“At the intersection of desperation and fear: Jesus”

John 6:1-21

Sunday, July 29, 2018
First Congregational United Church of Christ of Manhattan, KS

Sermon by the Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

Earlier this week I brought my kids with me to work for a couple of hours and they were kind enough to help me with a few tasks. One of the things I asked them to do was fill up our Blessing Box outside. They went through the bin in the lobby carefully selecting items - pasta sauce to go with pasta, some soup, beans, fruit. After we re-stocked the box, they noticed it didn’t have a sign and wanted to make one. So we came back inside and created a sign. When we went back out five minutes later to hang it, they noticed that some of the food we had just put in the box was gone. In the five minutes we were inside someone had already used the Blessing Box.

I assume some of us in this room have been hungry and unsure of where our next meal would come from. I assume others of us don’t know what this would be like. In her novel Anything is Possible, Elizabeth Strout tells the story of a man named Abel who had grown up very poor and had, later in life, married rich and started an air conditioning company, eventually becoming very wealthy. His wife, who didn’t know what it was like to be poor was astonished when he once told her that, as a child, he would hunt for food in dumpsters. “Weren’t you ashamed?” she asked with incredulity. “If you have to ask that question,” he thought, “Well, then, you’ve never been hungry.” [1]

Hunger is a powerful force. When we are lacking something as basic as food, nothing else really matters. When our basic needs aren’t being met, we don’t have the luxury of worrying about things like our pride. The same can be said lacking other basic human needs, too - like affection and love, shelter from the elements, mental and physical health, water, feeling like a person who matters and has worth.

When I was a child, one of the main takeaways I had from my time in church was that it was a Christian’s responsibility to help meet other people’s needs. If someone was hungry, we should feed them. If someone was thirsty, we should give them something to drink. If someone was lonely or left out, we should include them.

This is all true, of course.

But I realized later in life that I had somehow missed an essential part of Christ’s message in all of my hours in the pew and hunched over a Bible. Because following Jesus isn’t only about meeting other people’s needs - it’s also about allowing ourselves to get in touch with our own needs, our own hunger, our own desperation.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly enjoy feeling desperate. That frantic sort of feeling you get when you need something - really need something - and you’re just not sure how you’re going to get it. Whether it’s food, water, pain relief, money to pay the electric bill, letting go of the burden of a terrible secret, safety, acknowledgment of your humanity. When we’re not sure where these things are going to come from, we can start to feel desperate. And that’s a pretty yucky feeling.

Have you ever noticed how many stories about Jesus begin with desperation? Go through a Gospel sometime and look for desperate people. They’re everywhere. This is why I’ve come to believe that being in touch with our own hunger and desperation - no matter how unpleasant that can feel - is a prerequisite for following Jesus.

Today’s story is no different. It begins with desperate people. 5,000 of them, in fact. They are so desperate that they’ve followed Jesus up a mountain because they’ve seen how he can heal the sick.

The author tells us that “the time of Passover was near” so we know this is going to be a story about liberation. Jesus is clearly being cast in the role of Moses - not just climbing up “a mountain” but “THE mountain” - perhaps to help us remember how Moses did the same. We recall the desperate people who followed another stranger into freedom. We remember their hunger, too. Wandering in the desert with nothing to eat, they were completely reliant on God to meet their basic needs.

Hunger is a problem in this story, too. Now that they’ve all climbed a mountain to follow Jesus, they’re hungry. But Uber Eats hasn’t been invented yet and the disciples are starting to wonder who’s going to feed all of these people. This story, by the way, the story of Jesus and his disciples feeding thousands of people with just a few loaves of bread, is the ONLY miracle story that exists in all four Gospels. Our faith ancestors clearly believed this story taught something essential about Jesus.

In the other three gospels, Jesus instructs his disciples to do the feeding. But in John’s version, Jesus does it himself. A child has five barley loaves and two fish. Unbothered by the people’s growing desperation or the ridiculousness of trying to feed them all with this small amount of food, Jesus sets the table and invites everyone to take a seat.

The miracle begins when Jesus takes the bread into his hands and says the magic words, “thank you.” The Greek there, eucharisteo (“he gave thanks”) is where we get the word Eucharist, by the way. There is no story of Holy Communion in John’s gospel. At the “last supper” in John 13 we get Jesus washing his disciples’ feet instead of breaking bread. This Eucharist on the mountaintop is the closest thing we get to Jesus saying the Words of Institution in John’s Gospel.

