Sunday, July 26, 2015 | 8:00, 9:30, and 11:00 a.m.

Loaves and Wishes

Matt Helms
Minister for Children and Families, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 145:10–18
2 Kings 4:38–44
John 6:1–21

“There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?”
John 6:9 (NRSV)

Our contributions seemed to have made, when it came to it, not the slightest bit of difference. I had been utterly defeated on every front; and yet, as I sat at the window, I did not find myself despairing. For out of the gloom, certain images kept defiantly floating up. I didn’t ask for them; they didn’t appear to change anything; yet there they were. . . .

Everything I had tried to hold had escaped me. So perhaps the secret was to do the opposite: perhaps to keep the things one loved one had to gamble on them; one had to give all the heart.

Paul Murray
An Evening of Long Goodbyes

Many years ago, back in the 1920s, a young woman named Agnes believed she was hearing a call from God to enter into ministry as a global missionary. She was only twelve at the time, but she had grown up listening to stories about saints, and the men and women she heard about quickly became her idols. She wanted to imitate them, and with the help of her mother, they often did. Agnes and her mother would host the poorest members of their community at their family dinners most nights, and when looking back, Agnes recalled her mother telling her that they should never eat a single mouthful unless they were sharing the meal with others. “They may not be our relations,” she said, “but all of them are our people.”

This lesson remained with Agnes long after her childhood, and when she turned eighteen, she followed through on her sense of call to leave home and become a missionary. She was unusually short for her age—never even reaching five feet tall—and she had never been outside of her home country. But despite her small stature and knowing nothing about where she’d be sent, she believed that God was calling her to do important work in the world.

In 1928, she left home and studied English in Ireland for a few months before being sent by her religious order to Darjeeling in India—a country that she had read about in books but had never experienced in person. Agnes began work as a teacher in a schoolhouse near the convent where she lived, and she soon discovered that she had a natural aptitude for teaching. The classroom was a true gift to her, and even after she became a nun a few years later, she remained closely involved with education over the next decade. In 1937, she was assigned to a school in eastern Calcutta and was so successful during her time there that she became headmistress of the entire school.

It was easy to imagine that this was the life that God had called her to live: she was successful and beloved at the school, and her life was secure. But on her daily commute to and from the school, Agnes witnessed incredible poverty on the streets of Calcutta, and the outbreak of a severe famine left tens of thousands in the city without food. Wracked by guilt and a need to help, Agnes left her headmistress position at her school in 1948 to try and minister directly to the poor, not just those who could afford an education.

But while her previous experience at following God’s call had led her into immediate success, ministering directly to the poor proved to be more of a challenge than she had ever expected. Early on, she began a school of five students in a slum in Calcutta, but her school failed to attract any more than that, and the students eventually dispersed. She received medical training in the hopes of providing medical aid to those in need but soon found herself overwhelmed by how much she did not know. She invested a great deal of her own money into these projects and in others, but because she no longer had any income through teaching, she watched as her personal funds slowly sank down to nothing. After a year, she found herself almost completely broke, and she was forced to beg for food and supplies from her former friends and colleagues.

Her once unflappable convictions had been shaken, and in her diary she wrote about the sharp temptation she felt to give up and return to the school to teach. There was a home there and a safety net there. There was a clear sense of purpose as well. Having followed this dream of trying to help the poor by living among them, she felt like everything that she had to give was not enough—that she had let down herself, her order, and, most importantly, the people whom she was trying to serve. What were her small efforts of charity among so many people who were in need? What good were the small meals that she shared among an entire city that was teeming with hunger?

That was exactly the dilemma facing Jesus and the disciples in our passage from John today. The feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle other than the resurrection to be recorded in all four of the Gospels, but John adds a particular richness to his account in the exchanges between Jesus, Philip, and Andrew.

As the crowds come forward from their travels, ostensibly late in the evening and far away from their homes, Jesus asks Philip where they can buy bread for these people to eat. It was a great joke on Jesus’ part, because the text says that Jesus knew exactly what he was going to do, but one can imagine the fear in Philip’s eyes as he realizes they are about to have a lot of hungry, angry people on their hands. In the other Gospel accounts, the disciples try to convince Jesus to send the crowds away so that they won’t have the responsibility of feeding them, but in John’s account, Philip just hopelessly replies that buying bread would be a near impossibility for them. After all, they themselves were likely forced to rely on the generosity of others as much as the people who were coming to them. So when Andrew reports that their only food source is a boy with five loaves and two fishes, the situation seems like it has the potential to go well beyond the worst church potluck ever assembled. Located in a remote area high up on a mountain, there is a great risk to both the children and the elderly in the group as their hunger could significantly weaken them for their journey back home.

In the face of all this potential hunger, Andrew looks down at the five loaves and two fishes that the boy has placed before them and says, “What are they among so many people?” It was a generous gift to be certain—the boy could have kept the food for himself and for his family but chose instead to share it with all of the people. But the basic rules of math still apply: what are seven items of food among five thousand people? What bit of difference would that make?

Many of us wrestle with that very question as we look out at the great social ills of our day. Hunger is still a pervasive problem around the globe, as is access to clean water and to education. Affordable housing, unemployment, and systemic inequality are, as well. And, unfortunately, that list only begins to scratch the surface. We are all too aware that there are at least hundreds of millions, if not well over a billion, people who are in desperate need of help in the form of meeting basic needs and access to opportunities. It’s part of what motivates us to invest in this faith community and the ways in which we as a church try to make an impact on our city and our world.

