2 Kings 4:42-44 Psalm 145: 10-18
Ephesians 3: 14-21 John 6: 1-21
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
Today’s readings begin seven weeks….seven weeks, of lectionary readings that focus around bread and hospitality and in today’s reading from 2 Kings and from John…miracles. For some, both in the Scriptures today and in our lives together at in this place, food sufficient for the day is, in itself, a miracle. Fellowship to share it with is an added blessing. Gracious hospitality, then becomes the miracle.
To witness this, you only need to gather with us at breakfast on Sundays. For some of us, we have rushed out the door without a chance to take sufficient sustenance for our bodies. For others, arriving at this place at 9am is a piece of a carefully executed puzzle that involves determining just how one will find food for that particular day. And for others, what we eat here is not as important as the way our lonely spirits are fed by the warm conversation and fellowship among our sisters and brothers in Christ.
The miracle of food also happens every day at the lunch window here at Luther Memorial. It would be impossible to adequately describe the grateful responses we most often receive for the offering of a sack lunch, crackers and tuna, our version of a bit of bread and some fish.
Your gifts….of food, of money, of time, make these ministries possible. The way you steward what God has given to you to become enough to share and feed others, helps to feed hungry stomachs and hearts.
A few weeks ago, on a Saturday evening, I drove up to the church to see a man getting water from the spigot in front. He had a gallon jug, which he carried to his van, parked along 132nd. Dirty…shirtless….shoeless….his eyes betrayed the uncertainty and fear he must have felt. And I admit to you that my first response, as he walked so closely to our building, was to wonder what he was up to. Was he trying to get into the building? Was he trampling on the garden? What was he doing? But of course, he was only getting water and taking it to his van.
As I left the church that evening I took along some of your sack lunches and approached his van. I don’t know what protocol one uses in these cases and I didn’t know what I would find, but when I knocked on the driver’s side door, which seemed to me to be the closest thing to a front door, his two dogs barked a greeting and he hesitantly appeared there. “Here is food” I offered “from our church.” And tears spilled down his face as he expressed his gratitude. For in your generosity….because you continue to share with such grace….many others receive living water and the bread of life.
Both the reading from John and the reading from 2 Kings tell of multitudes being fed on very little food. Almost no one believes that the food miraculously multiplied. There are lots of other theories. One of those is that the people who had gathered there that day actually had brought enough food to feed everyone, but had hidden it away or kept it back, making sure that they had enough. Only when they brought out what they had and placed it together was there enough for everyone and more.
Of course, we will not ever know exactly how the food became plenteous enough to feed everyone; the point, after all, is not how, but that it did. And that Jesus was able to work through the hands of people who were simply there, albeit a bit uncertain, to accomplish this feast.
What happens next though, in the Gospel reading, after everyone has eaten, is that the leftovers are gathered up. The fragments of the feast are placed into baskets and they fill twelve…twelve….baskets. Numbers being what they are in Scripture, it is not insignificant that this was the number of baskets that were filled. One for each disciple, one for each tribe. Twelve.
It is after this fragment gathering that the people begin to understand the significance of Jesus’ presence among them.
The image of the fragments in the baskets has stayed with me this week. Partly because, as I have come and gone from this place, I have had the privilege of passing Edith’s wonderful artistic telling of this story. The fragments of the fish and the loaves, there in the basket, placed there at Jesus’ command….what does it mean for us, I have wondered?
What does it mean to us that fragments can be gathered in and placed before Jesus and become holy?
Can we trust the fragments of our lives to the One who created us and calls us to share in the feast?
I think of the many ways our lives can fragment. They can fragment in big, unthinkable ways. Ways that forever define our lives and categorize them into before and after. Before the accident. After the diagnosis. Before the baby. After the children were grown. And our lives fragment in other ways, with the people and relationships that come and go, that change and remain the same.
Certainly those who lost loved ones last week in that theatre in Aurora, or those whose friends and family were killed on 9/11…certainly their lives are fragmented.
I think of the family of 9 year old Rachel Beckwith, who was killed in a car accident in Bellevue last year and how their lives fragmented in an instant.
And I think of the stories I hear every day…stories from those who come to the window for a lunch or to breakfast. Stories of how lives, that seemed to somehow be holding together, came apart.
The gathering in of the fragments of bread and fish is no more remarkable than the gathering in of the fragments of our lives. Because what Christ sees there is not something left over. But something that is a foretaste of a great feast that is to come. Christ carefully gathers in each part of us…even those that to us seem broken, left-over, beyond use, and he stubbornly refuses to let them go. With great care and with great knowing, they are gathered and placed into the vessel that holds them….this cup….this plate….and they become the body of Christ.
When you came into worship this morning you were offered a fragment of paper. What many would consider a scrap. My invitation is for us to write upon that paper that fragmented place in our lives that we have all but given up on. That place or relationship or situation that is the fragment considered beyond redeeming. And as you come forward for communion this morning, I invite you to place that paper in this bowl, that is here to receive our fragments. Because it is here at this table, where what is broken will be made whole. It is here, in the broken body of Christ, that we are made whole.
We are going to rest in some silence as we write these fragments onto the scraps of paper.
After some time of silence
Thanks be to God. Amen.
0 Comments