“Enough”
2 Kings 4:42-44; John 6:1-21
In the process of spreading
the word about our picnic today at Hemlock Park, I put an invitation on
Facebook and said, “All are welcome.”
Jim McCreadie put a sign up on the church door telling anybody who
showed up where we are, and he wrote, “All are welcome.”
So I started wondering, “What if a bunch of people saw
that invitation and showed up for lunch?
Would we have enough to feed everybody? “ Then, when I got back to today’s scripture
lessons, I thought: “How relevant.”
The feeding
of the multitude is the only miracle story that’s told in all four
gospels. So I think it’s clear that it was important in
the life of the early church. The
lectionary wants to be sure we don’t miss an important theme today, so we also
heard the story from Second Kings.
In Second
Kings, we hear how a man came, bringing food from the first fruits to Elisha,
the man of God: twenty loaves of barley
and fresh ears of grain. Elisha says,
“Give it to the people and let them eat.”
But his servant says, “How can I set this before a hundred people?” In other words, we don’t have enough.
Elisha says
again, “Give it to the people and let them eat, for this says the LORD, “They
shall eat and have some left.” He set
the food out for them. They ate. And there was some left over, according to
the word of the LORD.
One of my
colleagues suggests that we can take this passage as an example of the way of
life in the community gathered around the power of God. It begins with the practice of stewardship by
the man who brings a portion of his first fruits to Elisha. It seems he offered the remainder of the
first fruits to God in some other context.
In the first fruits, he offers to God’s people his best, but also the
first harvest of his labor. To do this,
he would have to trust that God will provide more, so he can feed and support
his family.[1]
Out of this
act of stewardship comes the possibility for hospitality, as the gift is used
to feed the multitude. This is a
recurring theme in the Bible. Earlier in
the Elisha stories, a woman from Shunem is in desperate poverty and debt when
Elisha tells her to send her children out to borrow empty vessels from the
neighbors, and suddenly they have an abundance of oil to sell and pay off their
debts and have a livelihood.
Later, when
there was a time of famine in Gilgal, Elisha told his servant to put a big pot
on and make some stew. They gathered up
a wild vine and some wild gourds and added some flour. People were afraid the foraged food was
poisonous, but there was nothing harmful in the pot, and they could eat.
That’s
where today’s lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures picks up, with its acts of
faithful stewardship and hospitality flowing into the abundance of God. People look at something and see scarcity. If we’re afraid that there won’t be enough,
we’re tempted to hoard what we have.
The servant
looks at the small offering of first fruits and at the large crowd and says,
“How can I set this before a hundred people?
There won’t be enough.”
The person
of God looks at the same small offering ant the large crowd and sees not
scarcity—but an opportunity to bear witness to the reality and power of God’s
abundance. So Elisha promises, “They shall eat and have some left.” According to the word of God, it is so.
God’s
blessings are often more abundant than we realize. When we are thankful for God’s love and
goodness, and trust in God’s abundance,
we are free to share with our neighbor.
Fast
forward…
“The
Passover, the festival of the Jews was near,” and a large crowd was following
Jesus. I can imagine that in their
minds they were seeing connections between Jesus and Moses. When Jesus goes up the mountain, the crowd
follows him. Jesus sees the crowd, and
he says to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?”
He says
this to test Philip.
Philip is
sure they don’t have enough. “Six
months’ wages wouldn’t buy enough bread for each person to get even a little.”
But Andrew tells
him, “There’s a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among many people?” In other words, we don’t have enough.
Jesus told
them to have the people sit down. Then he
“took the loaves and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who
were seated.” Everyone had as much
bread and fish as they wanted. When they
were satisfied, he told his disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, so
that nothing is wasted.” So they
gathered up the left-overs, and they filled twelve baskets.
When the
people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, “This is indeed the
prophet who is to come into the world.”
Now fast forward to today. Imagine
that Jesus is testing us. Imagine
there’s a mission project for which we’re sensing a call. But we exercise responsible money-management
procedures, and the numbers say we don’t take in enough revenue to support the
mission. We don’t have enough.
I wonder. Do
we expect to be part of a miracle?
How might our work as a congregation be different if we
intentionally see what we do—each and every thing we do—as a way God can use us
to reveal God’s power?
What if we
understood a part of our mission to be responding to human hungers and as a way
to point to Christ’s abundance?
What if –
when we make ministry decisions—we remind ourselves of how Jesus can multiply
resources so that there is enough?
We can
choose to focus on scarcity and survival—or we can be agents of God’s grace and
abundance, bringing hope to weary souls.
The love of
God is made known to us through Jesus Christ, the one who knows our needs and
our hungers and offers us the bread of life.
This was good news for the crowd gathered in John’s gospel near the
mountain, and it is good news for us.
So let us offer all we have to
Jesus and trust that he will take it, bless it, and use it. Let us take God’s abundance out into the
world, so that they too can know that through Christ Jesus they are enough… and
there is enough.
Thanks be to God!
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