July 31, 2005
Genesis 32:22-31
NRSV
Matthew 14:13-21
NRSV
Beyond the Buffet
First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost – July 31, 2005
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Texts: Genesis 32:22-31/Matthew 14:13-21]
“They need not go away; you give them something to eat.”
I wonder if the staff of the hotel where the recent International Congregational Fellowship quadrennial meeting was held was responding to Jesus’ words to the disciples. They certainly seemed to want to give us “something to eat” twice a day, at least. Every morning there was the breakfast buffet and every evening – the earliest dinner was 7 PM – there was the dinner buffet. Each evening there were salads, entrees, breads, desserts, name it, it was all there. Ten years ago I stood in this pulpit for the first time and quoted Patrick Dennis’ character “Auntie Mame,” about life being a banquet and most poor so-in-sos going through life starving. Well, Auntie Mame would have been quite comfortable at the meeting – every day there was a banquet.
For someone like me, who says he’s on the “see food diet” – I see food and I eat it – life being a banquet can sometimes present a problem, at least when it’s connected with a buffet table. We had done some touring earlier and I have to say it was far easier when we simply sat down and they brought us what we were supposed to have, with a minimum of choices. All of the choices just make it more difficult because you feel like you have to take it. I mean, what if what you really want isn’t there when you’re ready to go back? Or, being a good, frugal Midwesterner, what if I don’t get my money’s worth? One way or the other one almost starts to feel a moral obligation to eat one’s self silly – and there’s the silliness.
Underlying those attitudes I talked about is a sense or fear of scarcity. We’re afraid that there might not be enough. We’re afraid that we might have to go without. We’re afraid that we won’t get what we really want. So what do we do? We take more than we really need just because we can, just because there is the slightest possibility that we may have to do without and we don’t want that. I’m reading a book by Mark McIntosh, Discernment and Truth: The Spirituality and Theology of Knowledge, which has brought some old friends back to my attention. One of these is the early church writer Evagrius of Pontus. Evagrius talks about the “eight deadly thoughts” that can kill the life of the spirit. The first of these is gluttony. As McIntosh points out, “Clearly, Evagrius is not pointing to overeating per se as the real problem, but, rather, a gnawing sense that there will never enough for oneself. Suddenly one is acutely aware of one’s hunger, preoccupied with thoughts about how it may or may not be assuaged, and about how the spiritual life interferes with getting what one wants. The incipiently infantilizing tendencies are not far to seek. From this simple root, in my view, Evagrius spies out the secret growth of the whole tenacious system that evil uses to control the soul – a nexus of fear, anxiety, anger at the goods of others, and self-preoccupation. It is as though the mind begins, in this apparently simple-minded way, to be gripped more and more by a conviction of fundamental scarcity and closed off to a perspective of hopeful generosity and trusting patience.” [p.100]
We live in a land of tremendous abundance. We live in a society that has the best standard of living ever known. However, when I talk to folks there is always this little concern, especially when it comes to giving of themselves, that there might not be enough to go around. The whole problem and the myth of scarcity, believe it or not, lie just beyond the buffet. Why? Because the buffet, a symbol of abundance and the good life, can also become an expression of self-concern and self-centeredness that leads us from the truly “Good Life,” one centered in God and in others, to something that is quite second-class. Something centered in ourselves and the obsession to make sure that we have enough. So, what’s beyond the buffet?
Jacob had succumbed to the myth of scarcity – that he wouldn’t get enough from God or from his father Isaac -- and, trickster that he was (even his name means “dissembler”), he fooled his brother Esau into giving up his birth-right. Now, fifteen years later, his brother is approaching him with an armed force and he’s got to do something. Once again he appears to resort to trickery and sends his family ahead of him. As he waits behind he confronts someone far more powerful than his brother. Some want to say it’s an angel and there are wonderful representations in art of Jacob’s wrestling with the angel. The statue by Jacob Epstein in the Tate Gallery has a bit of a twist in that it shows Jacob resting in the angel’s arms following the struggle. Others think that his struggle was with himself, with his conscience. Either way, it was no less real and no less true. We should remember that in Hebrew usage the Lord’s angel and the Lord himself are often one-and-the-same.