After Jesus feeds everyone to their heart’s content, they gather up the leftovers and the people are astonished. They call him a prophet - perhaps thinking of Elisha who also fed a big group of hungry people with very little food. Biblical prophets are those who can help us see with new eyes. They hold up a mirror, showing us what we are really like. And, at the same time, they put magical glasses over our eyes, showing us who we could be. It is that gift of being able to see the “how it is” right alongside the “how it could be” that is the particular role of a prophet.

In this instance, Jesus holds up the mirror to these hungry, desperate people. His very presence leads them to feel their own desperation more acutely because, for once, there is hope that another world is possible. And in the midst of very reasonable concerns about scarcity Jesus gifts the people with the glasses of abundance. Streams of water in the desert, manna from heaven, a jug of oil that never runs out, water into wine, hope in a hopeless place.

Lots of people have tried to explain this feeding miracle over the years. Maybe the miracle is that everyone actually had a granola bar or two tucked into their purses and they all took them out and shared. Maybe the miracle is supernatural. Or maybe the miracle is simply that a group of desperate people were willing to admit they had needs and sat down together trusting Jesus could feed them.

However the miracle worked, one thing is clear: Jesus doesn’t shy away from our desperation. He meets us there.

Later in this passage from John we find the disciples in the midst of another yucky human emotion: fear. This second, shorter, story has an almost dreamlike quality about it. The disciples go down to the sea but Jesus is not with them. They get into their boat to leave and the water becomes rough.

I don’t know what your fears are, but I assume you have some. Maybe you are afraid you’ll never amount to anything. Maybe you’re afraid someone will discover your deepest, darkest secret. Maybe you’re afraid because there’s just so much violence in our world. Maybe you’re afraid because you inhabit a body that makes you the target of other people’s fear and hatred.

When I was a child, I had a recurring nightmare for years. Nothing complicated or fancy. But the power it had over me was the visceral sense of fear it created in my gut. That fear would even sneak up on me in the daytime when I was just doing normal, everyday things. Even when the sky was blue and people around me were laughing and smiling, the fear would grab me and punch me in my gut. And it was a nasty, awful feeling.

It was probably that same sense of gut-punching dread that the disciples felt as their small vessel rocked and swayed in the waves three or four miles from shore that night. Suddenly, they see Jesus walking towards them across the water. He walks towards them on the sea and says, “Hey, guys. Wait up!”

Just kidding.

He says, “I am; do not be afraid.”

The voice of a friend whispering to you in the dark, when you’re both crouched in fear, “Shhh. It’s okay. It’s just me.”

But also….these are loaded words. “Do not be afraid” is what the angels always say when they show up in the Bible - remember the Christmas stories? To Mary, Joseph, the shepherds...the angels always start with “do not be afraid.” In the Bible these words arrive on the lips of holy messengers from God.

But not just a messenger. In saying “I am,” John’s Jesus makes an enormous claim. Because those are the same words Moses heard from the burning bush, “I AM. Tell them ‘I AM’ sent you.”

“I AM” is the One John says walks on the water and feeds the multitudes. “I AM” is the One whose very presence makes us realize our own desperation and causes crowds to climb mountains. “I AM” is the One who meets us in the midst of our fear and desperation and does not look away from it.

“I AM” arrives when we are hungry, thirsty, tired, vulnerable. “I AM” shows up even in a world where people are being killed in the streets and on subway platforms because of white supremacy. “I AM” is still present in the detention centers where children weep for their parents. “I AM” arrives even in the midst of ecological devastation as temperatures rise and plastic gathers in the sea. “I AM” is surely present when veterans and transgender youth continue to die by suicide at alarming rates. “I AM” is with us when the healthcare system fails us, when hearts are broken, when our control over our own bodies is threatened, when pain is unbearable, when leaders lie, when hope is nowhere to be found.

When we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, “I AM” meets us there. “You set a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil. My cup overflows.”

At the intersection of all our desperation and fear: Jesus.

Thanks be to God.

[1] Strout, Elizabeth. Anything is Possible, p. 245.