I was sitting in the
lobby of the bank in my hometown; I had a meeting that afternoon with the vice
president of the branch about a small loan I was needing to take out in order
to buy a car. You see, the week before, Sallie and I were in my rebuilt Toyota
Tercel, following some folks from our Sunday School class to the lake, when an
old, maroon Plymouth voyager van decided it needed to take a left more than we
needed to carry on straight down the highway. It totaled that little red car.
After settling everything after the accident, I had found myself a sky-blue
Chevy S-10 for sale, but I was going to need to borrow the money to buy it, so
I called and scheduled a meeting with the “man down at the bank.”
I sat in the lobby,
nervous (banks always made me nervous back then, like they could tell I didn’t
have any money and I was just wasting their time), waiting for the man to wave
me on in his office. He finally opened the door, looked around until he saw me,
and motioned for me to step inside. I sat on the other of his desk in a blue
leather chair, checking out the taxidermied ducks on the wall of his unusually
small office, explaining why I needed this small loan for an older truck. I
told him about how I needed a ride for work that summer, how I was going to
need a ride to get back to college in the fall, how I didn’t have anyone in my
family who could loan me the money. He just sort of sighed, stared at his computer
screen and began to read the list of financial obligations that showed up after
he punched in my social security number: student loans, cell phone bill, those
sorts of things. Then, he asked me if I had a job: I said, “Well, not yet.” It
was summer, I had just moved back home, and I was scheduled to start working as
a summer missionary in a week. He asked if I had any money to put down. I said
no. He asked if I had any money in savings. I told him I didn’t even have a
savings account. He typed a few more times on his keyboard and said, “Let me
run this by one or two folks, and I’ll call you tomorrow.”
I knew right then and
there, that I was done. I mean, who’s going to lend a few thousand dollars to a
twenty-year-old kid with no job, bills to pay already, and no money in the
bank? There was nothing I could do to make any of those situations change,
nothing I could do to make my bills disappear, my non-existent savings account
manifest itself with fresh funds at my disposal, nothing I could do to make my
job more immediate and better paying. I was toast, and I knew it. I mean, what
do you do when you know that no matter what you do, it just won’t be enough?
You know, I wonder if
that had crossed Philip’s mind after he had looked out on the same crowd of
thousands, after he heard Jesus ask him, “Where are we to buy bread for these people
to eat?" I mean, it seems to me like Philip was one of those
people who tackled problems systematically, probably carried around a
calculator and a legal pad. After all, did you notice his reaction after Jesus’
question (which John conveniently tells us is all just a test, because Jesus
already knows what he is going to do)? Philip doesn’t just shrug his shoulders
or make some joke about the nearest Sam’s Club. No, he has a somewhat precise
response: "Six months' wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to
get a little." It sounds like Philip was already counting heads
and doing the rough math in his head. What’s more, Philip doesn’t even answer
the question Jesus asks (did you notice that?). Jesus asks, “Where?” and Philip
answers with “How much?” Isn’t that something?
You don’t suppose that we
can get too distracted by the wrong questions when we’re faced with what seem
like enormous obstacles, do you? Surely we’re not trying to be two steps out
ahead of Jesus, ahead of God, in trying to figure out the answer to a question
we haven’t been asked yet, right? I’m sure not one of us in here has ever spent
a sleepless night running through every possible scenario of how that
conversation with our boss is going to go tomorrow, or how we’re going to deal
with that deadline we’re facing, or whether or not we can keep our house if
they lay us off. None of us have ever done that, right? But that definitely
seems to be what Philip has done: Jesus asks him about where they’re going to
buy bread for these folks, and all Philip can say is something about how much
it’s going to cost. Maybe he should’ve been scoping out bakeries on yelp before
figuring things up in his calculator.
Of course, Philip isn’t
the only one who puts the cart before the proverbial horse. There’s Andrew. While
Jesus was asking, “Where?” and Philip was asking “How much?” Andrew was doing
some community asset mapping: “One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's
brother, said to him, ‘There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two
fish. But what are they among so many people?’" Five barley loaves
and two (most likely dried) fish: the saltine crackers and potted meat of
Jesus’ day. This is the sack lunch of a poor kid, traveling with his poor
family. Andrew has scoured the crowd, and all he can rummage up is this kid’s
sack lunch. He’s got it ready before Jesus’ asks him anything. What if Jesus
had something planned around the corner? What if he was ready to make manna
rain from the sky? What if he was going to hand out coupons for the folks to Golden
Corral of Tiberias, but Andrew (believing he was doing the right thing) comes
to Jesus with the best rations he can find from among the gathered group of the
curious.
