. Sinai to Jesus later when he is transfigured. Mark says withdrew to let his disciples rest. John just says they went off by themselves and Jesus sat down. Sitting down is the position from which a rabbi teaches, so perhaps that’s what Jesus had in mind. Clearly, it’s a private party. But five thousand men show up – and their wives, significant others and children. What to do?

What amazes me about this story every time I go back to it is that it is so like us. I’ve been sitting with church committees for almost 50 years and every time a crisis occurs, the first thing that happens is someone talks about the cost. Philip does it here: “Two hundred denarii wouldn’t be enough.” Two hundred denarii is about eight months wages for most people. It’s an astounding sum. What’s the next thing we do, once we figure out we don’t have the money for the project? Don’t we look around to see what we do have? Andrew: here is a boy with five loaves and two dried fish. I’ve always wondered about this boy: it doesn’t say he offered his lunch, it doesn’t say he volunteered to share. These aren’t big loaves; the average lunch for a peasant is three barley loaves. Barley loaves are coarse and not as tasty as wheat bread; it’s what poor people eat. 

It’s easy to rush over the details that come next, but we shouldn’t. Jesus tells everyone to sit down; the Greek word here actually means “to recline”. That’s significant because poor people in this time ate standing up but rich people at feasts recline at table. He’s asking them to eat like they’re at a rich, wonderful banquet. Then Jesus gives thanks. “Blessed art thou O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.” He starts distributing the bread and the fish, and it turns out there is more than enough for everyone.  If you grew up in a church where they’re comfortable with the supernatural, this is miraculous. If you grew up where preachers like to make things more natural, maybe you’ve heard that everyone just shared the lunches they’d brought—as if that wouldn’t be a miracle as well. It doesn’t matter which road you take, they both get to this place: there is this miraculous abundance in God’s care. 

What God Does

This is what God does. At creation, God makes a world with everything we need and then says to people, “Take care of it.” Eat whatever you want, God tells them, except from the tree of the experience of good and evil. In the wilderness, when God’s people are hungry and whining, they discover manna, a bread like substance that occurs naturally. God feeds people twice at the request of Elisha, once with leftovers. No wonder every religion, every culture, has a way of saying thanks: at it’s foundation, what we need to survive is all gift.

We say grace, but what if we really gave thanks? What if we gave thanks for each part of the meal – main dish, potatoes, vegetables—hopefully dessert! Someone raised that chicken, someone plucked it, packed it, put it out for us to buy. Someone grew the vegetables which needed rain and sun and earth. What if we gave thanks for those as well. It would take a long time to say that much thanks. Even just the bread would take a while if we thought of all the ingredients – water, yeast, oil, flour. The wheat alone contains miraculous abundance. Annie Dillard writes,

So far as I know, only one real experiment as ever been performed, but when they get down to the root hairs, I boggle completely. In those same four months the rye plant created 14 billion root hairs, and those little strands placed end-to-end just about wouldn’t quit. In a single cubic inch of soil, the length of the root hairs totaled 6,000 miles. (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, pp. 166-67)

Jesus gives thanks—and there is miraculous abundance. My favorite part of this story is that there are leftovers. Remember where we started? We can’t afford it, there isn’t enough, we just have a little bit—now the disciples are scurrying about with baskets taking up the leftovers.

Some people want to seize Jesus—don’t let him get away, they cry. They wanted to make him King by force. Isn’t this like us too? We want to own Jesus, we want to make him our king, we want him to heal us, feed us, just us, not the others. But he slips away; he always does when we try to take charge of him. The only way to stay with Jesus is to stop making him ours and let ourselves belong to him. At the end of this story, he’s back where he started, up on a mountain.

Leftovers

The disciples have a new problem: taking up the leftovers. The text calls them “fragments”, the same word used by early Christians for the bread used in communion. What did they do with all those leftovers? Did they make bread pudding? Did they hand them out the next day? John doesn’t tell us, he moves on to Jesus using the image of bread for himself: “I am the bread of life”, he later says. 

And the boy, how did the boy react? Someone packed him a nice lunch: five loaves is a lot for a peasant boy and a couple of sardines to go along. I bet he looked forward to that lunch; boys get hungry and here he had everything he needed to be full, possibly something that didn’t happen every day. Going hungry isn’t something you forget. My dad grew up on a farm in Michigan and remembered going hungry. We always had enough to eat in the home where I grew up, but dad insisted that every dinner had to include a plate of bread, even though we seldom ate it. Did the boy give up his lunch voluntarily? Was he disappointed? John doesn’t say. But John does say everyone had as much as they wanted. So we know that at the end, the boy was full: he had enough.