Jacob had an encounter on that fear-filled night and he wrestled. He wrestled with who he was; just like all of us have to wrestle with our sense of self, with whether we are ‘authentic’ (are we who we say we are?) or not. Jacob also wrestled with who he was called to be, as all of us have to struggle to determine where we should go and what we should do to be the people God has called us to be. To talk about wrestling, hard physical struggle is really quite appropriate– and I don’t mean WWF “Smack-Down” stuff here. Sometimes we can struggle inside ourselves so hard that it feels as though we’ve been through something physical, we hurt all over, and it’s because we’ve been wrestling with the angel, the messenger, inside ourselves who is reminding us that there is more to us than we see and more to what God has for us than sometimes we even want to see.
So, Jacob wrestled all night long. As he wrestles he confronts his trickster self, he confronts his fear of scarcity. As he wrestles he declares, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” He hangs on for dear life and, in the process, he gets struck and wounded. He comes away blessed, but also wounded. I think that sometimes the blessing and the wound are, perhaps, one in the same. He sees himself for what he is and is now able to see life in a new way. He’s struggled, he bears the marks of the struggle and now he can move on and be the person God has meant for him to be. Jacob wrestles and comes with a new name, “Israel”: “God has striven.” (Hebrew yi?r?’?l, God has striven, God has saved: yi?r?, he has striven, saved + ’?l, God.) Israel limps away from that encounter to experience the fullness of what God has for him – he has moved beyond the buffet.
Nowhere in Scripture does it say that it will be easy to grow in faith. All growth – at least all growth that is genuine – comes as the result of effort. Each of us has a story we could tell of our own wrestling match. All of us have the marks, the wounds that came as a result of our struggle to grow. What this is about is our effort to grow in faith, grow in depth, and grow as true persons made in the image and likeness of God. To move beyond the buffet is to enter into the real abundance that is there for us beneath the surface and beyond our sense that there is never enough.
Like Jacob Jesus was left by himself. He had withdrawn so that he could spend some time in quiet, but soon the crowds were all around him. They were hungry. First, they were hungry for the spiritual food he offered them. He reaches toward them in compassion and offers them not only the gift of teaching, but the deep healing which comes along with it as we are made whole as God’s people. The time passes and soon they are hungry physically as well. The disciples wanted Jesus to send the people away to meet their own needs – as sometimes we do in the church when it appears that just maybe we won’t be able to handle something that is coming our way. The disciples simply didn’t have enough. Their five loaves and two fish just was not a match for the needs of five thousand plus people. So, they tell Jesus, there isn’t enough. They tell him to send these people off so they can meet their own needs and help the local economy. Jesus responds, “No. Don’t send them away. You give them something to eat.” In other words, don’t push it off on someone. YOU do something about it.
What Jesus does is to call the disciples to personal responsibility and reminds them that work is part of our life together. We have to work at relationship. We have to work at making the community become the place we want it to be. We have to work in order to share a vision of what our life together looks like because we’re on the other side of the buffet here. Jesus demonstrates clearly that whatever we have and whoever we are is the result of God’s gift. God’s gift, God’s abundance, doesn’t run out, there’s always enough and more than enough. When we acknowledge that reality and allow it to grow in our lives the dessert blooms, wilderness becomes a garden, and five loaves and two fish become the source of a banquet that not only fills everyone, there are leftovers!
