You do it!

Pentecost 8A, 8/3/14

Matthew 14:13-21

Gracious and merciful God, help our eyes always look to you, and give us our food in due season. Amen.

Yesterday I had the chance to participate in a meeting for the camp I used to work at. They are planning to build a new kitchen and dining hall. This building will be used for programs that happen on-site – but for the first time in this camp’s history, the same building will also have room to store all the food and equipment that groups take out on trail when they do wilderness camping.

The current executive director at camp is really wanting the building to be as useful as possible – and he wants as much buy-in as possible from people who faithfully support the camp – so he has been asking for input from staff alumni. Those of us who used to work in the kitchen or who used to work with the wilderness camping program have been contacted and asked for our opinions on the draft drawings of the new building.

The floor plan of the new building looks great.

But since we were asked our opinions, of course, everyone has something to suggest.

One of the biggest concerns at the meeting yesterday was, will there be enough storage space in the new building for all the food that groups take out on trail with them when they go camping in the wilderness?

It’s a fair question, really. When you head away from civilization, you have to be prepared for any situation. Whatever you need – Band-Aids, toilet paper, socks, a pen – everything that you think you might possibly want to use in the wilderness has to be packed in with your stuff when you enter that deserted place.

So in yesterday’s meeting, we discussed all the stuff that you need to pack for wilderness camping.

And there was some disagreement about whether the new building could handle all the storage needs.

What do we do with all the trail food that camping groups take out with them? Where should we store the 90-pound food pack the night before its owners leave for the wilderness and take it with them?

Do we store the on-trail food in the same place as the food for on-site programs? What happens if a staff member accidentally serves up the wrong meal for their kids, and the wilderness camping program is short on food the next week?

What happens if the people don’t have everything they need before they head into the wilderness?

This is the same attitude that the disciples start with in today’s Gospel story. Where are we going to get the food? What if there isn’t enough? They begin with worry and fear. They are focused on the limitations of their situation.

Jesus responds with abundance. He takes the small resources that the disciples offer, and transforms them into more than enough.

It would be nice to have Jesus along on every camping trip that my camp sends out into deserted places – the food pack would be way lighter!

When Jesus is in the wilderness with his disciples and a huge group of followers, and it comes time for the people to eat, Jesus feeds them. There’s not a huge ordeal. He simply takes the food that the disciples can find, blesses it, then makes the disciples distribute it to everyone.

It’s entirely possible, actually, that the people who ate the free lunch that Jesus prepared for them didn’t even realize that a miracle had occurred in order for them to be fed. The Bible reading doesn’t suggest that anyone other than the disciples watched Jesus bless the food before it was handed around. No one probably knew what a small amount of resources there were to begin with.

The other 5000 men, plus women and children, just know that food is offered to them. They don’t know how. They don’t need to know where the lunch came from, all they know is that they won’t have to go to bed hungry tonight.

The disciples initially don’t believe that Jesus will be able to pull this miracle off.

Partly, that’s because Jesus is basically asking them to be the ones to perform the miracle.

You give them something to eat!

Um, you want me to do what?

The disciples have no idea how they are going to fulfill Jesus’ charge to feed the crowds. And yet, the feeding of the 5000 couldn’t have happened without them.

Well, maybe it could have. I mean, we believe that God has the ability to work in whatever way God wants. So Jesus could have miraculously fed this group of people in many different ways.

He could have asked God to rain down manna from heaven, or just turned the grass in front of the people into a nice tossed salad or something.

For that matter, If Jesus was going to miraculously make food appear – why not have it appear in everyone’s stomachs? Couldn’t Jesus have just taken away the hunger pains by filling the bellies?

But Jesus doesn’t work like that. Part of the importance of this meal comes in the serving. The disciples had to serve the gathered people. Being a disciple of Jesus also means being a worker for Jesus. This meal was special not just because of the miraculous amounts of food, but also because of the community in which the meal was shared.

In this way, it’s sort of like the meal we share here week after week. When we come for Communion it’s not a help-yourself kind of meal – everyone is served the bread and the wine by another member of the community. Communion gains meaning as a sacrament because it is shared in community.