This is what God wants: for us to feel the fullness and thanksgiving is both the method and the appropriate response. Fullness is not an amount but an attitude, a spiritual state Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist in Vienna in 1942 when he was sent with his family to Theresienstadt concentration camp. Two years later he was sent to Auschwitz, where his family was murdered. Even there, he said thanks. He says in one place,

The most ghastly moment of the twenty-four hours of camp life was the awakening…We then began the tussle with our wet shoes, into Which we could scarcely force our feet, which were sore and swollen… One morning I heard someone, whom I knew to be brave and dignified, cry like a child because he finally had to go to the snowy marching grounds in his bare feet, as his shoes were too shrunken for him to wear. In those ghastly minutes, I found a little bit of comfort: a small piece of bread which I drew out of my pocket and munched with absorbed delight

Even in the heart of darkness, even in the midst of evil, God intends our fullness. The writer of Ephesians prays, “…that you may be  filled to the full measure of all the fullness of God

How Wonderful to Be Full

This story is one of the few told in all four gospels. I think it’s told because it helps us understand who we are. We are the people who pick up the leftovers of God’s grace and give them out so that need everyone will have what they need. We are the people who pick up the leftovers of God’s grace and share them out as fragments that can fill someone with the full measure of God. It’s what we do every time we open the clothing closet; it’s what we do through Neighbors in Need and countless other missions. It’s what we do every time we welcome someone; it’s what we do every time we share communion. We take up the leftovers of the bread of life, share them out, so that all can indeed, like the boy, like the disciples, like the crowd, have what they need. We share them out as God’s blessing. 

Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz. Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has brought forth bread from the earth.

How wonderful to be full. May you be full today.

Amen.

Got Anything Good? – Learning the Lord’s Prayer 3

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A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY
by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor
Third Sunday in Lent • February 28, 2016

What do you need every day? I suppose most of us have a daily routine: clean up, something to drink, something to eat, something to do. Most of this is a matter of choice: what do you really need? We can go about three minutes without air; more if you are a trained diver. The average person can go three days without water, although some have survived longer. We can go about three weeks without food; Mahatma Gandhi survived a 21 day fast. We can go a long time without light but it disorients us and distorts our time sense. Solo sailors on long voyages often report hallucinations; Joshua Slocum, the first person we know to have survived a solo circumnavigation, reported a period when he believed someone else was on board, helping him navigate. Simon and Garfunkel famously sang, “I am a rock, I am an island” but in fact we can’t survive in isolation: we need things, we need each other.

The first human experience is a fulfillment of Jesus’ prayer. An infant must be fed, must be cleaned, must be held or the child will not survive. An infant can’t provide these things. Instead, as we all know, babies develop a complex way of signaling their needs and making life unpleasant for unresponsive parents. “Give me” is in that sense our very first prayer, and if it isn’t for bread, it is the same prayer. Give me what I need. The need is supplied: the supply is gift and in the gift a bond of love is formed. “Give us our daily bread.” Last Sunday we talked about the first request of the Lord’s Prayer: thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Just as that prayer turns to the heavenly father, this prayer asks the heavenly father toward us, toward our needs. Like an infant asking for milk, like a child hungry for dinner, we come to God: “Give us our daily bread.”

Bread was both symbol and fact of daily life in Jesus’ time. Surely he means to remind us of Israel’s time in the wilderness, when the cry for bread was answered by manna, a bread like substance on which the people fed and which came as the gift of God. Surely he means to remind us of the great feast Isaiah imagined. Bread there is what sustains, and the feast itself is the gift of God, a gift to be given to everyone: “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat!” Surely he means as well to remind them of the great time when they believed a crowd would go away hungry and miraculously all were fed.

On their return the apostles told Jesus all they had done. He took them with him and withdrew privately to a city called Bethsaida. 1When the crowds found out about it, they followed him; and he welcomed them, and spoke to them about the kingdom of God, and healed those who needed to be cured. 12The day was drawing to a close, and the twelve came to him and said, “Send the crowd away, so that they may go into the surrounding villages and countryside, to lodge and get provisions; for we are here in a deserted place.

