The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes

15 September 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

This is the time of year when Jews celebrate their highest holy day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. “Atonement” is, I think, the only English word that became a theological concept, and its meaning is it’s spelling: At-one-ment. It is the time Jews re-establish their relationship with God by confessing their sins.

It is customary for Jews to wear white on this day, symbolizing purity and calling to mind the promise that our sins can be forgiven. The realization that our sins can be forgiven without an intermediary would be enough all by itself to make this a High Holy Day. In respect and honor of this tradition, I would like to lead us in a prayer of atonement:

We confess we have not been perfect. We have missed the mark. We have done things we should not have done. Some selfish things, hurtful things, thoughtless actions and words, sins of commission and sins of omission.

We have failed in the past; we will fail in the future. Yet even knowing we are not going to be perfect, we are determined once more to aspire to be authentic and whole.

Before our God, before the spirit of life and the habit of truth, let us dare to dream again.

We dream of living out of our highest possibilities rather than our lower compromises. And we would again make promises before all that is holy to us, by whatever name we call it forth.

We promise in the year ahead to speak the truth in love rather than living in easier half-truths.

We vow to try our best to live out of compassion rather than indifference, to grow beyond our habitual blindnesses by seeking fuller understanding.

We say in the face of all that is sacred and makes a claim upon our hearts that we will always try to seek the counsel of the angels of our better nature, in whatever forms they come to us.

We vow to remember that our world can not be made whole without our participation in it, and we will participate.

We desire to be inspired by the hope of a more loving world, a more just world, what some have called the kingdom of God. We commit ourselves to this vision, and ask those who love us to help us remember our commitment.

Together we can be and do more than alone, and we commit ourselves, once again, to being together, as we resume the sacred work of making our lives more authentic and our world more whole.

Let these wishes of our hearts become the mission of our lives. We are forgiven the sins of our past, so that we may enter fully into the dreams for our future, and the future of our world. Let us help one another remember, and let us help one another. Amen.

SERMON: The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes

I can’t think about preaching on Bible stories without remembering my friend Todd. Todd was a Christian minister, my closest friend. He was a liberal minister in the Disciples of Christ, a denomination that covers the whole spectrum from fundamentalism to liberalism, and it really made him crazy. Todd loved stories too, but it seemed that every time he used one, half the people didn’t know it and the other half didn’t understand it. Todd suddenly died of a heart attack almost five years ago at the age of 46, and I still miss him and think of him, especially when I preach on a Bible story.

It was a dozen years ago when Todd called me as soon as I got home from church. He was so frustrated he was near exploding, and wanted me to meet him for lunch so he could vent.

He had preached that morning on the story of the Prodigal Son. He’d worked hard on the sermon and thought he had done a good job on it. Afterwards, in the line outside the sanctuary, a woman came up to him. She had been a member of that church for two dozen years and had taught adult Sunday school a few times. She shook his hand and said, “that was a really nice story. Did you write it?” Todd did a scene like the comedian Lewis Black, screaming “It’s the story of the Prodigal Son! How can she not know the story of the Prodigal Son! You can’t come to church for twenty-five years and not know the story of the Prodigal Son! It just isn’t possible!”

A lot of Unitarians don’t know much about the Bible, but the truth is that most Christians don’t know it well either, and don’t understand its stories. It’s a common complaint from Christian ministers: in order to preach on a once-famous story from the Bible, they have to tell the story, and often explain it as well, because many people will be hearing it for the first time.

This problem with stories isn’t new. When you read the stories Jesus told, you realize that most of his disciples didn’t understand them either. One of the most common themes in the Christian scriptures is Jesus telling a symbolic or metaphorical story and his disciples hearing it only literally. Nearly the entire gospel of John is composed of these examples. The disciples were literalists, he was telling them parables and metaphors, and they didn’t get it.

So it’s risky, telling Bible stories.

