Filled

Sunday, July 31st, 2005
Pentecost +11
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Matthew 14:13-21

13 Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. 14When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. 15When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.’ 16Jesus said to them, ‘They need not go away; you give them something to eat.’ 17They replied, ‘We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.’ 18And he said, ‘Bring them here to me.’ 19Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. 20And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. 21And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.

You may remember my sharing with you about my Cousin Eric’s sudden death in 1991 a couple of years ago. I remember lying on the couch at my friends’ house, reeling from the news, trying to imagine what my Aunt, Uncle, and other cousins were going through. I remember wondering what it would feel like if it were ME getting word that MY younger brother had died. Eric had developed ulcerative colitis over the previous two years or so, and while we knew it was serious, we did not realize just HOW serious. Jimmy, Becky, and I were living in Louisville at the time, Eric and Aunt Lala and Unlce Ray were living just outside Nashville, and though we saw them on occasion, we had not seen them in several months at that point.

The Elliotts, Aunt Lala, Uncle Ray, and their kids, were in many ways the family we had grown closest to over the years. At one time or another, three if not four of us Park children had lived with Aunt Lala on a temporary or even not-so-temporary basis. It was with them that I stayed after graduating from college, for the few weeks between that and the time I flew to Richmond to enter Journeyman training in 1985 before heading off to Spain.

Christmases during college were here and there each year, but whenever we wound up at the Elliotts’, at least for me, there was more a sense of home there than in most other places, as much as I loved the rest of my extended family.

So I can only imagine what it must have been like for Jesus to hear of his cousin John’s not just death, but murder. We only get a brief glimpse of the grieving Jesus in the beginning verse of today’s passage: 13 Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. I know when I heard of my cousin’s death, I mostly wanted to be with family, to cry with my brother, to hug my aunt. But since I was away from them all, I just lay stunned on the couch. Eloise, my friend whom I happened to be visiting with when the call came in, was there, and VERY present, but I needed to be alone with my thoughts and memories for at least a while, to begin the process of adjusting to what it was going to be like from then on out without Eric around.

I suspect that might have been what Jesus had in mind, when he “withdrew to a deserted place by himself.” The problem is he did not get a lot of time to BE by himself when he got there.

This was not long after the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, and he was the hottest thing going in prophetic voices in first century Palestine. Word was getting out about the way he taught, the way he spoke, the way he was turning the establishment on its head (always a good thing if you are working from outside the beltway, or outside the temple, as it were), and people were flocking to see him. When people flock, they leave precious little time to ones’ self. There’s a chance that the folks who followed Jesus to the deserted place hadn’t heard about John’s death, but it seems unlikely, in view of the fact that John was, in his own right, a fairly popular prophet, even though he spent his time ‘crying out in the wilderness’. The likelier scenario is that they heard, they knew of the connection, and they wanted to see how Jesus was going to respond.

What they got was Jesus being more concerned for their welfare than for his own. To those of us who have grown to know Jesus over time, it is not surprising in the least to hear that. After all, we know the end of the story. We know that this sacrifice, though significant, deserves no more than the passing mention at the beginning of the passage, and does not need revisiting in later verses. It pales in comparison to the greater sacrifice Jesus made at the end of his earthly ministry and the culmination of his time here on earth among us – FOR us.

The belief that Jesus performed miracles is a basic tenet of most of our faiths. Jesus performed two types of miracles: healing miracles and nature miracles. The first are miracles in which he healed a person of an illness, or raised them from the dead, or cast out a demon or a legion of demons. The second are those miracles that affected not so much PEOPLE directly as they did some aspect of nature. A sudden storm on the Sea of Galilee, a fig tree that did not have any fruit on it, or in this case, we have a huge crowd of people with no food to eat. The aspect of nature is a single meal brought to him that consisted of five loaves of bread and two fish, over which Jesus performed the acts of taking, blessing, breaking, and giving … and giving … and giving. And the miracle of the feeding of five thousand men, and probably as many as ten to fifteen thousand women and children in addition TO those men, took place.

To put it mildly, this is a significant event, in not only the ministry of Jesus, but it BECAME a signal event in the life of the early church. It is the only miracle that appears in all four gospels (Mark 6, Luke 9, and John 6). There are variations, of course, in the retelling of the story, but the central story remains. Jesus took what was a clearly inadequate meal and turned it into something that satisfied thousand of people.

There is the view that the miracle was actually one where the generosity displayed by the little boy prompted people to pull out their own lunches and share it with those who had less or no food of their own. I will allow that to be a possibility, but a distant one at best. The fact that each gospel tells the story essentially in the same way lends credence to the fact that how we read it is how it happened. We are a people of faith. We believe in miracles, whether they can be explained by highly unlikely natural phenomena or not, we believe in a God of miracles, a God who led people out of Egypt, across the sea, through the desert, against seemingly unbeatable enemies, and against pretty much all odds, established the people of Israel as the people of God.

There’s a continuity to understanding God through the miracles that keeps things together for us. Miracles broaden the picture of what might be. Of what God can do. We read of the miracle on the Sea of Galilee and hope is born in us that God will calm our inner storms and struggles. We read about the fig tree and Hope that God will treat our weakness and character flaws in a similar way, or that we will at least be able to overcome them and move on in a some way like that. We read of the healing of the sick, and find hope in the promise that we will one day be free of this earthly shell.

Here’s a thought: Jesus performed the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand in direct response to the news of his cousin’s death. In his grieving, in his sorrow for the loss of his beloved brother, his response was not anger at Herod, but compassion for the people who were in front of him. Note the almost passing comment in verse 14 – he had compassion on them and cured the sick.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

Christ’s response to death is to affirm life. Christ’s response to the injustice of the arbitrary taking of an innocent life is to better the lives of those who are afflicted – with illness, with disease, with hunger. The folks who were standing in front of him were there because they’d heard about John’s death and they wanted to see what Christ would do.

Jerusalem finds itself in a similar place. We are confronted by a world that is watching – our local community—the people we run into each and every day; our neighbors across the street or next door, folks we run into at the ball field, or at Wal-Mart, and though it may be an unspoken question, it is nonetheless a question that is present: What are you, Jerusalem, going to do in the face of … what? How many things can we list here? Neglected children, left on the side of the road. The sudden death of Boy Scout leaders while pitching a tent. Drug trafficking, not in some far off South American country, but right down the road here.

Are we filled? Are we truly filled with the spirit of God to the point that we can focus on THEIR needs, and not our own? Can we trust God in that way? We say, and read, and sing about God taking care of us, but does the way we live our lives continue that lesson? Does it speak of a seemingly reckless reliance on the grace and bounty of God to do as God promised, or are we saying one thing with our mouths and another with our lives and wallets?

Can people look at Jerusalem and say that we are living as Christ taught? If we were to ask the question, can we live with the answer?

My hope is that yes. My sense is that, if asked, most people would say that yes, MOST of the time, we are, after all, fallible. We are not yet perfected. My suggestion is that we venture into the question, and respond to the answer we receive as Christ did.

Let’s pray.