You don’t suppose we that
we can sometimes jump the gun and try to figure out an answer to an
insurmountable problem before we have all the information, do you? Surely we’d
never try to put together a solution we know won’t work just to say we tried,
right? I mean, none of us have ever done just enough to say we’ve done it,
handed in the paper that met the page requirements, sat and watched the clock
until the sixtieth second of the sixtieth minute of the four o-clock hour in
the afternoon, figured no one would notice if we didn’t nail that one down—none
us have ever done that, right? I kind of get the feeling that may be what
Andrew was up to here: he (like Jesus and Philip) saw the crowd, knew it was
getting on up into lunchtime, but also knew there was no way they had enough to
feed everyone, so he took off to try to find a solution among the folks, but
when he came up incredibly short, he may have thought to himself, “Well, maybe
Jesus will give me an ‘A’ for effort.”
Now, we all know what
happens next (even before we read the text this morning): Jesus takes the boys
barley bread and dried fish, blesses it, and Jesus himself (according to the
Fourth Gospel) distributes it to the masses, and after everyone has eaten,
there are twelve baskets of leftover bread. John says Jesus already knew what
he was going to do; Jesus already had it figured out, but his disciples are tripping
over themselves in an attempt to either dismiss the task as impossible or at
least show that they tried. Jesus, nevertheless, carries on and there’s more
than enough for everyone—there are even leftovers.
What do you do when you know no matter what you do, it won’t
be enough? Trust that Jesus has it covered.
That’s a lesson the
disciples get to learn twice in the passage before us this morning. After this
miraculous feeding, the disciples get in a boat—without Jesus—heading for the
other side of the lake, and the gospel says, “It was now dark, and Jesus had
not yet come to them. The sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing.”
So it’s dark, and the water is rough because a strong wind was blowing, so what
do you think these disciples (professional fishermen among them) did? Do you
think they turned back to the still-close shore? Do you think they dropped
anchor to ride out the storm? Of course not! “[T]hey had rowed about three or
four miles…” They just kept right on rowing!
Of course, I suppose
there may be some of us who do that sort of thing: when faced with something
that seems impossible, something that might chew us up and spit us out, we just
put our head down and plow on, into the waves, into the storm, because we’re
too stubborn to stay put, too driven to turn back. We’ve got to keep moving,
but what if in our desire to keep going, we’re leaving Jesus further and
further behind? I mean, sure, he’ll catch up, but when he does, it isn’t always
in the most desirable way. After all, when he caught up with the disciples,
they were scared: “they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat, and they
were terrified.” So, what if in our desire to just row on, we wind up
even more terrified?
What do you do when you
know no matter what you do, it won’t be enough? What do you do when it won’t be
enough to feed five thousand people. What do you do when no matter how hard you
row, you won’t make it through the crashing waves? What do you do when you’re
sitting at the kitchen table with a stack of pink and red-stamped envelopes and
no matter how many times you punch the numbers into the calculator there’s
still too much month at the end of your money? What do you do when you don’t
have a job, when you have no money and too many bills, but you still need to
borrow a little money for a car? What do you do when there’s too much to do and
not enough time to do it? What do you do when no matter what you do, it won’t
be enough?
I mean, it won’t ever be
enough, will it? There’s always another day to get it all wrong, isn’t there?
There’s always another minute you could’ve spent, right? Another dollar you
could’ve given, another word you could’ve said? There’s always a better way I
could’ve handled that conversation, a better way you could’ve done that job, a
nicer way to have spoken to your wife, a kinder tone to have taken with your
kids, yeah? The truth is, no matter what we do, it won’t ever be enough,
because we can’t solve every problem, we can’t feed every hungry belly, we
can’t get everything right every time—we just can’t. And so many folks hear
that and think it’s such an awful way to be, or they get depressed by the shear
size of life’s hurdles, but I can’t help but think that there’s something to all
of this, some…I don’t know…grace behind it all.
I mean, that’s what grace
is, right? That no matter how much I do, it won’t be enough, but Jesus still
has it. Jesus still feeds the masses. Jesus still calms the sea. Jesus still
cares enough about me to walk out in the midst of all the chaos that is my
life, all the uncertainty and “way-over-my-head” depth I’ve gotten myself into.
No matter how much I do, it won’t be enough, but that’s ok, because Jesus still
loves me! No matter how much you do, I can tell you for certain it won’t be
enough, and that’s ok, because Jesus still loves you too!
It’s not up to you alone
to feed five thousand—it’s up to us to follow Jesus as he leads us to feed them
together. It’s not up to you to plow through the storm alone—it’s up to us to
remember why we’re on this journey together in the first place and that Jesus
is enough to get us through. It’s not up to you or me or this one church to
solve all of the world’s problems (and believe me, I wish we could)—no, it’s up
to us to be faithful in following the Christ who calls us wherever we are and
wherever we may go to do as much as we can with as much as we have, trusting
that even though it’ll never be enough, Jesus will come through in the end, and
there’ll be more than enough. So much, in fact, folks will be taking home the
leftovers! Amen.
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