Polk City UMC
July 27, 1997
Mark Haverland
2 Samuel 12:1-14
1The LORD sent Nathan to David. When he came to him, he said, "There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor. 2The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle, 3but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him. 4"Now a traveler came to the rich man, but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep or cattle to prepare a meal for the traveler who had come to him. Instead, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it for the one who had come to him." 5David burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan, "As surely as the LORD lives, the man who did this deserves to die! 6He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity." 7Then Nathan said to David, "You are the man! This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: `I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you from the hand of Saul. 8I gave your master's house to you, and your master's wives into your arms. I gave you the house of Israel and Judah. And if all this had been too little, I would have given you even more. 9Why did you despise the word of the LORD by doing what is evil in his eyes? You struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and took his wife to be your own. You killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. 10Now, therefore, the sword will never depart from your house, because you despised me and took the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your own.' 11"This is what the LORD says: `Out of your own household I am going to bring calamity upon you. Before your very eyes I will take your wives and give them to one who is close to you, and he will lie with your wives in broad daylight. 12You did it in secret, but I will do this thing in broad daylight before all Israel.'" 13Then David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the LORD." Nathan replied, "The LORD has taken away your sin. You are not going to die. 14But because by doing this you have made the enemies of the LORD show utter contempt, [1] the son born to you will die."
John 6:1-15 (English-NIV)
1Some time after this, Jesus crossed to the far shore of the
Sea of Galilee (that is, the Sea of Tiberias), 2and a great crowd of people
followed him because they saw the miraculous signs he had performed on
the sick. 3Then Jesus went up on a mountainside and sat down with
his disciples. 4The Jewish Passover Feast was near. 5When Jesus
looked up and saw a great crowd coming toward him, he said to Philip, "Where
shall we buy bread for these people to eat?" 6He asked this
only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do.
7Philip answered him, "Eight months' wages [1] would not buy enough bread
for each one to have a bite!" 8Another of his disciples, Andrew,
Simon Peter's brother, spoke up, 9"Here is a boy with five small
barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?"
10Jesus said, "Have the people sit down." There was plenty of grass in
that place, and the men sat down, about five thousand of them.
11Jesus then took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed to those who
were seated as much as they wanted. He did the same with the fish.
12When they had all had enough to eat, he said to his disciples, "Gather
the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted." 13So
they gathered them and filled twelve baskets with the pieces of the five
barley loaves left over by those who had eaten. 14After the
people saw the miraculous sign that Jesus did, they began to say, "Surely
this is the Prophet who is to come into the world." 15Jesus,
knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew
again to a mountain by himself.
It has always impressed me that the boy gave his lunch to Jesus for blessing and sharing with five thousand other people. I remember how hard it could be to get an extra potato chip or a piece of a Reese's Peanut Butter cup from a fellow student when I was in grade school! Sharing, as any parent knows, is not a natural act for a child.
Not that I, a child in a secure middle-class home of the middle 1950s, was any better than my peers. I recall the day I came home from school and my snack was a large piece of pecan pie left over from the night before. I had settled down to enjoy this manna, when my mother called out from the front room: "Glenn is coming up on his bicycle."
Glenn was my best friend, and I knew if he got in the front door before I got that pie down, it would have to be split in two. So I devoured the whole thing in seconds. The half-chewed pecans and sweet filling agglutinated in my stomach as if I had swallowed a bowling ball. When Glenn walked into the kitchen, I remember having one of my first primitive realizations that sharing would have been much more enjoyable than the ache that resulted from my selfishness. Things might have turned out quite differently for Jesus that day with the crowd if I had been the boy and Simon had reported: "There is a child here who has a piece of pecan pie."
My reaction was more than the childish act of one particular individual. I was participating in the more primal human fear that haunts us all: Will there be enough for me? Will there be enough for me and mine if we give some away? Even fairness doesn't get us very far. I don't mind being fair, of course, but only if this means I get more than I otherwise would. No one cries for fairness when it means he gets less. What child ever said, "Oh, my piece of pie is larger than my little sister's. Let's give her some of mine." But this is exactly the spirit which Jesus elicited from that little boy two thousand years ago. And it's a spirit we need now as well. We need, in other words, the spiritual power of extravagance, of wild generosity, of unbridled trust that the resources of God will provide for us all if we don't clutch too tightly to what we think is ours alone. We need to learn not to begrudge what other people get, even, or maybe especially, when it directly costs us something. It is difficult to set loose such extravagance in a first-world setting where our dominant cultural mind set is how much can I get for myself. We play the game where the winner is the one who dies with the most toys, even if they are already so bountiful as to be no longer valuable. Must not the CEO of the large corporations who are getting what can only be called obscene salaries and bonuses be like small children who get too many presents at Christmas. They get tired and bored opening the presents long before they get to the last package.
The story of the loaves and the fishes is one of the most familiar stories in the NT. It's the only story which all four Gospels tell and most of us can recite it from memory. But that doesn't make it easy to understand. It challenges us in some fundamental ways. First of all, what do we make of the miracle at the heart of this tale? Is it magic? Do we suspend our normal post enlightenment judgment to believe and grasp the magic to our hearts, rather in the way a three-year old responds to "Where the Wild Things Are?" Are we to become like children who breathe in these magical mystery tours with no pause to wonder if they could really have happened that way? Are the miracles of God like a circus performer's magic tricks - only God's magic isn't a trick?
Or do we associate believing in the miracle with faith. We know it's preposterous, but we believe anyway because faith is believing in the impossible. Only inside the faith can one see the truth of miracle. Not to make sense of a miracle is unbelief. We know that miracles are not "modern" but we separate our heads from our hearts. We live in a rational world where miracles don't happen, but in our religious world we believe the impossible.
