Today's Sermon

 

“The Crowds: Miracles 5"

 

Matthew 21:1-11

            1When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, 2saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. 3If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The Lord needs them.’ And he will send them immediately.” 4This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying,

5   “Tell the daughter of Zion,
     Look, your king is coming to you,
          humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

            6The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; 7they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. 8A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. 9The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting,

“Hosanna to the Son of David!
     Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

            10When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, “Who is this?” 11The crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”

The Crowds - Miracles 5

            I almost omitted that passage from today’s worship. We’ve said so much about it over the years and we’ve been in this series on miracles in the Bible all Lent. Over these weeks, we’ve been making the case miracles are neither to be overlooked nor explained away. Even if we do not know exactly what happened, we know something happened that led people to tell these stories. They are experiential realities which defy normal parlance. The language of miracle is what we use when ordinary words won’t do. Taking the miracles seriously trains us to look at the world differently and in partnership with God create a different world.

         You might think we took a break from our series last week with confirmation, but what greater miracle is there when young people take the faith in which they’ve been raised and claim it their own? That’s the thing with miracles, once you see them one place, you start to see them more places. For example, in that Palm Sunday story, before the crowds show up, wouldn’t you know there’s a miracle right there in the beginning. Jesus instructs his disciples to go to a village where they’ll find a donkey, two by Matthew’s account, which they should commandeer. When they do, we may be tempted to ask how that happened, but what we should ask instead is “What does it mean?” Asking better questions gets us better answers. “How did it happen?” seeks to end an exploration. Asking “What does it mean?” begins one. It asks us to explore what God is up to in Jesus as he confronts with truth and nonviolence powers who want to eliminate with lies and brutality. It leads us to consider which power is greater, Jesus’ or that exhibited by either the pagan empire or Jesus’ own religious authorities. It reveals that while God does not spare us suffering neither does God abandon us to futility. The miracle we celebrate next week offers an even fuller revelation of what God is up to.

         Today’s second passage for today, our next installment in the miracle series, shows us what’s possible when crowds show up. It’s a story of Jesus feeding the multitudes with just a few loaves of bread and a couple fish. Listen…

            Mark 6:30-44
            30 The apostles gathered around Jesus and told him all that they had done and taught. 31 He said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. 32 And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves. 33 Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. 34 As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and he began to teach them many things. 35 When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; 36 send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.”

37 But he answered them, “You give them something to eat.”
They said to him, “Are we to go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread and give it to them to eat?”
38 And he said to them, “How many loaves have you? Go and see.”

            When they had found out, they said, “Five, and two fish.” 39 Then he ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass. 40 So they sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties. 41 Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and blessed and broke the loaves and gave them to his disciples to set before the people, and he divided the two fish among them all. 42 And all ate and were filled, 43 and they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish. 44 Those who had eaten the loaves numbered five thousand men.

         You can see who counted in Jesus’ time and place as only the men are mentioned in the head count.

         Again, if we ask limited questions, we get limiting answers. If we ask, “How did it happen” we end up with answers that are wanting and not very helpful. On one end of the spectrum, we might answer, as some do, “The Bible said it; it happened. God can do anything.” Okay, maybe true, but…so what? Moreover, if God can do anything and did that, why does God not do so many other things? On the other end of the spectrum, we might adopt the interpretation, as some do, that what happened was the people in the crowd shared food they had brought. That’s a nice story, I suppose, but hardly something that warrants a miracle’s framing. A woman once offered a friend and I a ham sandwich at a NASCAR race, but I didn’t feel the need to describe that in miraculous terms.

         If, however, we ask what Jesus feeding the multitudes means, then it starts to get more interesting. Alyce M. McKenzie is a professor of preaching and worship at the Perkins School of Theology of Southern Methodist University. She titles a reflection about this passage, “Feeding The 5,000: Not Just Another Church Potluck,” sharing the theme alluded to moments ago that this is more than sharing.[1] In it, she points out an important discrepancy between Jesus’ response to the crowd’s hunger and that of the disciples. It’s based on what each sees as possible and what each sees as their role. She writes:

The disciples notice that it's getting late and the people are hungry. They come to Jesus to get him to give the benediction and get the crowd on its way (and out of their way). "Send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat" (v. 36). I don't get the idea that this crowd has that kind of money, but the disciples don't seem to care about that as long as they evacuate the premises. Essentially, the disciples responded, "Send them away. They are not our responsibility." Apparently, they don't have the same compassion reflex of Jesus when they look out over the crowd. Jesus sees needs that God can meet. The disciples see obligation that they seek to avoid.[2]

           The miracle confronts us with the question of our responsibility for others. In our society, there is widespread adoption of the posture, “Not my problem,” but there’s a difference between having boundaries and closing off what God can do for someone else through us. Jesus the teacher sees an opportunity to bless the world. The disciples seize the moment to escape responsibility for it.

          The miracle has at least four other elements worthy of note as chronicled by Luke Timothy Johnson, our biblical scholar companion to this story[3]: First, the setting, a deserted place, a desert place tells us something. It should remind us of the ancestors whom God sent out in faith, also the winding and vulnerable wandering of the ancestors in the wilderness after the exodus from captivity. Through Jesus, God is orienting the disciples anew and helping them find a new homeland where neighbors look out for one another, trusting in the provision of God.

         Second, what’s revealed in the miracle is not merely power, but power of a particular sort. It’s power in the form of compassion, of concern. It’s the same power that shows up in Jesus’ healings, his exorcisms, his eating the ones everyone hates—tax collectors and sinners. If you want to be godly, don’t just exhibit godly might, exhibit godly caring.

         Third, Jesus invites the disciples to rise to the occasion and doesn’t give up on them when they fail to. He keeps teaching them. Jesus has the disciples distribute the fishes and loaves he’s multiplied perhaps to open their eyes, both to the faces of need and the power with God’s help to meet those needs and meet those faces with love. The story doesn’t let us settle for meeting spiritual needs either. In fact, Jesus is constantly reuniting the material and the spiritual, inviting us to do the same.

         Fourth, Jesus makes the link between prayer and miracles. This can get tricky. We probably all know someone who has prayed for a miracle that has not come true. Maybe we ourselves have. It’s not so simple as reducing God to a divine vending machine. Johnson praying the Psalms, this songbook of prayers right in the middle of the Bible, which covers every imaginable human emotion, as a way of reconnecting with God’s activity:

It is not the narrative accounts that persuade believers of God’s action in the world: it is the prayer of the psalms that demands for the narratives to be written in the fashion they were. Because believers pray the psalms, they not only perceive the world in a certain fashion; while they are praying, they also inhabit that world and thereby enable themselves to perceive and engage the world outside the sphere of prayer as one permeable to God’s presence and power.[4]

           Johnson wants us to imagine the world that scripture imagines. Praying is a way of training the mind and heart to be on the lookout for God’s activity in the world that we might join it and create the kind of world the Bible doesn’t so much report as imagines into being. This story is meant to get us to ask what kind of world would we have if leaders attended to the needs of the crowds rather than turned them away, meant to ask us to consider our role in feeding in every sense.

          There are miracles everywhere waiting for our recognition and collaboration.

          If you want to see what happens when you give your life over to collaborating with God’s presence and power, come back next week. Get here early because they’ll be a crowd.

          Amen.      

[1] https://www.patheos.com/progressive-christian/feeding-5000-alyce-mckenzie-07-16-2012

[2] Ibid.

[3] Luke Timothy Johnson, Miracles: God’s Presence and Power in Creation Interpretation Series (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2018), p. 210-211.

[4] Ibid., 86.