Allow me the liberty of beginning with a disclaimer. I’ve been a priest for all of six weeks now, and every Sunday it still feels brand new. Which means you may have to bear with my learning, but you also get the benefit of my complete and shameless joy in the new job. And, lest you’ve never heard this from a priest, let me make a confession on behalf of my order. There’s something utterly wonderful about preaching the feeding of the five thousand, knowing that I’ll have the privilege of blessing, breaking and sharing the bread of heaven in our midst in just a few minutes. As I prepare to do that, I’m remembering also the stories of the unleavened bread with which Jewish people memorialize the Passover, the manna that God provided in another deserted place, the bread of the presence that was part of the temple rituals, the bread that Jesus broke and shared in an upper room.
Yes, I know the Bible stories about bread. I can preach this Word. And if I’ve caused you to worry about my relative inexperience as a sacramentalist, let me assure you that this is not my first food service job. When I was in high school, my very first paying job—earning $3.15 an hour, I think—was at my neighborhood McDonalds in Boulder, Colorado. And if I was able to manage the complicated liturgy of that fast food counter, surely celebrating the Eucharist can’t be that hard. Because nothing could ever be as nerve racking as that moment when a busload of fans bound for a CU Buffs football game pulled into our parking lot, and 60 people begin to clamor for burgers and fries all at once.
Nothing could be as nerve racking as that, except perhaps for five thousand hungry people—besides woman and children, as the text reminds us—clamoring for bread at the end of a long day in deserted place. Lest I am ever tempted to judge those typically doubting disciples, all I have to do is remember my own fast food experience. I can almost hear myself saying to Jesus “send the bus away so that they may go to Taco Bell and KFC to buy food for themselves.”
Even when our intentions to serve are good, its scary to face the limits of our hospitality. What if there isn’t enough? What if I can’t feed them fast enough? Those were my adolescent fears even before I knew to question whether industrially produced beef cut with pink slime served on a high glycemic index bun filled with wheat gluten was suitable to eat, anyway.
In so very many ways, food evokes our deepest fears. Ours is a culture of a particular kind of food anxiety; we worry about what to eat and how much of it, how it is produced and what its impact on our health will be. These are all important questions, but I think its helpful to remember that throughout most of history and in most of the world, the fear associated with food is that there might not be enough.
The story of the feeding of the five thousand was an important one to the early Christians; we know this because it shows up in all four gospels. Some scholars suggest that it was the primary story told when people gathered to make Eucharist, which makes sense to me because it reveals so much about the character of the God to whom we give thanks. Jesus is moved by compassion, the text says, and in him God meets people at the level of our most basic human needs.
And even if I don’t get to preach it at every Eucharist, this is a story that retains its power across time and cultures. I’d suggest that its especially important to us now because it repudiates both ancient and modern fears about food. The feeding of the five thousand bears witness that that neither food anxiety (that is, whether it’s the right kind) nor food security (that is, whether there will be enough) have the final word. In fact, the miracle in this story may be less about multiplying food and more about overcoming fear.
Moreover, I think there are many miracles in this story. There’s the one I’d call the miracle of the how. Which in this case is not so much about how much bread and fish there ultimately was, but how people were empowered to share what they thought they didn’t have. Notice that within this story, it actually wasn’t Jesus who fed the multitudes, it was his twelve skeptical disciples. Somehow, after they recovered from the incredulity of being told “you give them something to eat,” they discovered that they were actually able to.
Then there’s the one I’d call the miracle of the what, which in this case is not what the food was, but what the people became. All we really we know of that motley lot of people is that they were hungry enough to leave the familiar to follow Jesus to a deserted place. We don’t know if they were Jews or gentiles—the text is conspicuously silent about that—and we don’t know their social status or if they were good people or bad. We do know that some were sick and many were women and children, in addition to the men. Which in Jesus’ time would make them unlikely mealtime companions. But miraculously, they became people who could eat together. They became com-panions, people who shared bread. As Nora Ephron once said“a family is a group of people who eat the same thing for dinner.”
Which leads me to think that this Gospel is actually a miracle of who. In a sense, that’s always the case for those of us who profess via the Nicene Creed that Jesus became incarnate from the Virgin Mary and was made man. The great miracle is God with us in Jesus Christ—doing in this story what he always does best, which is revealing and then disarming our human fears. And if Matthew 14 and the other feeding stories teach us anything, it’s that Jesus’ acts of compassion are meant to be multiplied. So the miraculous who is not just Jesus himself, it is also us: five thousand of us, fifty million of us, uncountable women and children of us. The miracle is us when we are fed by his body and when we act as his body. Regardless of whether we think that we have enough or that we are enough.
Which brings me back to the joy of being a new priest. I have no idea what you will do after we share Holy Communion and you leave this sanctuary. Maybe you will bless a lonely person with kindness, maybe you will care for a sick friend or family member, maybe you will organize for a safer city and better public schools, maybe you will feed the hungry. But what I do know that you will be is Christ in the world, because that is what you were made for and that is what you are fed for.
“You are the body of Christ, member for member,” wrote St. Augustine in the late fourth century in one of his great sermons on the Eucharist. “If you, therefore, are Christ’s body and members, it is your own mystery that is placed on the Lord’s table! It is your own mystery that you are receiving! You are saying “Amen” to what you are: your response is a personal signature, affirming your faith. When you hear “The body of Christ”, you reply “Amen.” Be a member of Christ’s body, then, so that your “Amen” may ring true! Be what you see; receive what you are.”