Last week I played with the story of Adam and Eve getting thrown out of Eden, and paired it with a Turkish folktale to offer a new way of looking at the idea of justice. This week I want to get into another story from the Bible, the story of the miracle of the loaves and fishes. You probably all know the basic story. Jesus wanted to feed all these people who had formed a kind of loose congregation around him. He had seven loaves of bread and a few fish, and his disciples didn’t see how they could feed four or five thousand people. But they began feeding them, and the loaves and fishes multiplied until everyone was fed and there was lots left over.

I don’t want to know how many people think the story of the loaves and fishes is a story about an amazing magic trick where Jesus the Magician created a few thousand fish out of thin air. I can just hear my friend Todd going berserk over it. But Jesus wasn’t a magician; he was a teacher. What a shame if we miss the point of these great stories because we think of them as mere magic tricks.

They’re never about that. Jesus was not the first century equivalent of David Copperfield. Religious miracles aren’t magic tricks. They’re always participatory. You can only experience the real magic from inside of them, not outside of them. You have to get inside the stories, and let the stories get inside of you, just as you have to do with any other good story.

This story about the loaves and fishes wasn’t an eyewitness account. It was written many decades after Jesus died. He was hardly known at all during his life, and never gathered large crowds, certainly nothing like hundreds or thousands of people.

If you take courses in the Bible, you’ll most likely learn that the story is understood as a story not about Jesus but about the church. It’s found in the gospel of Matthew, the “church gospel.” It’s a story saying the way a few words of wisdom, a few bits of spiritual nourishment, can feed thousands is because the church multiplies the loaves and fishes through the participation of its members.

Both with real food and with spiritual food, a church is a gathering of people who spread the nourishment to others. Over three hundred of you experienced some of this here last night, at that lovely church party where we fed hundreds of people. The same happens with spiritual food. Here’s a church with one minister and one ministerial intern, yet there are more than a half dozen adult classes, covenant groups, Tai Chi classes, men’s breakfasts, a whole host of offerings, plus e-mail chats and all sorts of discussions here and with your family and friends during the week.

Now just describing it that way, it doesn’t feel very miraculous; it just feels like potlucks and various kinds of classes. But there is something else going on, and I want to see if I can show you what it is in these few minutes we have together.

Jesus died around the year 30. The gospel of Matthew, where these stories are found, was written more than fifty years later. What had happened during that half-century was that as the church began to grow, people came to hear its messages and they felt fed. They felt a kind of hole inside of them being filled, and it was a feeling they’d never had before. They found a community of people who were also asking questions about who they were, who they were meant to be, and how they were supposed to live. They felt their lives were being taken more seriously, and at a more significant and personal level, than ever before. And as they got fed and filled up, they wanted to feed others with the overflow.

And so they did. History says the early church had common meals like we had last night, that they fed the hungry and cared for the poor, both the economically poor and the poor of spirit, just as we try to do. In the version of Christianity that “won,” Paul’s sect, communion is a magical act involving eating the body and blood of a savior. But in most of the Christian communities even by the end of the first century, it wasn’t about that at all. The Christian communion was simply a common meal, much like what today we call a potluck. Early Christian documents (The Didache) never mention any association with the body or blood of a savior.

The miracle of the loaves and fishes was that the people who had been fed brought their own loaves and fishes to feed others, until the food that had first fed a few people began to feed a few thousand people. What does this mean in simple, down-to-earth ways?

I’ve heard some of our people here in their 20’s and 30’s talk about the small groups, or covenant groups, they have joined here. Some have said that after a month or two in such a small group they find that they’ve learned how to know and feel close to a half-dozen other people on a personal level, and they’ve never once talked about how much money they made or what they did for a living. They find their lives being measured by a new currency, a kind of personal or spiritual currency, and it feeds them.

If it ends there, they’ve just been fed. But when they start a new covenant group, or invite friends to come join them so that others are being fed, something miraculous is happening.

