One of Those Days

Sermon

This is a sermon about the nature of God and the nature of discipleship. You might have to listen closely.

Jesus is having a day, that’s for sure. His disciples have just told him about the death of his cousin John, which means the disciples are having a day, too. They were the ones who went to Herod’s palatial estate and reclaimed John’s body. They were the ones who buried John. They were the ones who had to tell Jesus the awful news. It’s a wonder anyone is still standing upright.

We can hardly blame Jesus for wanting to get away—that’s what fear and grief will do to you, make you want to run and hide. And of course Jesus handily finds a boat and drifts away from the crowds, from the bad news, even from his disciples. But to no avail—those crowds watch him row away and follow him. There’s no rest for the weary this day.

And then, just when you think Jesus is going to yell at everyone and tell them to leave him alone and just go figure things out for themselves, just when you think he’s going to say to God, That’s it, I’m done, find someone else to be the Messiah, just when you think he’ll call on the angels to carry him away, he does the opposite. When he could turn to self-care, he turns to other-care. When he could claim that grief and fear and plain old exhaustion are draining his well of compassion, he doesn’t.

What he does do is heal the sick in that crowd, that crowd of 5,000 men and maybe another 5,000 women and children—not the folks who lived in a nearby village but enough people to fill a city.

Don’t you wonder what the disciples made of all of this? They too had experienced trauma—they were the ones who took John’s headless body and buried it. They too could claim grief and fear and exhaustion, and in a way, they do. Their compassion has a limit—they can tell that the thousands of folks there are getting hungry, so maybe it’s time to let them go find their evening meal.

It’s a given that the people are hungry. The poor of Jesus’ day—and they were the ones in search of healing, in search of a savior—the poor faced food insecurity every day. It’s not for nothing that the Lord’s Prayer includes that line, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Those crowds meant it, because they could never be sure that daily bread would appear the way manna from heaven appeared to their ancestors in the wilderness so many centuries before.

Maybe the crowds stay around, even though it’s getting late, because they’re used to being hungry. They aren’t used to the kind of healing and compassion that Jesus offers them. They won’t let some bossy disciples send them off; no sir, they have come to see Jesus and they will wait there for as long as it takes.

It reminds me a little of the Taylor Swift concerts that have been happening up and down the West Coast recently. (If you’ve never heard of Taylor Swift, you need to know that she is an incredible songwriter, storyteller, and musician, and her concerts fill stadiums. Look her up after worship, and better, listen to some of her music.) Anyway, the niece of a friend of mine went to the Taylor Swift concert recently, despite the fact that she had had brain surgery ten days prior. Nothing was going to stop her, not even the wheelchair she was using.

But here’s the thing about Taylor Swift people—when the concert venue folks learned that this young woman was coming in a wheelchair even though she was recovering from brain surgery, they upgraded her and her friends to a box from where they could enjoy the concert without people blocking her view or coming too close. And just to be clear, I am not saying that Taylor Swift is Jesus. Not at all. But she probably sings better than he did.

Back to Jesus. So the crowds will let neither hunger nor disciples dissuade them from seeing Jesus. And Jesus knows that—of course he does. He’s Jesus. He knows that he’s the reason why they are all there. That, and the fact that they need healing because they or their beloveds are sick, and sometimes they’re sick because they don’t have enough good food to eat.

Now maybe Taylor Swift packs stadiums because she kind of likes it when her ego gets fed—I don’t know, but I know enough about celebrity stardom to know that the ego is pretty central in all of that. When Jesus lived, Sigmund Freud would not be born for another 1823 years, so there was no concept of ego. Getting fame and fortune was not what motivates Jesus to stick around, to heal, to feed. Something else is going on.

Many years ago, when I was in seminary, I worked on the recruiting weekends that the school put on twice a year. Prospective students would come in, and I and some others would set up tours and lectures and meetings with current students. One year there were two guys from the same church who had come to check things out. They were late for breakfast one morning, so I went over to where they were staying and asked if they needed some food. No, they said, no, not at all. We had the Word for breakfast, meaning their morning Bible study would hold them over till lunch.

I think the Word, the Hebrew scripture that Jesus grew up on and now embodied, is what motivates him to stick around and heal and feed. Maybe it’s because his parents took him to the synagogue in Nazareth, or maybe it’s because he was the son of God and God (another sermon for another day), but Jesus knew the Torah and the prophets. Their words were an earworm for him, the way a Taylor Swift song might get stuck in your head.

So when the disciples tell Jesus that the crowds need to leave and go find dinner, what he hears is Psalm 78:

“‘Can God spread a table in the wilderness?
Even though he struck the rock so that water gushed out
and torrents overflowed,
can he also give bread,
or provide meat for his people?’
[God] commanded the skies above,
and opened the doors of heaven;
he rained down on them manna to eat,
and gave them the grain of heaven.
Mortals ate of the bread of angels;
[God] sent them food in abundance.
And they ate and were well filled….”

Jesus hears that earworm from the prophet Ezekiel: “The trees of the field shall yield their fruit, and the earth shall yield its increase…. I will provide for them splendid vegetation, so that they shall no more be consumed with hunger in the land….” (34:27-29)

Jesus remembers the prophet Isaiah, too. “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear.” (25:6) Jesus knows that feeding people is sacred work.

Already Jesus told the people it was okay to break the sabbath if it meant feeding someone who was hungry. And later in the gospel, Jesus would tell a parable in which the king says, “‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink….’” (Matthew 25:31ff)

If Jesus himself is the fulfillment of the word of God, then of course he will ensure that hungry people eat, not just enough to stop their stomachs from rumbling, but with an abundance so that there are leftovers, because, as my grandmother used to say, it’s always better the second day.

And did you notice—Jesus doesn’t feed the crowd. He tells his disciples, “You give them something to eat.” He invites them into the sacred work. He lets them be part of the miracle of abundance.

Jesus is having quite a day, but instead of crawling into bed and hiding under the covers, the way you or I might deal with a hard day, deal with our fear or grief or exhaustion, instead of leaving it all behind, he faces the challenges right before him. And I think that his healing and his making sure the disciples feed the people is about more than just compassion. It’s about how things are done in the empire of God.

Remember that this story begins with Jesus hearing about the murder of John the Baptist, a victim of King Herod’s evil. John was beheaded during a banquet of the rich and famous, and his head presented to the king. That story shows what the empire of the world is like, a place of death, and the abuse of power, and terror.

Jesus is about life, and power to the people, and so in healing these thousands, in ordering his disciples to feed the men, women, and children, Jesus is illuminating the empire of Heaven, where Herods don’t get the last word, where murder is met with a commitment to life, where greed is vanquished with abundant generosity.

Now we’re disciples too, you and I. And we have our days. We have our days that are so weighed down with grief that we really can’t get out of bed.

And we have our days when fear—about climate change, a topsy-turvy political landscape, intractable issues like the plight of refugees and unconquerable addiction—shuts us down.

We have days when we simply cannot take one more story of a trans person being murdered, of a Black man shot by police.

And I do not want to say to you, “Buck up, people.” Sometimes we really do need to put our oxygen masks on before we can help someone else. And yes, sometimes, when we are grieving and afraid and exhausted, what we need to do is throw off the covers and go be with people.

Sometimes we’re with people who will take care of us. Sometimes we’re with people who know exactly what we’re going through because they’re going through it too. And sometimes we’re with people who need us, us—with all our fear and grief and exhaustion. They need us to remind them that they are worthy of food and drink; they are worthy of healing; they are worthy of love.

This is a sermon about the nature of God and the nature of discipleship. Amen.