Sermon by the Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
First Congregational UCC of Manhattan, KS
Matthew 14:13-21
Ordinary Time, August 27, 2017
This past Monday night, the sanctuary of First United Methodist in Topeka was overflowing. I was told the sanctuary holds 750….and there were people sitting and standing in the aisles and lining the wall in back of the balcony. Gathered together for the first Mass Meeting of the Poor People’s Campaign in Kansas, the energy was palpable.
Yara Allen stood in the pulpit and introduced herself as the Theomusicologist for Poor People’s Campaign. Ms. Allen told us that she likes to begin like this, “When I say ‘Forward together’ you say, ‘Not one step back.” Let’s practice. Forward Together (not one step back!)
TOGEHER, for almost three hours we sang together, prayed together, received wisdom from other Kansans, and the two co-conspirators of the Campaign - the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis and the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber. If you missed it, you can still find the livestream of the entire evening online and I’ll be sure to include a link to that when I post the sermon online later this afternoon.
The Poor People’s Campaign. It’s a name that makes some uncomfortable. It made people uncomfortable 50 years ago, too, when Dr. King and others were working on the initial campaign. Most folks don’t want to be poor. Don’t like to think of themselves as poor. And yet we know that 80% of people in our nation will be poor at some point in their lives. We know that even in town as small as ours, there are about 300 children in our school district who are homeless. [1] We know that 40% of the students who attend USD 383 schools qualify for free or reduced lunches. [2] That means that almost half of the students living in our school district have a family income of $45,000 or less if they have a family of four.
Poor people are here in Manhattan. Poor people are here in this room.
A living wage for our community has been calculated by MIT. For one adult living alone, a living wage here in Manhattan is $11.40/hr or $22,800 a year. For two adults living with two children, the adults would need to both make $14.87 a year and, together, would need to pull in a combined income of almost $60,000 to make ends meet. [3]
If you have looked for hourly work in Manhattan or if you employ hourly employees, I don’t have to tell you that jobs that pay a living wage are difficult to find in our community.
Earlier this week I spoke to someone in our congregation who works multiple jobs that don’t pay a living wage. They said (and I’m sharing this with their permission), “You know, the thing is, I don’t want to be rich. I just want to be able to pay my bills. And I would like to be able to come into work and see the CEO and not have to think to myself, ‘Why do you think you’re worth 20 of me?’”
Poor people are here in Manhattan. Poor people are here in this room.
We are so ingrained as a culture to associate poverty and shame. When I was at the two-day training with the Poor People’s Campaign we were asked to talk briefly about how we, ourselves, relate to poverty. I listened as people struggled to recount times in their lives when they couldn’t pay the bills, or didn’t have enough to eat, or were homeless...but even in those conversations about poverty, it was rare for any of us to say “I am poor,” or “I’ve been poor.”
We are taught from an early age that if you are poor, it’s because you’ve done something wrong. This is a lie. People are poor because we have all - all of us, collectively, as a society - have failed to care for one another. People are poor because we have decided this is a problem we can’t fix or won’t fix. People are poor because we’ve decided it’s okay to consistently prioritize profit over everything else. Or, as Dr. Barber said Monday, “When you treat people like things and corporations like people, it’s not only bad public policy, it’s morally wrong.”
The poor we have with us because we have collectively failed to imagine a better way and make it happen. The poor we have with us because we have turned a blind eye other each other’s’ suffering. The poor we have with us because we have believed the lies we’ve been told.
Poor people are here in Manhattan. Poor people are here in this room.
The Poor People’s Campaign is a campaign that is led by poor people with others walking alongside, working alongside, working with, not for. It is not a campaign FOR Poor People. It’s a campaign of, by, with Poor People. If you are wealthy, there is plenty of room for you to come along. We need you. But you will have to get used to following and doing with, not for. Dr. Barber reminded us that Frederick Douglass sometimes said, “Those who will be freed must be the ones to strike the first blow.”
The poor are leading. The poor are teaching. The poor are striving for their own liberation and those who are not currently poor are invited to come along and see what it feels like to find liberation together.
The poor are also leading in this morning’s story from the Gospel of Matthew.
Jesus, the one many of us call Ruler and Savior, was a poor man. Homeless, too. He never held a job - not one with a living wage or any other. He didn’t have a Linkedin profile. He didn’t own property. In fact, he was dependent on the charity of others to receive his daily bread. When he quoted the Hebrew Scriptures, “Humans cannot live by bread alone,” he knew that we need bread to live. That’s why he said we can’t live by bread ALONE. And when he taught his disciples to pray, “give us this day our daily bread” he knew the urgency of that prayer because he knew that the Powers and Principalities would look to those who were hungry and say, “Oh, let them eat cake.”
