July 26, 2009 Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 145; Ephesians 3:16-21; John 6:1-15
Last week at our Mission Lunch discussion we found five core issues that
this congregation feels passionate about and hopes to address in the coming year:
climate change; violence; hunger; health care; and spiritual renewal.
That’s all. Just those five little things.
It sounds ridiculous. Even Margaret Mead would have to agree—Margaret
Mead who said “Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can
change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” But for a little band
of people off in Vermont to think it can make a difference in these five
enormous, intractable issues? Absurd.
Absurd, and just like Christ. Because Jesus himself lived and worked
most of his life in places like Thetford, Vermont. And he, too, had only a small
group of committed people with him and enormous forces pitted against him as
he took on issues of justice and peace and spiritual renewal.
All the gospel writers seem to have loved the story we heard today of
Jesus feeding the huge crowd with next to nothing. Some of them loved it so
much that they included it twice in their little books. Maybe the reason John
loved it is the same reason the progressive evangelical leader, the Rev. Jim
Wallis, loves it. At General Synod last month I heard him say that what moves
him is the boy with the five barley loaves and few fish. Wallis says that the
important thing about that boy is that he gives Jesus something to work with.
That’s all Jesus needs. Just a little contribution from us, and he can work
miracles.
So if we have faith that there is a higher power in the universe that is on
the side of feeding the hungry and resolving injustice and creating on earth the
ideal we call God’s realm, if we have even the smallest amount of faith in the
cosmic power of God, then this church’s mission agenda does not look so absurd.
It looks like just the right thing to do.
Jesus is asking us with the all-knowing twinkle in his eye that he has in
John’s version, “Where are we going to buy bread for all these people to eat?
How are we going to stabilize an entire planet’s climate and change huge national
economies and transform the way billions of people live?”
Well, this is Christ we are talking about. Just give him something to work
with, and wait and see.
As Jim Wallis says, change happens when social movements push against
open doors. The doors of power can look monolithic and impenetrable, but when
the timing is right, a movement of people can push against them and see them
miraculously swing open. The Civil Rights movement did it. The Women’s
Rights Movement did it. The Gay Rights Movement is pushing such a door open
right now.
So as we do our small part in the year ahead,
* as we work with youth,
* as we sing at the bedside of the dying,
* as we check blood pressure at coffee hour,
* as we try to foster more participatory democracy,
* as we listen to speakers and discuss films and books,
* as we engage in local networking and direct action,
* as we make public statements and write letters to the editor,
* as we work on weatherization and local resource directories,
* as we help out the food shelves and community gardens,
* as we renew our spirits with nature walks and centering prayer and
creative worship services,
as we each do our own part—even if as small as a single barley loaf—we can do
so with the faith that every little thing gives God something to work with. Each
one is setting the stage for a miracle to occur.
As the writer of Ephesians puts it, “the power of God that is at work within
us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.”
But this gets at a dimension we need to add to the Rev. Jim Wallis’ thought. Yes,
we need to give God something to work with, but before that, God needs to give
us something to work with. As it says in the First Letter of John, “We love
because God first loved us.” The reason we can give God something to work
with is that the power of God is at work within us.
And yet, do we really believe that the greatest force in the universe is
within our own heart and head and hand? Do we really feel that? Do we act like
it?
Jesus said we had to lose our life to gain life, and Robert Frost in his poem,
“Directive,” that I read as the Call to Worship, invites us to do the same. The
poem leads us up an abandoned mountain road, “if you’ll let a guide direct
you/Who only has at heart your getting lost.” Then later it says, “If you’re lost
enough to find yourself….” The thing Jesus and Robert Frost want to help us
lose is everything that blocks us from believing and feeling and relying on God’s
higher power in our deepest, truest self. We need to lose what Frost calls “all this
now too much for us,” the raging streams of our lives “that leave their tatters
hung on barb and thorn,” the chaotic, twittering, constantly assaulting stimuli that
leave us feeling turbid, fragmented and confused.
That frantic feeling arises in part because our society is full of voices
telling us that we have to do everything ourselves, and that beyond what our
limited powers can accomplish, we are small and helpless. Empirical evidence
and rational thought are on their side. Only the divine madness of a poet,
prophet or priest would suggest otherwise.
