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"Feast or Famine"
Mark 8:1-9
A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Douglas M. Donley
World Communion Sunday
October 7, 2001
University Baptist Church
Minneapolis, MN
On this World Communion Sunday, we pause to remember that we are connected in a great web of inter-dependency. This is not-codependency in the negative sense nor is it rugged individualism that we experience in so much of our lives. In a healthy world, all aspects of our beings are connected. Not only is the neck bone connected to the head bone, but the third-world bone is connected to the first world bone. The African bone is connected to the Asian bone. The Arctic bone is connected to the Antarctic bone and the Middle East bone is connected to the US bone. We are all needed in order to build a culture of peace. None of us are isolated rocks and islands. We also know that when we pull together amazing things can happen.
While I’m grateful that there is a growing international alliance against terrorism, I hope that as Christians, Jews, Muslims and other religions we can come together with all of our religious fervor to build an international and interfaith coalition for economic justice. That is a large part of what the protesters at the World Trade Organization events worldwide have tried to demonstrate.
What we do has an effect on something somewhere else in the world. Our good actions have effects near and far. Our bad actions affect those near and far as well. So it is never okay that one has a feast while another has a famine.
Today’s scripture reading is about the feeding of 4,000 people. Previously in Mark’s gospel, Jesus fed 5,000 people. The first feeding was to the Jews and the second feeding was to the gentiles. This means that it is a world communion that Jesus shared. He made no distinction.
After healing people, Jesus had compassion on the international crowd gathered around him who had not eaten a decent meal in three days. The disciples mentioned that they had only seven loaves and a couple of fish. These elements were so important and symbolic.
When the people were fleeing slavery in Egypt, God gave them manna in the wilderness, a kind of bread. When Jesus encountered Peter, Andrew, James and John he encouraged them to leave their nets behind so that he could make them fishers of human beings. The early persecuted Church would use the symbol of the fish as a sign that there is safe harbor nearby. If people had fish on their homes, or on their chariots, it was a symbol to those who knew that they were Christians.
Jesus multiplied the loaves--or did he? Jesus asked the disciples what they had. He told them to spread out what they had. They used their resources, their abundance. He didn’t require the gathered international crowd to convert to Christianity before getting the bread or fish. He had compassion and that was enough. And you know what, when the disciples pulled together their goods, everyone had enough to eat and there was even some left over. The point is not the physical multiplication, it is the recognition of the abundant mercy of God to all people.
There is a new piece of music, a symphony which is being performed this weekend for the first time. It combines 400 voices and an orchestra. It is written to honor the 50th anniversary of the Nobel Prizes. During one movement, the chords change every three and a half seconds. That is the amount of time it takes for another person to die of hunger in this world. Every three and a half seconds the chord changes and another person dies. During our feasts, we remember the famines.
When we eat this feast, we do not do so to show that we are better than another. We do not do it because our God is better than your god. We don’t do it even in order to follow the rules of the world. We do this to proclaim in defiance of the world that there is to be no famine:
No famine of food.
There is to be no famine of compassion.
No famine of homes.
The only famine there should be is a famine of thoughtlessness.
A famine of violence.
A famine of terror.
A famine of injustice.
A famine of exclusion.
We are to join a feast that puts an end to all of that. We may think we have only a few morsels of bread and a couple of fish. But we have so much more.
We are here to feast on community.
We are to feast on the fact that we are connected with a wider people, a people for whom we pray and who pray for us.
We have a generous church with plenty of resources to spare.
We still live in a relatively peaceful world.
We have creative witnesses undergirding our work from places like the Baptist Peace Fellowship.
When we pull these resources together, we feast on our abundance, but we also recognize the famine in the world.
As we eat this bread and drink this cup, we symbolically weld ourselves to a new world order.
We take manna in the wildreness to give us strength on the journey from slavery.
We recommit ourselves to Jesus’ ethics of active, forceful and creative nonviolence in the wake of a violent world.
We commit ourselves, like Jesus, to invite everyone to the feast: Jew, Gentile, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Hmong. We invite them to a feast for love and mercy and declare famine on intolerance and injustice.
The scriptures tell us that on the night Jesus was betrayed....