Enough for All
World Communion Sunday
Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church
October 5, 2014
John Buchanan
The best commentary I know on the Feeding of the Five Thousand and one of my all-time favorite stories was told by Quaker theologian and popular author Parker Palmer. The story takes place long ago in that wonderful time when airlines actually served food during flights. It was the time, fast receding from memory, when there was no TSA, no security lines, no electronic screening and you could carry pretty much whatever you wanted onto a plane. (The current system is the source of much irritation, and sadness and loss. I cannot tell you how many small Swiss Army pocketknives I have left behind. One tragic night I had to leave behind a jar of homemade strawberry jam. I had forgotten and packed it in my carry on. I pled with the TSA attendant. “It’s strawberry jam. It’s for my youngest song who misses me and my jam. I made it myself.” She was unimpressed and undeterred. “It can’t go on the plane.” I then offered it to her to take home for her family. “It’s really good jam.” “I can’t do that, sir.” In the garbage it goes – it was one of the saddest things I ever had to do.)
Well, Parker Palmer was on a flight from Chicago to Denver that pulled away from the gate and taxied for a long time. You know the feeling. You look out the window and you’re not in a takeoff line but out in a remote corner of the airport looking at the chain-link perimeter fence. Your heart sinks as you hear the engines wind down. The pilot comes on the intercom: “I have some bad news. There is a storm front out west, exactly where we’re headed. Denver is socked in and shut down. There are no alternatives. So we’ll be staying right here for a few hours. That’s the bad news. The very bad news is that we have no food and no drinks on board.” Remember, this was the time when there was real food, and passengers actually looked forward to a nice lunch or dinner, with cloth napkins and silverware.
Everybody groaned. Some passengers were angry. But then, Palmer said, one of the flight attendants stood up in the aisle and took the mike. “We’re really sorry, folks. We didn’t plan it this way and we can’t do anything about it. We know that for some of you, this is a big deal. You’re hungry and were looking forward to a nice lunch. Some of you have a medical condition and need to eat. And everybody, including us, is frustrated. So I have an idea. We have a couple of empty breadbaskets up here, and we’re going to pass them around. Everybody put something in the basket. I know that some of you have brought along a little snack just in case – peanut butter crackers, candy bars. Some of you have chewing gum, Rolaids, Life Savers. And if you don’t have anything edible, you have a business card, or a bookmark, or a picture of your kids. The thing is, I hope everyone puts something in the basket. And then we’ll reverse the process. We’ll pick up the baskets at the back of the plane and pass them around again and everyone can take out what he or she needs.
Well – what happened next was amazing. First the complaining and griping stopped. People started to root around in pockets and handbags and briefcases. Some stood up and retrieved luggage from the overhead and got out boxes of candy, salami, an Italian sausage, cheese, crackers, a bottle of wine. Now people were talking and laughing. The flight attendant had transformed a group of people focused entirely on their own need, deprivation and scarcity, into a gracious community, sharing and creating an abundance of sorts.
The flight eventually took off and landed in Denver and as he stepped off Palmer found the flight attendant and said, “You know there’s a story in the bible a little like what you did back there.” She said, “I know the story. That’s why I did it.”
Scarcity became abundance. There was enough for all. The scholars tell us that the early Christian church loved this story; that when they gathered in secret, after dark, to break bread and drink wine together, they always told the story of Jesus feeding a multitude with five loaves and two fish.
Jesus had found a place to be alone. He had just heard that his cousin, John, had been brutally murdered by the puppet king, Herod. John was family, a childhood friend and playmate perhaps, an adolescent companion. Jesus and John shared a deep faith and fierce commitment to the promise of their people. And now John was gone, killed by a cruel tyrant. Matthew says, “When Jesus heard this, he withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself.” Of course he did. That’s what you do when you receive devastating news.
But the crowd that had been following him is still there, bringing their sick and lame and their children to be touched and healed and blessed. The crowd doesn’t know what happened, so they are following him along the lake shore. “Send them away, Jesus,” his friends advise. “It’s time to take care of yourself. Besides, it’s late in the day. They’re hungry. They need food. We’ll tell them to go home, eat dinner and come back in the morning.”
Jesus, heartsick, heartbroken…”They need not go away. You give them something to eat.”