Those of you who have shared Communion with me in a hospital or in someone’s home know that I always ask someone else to serve the bread and the wine to me. I don’t just take it. We don’t take Communion, as if it were something that belonged to us. We receive it, as a gift, every time it’s offered.

It’s in the serving and the sharing that we actually experience God – this is where the miracle happens! That’s what the disciples discovered in today’s Bible story – joy came when they served others, sharing their limited resources, because Jesus commanded them to do so.

The miracle of the feeding of the 5000 men plus women and children happens because Jesus blesses and breaks the bread, and gives it to the disciples – just like when we share Communion.

But the miracle spreads to the whole gathered community because the disciples follow through on it – the disciples are the ones to share the food with the crowds. Jesus almost hides in the background. He’s the reason behind the feeding of the 5000, but not the focus of it. He lets the disciples be the messengers.

There are 12 baskets of leftover food at the end of the meal. There are 12 disciples. Pointing this out is just another way that the Gospel of Matthew emphasizes the fact that the whole serving process was the work of the disciples. The miracle couldn’t have happened without them.

We can learn from the disciples in their role as servers in this meal.

At the beginning, the disciples have a mentality of scarcity. They are afraid. Their resources aren’t enough to cover the job at hand.

But Jesus turns scarcity into abundance, and he uses the disciples to do it.

That’s what happens when we let God use the gifts that we bring to the table – wonderful, miraculous things can happen!

You know, the camp that is getting ready to build this new dining hall used to operate out of a mindset of scarcity, like the disciples.

About 15 years ago, they started a capital campaign to do some major improvements to the camp, including building a new dining hall.

But camp was struggling to make ends meet. They couldn’t cover their operating expenses. At some point, they ended up borrowing money from themselves. The camp spent all of the money that had been raised for the capital campaign in order to cover the regular budgeted expenses of running the organization.

Obviously, this is not OK. And they knew it wasn’t ideal when they were doing it. But they didn’t know what else to do – they were stuck, thinking that they didn’t have enough resources, and they didn’t know when or how they would ever have enough.

In the past two years or so, the executive director at this camp has worked really hard at paying back all that money that was borrowed from the capital campaign.

He got in touch with the people who care most about camp – the ones who would be likely to encourage their friends and relatives to join in the cause. He sent out emails, printed brochures, and posted information online, trying to let everyone who cared about camp know that the capital campaign was back on – we were going to finally build this new dining hall.

To get to the point of actually having that meeting yesterday, talking about the details of what the building might look like, a lot of leaps of faith had to be taken.

The folks at camp started by believing that there wasn’t enough. And then, with the involvement of many other people, they started to believe that maybe God could provide what was needed.

And God did. Last year, all the debt was eliminated and new money raised for the capital campaign. People stepped up to help. They believed in the mission and decided to let go of their own possessions in order to support the common good.

You know, that’s one theory about how this miraculous feeding miracle took place. Some people believe that lots of folks had brought lunches with them when they went out to follow Jesus that morning. But no one had enough for everyone. So no one was willing to share. Maybe they didn’t want others to be left out.

But once the disciples started to share the first loaves and fish, other people started sharing their food as well. They realized that, while none of them individually had enough, they still had something valuable to contribute. And once everyone’s contributions were added together, there were 12 baskets full of leftovers.

I don’t know if this is really what happened. Maybe the miraculous meal happened because everyone shared out of what they had, and the miracle was really in turning people from being selfish to selfless. Or maybe the more traditional understanding is true – the miracle happened because Jesus multiplied the food.

What I do know is that God chose to use the disciples to carry out this miracle. We can’t just wait for Jesus to do it all – like the disciples, we have to be willing to step out in faith when Jesus tells us to do so. We don’t know what will happen, but we know that Jesus will be with us when we take the risks he leads us to.

When we recognize the gifts that God has given us, we share those gifts with others. So like the disciples sharing bread with crowd of thousands, we realize that God has given us blessings in our lives – our family or community or belongings – and we want to share those blessings with others. In miraculous ways, Jesus will spread our gifts so that they continue to multiply the more we share them with others.

That’s what happened in the miracle of the feeding of the 5000.

And that’s what happens in our world, in our communities, when we follow the example that the disciples give to us today.

And God will bless our efforts and spread the love to more people than we could ever imagine.

Thanks be to God. Amen.