February
12, 2017 6th Sunday after
Epiphany Matthew 13:54-14:36
As
we’re reading through Matthew I hope you’re understanding just how much fear
and stress there was in the lives of the people who first read Matthew. Their nation was in ruins and the Romans were
cracking down ever harder. Jesus promised
to return soon, but that promise was decades old and almost everyone who ever
met Jesus face to face is now dead.
Their families were being torn apart because of their faith. There are betrayals, backstabbing,
persecutions, and in the midst of it all some people renouncing their Christian
faith as a hope of release from it all.
God seems all too far away. Faith
feels all too weak.
As
we get into our reading for today we discover that disorder was not unique to
Christian households. The infamous Herod
family has some problems of its own. And
I think that is a take on this situation that we do not often consider. There’s plenty of manipulation and
backstabbing going on there too. And who
is the victim of it all? John the
Baptist.
John
is one of the saddest deaths of all time.
Was he a martyr for his cause?
No. As the precursor to Jesus
does he go down in a blaze of glory?
No. Do people rally around his
death and cause an uprising? No. John is beheaded as entertainment for a
birthday party. His one and only life
snuffed out at the request of a dancing girl and her mother.
If
I’m executed for something I want it to be something worthwhile, not the sick
whims of a dictator’s family; yet this is the world of Matthew’s church. You might notice there’s a change in tone in
the next few chapters of the gospel.
Prior to this Jesus has delivered a lot of harsh teachings. The Sermon on the Mount makes impossible
demands. Jesus turns away disciples who
are not committed to a ridiculous degree.
And Jesus teaches that discipleship must always come first, even over
family ties and obligations. You start
to wonder why anyone ever followed Jesus.
And you start to think if Jesus is God incarnate, then this is not a
loving God you want to have a part in; but you have no choice.
Humanity
fails. It is impossible. So does Jesus say, “That’s it! I quit.
I refuse to die for this bunch of wishy-washy uncommitted
weaklings”? No. He sticks with us.
To
me, this is a far more powerful teaching than any of the miracles he performs
or the great sermons he gives. Hopeless,
broken and bad as the people of that day were (and us as well) Jesus stays in
relationship with them (and us).
One
summer when I was in college I was inspecting a road construction project on
Route 15 in Pennsylvania. It was a huge
project and several concrete workers were hired and added to the company’s
regular crews. One guy was never
happy. He complained constantly. He said how other companies he worked for had
done things better. He said everything
we did was backwards. He said our
equipment wasn’t set up well and was backwards.
On and on and on he droned day after day. Indeed paving a concrete road in the middle
of the hot July sun is a miserable task, and no one was all that happy. And then one day I’ll never forget, in the
middle of the morning this guy suddenly gets mad, tips his bucket of tools over
and says with disgust, “I quit.” And he
just walked away. The crew leader yelled
out to the foreman, “He quits.” And we
all just kept working, with smiles on our faces.”
Jesus
doesn’t quit. He stays with us, even
when we do things wrong, working in the misery and the heat of the day. Valentines Day is just around the corner and
there are plenty of smarmy cards with sweet love messages on them. But a far more powerful statement of love is
when you stand with someone, sharing a miserable burden with them.
Chapters
14 through 20 of Matthew’s gospel are about Jesus standing with people in their
needs. You might notice that he doesn’t
necessarily solve their problems for them, but he is with them in the problems.
The
first one, and my favorite, comes with the Feeding of the 5000. Jesus has tried to withdraw from the crowds
because he wanted to be away from it all after his cousin John’s death. The crowds won’t let him alone anyway. Even in his exhaustion and stress he has
compassion for them and ministers to them.
When the day is nearly done the disciples suggest that the crowds be
sent away so they can get some food.
Jesus makes one of the most concise and profound statements of his
entire ministry, “You give them something to eat.”
That’s
such a simple statement, but it has profound ramifications. The disciples state the obvious, “We have
nothing here but five loaves and two fish.”
Unless those fish are whales and the bread loaves are the size of eighteen-wheel
trucks there’s no way that’s enough resources to feed 5000 men plus women and
children!
“You
give them something to eat.”
The
disciples have taken a very logical approach.
They have meagre resources. They
have needs. They will use those meagre
resources to take care of their own. The
just can’t take care of the rest.
“You
give them something to eat.”
How
many times in our lives have we been in the same situation? We see the needs around us. We do some pretty quick calculations and know
there’s no way we can even make a small dent in the needs and the
problems. We turn to God and say, “I
don’t have the resources to do this. I’m
not talented or special or capable of this task. All I have are five loaves and two fish, and
what are they among so many? I think I’d
better just keep what I have to stay safe and take care of my own.”
“You
give them something to eat.”
To
Matthew’s original readers they have nothing.
The problems in their families and the problems in the world around them
are just too great. There’s no way they
can ever have an impact on them. They
aren’t rich. They aren’t powerful. They aren’t well connected. Even their faith is weak and struggling. All too often they’ve seen people go the way
of John the Baptist.
But
they are not alone. Jesus is with them,
and he’s not a quitter. The only thing
he asks is that they make their resources, meager as they are, available to
him. Like the five loaves and two fish
he takes them, blesses them, and gives them to the disciples to distribute. There is enough. Every last person eats their fill. In fact there is so much abundance that there
are twelve baskets of leftovers!
Meager resources, used in companionship with God’s will, and they bring about an
abundance.
It
would be wonderful if such miracles of abundance would occur every day for
us. We might think that would be a sure
way to build our faith when we have doubts, but that is not the way God does
business. Several times over the Bible
teaches that signs and miracles do not build faith or bring about belief. We may think that would be so, but it is not
the case. Faith is in a different place.
One
of the greatest challenges our faith faces is that when tasks seem overly
large, and our resources look ever so small, we want to horde them. We want to protect them. We want to turn in on ourselves and take care
of our own. Yet God wants us to make
those resources available to him.
Here’s
one guarantee I’ll make. If you horde
what you have to protect yourself you won’t have enough. You never will no matter how much you
stockpile for yourself. Turning inward
is a journey towards fear and frustration.
If
you make what you have available to God’s will good things will happen. In your hands your resources are never
enough. In God’s hands any amount of
resources will lead to abundance.
Turning outward is a journey to fulfillment and peace.
May
you trust God enough not to horde, but to make available. May you know that God does not just take what you have and redistribute it elsewhere. God does not run a Robin Hood scheme. God uses what you have, in-you and
through-you, to do his will. That is
key. Jesus doesn’t quit. He wants to work with you even if you are a
miserable-mess-of-a-failure. Because
together, God’s will is done and God’s kingdom comes.