I so appreciated something John Shea, the contemporary theologian and story-teller, said. He tells the story of how a faculty he was part of brought their “standard organizational wisdom” to meet the needs of prospective students and supply what they wanted. They designed a program to meet the needs and to fulfill the desires of the accrediting agencies. Once it was done they stood back and said, “Who is going to run this program?” Shea writes, “We had created a program that was needed, but we did not have the personnel to pull it off. We looked around the table at ourselves. That was all we had, and it was not enough. Someone suggested we hire new faculty. We should ‘go and buy’ some good people. But that would require money we didn’t have. The program, as they say, never came to fruition.” [On Earth As It Is In Heaven, p. 243]
Shea points out, “This way of thinking that leads to inaction is analogous to how the disciples construe the situation in this Gospel episode. Beginning with need is beginning with what we lack.” [p. 243] What is required is to see what you have, rather than what you need. Begin with the assets you do have, that’s what Jesus tells them, “You give them something to eat.” The first step in spiritual growth is to understand what you have, be still and become aware of who you are and whose you are. Then the abundance becomes obvious.
When they bring what they have Jesus is able to take it and provide a banquet for all those people. How does he begin? He gives thanks for what they have. Here’s the second step of spiritual growth, to be grateful for what we have once we have come to awareness. They no longer see it as too little, they are beyond the buffet of scarcity, and they see the gift they have to offer others with gratitude. The third step is to give the gift and to let the gift, to borrow a phrase, “keep on giving.”
I don’t know how that feeding happened that day. I don’t know if Jesus literally took five loaves and two fish and fed those people or if the very audacious act of trying to feed them shamed the people there into sharing the lunches they had. I don’t know and, you know what, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that which is given is blessed, broken, and given. It becomes yet another reminder that our lives are to be Eucharist – thanksgiving, communion – blessed, broken, and given so that others may live and be drawn into God’s life. We no longer need to cripple ourselves with the idea that there is not enough – five loaves and two fish make that a lie.
We are a covenant community here on Church Street which counts 830 plus folks as “members.” There are more if we count those who are part of us, but who have not gotten around to “owning the covenant” (though some of them live it better than those who have!). When we look at the statistics we see that less than half of our members regularly worship with us. There are fewer still who regularly support the work that we try to do here. Am I discouraged? No. Is there not enough? Certainly not. I see who we are and where we are and I rejoice in God’s gift. I am grateful and I see, already, what we’re managing to do here to make a difference in the lives of those we touch and in the community around us.
Now, does that mean that I am satisfied? No. And neither should any of us be satisfied with where we are. I want to challenge us to think about what life would be like here if we struggled with God, as Jacob did, and said we weren’t letting go until we were fully blessed. Let me put it a different way, what would it look like if we intentionally, fully lived our covenant to worship God together and to grow in the knowledge and expression of our faith? I wonder, too, what it would be like if we realized that God IS enough for us and that the myth of scarcity has no place here on Church Street, or anywhere else for that matter? And, to be honest, I wonder what it would be like if we realized that we CAN meet the needs of all the various people who come to us in any given week? As your pastor and teacher – your sheepdog-in-chief – I want you to wonder about it too, to dream of it, and to see the possibilities of just how wonderful it is when the desert blooms all around us. So, what might it be like? Well, it’s far beyond the buffet I can tell you that and it has to begin with each of us realizing that it’s up to us to feed those who come hungry and hurting.
Let me tell you something I learned while I was at the ICF meeting. We had the opportunity to visit the mission in Albania and while I didn’t see some of the things I’d hoped to see, I did get to talk with some folks from the mission. I was shocked to learn that these people, most of who have next to nothing, rose to a situation much as the disciples had. During the Kosovo crisis the government came to this fledgling church of sixty members and asked them to help take care of Muslim refugees. They said, “Of course.” Do you know how many people they fed and housed for almost six months? Twenty-five hundred. They got help from the churches in Greece, but by and large they did it on their own.
Not enough? Don’t tell that to the people in Saranda, Albania. They heard the message, “You give them something to eat,” and they did. So should we. God is enough and we are enough and there’s more than enough to go around. The miracle is that it happens, that there is life and love and struggle and it’s all beyond the buffet. Amen.