August 3, 2014 Scritpures: Isaiah 55:1-5 and Matthew 14: 13-31 Sermon: Feasting in God’s Kingdom by Rev. Charlotte Ellison Beloved of God, The theme of “feeding” figures prominently in the bible. Indeed, a great deal of human activity centers on getting our physical needs met--and always will. Food, like water, is an “Essential Need”, and is so named in countless committees and legislative initiatives when dealing with people who do not have what basic, physical life requires. I learned this in working with the homeless. It becomes much less abstract when you are face to face with a person who has no means of securing such basic things as a meal, or a drink of water on a hot day. In Detroit, we are seeing a new thing—the shut off of water access on an industrial scale, for people whose bills have grown very large, for many reasons. It is a manifestation of the economic chaos that city has been thrown into during our most recent downturn, but it is more: it is a debate about access to “Essential Needs” and whether or not an “Essential Need”, like water, is a human right. And this question arises amidst a growing trend to “privatize” everything, claim that things considered so vital as to be beyond denial, might actually be seen only as property and come to be held by a few overlords—the Nestle’s of the world, to be distributed only to those who can meet their price. Try to imagine a world where this Essential Need was so controlled as to make its access an uncertainty. Never mind Nestle’s controlling aquifers for their bottled water business; just go to Toledo this week where the algae bloom on lake Erie is throwing their whole metro water supply into grave doubt—and boiling doesn’t help, I gather; it only makes the toxins more ferocious. “Water Wars” is more than just an apocalyptic movie title, as we look into a future where clean, unsalinated, potable water is progressively more rare. Imagine being denied access to water. In Detroit, it is happening in an individualized way: in Gaza, it is happening to a whole territory, in the form of a siege—the old fashioned way to conquer a people and bring them to heel, into submission as the vanquished and enslaved. We cannot live without water. We cannot live without food. They are both “Essential Needs”. Well before Father Abraham’s covenant with the Lord, and in religions around the world, local cult gods were worshiped to elicit that most important gift: crops that grew when rain fell and sun shined, abundance that came when everything multiplied and filled the earth. Fertility cults existed to secure a bountiful harvest, recognizing that we cannot survive without these things and yet neither can we control whether or not we can produce them. At the center of life is the farmer, the one who brings forth that which nourishes everyone else. But standing beyond the farmer was always the giver or rain and calmer of storms . . . angry gods needing to be appeased with “sacrifices” so precious as to include one’s own children, in the expectation that by doing so, the gods would “give back” and bless with success and abundance. The very word “sacrifice” connotes a costly donation, a weighty appeasement. And who can blame them, living in their ignorance? One only needs to live through one serious draught, one blighted harvest, to understand how dependent they felt to the powers that held life or death for them, to be reminded of how dependent we all are to those things, despite our cleverness, our mastery, our extraordinary magnification of production that humans have concocted over the millennia. Food and water—drink—nourishment and hydration come just after “air” in our pantheon of necessities for all we hold dear. They are “essential” needs, indeed. So it is no wonder that both today’s Old Testament and New Testament passage link God with provision of that essential to life: food, bounty, unearned, unpaid for, bounty pouring forth from God’s largess. * * * For several weeks in a row, one lectionary passage or another has dealt with Jesus’ feeding crowds of people or amazing his followers (with the feeding of the five thousand, the feeding of the four thousand, the parable of the net so full of fish it almost tore open). Amongst other things, these send a clear message that the one who gives such good gifts is God alone. It is ALWAYS miraculous how the earth gives up her bounty and how the death of other things sustains and supports our own life. These remain powerful stories, although we puzzle over the miraculous provision described. They are “miracle stories”, after all, because they portray miracles—how can you feed a party of 8, let alone four or five thousand men (plus women and children!) on a picnic basket of a few measly loaves and fish?) And yet, God is miraculously providing, feeding, in impossible circumstances—as God did in sustaining his people, his community, wandering in the desert for forty years with manna that would appear each day but last for ONLY the day. If you tried to gather or hoard it the stuff would go bad and become like that forgotten carton of cottage cheese that got pushed to the back of the bottom shelf of my fridge now culturing the most fascinating mold garden of decomposing food stuff. God gave what they needed--everyday and no more, as if to teach them how dependent they truly were and how reliable he truly was--and is--and will be forever. Jesus is always demonstrating God’s faithfulness in providing “Essential Needs” by faith and reminding us that as “essential” as that is, as great a blessing we are provided by God’s “ordinary bounty”, there is something more we are offered. “Man does not live by bread alone” and there is “Living water “that satisfies, living water whose essence is so deeply satisfying that it makes the need for the ordinary stuff seem inconsequential. He said he had food the disciples did not know about or understand—to do the will of the Father. Again and again, God is associated with every good thing and, most centrally, that involves the very process of us taking in, each day, what we need. When we lack, by implication, it is because we are not depending upon God, no in alignment in some way. Our being so seriously out of whack goes all the way back to our foundation story—in the Garden of Eden, before sin changed everything and cursed us with the necessity to earn our living by the sweat of our brow. Still, it is God who provides and while one must work to eat, there is an abundance sufficient to take care of those who cannot meet their own needs—the orphan, the widow, the stranger in our midst who is blocked from participating in society and without a support circle. I find today’s Old Testament text deeply intriguing. Isaiah writes: Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David. See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you. The opening seems like nonsense—God is saying all will be provided, a banquet will be laid, even in the presence of thine enemies—water will be plentiful and food will be given without even money being exchanged, some demonstration of hospitality or grace, some mirroring of a deep value of God’s own self and a time when the world itself will behave in accordance with this value. Then it shifts and challenges the value of that which we focus on, and reminds us that physical survival, as is made possible with food, is still a lower order of importance in the life of human beings who were created with souls, with spiritual lives, Feeding the body is a hollow exercise if the deeper life is not nourished and thriving. The answer for this deeper hunger is to incline our ear and listen to God’s instructions for life—eternal, abundant, and take heed of God’s warnings about that which is counterfeit. And all of this is tied up with Israel’s call, Israel’s Essential Purpose and role: to live before the nations as a people who have a vivid, controlling relationship with the one true God; that they may live as a witness and lift up the great gracious nature of their God, their special friend, their covenant partner. It is THIS WITNESS that shall turn nations to God and cause them to turn and worship God and God shall glorify them even as they glorify him. I know some scriptures are harder to identify with than others, some “miraculous occurrences” are hard to swallow—they are, after all, miracles—events that are impossible in our normal experience. It is easy, I think, to “accept them” as portals or pathways to understanding but only by holding them lightly in the sense of not really believing them, unless experienced with our own eyes. We have all had a friend tell us an implausible story, perhaps a behavior on the part of a third party, that seems so completely out of sync with the person we know that the best we can do is basically say, “Look, I believe that YOU believe that this is so but I just am not there. “ Like doubting Thomas, unless I see it with my own eyes, I can’t quite go there with you. And I think the many, many passages that speak to God’s vision for an abundant community do not square with our experience of human nature. If food is free, some people will mooch. Unless people are compelled or constrained, the world will be an unspeakable mess—this is the reason I find Libertarianism unconvincing. My life experience has not persuaded me that everything will get done that needs to be done by cheery volunteers, happily doing things like public works that they so ferociously resented paying for, before establishing their free will utopia. Be that as it may, we are confronted by this persistent image of God insisting that life is to be abundant, that HE is the source of that abundance, that such a condition requires a just society that demonstrates the same largess that He does and that the people who call themselves by His name have a central role to play in that. There are many opportunities in our world today to bear witness to this truth: There are the aliens amongst us who are being denied Essential Needs, being turned back—even as children—as they flee untenable circumstances; there is the ongoing fiasco in Gaza where the nation formed out of a response of “Never Again” has moved closer and closer to behaving exactly like the oppressors who first persecuted them; there is massive poverty around the globe that is not the result of natural causes—not famines or draughts—but is purely human-made by corrupt and distorted practices that create distributive injustice. Pick a cause—any cause, and live into the call we have been given to be part of that abundance with our witness, part of the reconciliation by our action, part of God’s kingdom as those who, having been fed on the loaves and the fishes, return home to share the wondrous news that God’s kingdom is at hand. Hallelujah! What a banquet that is. What abundance is ours to share. Let us go forth to share this bounty with all we meet. Amen.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 23:50:47 +0000
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