"All Filled"

Sermon Text: Matthew 14: 13-21

August 3, 2014

First Congregational UCC – Sermon by the Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

I know I told you last week that we were done with parables for a while. Don’t worry. We are. But today I want to tell you a story. It’s a made up story….but it is my hope that some truths can be found in it.

The Realm of God is like a congregation that gathered for worship in their new building for the first time on a Sunday morning in June. No, that sounds too hopeful. This group wasn’t hopeful. And it’s hardly fair to call them a congregation at all.

They were the remnant of a congregation. On that Sunday morning in June there were just 12 of them gathered for worship. All of them were over 70. All of them have lived their entire lives in this tiny border town in Texas. All of them remembered the glory days. The days when their downtown church had been filled to overflowing. Christmas pageants when the children were young. Work days on Saturdays when they were able-bodied. Congregational meetings where people got fired up over important issues facing the church…and then made up over cups of coffee and punch in the fellowship hall. A big choir that filled the whole chancel, decked out in the nicest robes, even in the heat of summer.

But all of that was gone now. The town had changed. The kids had grown and moved on. Friends and loved ones had died. But these 12 faithful few remained. As the numbers dwindled, they did what they could to hang on to the building. They did what they could to hang on to their pastor, but, in the end, they could hang on to neither.

And so here they were, on a hot Sunday in June, striking out, tentatively, with the hope of being church once again.

A few months earlier, just after Easter, they had finally moved out of their building. They sold the building and put the money in the bank, unsure about what they would do with it. Their pastor had moved on and they weren’t planning on calling a new one. For a few months, no one was really sure if the church would continue at all. Most of the people who had been left were tired. Exhausted from trying to stay afloat. Many of them started attending the other church in their town.

But slowly, the phone calls began. These 12 began to whisper to each other, “I miss the church. I wonder….could there be a way to do something new?” And so here they were, gathering outside a simple storefront downtown. None of them had been to this part of town in a while, but one of the women in the group had heard of this store that was for lease and had jumped on it. They really had no idea what they would do, but they gathered early on a Sunday morning, 8:00 a.m. and they allowed themselves to dream.

When they pulled up just before 8:00 that June morning, they were greeted by a pickup truck full of migrant farmworkers parked near the church. John, an old farmer himself, knew exactly what this meant. A group of day laborers sitting around this late in the day could only mean one thing: they had not been picked up for the day. They would have no work today and no way to feed their families that evening.

John and his wife Margaret were moved with compassion. They walked up to the pickup. Margaret’s Spanish was better than John’s. She invited them in to join them in worship. She had no idea what she would do with this group of men, but she figured she could rustle up some ice water and they could at least sit in the air conditioning. It was starting to get hot.

They sat in the delicious air conditioning together on metal folkding chairs. They sang and prayed. The group of 24 managed some conversation through the language barriers. They found hymns that were in Spanish and they sang them together. After the service, the head usher went to gather the money from the offering plate, but instead of putting it into the bank bag he began to count it and divided it carefully into 12 equal portions – one for each of the men from the pickup truck. The old timers from this new church nodded approvingly. Of course that was the right thing to do with the offering today. Several took out their wallets and added to the offering.

They went their separate ways, but people from both groups couldn’t help thinking about the others. They wondered if they would see each other again. Something special had happened that day in that storefront church. They couldn’t exactly put a finger on what it was, but they all knew they wanted to experience it again.

The next Sunday, the old timers of this new church showed up again at 8:00am to worship. This time, they were greeted by a crowd of people waiting outside the church. As they drew closer, they began to recognize faces from the week before. But this time there were women and children, too. One of the men from the group stepped forward to shake hands and said simply, “We came to worship again. And we brought bread and wine to share for Communion.”

They gathered once again inside the delicious air conditioning as the day began to heat up. The children wiggled in the metal folding chairs and the old timers in this new church reached out their arms to hold babies. It had been so long since they had been blessed with the sound of children in worship. The reading for the day was from 14^th chapter of Matthew. They read it in Spanish and English. You know it. The loaves and fishes.

After the reading, there was silence for a few moments and then Margaret stood up to speak. She did her best to say what she needed to say in both Spanish and English, painstakingly speaking for a few sentences, pausing, and then translating to the other language.

Margaret said she had never heard the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000 in quite the same way as she heard it today. “I don’t like the title of this story,” she said. “I think they got it wrong. Jesus didn’t feed the 5,000. Not by himself. It should have been ‘The DISCIPLES feed 5,000 with Jesus’s help.’ I have to say, I can kind of relate to how the disciples must have felt. They were trying hard to do the right thing, but they were so tired. So worn out from trying to take care of everyone…Jesus, themselves, the crowds that followed. That’s how I felt when we were trying to keep the old church alive. But then it died….but I just couldn’t let it die. So I came here, not knowing what to expect. And in these past two weeks, I have been thinking about how we are all hungry and we are all sick….just like those people who followed Jesus. We all come to church begging to be healed and fed in some way. We all have needs and we all hope Jesus can fix it all for us.”

She took a deep breath and let out a bit of a sigh, “But I think what I’m learning is that Jesus isn’t coming to fix it all for us. He’s not. But he is showing the way. I hear this story and I don’t pretend to understand exactly how the miracle part happened. But what I do see and understand is Jesus being moved by compassion when he saw the crowds. He saw the need in the other people and because he was hungry and tired and sick to death of all the pain in the world, he understood just what it felt like. He reached inside of himself and found the strength to love the people around him. And even though Jesus surely could have fed all those people himself, he didn’t. He told the disciples, ‘You do it. You feed them.’ And then he showed them how.”

Margaret paused and looked around the room at these people she had known nearly all her life and the people she had just met in the past week. “We are, all of us, like those crowds who came to Jesus needing to be healed and fed. We all have things in our lives that aren’t going well. We all know pain and fear and hurt.” She smiled, “But we are also, all of us, like the disciples who followed Jesus around because they, too, needed to be healed and fed. And if we keep our eyes on Jesus, he will show us the way to take care of each other. He will show us how to take what we have…our loaves and fishes…and make it enough for all of us.”

Margaret took the bread and the cup from the folding table sitting at the front of the room. Like Jesus and so many before her, she gave thanks, she blessed it, she broke it, and she shared it with all those gathered. And they passed the bread and juice around, and the children wiggled, and the metal folding chairs squeaked, and the people gave thanks.

They were, all of them, broken and hungry and tired. And they were, all of them, fed and filled.