Whether you’re new to the church or have been here awhile, I strongly urge you to think about trying these small groups out. You can call the office for more information on them. They are one way we are taking a simple idea and using it to help a growing number of people feel nourished, and feel known.

I think any good church, including this one, is trying to turn a few simple ideas into spiritual food to nourish their people. Simple ideas like the idea that we want to take our lives seriously. We want to examine how we’re living, what we’re serving with our lives, and whether it’s worth serving with our lives. What actions bring us satisfactions, how can we live so we’ll be glad we lived that way when we look back on it in years to come? And how can we work, alone and with others, to improve the quality of our lives and of our world?

Those are the simple questions being asked by every church worth its salt. Simple questions, but the pursuit of them can feed us, and can make us want to help feed others too. That’s the miracle of the loaves and fishes.

I think of that passage in the gospel of John where Jesus tells his disciples “I have food of which you do not know,” and they don’t get it. They’re thinking hamburgers; he’s thinking soul food. It’s the deeper hunger that religious teachers are concerned with. Once a church has been formed, people always seem to want to help feed hungry people with both kinds of food: real food for food pantries, freeze nights for homeless people, and so on, but also spiritual nourishment, soul food.

That’s what this loaves and fishes business is about, but there’s more to it, too.

Did you even wonder, when you read or heard this story, what it might have felt like to Jesus, being able to feed others with his words?

Don’t get sidetracked because the story is about Jesus. Don’t start thinking “Oh, but he was the Son of God! That couldn’t have anything to do with me!” This isn’t about genetics; it’s about potential, and about transformation.

Consecration

There’s another concept from early in the history of Christianity that helps here. It was the early church’s notion of “consecration.” People brought their ordinary tools of work to the church. Carpenters could bring their hammer; women might bring rolling pins or baking pots. They brought them to have the church consecrate them, and they dedicated those objects to serving something bigger than themselves, then they took them home and built houses or baked bread, but with a huge difference. For now they were doing these ordinary things “for the greater glory of God,” and that changed everything. The money they gave for the church’s work was consecrated too, devoted to a higher purpose. Money that would have gone to buy bricks or flour now went, they believed, to making ‘s oul food” for the spiritual nourishment of others.

It’s like the story of King Midas, in reverse. King Midas had the power to turn everything, including people, into gold, and it drove him to despair. Consecration is about taking money, time, energy and care, and turning them into things that give life to others.

Spend a few minutes on this with me. When we work for something bigger than ourselves, when we can feed others, the time, money and energy we spend doing it blesses both them and us. That’s the secret of the loaves and fishes. The act of giving gives more to those who give than it does to those who receive. The saying “it is more blessed to give than to receive” isn’t just pap from Hallmark cards, it’s a deep truth of life.

That’s where the social witness of people of faith has come from – soup kitchens, homeless shelters, hands-on housing, food banks and clothing drives. Your clothes keep someone else warm. Your food fills the stomach of a person who was hungrier than you. Your money makes possible things that would have been impossible without it.

And because of this, the time and money you spend on things that feed others, both their bodies and their spirits, that time and money are transformed, consecrated. And so are you.

I can prove this to you from your own lives. If you eat three meals a day, you’ve had almost 1100 meals in the past year. How many of them do you remember? That’s a lot of time, a lot of your life spent eating; how many of the meals do you remember?

And of those you do remember, isn’t it because something else about the meal made it memorable? Someone’s birthday, a conversation over dinner where another person’s life opened to you, or you felt known, a meal where the conversation got so real there were tears, or deep laughter. And you knew you would never forget this moment because it was magical.

Suddenly, it had been defined as partaking of higher things, nobler things, more important things. It was consecrated and, for that moment, so were you. You went expecting a steak and instead found that food that you didn’t know of and didn’t expect. Food for the spirit. Nourishment for your soul. Ordinary time transformed into extraordinary time, mealtime become miracletime.