But if we follow one of them as our guide, and we are willing to lose our
rational, constricted self up on the mountain of transfiguration, we will begin to
see things differently. We will begin to see the world with childlike simplicity,
like the pine tree that was a playhouse in the poem, and the shattered dishes with
which the children set up housekeeping. We will weep for what little things
could make them glad, partly out of pity, but partly moved by the beauty of the
thought that maybe we, too, could become as glad as they were, if we could just
see as they did. As Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the
realm of God like a child shall not enter it.”
If we do not see that all the power of God’s realm is at work within us, that
God has given us something to work with, it is perhaps because we have not
received it as a child. Frost was seventy years old when he wrote this
“Directive,” and he had seen the tragic deaths of four of his six children and his
beloved wife. He had suffered from severe bouts of depression. Mental illness
affected most of his family. His son had committed suicide.
Frost came by his child-like wisdom the hard way. He found it because he
had to in order to survive. Need drove him up that mountain road. Suffering
shocked him into the awareness that reason and all that the raging world had to
offer was not enough to help him. He went looking for something more, for a
higher power and a higher meaning, and he found it. He found it in a shattered
cup, a shard remaining where once there had been children and a wife and home.
He found that dipping that broken cup in the flow of the stream of living water
transformed it into a Holy Grail.
God gave him something to work with. God made him whole again
beyond confusion. And his directive to us is to go ourselves, to go lose ourselves
beyond everything we think is important, everything we think we have to have,
all the frantic busyness and stimulation we think is the meaning of our lives, to
go up the mountain and drink from the source. Because when everything else is
taken away from us, that will last. And it will be enough.
The story of Jesus feeding the five thousand in the gospel of John begins
and ends with the same action. Did you notice? At the beginning Jesus and the
disciples have gone up a mountain to get away from the crowds that have been
thronging them because of the healings Jesus has been doing. Then at the end it
says, “When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to
make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.”
The thing that characterizes the work of Christ is that it all begins and ends
up that mountain. It is up that mountain that we get the essential thing we need to
work with, without which all our talk is a noisy gong or a clanging symbol (I
Corinthians 13), without which our life is “a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound
and fury,/ Signifying nothing.” (Macbeth V.5.28) Sooner or later Pharisees like
Paul and the rich and powerful like Macbeth realize the emptiness and madness
that life becomes when it is disconnected from the source that Christ sought up
the mountain. Sooner or later we all face tragedy, or death, or a whopping
midlife crisis, and we come to thirst as Frost did for a high brook, “Cold as a
spring as yet so near its source.” That thirst saves our life. It leads us to drink
what fills life with meaning and sanity, with wholeness beyond confusion.
Looking back on our Mission lunch last Sunday, I am surprised that I was
not surprised by one of the results. In this church the word Mission has meant
peace and justice work for the last twenty years or more. It has meant being a
witness for peace in Nicaragua or Palestine, it has meant launching the Upper
Valley Peace and Justice Group here, it has meant leading the CROPWalk to
alleviate hunger and poverty, it has meant making many bold efforts to counter
homophobia and racism. So it made perfect sense to see the first four areas of
concern arise last Sunday—working on issues of climate change, violence,
hunger and health care. On the other hand the fifth, spiritual renewal, should
have surprised us. It is not what we have traditionally thought of as Mission
work. It is more in the realm of Deacon work.
And yet it, too, makes sense in light of today’s gospel passage. Spiritual
renewal is what Jesus and the disciples sought up the mountain. It was what they
needed in order to do their mission. They were seeking “the power at work
within us that is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or
imagine.” Ephesians promises you that “Christ may dwell in your heart through
faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love.” You may be filled with “all
the fullness of God.”
God knows, we need the power of God’s fullness and Christ’s love that
come through spiritual renewal to give us the courage and the chutzpah to push
against the massive problems that call to us. This power is the something to work
with that God gives us in order for us to give something to work with to God. We
have only begun to imagine what we can do with this power.
Let us pray in silence…
Sermon 07/26/2009