Poolesville Presbyterian Church
07.29.12; Rev. David Williams
Over this last year, the little quarter-acre patch of suburbia I call home has seen some changes. There’ve been a few necessary modifications, like replacing the collapsed stairs that descended from the carport to the back yard, which were washed out last year during one of those every-hundred-year floodrains we’ve been getting every year lately.
But mostly, what’s changed around the house has been the garden. For most of the decade we’ve living in our little hobbit-hole of a rambler, the best we’ve found the time to manage was a lawn. Well, sort of a lawn Way we figure it, so long as it’s green and you can mow it, it may as well be grass. This year, though, we finally committed to trying to grow something, to having that patch of earth we call our own actually producing something.
And so, with some digging and prepping and mulching and planting, the spring saw the first efforts to actually grow anything in our household. Things were not without their setbacks. The blackberries that went into the most light-filled area of our back yard became delightful chew-toys for our dog, who was amazed that we would take a stick and so considerately plant it in the ground for her to dig up.
You gave me a Stick? A stick with digging? A stick with digging and chewing? Oh thank you thank you thank you.
The blueberries in the front of the house fared better, although one of them succumbed to the overzealous weeding of a member of the household who shall remain anonymous. Generally, the plant that’s right by the stick with a picture of a blueberry on it is the one that you leave in the ground, but sometimes those weeds can be tricky shapeshifting devils. So it goes. In a few years, the ones that remain will be producing.
The strawberries did the best. A midnight raid by a crack team of ninja bunnies before the defensive perimeter fence was established wasn’t enough to keep them down, and now they’re cranking out a good half-dozen ripe red fresh morsels every other day. It’s fun, having this little patch of organic sweetness out front of our carport where once only a few clumps of sickly browning japanese forestgrass grew.
Yet as the season has gone on, I’m already looking forward to next year, and to expanding our strawberry plot. There’s plenty for us...but I find myself yearning to have more. Because as much fun as a garden is, perhaps the most fun comes with sharing it. If you’re growing flowers, guiding a friend through the displays of yellow and crimson is much of the pleasure. Whether you’re growing fruit or vegetable, having something you’ve helped summon from the soil that you can give to a friend is a significant part of the pleasure of growing.
And yet for all the joy of growing and giving, sharing abundance doesn’t come easy to our culture. Even in the face of the miracle of the abundance of creation, we still struggle with it.
The loaves-and-fishes miracle story we just heard from John’s Gospel this morning is one that is shared across all of the four Gospels. It is told here in John, but also in Matthew 14, Mark 6, and Luke 9. Matthew and Mark actually tell some variant of this story again, in Matthew 15 and Mark 6. Whether this is a repetition of an old favorite story, or a similar event happened multiple times is not clear. What is clear is that something like this was a significant part of the story of Jesus.
The reasons behind this are many, but part of the backstory of this story of abundance comes as it resonates with other, much more ancient tales. One of the reasons it would have been told and retold was that it had strong echoes with the stories of prophets, particularly the story we heard from the book of 2 Kings. It’s a story of Elisha, the disciple of the prophet Elijah. He’s faced with feeding a crowd...a hundred people...with twenty loaves of bread brought from a man whose hometown is Baal-shalishah, which is just such an awesome sounding name for a town. This seems like not quite so much of a stretch, but the people are fed.
The challenge before Jesus and the disciples is considerably more substantial. They have no food at all, and are faced with a teeming throng of 5,000. They first struggle with the idea of how such a group might be fed. According to the New Revised Standard Version, Philip looks at the 5,000 and wonders if even six months wages would cover the bill. The New International Version suggests that was eight months. Both are trying to describe the phrase “two hundred denarii,” with a denarius being a day’s wages.
Whichever way, and no matter what caterer they got, it would still have cost them an arm and a leg.
At this point in the story, John adds a detail that the other three accounts lack. The five loaves and two fishes are consistent, but only John tells us that they belong to a boy. Why? It’s not clear. But the detail is there anyway.
And then everyone sits, and there’s a blessing, and the disciples clean up, and discover to their amazement that there are twelve baskets left over.
It’s a relatively familiar tale. Several things are striking about this miracle story.
First is the remarkable simplicity of the event it describes. The miracle of the loaves and fishes is viscerally material, and yet it presents very subtly. This isn’t a cloud of fire in the heavens, or Charlton Heston standing atop a windswept rock as the Red Sea boils and opens before his over-the-top scene-chewing. It’s not even Jesus whispering words of healing. They bless what food they have, and then they eat, and there is enough to go around. It’s the kind of miracle that happens right there in front of you, so simple and so basic that you don’t even realize it was a miracle until later.
Scottish mystic George MacDonald once described this as a twofold miracle, with the essential miracle being not the reproduction of food, but the mere fact of the bread and fish. He marveled that the light from the sun falls on fields and wakes the barley, that it rises, tall, rich, and golden to meet the sun, that human beings take to those fields to harvest, and return home with sweet nutty grain to grind and bake. That most basic miracle, the miracle of life itself and the generous abundance of creation, that miracle is the easiest of all to miss, and a thousand times more amazing than the simple division of a substance.
The second striking thing is just how miraculous even the most non-supernatural approach to this event would be. Imagine, for a moment, that this crowd wasn’t entirely unprepared. Not all of them had set out to hear this rabbi and wonderworker without first bringing something to eat. Some had, in their eagerness. But others were thinking about lunch before they left. Encountering his grace, and hearing his blessing, and watching how he and the disciples shared what little they had, those who came did likewise.
This is far from the only way to interpret this event. But even this most simple explanation seems so far beyond us that it might as well be a miracle.
We produce two point three billion metric tons of grain a year on this planet,
and another billion tons...give or take...of vegetables.
Add to that five hundred million metric tons of fruit, and the riches of this world are still ample supply for the almost seven billion human souls who inhabit it. And yet there is still hunger, not from a lack of providence, not because this little world of ours doesn’t have enough, but because in the face of that abundance we can’t figure it out. One billion souls go hungry each year, and here in America we fret and worry because we’ve got an obesity epidemic.
Strange thing, given that there’s more than enough to go around.
Some miracles are just right there, waiting to be seen, and waiting to be acted upon. The joy of growing, giving, and sharing from whatever sweetness we have been given is just such a miracle. But first, we have to be able to see it for the miracle it is. Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
No comments:
Post a Comment