And then, during the past year, have you ever helped feed others, people you didn’t know? Fixed dinner or breakfast at one of the Freeze Nights here, where we offer food and shelter to about fifty at a time of Austin’s eight thousand or more homeless people? If you did, you remember those times. Among the 1100 meals of the past year, those are some you remember, because your time and those moments of your life were transformed and transfigured by being consecrated to the service of others, the service of something larger than you, outside your personal world.

When we consecrate our time and money to the service of high ideals and people in need, we experience the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the miracle of having the very quality of time change, the miracle of making those donations and those actions serve something bigger makes us bigger too.

I can only go so far on this topic, then sooner or later many of you may feel that I’m speaking from a world that’s different from the one you spend your days in. We live so alone today, we have taken individualism to such an extreme, we hardly know how to define ourselves as parts of something larger any more.

The book Bowling Alone that came out a few years ago talked about this, about the fact that there are more bowlers today, but fewer bowling leagues, because everybody’s bowling alone. If you grew up this way, it may simply sound strange or foreign to hear someone talk about consecrating your time or money by making them serve values and ideals you cherish, or provide services that help make positive differences in the larger world around you. We need to learn or relearn how to see ourselves as parts of something larger than ourselves, and a church is the safest place to do it.

Maybe even the idea of joining or supporting a church is a new idea that feels odd. If it is but you know it’s time to start, then start where it’s comfortable. There are people in this church who regularly pledge ten percent of their pay, ten percent of their gross pay before taxes. I envy and admire them, but I’m not one of them. That still feels too hard for me.

I pledge just half that, five percent of my salary and housing, and for now that feels right to me. I know some of you give a higher percentage, and I respect you for it. I’m not trying to seem holier than you, I’m just trying to be honest here, this is a place where we need to be able to be honest about everything. If you’re just starting and this still feels new, start at a percentage that feels right. Start out at just two percent if you like, just two cents on every dollar that you decide will go to support a church that is trying to feed people with the kinds of values and ideals that you honor and want to support. Then as it feels right, you can raise it a percent at a time, whether next year or next month.

But don’t look at it as just paying another bill. You’ll get more out of it if you look at it as a way of consecrating your gifts of money, time and talent to work toward offering soul food to others. That’s what we’re trying to do here.

The miracle of the loaves and fishes wasn’t what happened to those who ate the fish. They just got a meal. The miracle happened mostly to those who fed them. They learned that simple acts done in the service of high ideals consecrate and transform us. They really do, and the miracle can occur on any day.

The poet Denise Levertov wrote a wonderful short poem about such a day, which I’d like to share with you. But think of particular days when you have experienced this kind of transformation, consecration, as you listen to it, and you’ll be able to feel it more fully:

“Variation on a Theme by Rilke,”

by Denise Levertov

A certain day became a presence to me;

there it was, confronting me – a sky, air, light:

a being. And before it started to descend

from the height of noon, it leaned over

and struck my shoulder as if with

the flat of a sword, granting me

honor and a task. The day’s blow

rang out, metallic – or it was I, a bell awakened,

and what I heard was my whole self

saying and singing what it knew: I can.

What wonderful words: – “and what I heard was my whole self saying and singing what it knew: I can.” I can. And you can. And we can, and we can do it together.

Now I invite you to come forward and place your pledge card in this basket. If you are a visitor, I don’t want you to feel excluded. You can just bring your offering and put it in the basket with the pledge cards.

(Commitment ceremony follows.)

BENEDICTION:

From the beginnings of civilization, people have shared their resources to accomplish together what they could not do alone. Above all, they have set aside a portion of their money to be consecrated, dedicated to teaching and serving the values and actions that give life to themselves and others.

The multiplication of our gifts makes possible the multiplication of our efforts. As it has been throughout our history, so it is again here today. Together, we consecrate these gifts to our higher callings, and together we shall serve those higher callings.

And now for those who seek God, may your God go with you.

For those who embrace life, may life return your affection.

And for those who seek a better path, may that better path be found,

And the courage to take it:

Step, by step, by step.

Amen.