It’s an incredible gift that we can have high school students from our youth group and our Tutoring program travel together to learn about the history of racism in this country and to dream about a future where it’s no longer present. It’s a gift that we have church members who spend their vacation time traveling to Guatemala to build houses for those who don’t have a quality roof over their heads. It’s a gift that our Social Service Center and Meals Ministry teams feed thousands of people throughout the year.

But while it feels right that we donate our time and money to combating things like homelessness or hunger, there’s still a small voice within that gnaws at us and says the math doesn’t add up. I loved going on building trips when I was in high school, assembling frames for a new house and repairing others that had fallen into disrepair. But while I always left those work weeks feeling proud of what we had accomplished, the math in my head was telling a different story. What was one new house among the estimated five thousand men and women who were homeless in that state alone?

A similar question was posed in our first lesson from 2 Kings, telling of Elisha and his band of prophets in the midst of a famine. Elisha was the successor to Elijah, who was one of the most revered prophets in the entire Hebrew Bible, and early in Elisha’s ministry he was facing a crisis. Famine had broken out throughout Israel in the midst of drought and war, and his community was facing a serious food crisis. In our passage, Elisha was gathered with a group of a hundred people when a man came forth with twenty loaves—all of the food that he had—to offer to them. Although the ratio is certainly better than the feeding of the five thousand, the problem of basic math remained. Twenty loaves would not be nearly enough to sustain this group of a hundred people. But instead Elisha invites the man to give what he can and to trust that through God it will be enough. It is noteworthy that Elisha does not try to take any credit in the feeding that follows—he knows that the math does not add up as well. Instead, he attributes this to God’s work and leaves it at that. We as readers and listeners would love more detail in the text—the mechanics of miracles explained—but our part to play in the story seems more mundane. We can only give what we are able, trusting and hoping that through God the gifts we bring will be enough, even when it looks like the math doesn’t add up.

In the 1960s, a couple named Millard and Linda Fuller were growing increasingly troubled by the small number of low-cost housing options in both Alabama and Georgia, where the two of them had grown up. Millard was a self-made millionaire and an extremely successful businessman, but in 1968 the couple decided to focus instead on creating housing through volunteer labor. The couple initially began working in Zaire, before eventually feeling called back to the United States, and in 1976, they began a series of houses in the slums of San Antonio.

Even though they began by creating just a handful of houses per year, eventually their model of volunteer labor and a partnership with prospective homeowners began to take hold, and within a decade the group, which became known as Habitat for Humanity, grew on a national level. Amazingly, last November Habitat celebrated their one millionth family helped across the globe—an astounding growth from what they were able to give early on. “God’s love doesn’t leave anyone out,” Fuller explained, “so my love shouldn’t either.” Through their giving what they were able—at first just a handful of houses in a country that needed hundreds of thousands of them—God was able to take the Fullers’ passion and make that love spread farther than they ever could have imagined.

When the boy brought five loaves and two fishes to Andrew, they were indeed objectively not very much for a crowd of five thousand. And yet through God’s love and grace, there was somehow an abundance, and everyone was able to be fed. There have been attempts to parse out the mechanics of the miracle over the years, with some positing that the boy’s kindhearted gesture prompted others to give what they had as well, but doing this ignores the wider point of the miracle story, I think. Through Christ, we can give wholeheartedly of ourselves without feeling a sense of doubt creeping in that all our efforts will be for naught—and like the story of Jesus walking on water that is curiously always coupled with the feeding of the five thousand, we know that God will be with us even in the moments when we are afraid or things look particularly hopeless. We have each been given a variety of gifts for a reason, and through God we believe our gifts will bear great fruit—even beyond what we’re able to understand or see in the moment, and even in those moments when we are filled with self-doubt about how much of an impact we’ll truly be able to have.

After her first year, Agnes continued to struggle with her call, and she felt like all of her contributions hadn’t made the slightest bit of difference to the poor living in Calcutta. But in 1950, two years after she had left her position as headmistress at her former school, she received a grant from the Vatican to begin a congregation that would later be known as the Missionaries of Charity. Although this congregation began with only thirteen members, it soon began to inspire and attract national attention for the work that it was doing amongst the poorest neighborhoods of Calcutta—opening orphanages and hospices in places that had previously had none.

By the 1960s they had opened up orphanages, hospices, and communities all across India, and Agnes’s reputation had grown throughout the world. Known to most as Mother Teresa, the name that she took as a Catholic nun, Agnes’s service to God and to the poor grew from humble beginnings to a movement estimated to have around five thousand sisters today. This was not something that she had planned on, I don’t think. She was only doing what that boy was doing: giving the loaves that he had, while wishing for something more. She was doing what the Fullers were doing: building something for strangers they had never met, hoping for a better life for them. She was only doing what Elijah had done: offering what he had and trusting that through God it would be enough.

One of my favorite prayers—which comes from the Franciscan community—puts it like this: “May God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you really can make a difference in this world, so that you are able, through God’s grace, to do what others think cannot be done.”

Friends, when our doubts are creeping in and we start to think that all our efforts won’t be enough to change things that seem utterly beyond our control, I truly hope that we can be blessed with enough foolishness to believe that we are indeed making a difference in this world—and that like that boy offering what little he had to a crowd of five thousand, our impact will extend far beyond what we could ever imagine, through God’s love and grace.

Thanks be to God for that challenge in our lives.

Alleluia and amen.