Or do we tinker with the concept of miracle, pointing out that the story can be true without believing that it really happened. "The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf" is a good example of a story which is very true, whether or not it actually happened. This is the way I tend to treat most miracles in the NT. The story of the feeding of thousands with a few fish and loaves of bread fits neatly here as a moral tale about the benefits and contagiousness of generosity.
None of these approaches captures what the Gospel writer John was trying to do, however. He certainly wasn't talking about miracles or magic. "Miracle" presupposes the very modern science which declares it an impossibility. John doesn't call this event a miracle. He calls it a "sign." John neither wants us to see this as magic which proves the power of Jesus to work miracles, nor is he telling a simple moral tale to help us be more generous with our neighbor. John's point with this story, as with all of his gospel, is that Jesus came to die and be raised from the dead as foretold in the scriptures. Everything John does in the construction of the feeding story signals to his readers that the fish and bread represent many things: the OT events of manna in the wilderness, Elisha feeding his crowd with a pittance and the Passover meal. The story also represents the events toward which Jesus leads: The Last Supper, communion in the budding Christian church and the messianic banquet of the coming kingdom of God. What the story does not represent for John is a miracle or a moral lesson about generosity. Instead, John is preaching something very solemn: The one who feeds is himself eaten, as once in the wilderness, in celebration of release from slavery, now in light of his death and in memory of his death, and in anticipation of the final meal. The miracle, if there is one for John, is that the divine life is communicated by something as primitive as eating.
This approach only goes to show how different were the preachers of 2000 years ago. Today, we would be sadly confused and disappointed if the sermon dwelled only on the symbolic nature of the story as a sign of the way the OT and the NT were linked together. We read the story very differently. We see in it the spirit of extravagant love, of wild generosity, of unbridled trust in the resources of God. We know that the story as told by John superimposes the heart of the NT over the heart of the Old, that Jesus becomes the new Moses, feeding his followers with a new manna. We know that Jesus is the prophet Elisha, who also fed his followers with a magical meal. Sure, Jesus is the new Seder meal, feeding the faithful as they escape from spiritual slavery. But the sermon John made out of this story is no longer the sermon that we need to hear. We read the story and know that it tells us something about human nature - about how quick we are to decide there is not enough of anything to go around, and how often God proves us wrong, about how we choose our prophets and kings according to how well they feed us.
The lectionary offers us a clue as to how we should read and undertand this story. It asks us to read this story in light of the OT passage from 2nd Samuel. David is punished in this passage for taking advantage of his riches and power to take from someone who has very little. The writer of the Gospel of John would have paired the story with passages about Elisha who fed and healed and even raised from the dead, just as Jesus did. But we are meant to draw conclusions about the abuse of power. Those in the crowd around Jesus who had something to eat wanted to hoard it to themselves, and maybe even try to get a little more so that they would have a snack on the way home as well. Instead, and ironically, inspired by a child, they engaged in extravagant gestures of generosity, and, as a result, there was more than enough for everybody.
Can we avoid the parallel with current events as our congress discusses how to reward some people with tax cuts more than others? Those who have, according to some reports, will get more at the expense of those who have less. Can we avoid the parallel with the specter of world hunger raised in the past week or so by our own John Ruan and Norman Borlaug? We gobble up farm land for our nice suburban homes while many people in the world go hungry. Can we not notice that we behave all too often more like David, who hoarded what he had and took from those too weak to defend themselves? Can we avoid the comparison with our current economy which transfers enormous wealth from the many at the bottom to the few at the top? Can we avoid seeing ourselves in Andrew and Philip who were at a loss as to how to feed the hungry crowd, when all they needed was to trust in God that the hearts of everyone would be changed? We need a far different sermon today than the one John preached and wrote down in his Gospel.
Unfortunately, this story has much to say to us which we are not anxious to hear. It wags a finger of disapproval at us when we hide behind our skepticism and cynicism. It casts a jaundiced eye at our tendency to take as much as we can and give as little. We are what some have called scarcity people. We think that life is a zero sum game. If you get more, then I get less. If I share my pie with Glenn, my piece will be smaller. I can't have that. There is only so much to go around. We must each grab and hold on to what we can. We are like the cynic who knows the cost of everything, but the value of nothing.
Jesus calls us away from all this to be a people of abundance, of extravagance, of exuberance. We should not just be generous, we should be generous with abandon. Love is like the magic penny. The more you give away the more you have. The more you divide it, the more it multiplies. Love is like the magic pitcher of milk which no matter how much you pour out, always is full to the brim.
Many of the American Indian cultures staged enormous give-aways on special occasions. At weddings and birthdays, births and deaths, the honored party gave enormous gifts to everyone around. Here is all I have, take what you need. The newspaper recently had an article about the difficulty this poses for some people. In Japan, for instance, golfers are expected to give gifts to their partners when they hit a hole-in-one. This has become such a burden to players of what is already a very expensive sport, that most of them buy insurance to cover the cost of these gifts if it should happen to them. No one can afford to be as generous as Jesus calls us to be - or so we think.
The story of the loaves and fishes is about the miracle that happens when people abandon their desire to hoard what they have and take what they can get away with. This story is for us about the spirituality of extravagance, about living a life of wild generosity. When we reach out in trust and faith, we receive back more than we invest. Those who give to God out of a sense of scarcity are always counting costs and worrying about what they have given up. Those who give to God out of a sense of abundance, even when they is no abundance, always find that, in the end, they have more than they need.