As the story of the feeding of the 5,000 opens, Jesus has just received a terrible blow. His cousin, his friend, his co-conspirator in heralding the Realm of God, John the Baptizer, has just been executed. Killed by the Powers and Principalities for sport. Decapitated on a whim. It’s a disgusting, horrific, stomach-turning story. Matthew creates a juxtaposition of the wealthy at a big, blow-out party, sitting on high in the royal palace with the poor man Jesus….out in the wilderness, just trying to find some space to grieve.
But there is no rest for the weary because there are just so many needs. As always, the crowds find Jesus, seeking healing and wholeness. And Jesus did what he always did - he had compassion on them - even in the midst of his own pain and anger. He set up his free health clinic and healed all day long. As the day turned into evening, Jesus’s friends began to fret. “It’s getting late,” they said, “Maybe we should tell these people to go home so they can get something to eat.”
But Jesus has other another plan. Instead of scattering to the four winds, Jesus wants everyone to stay together. (Forward together! Not one step back!)
He tells his disciples, “They don’t need to go home. We’ll eat here. You feed them.”
The disciples protest, “Well, we don’t have enough food to feed them. We only have five loaves and two fish.”
Jesus, never one to be scared off by the impossible, says, “Gather round. Everyone sit down.” Taking the meager five loaves and two fish into his hands, he begins the same ritual we know from Holy Communion. Take, bless, break, give. Take what you’ve got to work with, whoever shows up. Bless the gathered community and the sustenance we share. Break the bread, the hearts, the lives wide open so there is plenty of room for new life to enter. Give to one another in thanksgiving and joy. Take, bless, break, give. Together.
It’s at the heart of who we are as Christians. And we learned it from a poor man working with just five loaves and two fish at the end of a long day of unpaid labor.
Now we are not told how the miracle happens. But we are told that everyone present - more than 5,000 people - were filled and there were leftovers.
One of the powerful things about this story is that we are invited to use our imaginations to figure out just how it happened. [4] Many scholars have imagined that perhaps the miracle here wasn’t really in Jesus’s hands or the work of the disciples. Perhaps there was something about sitting down in the presence of Jesus and being a part of that ritual - take, bless, break, give - that reminded people there was enough. And so they took out bread from their bags, granola bars from their purses and shared. In the presence of knowing they were blessed and broken, they shared what they had….and it was enough.
I’ve always liked that interpretation. Because it reminds me that together, we can do mighty, magnificent, miraculous things. (Forward together! Not one step back!)
This week as I was pondering the socio-economic realities of this story I had a new thought. I wondered about this possibility: we know that in our own time lack of access to healthcare often goes hand-in-hand with hunger. So I have to suppose that many of the people gathered in the wilderness clamoring for Jesus’s free health clinic were probably not the same people gathered in Herod’s palace the night before. They were probably poor people.
Seeing that the day was coming to a close, maybe the disciples began to worry, “Oh, man. Look at all these poor people. They are going to be hungry. And they’re going to expect us to feed them.” So they asked Jesus to send them home.
But Jesus said, “No. We’ll stay together and eat together.” (Forward together! Not one step back!) And then he taught the disciples something very important that they likely never forgot.
The poor people gathered in that crowd didn’t need the disciples to feed them. They had among themselves the resources and abilities and skills and wisdom to feed themselves. We aren’t told exactly how it happened, but we are told that when the crowd gathered their resources together no one went away hungry.
What seemed to be impossible was actually possible. The “what abouts” didn’t matter. The “but we can’ts” held no power. For one day in the wilderness those who were hungry were fed. Together. (Forward together! Not one step back!)
Now you may be thinking, “I dunno, preacher. This still seems pretty fishy (no pun intended).” I guess the early followers of Jesus had a hard time believing it, too, because in the very next chapter, the miracle repeats itself all over again as Jesus and his followers feed 4,000 with just seven loaves of bread and a few small fish.
The refrain is the same - take, bless, break, give.
Friends, Jesus showed us what can happen when we are willing to attempt that which seems impossible. He showed us a way around the “what abouts” and the “but we can’ts.” He showed us with his actions - take, bless, break, give.
When we stay in the room with one another. When we gather together - rich ones and poor ones and everyone in between - and when we fix our eyes on the poor man who came to teach us, we can move mountains. We can break ancient bonds. We can dismantle systems of oppression that keep us impoverished. We can imagine new ways of being.
And even when we can’t quite imagine it - even when our brains can’t quite comprehend how it will work - Jesus shows us what we are supposed to do: take, bless, break, give.
Together.
(Forward together! Not one step back!)
No comments:
Post a Comment