Barbara Brown Taylor says she wishes she was there when he said that. “What do you mean? We should give them something to eat? All we have between us is five loaves of bread and two small salted fish – hardly a snack for us. There are five thousand people out there, Jesus. No disrespect intended, but you are not making sense.” (The Seeds of Heavens, p. 50)
They were operating out of a sense of scarcity, Barbara says. They looked at the crowd, there own hunger and limited resources and concluded, reasonably and logically – there is not enough.
I suppose we’ve all wondered about that story. What exactly happened? How did he do that? Let’s stay with the text. The disciples gave what they had and it was enough. It became abundance. There were plenty of leftovers. Maybe, something like what happened on the airplane happened. However it happened there was enough for all.
“When you are with Jesus, you are in the bread business,” Walter Brueggemann says. “You need bread to share because it is the work of Jesus to feed hungry people.” (Collected Sermons, p. 2360
And so it has always seemed to me that the Church of Jesus Christ, whatever else it is, is in the bread business. Sack lunches for the homeless, food pantries don’t begin to address the huge, systemic issue of hunger in our nation, not to mention the world. That is our business too and it takes us into thorny issues of economics and agriculture and politics. But, in the meantime, one of the reasons the church is here, this church is here, is to be a place where the hungry are fed.
And there is a personal moral imperative here, for you and for me, to trust God to begin to live, not out of a sense of scarcity – that there isn’t enough, so we have to save and preserve and hoard. Studs Terkel once said that for most people enough is 25% more than we currently have. The personal imperative is to listen to Jesus, watch him, be transformed, connected by the grace of God we have seen and experienced in him, to open our hands, live abundantly, share what we have, confident that in God’s hands, whatever we have will be transformed into abundance, will be enough and more.
And there is Gospel here, good news for the hungry.
“Thou hast made us restless until we rest in Thee,” St. Augustine wrote centuries ago. Who doesn’t know what that means, who is not hungry for the bread of heaven, for mercy, and grace and love, for healing and forgiveness, for meaning for our lives, for living water? That is why 5,000 people followed him late in the day, into evening, past dinnertime, with gnawing hunger in their stomachs but also their hearts.
That is why I came here this morning, and I suspect, if you thought about it, it is why you came here this morning, on the outside chance that you might find bread for your deepest hunger.
This beloved old story reminds us that God’s abundance is all around us, that the whole creation is full of god’s love and grace, and that every meal is a sacrament, that bread broken and shared is a reminder of him, his grace and compassion, his profound self-giving, his presence at every table, to meet every hunger.
One summer long ago, I was the minister in a small parish church in Kinlockleven, a village in the western Highlands of Scotland. The Church of Scotland minister in the neighboring parish, Johnny Dunlop, came to visit and welcome me. We sat in the little manse study, drank coffee and had a good conversation. The next Sunday was Communion Sunday and Johnny told me a story he said he recalled every time he presided at the Lord’s Table, and a story I remember every time I am privileged to stand behind the Table and break the bread and share the cup.
Johnny was in the infantry in the Royal Army in World War II. His unit found itself surrounded, he was captured, and ended up in a German prisoner of war camp somewhere in Poland. It was dreadful: cold, wet, filthy, and worst of all, there was almost no food, just a bowl of thin soup and scraps of bread once a day. Prisoners lost weight until they were skin and bones, contracted diseases, and started to die. There didn’t seem to be any reason for hope. When the tide began to turn and Germany’s fortunes diminished, the conditions in the camp became even worse, until some prisoners did not want to go on living. One easy way to end it all, Johnny told me, was to throw yourself against the barbed wire fence as if trying to escape and be shot instantly by the guards. Johnny said that one night he was so deeply discouraged and depressed, sick with despair and hunger, he slipped out of the barracks and walked toward the fence, not quite sure whether he ought simply to end it all
He sat down on the bare ground, thinking. He sensed movement in the dark on the other side of the fence. It was a Polish farmer. He had half a potato in his hand. He thrust the potato through the barbed wire. As Johnny Dunlop took it, the man said, in heavily accented English, “The Body of Christ.”
“And all ate and were filled and they took what was left over – twelve baskets full.”
Later he would break bread and bless it and give it to them and say,
“This is my body broken for you,
Do this in remembrance of me.”
Amen.