There they are, in a deserted place, a place that must have felt to them like a wilderness. No McDonalds, no Stewarts, no Dunkin Donuts, not even a gas station in sight. Yet even there, bread is provided. They bring what they have to Jesus, intending obviously for him to get the message: five loaves, a couple of fish, not enough, not nearly enough. Yet when he blesses what they have, somehow everyone is fed and there are 12 baskets of leftovers. “Give us this day our daily bread” reminds us that our source is not ourselves but the gift of God.

The importance of the gift is part of the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. Do you remember the story? Jesus is baptized; immediately, he is called into the wilderness. Some versions say he was led there; some that he literally “thrown into the wilderness”. The wilderness is more than geography or climate, it is the place where Israel met God, where God formed the people and gave the covenant. Jesus is in the wilderness, according to the story 40 days, a Biblical number that really means “complete”.

While he’s there, he’s hungry, and the tempter comes. Jesus has just been embraced and heard the Spirit call him the son of God; now the tempter takes this great blessing, this wonderful moment, and turns it around: “If you are the song of God, command this stone to become bread.” You know this temptation, don’t you? You’re at home; there’s food in the fridge you could make, but you’re hungry and there are potato chips so… What would it mean to be hungry and told you could easy as waving turn stones to bread? Stop relying on God and God’s way: just do it yourself. Most of us know this temptation because so often we’ve given into it. We substitute things we make for bread that satisfies: the list is endless, from career success to how we look, how much we make, how many likes we have on Facebook. Jesus replies to the temptation by turning to God’s Word, saying that we do not live by bread alone.

“Give us this day our daily bread.” Bread is easy for us to get today. We stop into a store, pick some up off a rack, the only difficulty all the choices: white, whole wheat, rye, whole grain, cinnamon, so many types. But in Jesus’ day, bread had to be made, then as now, from basic ingredients: flour, oil, yeast, baked in an oven. Most people didn’t have these things on their own. You might raise the grain; but it had to be milled, and for that you traded grain. You might have olives to make oil, but you needed a press, and you might trade for that. Ovens weren’t individual, they were a community resource, a place where people gathered together to bake together. They were a focus of community life, like the village well, a place to go and talk and laugh and share and gossip and finally take the hot loaf of bread from the oven. So when Jesus speaks of being given our daily bread, surely he has in mind this sort of community. You can raise lentils and make lentil stew on your own but it takes a whole community to make bread. This is the effect of bread. So it is with us. We sing, “One bread, one body, one Lord of all”, at communion, reminding ourselves that sharing the bread of communion binds us into the body of Jesus Christ. For as the Apostle Paul said, “The bread which we break, does it not mean [that in eating it] we participate in and share a fellowship (a communion) in the body of Christ?”

So: packed into this one prayer we remember and acknowledge we live not alone as a result of our own efforts but within a community, where so much of what we need comes not as reward but as gift. There is one more thing this prayer has to teach: it says, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Jesus teaches here as he does elsewhere a focus on the dailyness of life, the nowness of our lives. I’ve been going to the yoga class here on Tuesday nights for a little over a year, off and on. I’m not very good at yoga; I have trouble keeping up with the poses. I struggle along, better some weeks than others. But the hardest thing for me at yoga isn’t the poses or the effort or the stretching it is the constant encouragement to be present, to focus on that moment and not let my mind wander off to other places. I live with a constant future tug; there’s always next Sunday’s sermon, next month’s worship, next year’s strategy. So given the chance, my mind will happily go off there, thinking about what’s going to happen Sunday, what’s going to happen Easter. Jesus means to bring me back, I think, as he does with each of us. The manna in the desert was a daily thing; in fact, only on the day before sabbath could more than today’s need be gathered, anything over would go bad. “Give us this day our daily bread” means to bring us back to today: what do we need today to live as God’s people?

We have seen already how Jesus’ prayer means to turn us to a relationship of loving intimacy with God when he begins, “Our father”, or as I suggested, “Hiya Dad”. Then he moves to inviting God’s rule in our lives: “Thy kingdom come”. Now in the prayer he asks us each day to focus on today, to remember thankfully how we are sustained by God’s gifts; to remember that live from God’s gifts. So this week, each day, every day: let us indeed pray with Jesus, seeking to live as the body of christ, sustained by the bread of life.

Amen.