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© Rev. Diane Kay
Martin
Trinity UCC, La Crosse, WI
July 31, 2005
Texts: Isaiah 55.1-5
Matthew
14.13-21
Enough to Go Around
When a person sits at home recovering from
surgery, as I did much of this week, she has lots of time to think. Lots of time
to watch TV and think.
My TV watching took
me often to CNN, where I caught up on some of the things that are happening in
the world. I saw the announcement, on Thursday, that the Irish Republican
Army—the IRA—would no longer use violent means in its efforts to pull Northern
Ireland from British control. They would use diplomatic means, instead.
This took me back
to the mid-1980s when I traveled to Belfast and saw the barbed-wire fences
lacing the tops of brick walls and the skeletons of burned-out cars, left in
place as a monument to the struggles—“the troubles”—that have torn Northern
Ireland apart for centuries. I asked my Irish friends, when I was there, what it
was all about. They spoke of Protestants and Catholics and Sinn Féin and Gerry
Adams and the Republican Army and various car-bombings and house-burnings. They
spoke of the tragedy and heartache in their own lives.
But before all of
this was something called the Potato Famine. It happened in 1845-1848, just 20
years before this congregation was founded. Now, we love our German Potato
Pancakes here at Trinity, but we don’t depend on potatoes for survival, as the
Irish people did in the 1800s. It seems that, when the Irish potato crop was
destroyed by famine three years in a row, the English settlers in Ireland who
grew crops there refused to share their food with the Irish. On top of that, the
British government, fearing the Irish people would buy guns and revolt, refused
to send money to the starving Irish population. One and a half million people
died in the Potato Famine, and a gaping hole was left in the fragile trust that
had developed between the Irish natives and their English colonizers.
My TV watching also
took me to Africa. Two countries, Zimbabwe and Niger, are in the news. It seems
that, 40 years ago, Zimbabwe was a fairly wealthy country, and its neighbor,
Botswana, was poor. Somehow the tables were turned, though, and now, rich
Botswana has erected electric fences to keep out its neighbors from Zimbabwe,
down on their luck, who try to cross the border just to find work. Not only
that, but President Robert Mugabe has started a campaign of demolition and
displacement in the inner cities of Zimbabwe, which he calls “driving out the
rubbish.” He’s plowing down the homes in the slum sections and the shantytowns
of the cities and forcing the inhabitants out. They have no place to go, so they
walk to the country, starving, sick, and hopeless. The average life span of
these people is 33 years. Eighty percent of them are HIV-positive. A spokesman
for Mugabe’s government said, “Sometimes you have to cut off the leg to save the
foot.” And Botswana is building electric fences to keep her neighbors out.
Niger is another
story. The U.N. has declared Niger to be the second-least developed country in
the world. Famine has hit Niger, too, as it hit Ireland in the Potato Famine and
Zimbabwe’s poor in recent years. The U.N. saw this coming: drought and
locusts—plagues that remind us of the Israelite people and Moses and Pharaoh.
The U.N. pleaded with world leaders last October to help Niger. But the world
didn’t respond, and now 2 ˝ million lives are at risk. Hundreds die each day,
and help just trickles in. U.N. officials say, “We’re at the 11th
hour, and it just isn’t enough.”
It just isn’t
enough.
And then, well, it
was time to start thinking about my sermon. I turned to today’s Scriptures. I
found, in Isaiah, “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you
who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and
without cost.” And in Matthew, “They all ate and were satisfied, and the
disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. The
number of those who ate was about five thousand men, besides women and
children.”
And I thought, it
is enough! The U.N. official said, “It just isn’t enough,” but there
is enough to go around. There is enough! Jesus proved it. He changed
five loaves and two fishes into enough food to feed 5,000 men plus their
women and children—a crowd of maybe 35,000 people in one day! With 12 baskets
left over! See? It is enough!
But how do we get
there? How do we move from an attitude of scarcity—limited supply—the pie is
only just so big and no bigger, so we have to carefully guard our slice—to the
attitude of abundance—unlimited, infinite supply, where the pie is as big as it
needs to be to feed all of those people and still have something left over?
How do we get there from here?
And I looked up the
other places where this story appears in the New Testament. Did you know it’s
the only miracle story that appears in all four of the Gospels? Check it
out. Not only that, but it appears in two of the Gospels twice—the
second time as the feeding of the four thousand, where there were
seven loaves of bread, and seven baskets left over. So the question
doesn’t seem to be, did Jesus really do this—did he really feed all those people
that day—but just exactly what were the numbers? Just exactly how many people
were there? How many loaves of bread did they start with, and how many were left
over? But nobody questions that Jesus did this miracle!
So just exactly what did Jesus do?
The Bible
says, “Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he
gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the disciples, and the
disciples gave them to the people. And they all ate and were satisfied, and the
disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over.”
“He gave God thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave
them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people. And they all
ate and were satisfied.”
“He gave God thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave
them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people. And they all
ate and were satisfied.”
And I was stuck there, because every Communion
Sunday, we re-enact a similar event. Jesus looks up to heaven—at the Last
Supper—and he gives God thanks, and he breaks the bread and he pours the wine
and he gives them to the disciples.
And on the first Sunday of every month, we
receive Communion, and we go away, knowing that we are loved by God and we are
forgiven for everything we’ve ever done wrong and everything we will ever repent
of, and … that’s it.
The last part is missing. It must
be missing, or U.N. officials wouldn’t have to say, “We’re at the 11th
hour, and it just isn’t enough.”
That last part—the part about “and the
disciples gave them to the people. And they all ate and were satisfied”
is missing! Jesus has blessed the bread and the
fish, the bread and the wine. It is enough, now, to feed the multitudes—to feed
them physically, and spiritually, and emotionally; as individuals, as families,
as nations—but the last part is missing! The part where the disciples turn and
give the blessing to the people, and they all eat and are satisfied, is missing!
It must be missing, or we wouldn’t be saying, “It isn’t enough.”
And I stopped there, and I pictured a world
where there is enough to go around, and it does
go around. I pictured a world where the
barbed-wire fences and electric fences that are built to keep people out are
torn down, and where the people say, “Come in! Come in! There’s plenty to go
around! Here! Take this! I know it doesn’t look like much, but Jesus has blessed
it, so we can’t imagine how far it will go!”
I pictured a world where the wine of trust was
shared among people who had shared nothing for decades except grudges. I
pictured a world where peace flowed like a river, filling in all the
drought-ridden and locust-eaten places we have created since time began. I
pictured a world where the disciples turned to the people, and gave the
blessings of God to the ones they had overlooked before.
Maybe it was the drugs
J, but
I saw the disciples—all of us—finding
new ways to turn to the people with our full baskets of broken bread and meeting
their needs, all kinds of needs, from care and companionship to food and
friendship to a advocacy and social activism. Some of the people we turned to
were—well, right next door—and some of them were on the other side of the world,
because the bread has already been blessed, and there’s enough to go
around!
And I couldn’t bear to turn on my TV again, for
in the world I had imagined—this Kingdom of God on earth, this here-and-now
Kingdom of God that Jesus talked about in his parables and in his preaching—God
was smiling, and when God is smiling, well, the whole world smiles along. Amen.
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