“The Feeding of the 5000” -Daniel Bonnell
Elisha was the Old Testament prophet who followed the Prophet Elijah. Maybe you remember the story of the chariot of fire swinging low and Elijah being carried up into heaven. As he is being swept away in this fiery chariot, Elijah drops his mantle, the sign of his earthly ministry, and Elisha, picking the mantle up, continues Elijah’s prophetic ministry.
In today’s Old Testament reading, a famine has spread across the land. A band of around one hundred prophets has gathered around Elisha to receive his teaching. They are hungry.
As was the custom at that time, a man who has managed to eke a crop out of the dry earth comes to Elisha with his offering of first fruits. He brings twenty loaves of barley and fresh ears of grain in his sack.
So Elisha says to his servant, “Give it to the people and let them eat.”
But the servant has a question.
Those one hundred prophets will think he is crazy! This amount of food is not nearly enough to feed them all.
The servant points out this fact to Elisha.
Fast forward several hundred years to a grassy field on the other side of the Sea of Galilee. A large crowd has gathered around Jesus. And Jesus, seeing them coming, and knowing that they have traveled a long distance to be with him, says to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?”
Philip was just as puzzled as Elisha’s servant had been.
“We don’t have enough money to buy bread for all these people!”
Another one of the disciples, Andrew, trying to be helpful, says that there’s a boy with five barley loaves and two fishes. But what good will that small amount of food do for all these people?
As I pondered these two stories for today’s sermon, I could really relate to the puzzlement of Elisha’s servant and Philip and Andrew, the disciples, who all could see the reality in front of them when they looked at what they on hand—not enough to go around.
They got caught up in what I am going to call “not enough to go around” thinking.
“Not enough to go around” thinking certainly plays a part in all our lives, I’m guessing.
Not enough money to go around, not enough time to go around, not enough talent to go around, not enough strength to go around, not enough energy to go around, not enough love to go around.
The “not enough to go around” list could go on and on.
After all, “Not enough to go around” thinking is realistic. I really do have only this much money. There really are only twenty-four hours in a day.
The writer of Ephesians knows the reality of “not enough to go around” thinking as well, the deep truth that we, counting only on ourselves, left to our own devices, really don’t have enough to go around, to meet the challenges of this life and to do what God calls us to do on behalf of God’s people.
That’s why the writer gets on his knees and prays for us—that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith.
The writer knows that faith in Jesus is what saves us from being limited by “not enough to go around” thinking.
When we decide to follow Jesus we put our whole trust in the grace and the love that Jesus has for each one of us. Trusting that Jesus is with us as we experience God’s grace and love, God’s goodness and mercy, is ultimately an act of faith.
And as this faith, like a mustard seed, takes life deep inside us, we get rooted and grounded in God’s love.
And that faith in God’s love, if we tend it, will grow and become powerful.
Our faith in God’s powerful love helps us to overcome our doubts and saves us from the “not enough to go around” thinking that keeps us stuck in only what we can see with our own eyes.
Faith in God’s powerful love allows us to glimpse the world through God’s eyes, and to imagine God’s reign of the abundance of more than enough for all as a reality on this earth.
And we get strengthened in our inner beings with power through the Holy Spirit. As the Passion Translation puts it, God keeps unveiling the unlimited riches of God’s glory and power within us until “supernatural strength floods our innermost beings with God’s divine might and God’s explosive power.”
And when our innermost beings get flooded with God’s divine might and God’s explosive power, our not enough thinking gets swept away.
The writer of Ephesians finishes his prayer with these words, and I quote from the Passion Translation.
“Never doubt God’s mighty power to work in you and accomplish all this.”
But we do doubt, because we are human beings, and we are limited by what we can see with our own eyes.
But we have also picked up the mantle that the followers and servants of God have handed down through the ages. We are God’s servants on this earth now.
When we doubt in the wisdom of what God is asking, we can remember Elisha’s servant and the disciples, Philip and Andrew, the ones who have gone before us.
They doubted.
They engaged in “not enough to go around” thinking.
But spite of their doubts, they went on and did what was asked because they trusted the ones asking.
When Elisha’s servant expressed his concern, Elisha simply repeated his instructions, “Give it to the people and let them eat. “For thus says the Lord, ‘They shall eat and have some left.’”
And so the servant laid out the barley loaves and the ears of grain in front of the hungry prophets, and they all ate, and some food was even left over.
After Philip and Andrew expressed their reservations to Jesus, Jesus simply told them to go make the people sit down. And that is what the disciples did. They got everyone seated.
We know the rest of the story. Jesus took the loaves and the fish, gave thanks, and then distributed the food to the five thousand people, and they all ate as much as they wanted, and they were all satisfied. And when everyone was full, the disciples gathered up all was left over.
Not enough to go around became more than enough, and the promise of God’s reign on this earth became visible.
The writer of Ephesians says that when we are rooted and grounded in God’s love, we too can do as Jesus asks, no matter how puzzling or daunting the request, and simply take the next step in faith.
We don’t have to know how God is going to work things out.
Our job as God’s servants is to trust that God does indeed have a plan and then to act in faithful obedience as God makes that plan a reality.
As the Passion translation puts it, “God will achieve infinitely more than our greatest requests, our most unbelievable dreams, and exceed our wildest imaginations. God will outdo them all, for God’s miraculous power constantly energizes us.”
God’s miraculous power can work through each one of us, so that more and more people can see God present and active on this earth, so that more and more people can say yes to what we cannot yet see, but to what we as the Church can only begin to imagine through the eyes of faith, the reign of God’s abundance and plenty on this earth.
“So now we offer up to God all the glorious praise that rises from every church in every generation through Jesus Christ—and all that yet will be manifest through time and eternity. Amen!”
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