Proper 13 (A) + Wanton abundance + 8.3.14

Melissa Campbell-Langdell+

All Santos, Oxnard

(Genesis 32:22–31; Ps. 17:1–7, 16; Romans 9:1–5; Matthew 14:13-21)

“There is no such thing as a free lunch.” This is what was running through my head as I attended an information session on timeshares this past week that promised as a free gift a short vacation trip. And of course, there was a charade of transparency as they tried to convince us again and again that we needed this time share, sending us twice after we declined the offer to more people who proceeded to drop the price, offer us not free memberships, and then after not 90 minutes but 2 and a half exhausting hours, we were ushered out the door with some dubious-looking but apparently genuine certificates. I was reminded that, even as the business world wants to dress itself up in approachability and generosity, it is still all about getting every cent out of you that it can. This is not to say that all businesses are this way, but it is just human nature. We rely on our own resources and tend to feel we must only strive to get more and more for ourselves and our families.
By contrast, Jesus this week does indeed seem to provide the people with a free lunch, or dinner as the case may be. Speaking of his foray into bread baking, Michael Pollan says: “I hadn’t done much, after all, except mix together some flour, water, and a little sourdough starter, and then babied it for several hours. And yet—here was this substantial thing that hadn’t existed before, this fragrant risen form. I might as well have pulled a rabbit out of a hat, and indeed my family, whose expectations for this latest project of mine were modest, reacted as if I had. Something for nothing: You can see why the prescientific mind (and the skeptics in Jesus’ audience) might have been impressed.”[1]

But to me this isn’t just impressive, what Jesus did, to us, science or not. Jesus does seem to create something from literally nothing, which makes sense as he is a part of a very creative God-head. So, speaking of God, we are reminded in this amazing passage from Genesis that Jacob is a symbol of all Israel, and just as Jacob wrestled with God and humans, so do all followers of the Judeo-Christian tradition wrestle with God. We strive to understand God, we fight to follow Jesus, and sometimes we rail at God when things feel unfair. I love this image of us as those who wrestle with God. It shows that we are called into an intense relationship with our creator. We are called to be face-to-face, skin-to-skin, and to bring all our strength to bear in grappling with God’s nature. We Jesus-followers wrestle with God and man every day in striving to follow Christ. As we do this, we bring everything to bear in our striving. You don’t sense that Jacob held any of his strength back. We, too, must entrust every aspect of ourselves to God.

So, back to the gospel, here the disciples are just trying to look out for their fellow men and women and do the most practical thing—to allow the people to leave in order to care for their own needs. But what does Jesus say? “You feed them.” Imagining this moment, I am struck by how crazy it must have sounded. We have five loaves and two fish. That might hold a tiny fraction of this crowd, but there’s no way we can feed everyone. And they were right. Relying on their own resources, they wouldn’t get far beyond serving their own needs and perhaps those of a couple of others. Even if they were to do that, it wouldn’t qualify as a feast, exactly. Instead, Jesus says, “Bring them here to me.” And he blessed the food, and broke it. And there wasn’t just enough for everyone, there was abundance, baskets of the stuff left over.

Now, you could get caught up in the mechanics of how all this occurred. But that’s not my focus today. Today what I hear in this passage is how, just like as Judeo-Christian believers we must wrestle with God, bring our whole selves to bear in our relationship with God, we must also be willing not only to listen to what Jesus would have us do: “You feed them.” But we must also be willing to take what resources we do have and present them to Jesus. Because it is only in entrusting all that we have into God’s hands that we can allow what we have to be blessed. And yes, it will be shared, just as your tithe or your contribution to the food pantry is shared. But it will also, oddly, come back to you, often in the form of wanton abundance.

Because each and every one of us has some small resources of time, talent and treasure. Some little fish and loaves that we can use to care for ourselves and for our own families. If we rely only on our own strength, we may make do, but chances are we will always feel we are scrambling, no matter how prosperous we become, by whatever index we measure prosperity.

But when we place everything we have and hope to have in God’s hands; when we place all our eggs in God’s basket, we risk handing what little we have to God and not having it returned to us. And somehow in this risk, we allow God to bless and to multiply it. This is the only way we can create abundance for us and for everyone else.
Is that a scary proposition? Sure. Can it be hard to hear how Jesus is asking us to turn this over, since we do not have a physical Jesus here and now? Of course. We must be vigilant for God’s guidance as to how we can continue to place our lives in God’s hands.

And yet, we have a promise. Your heavenly Father knows your needs.

Trust God, and see what abundance unfolds.

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[1] Michael Pollan, Cooked (NY: Penguin, 2013), 234.