"A Power Picnic"

John 6:1-15

A Sermon Preached by The Rev. Douglas M. Donley

August 6, 2006

University Baptist Church

Minneapolis, MN

 

            It’s amazing how quickly the weather can change in one short week.  On Sunday and Monday it was hot as blue blazes and it was very uncomfortable to leave behind the air conditioning.  On Tuesday, it rained cats and dogs and flooded basements yet again.  When we prayed for rain to relieve us of a drought, we would have preferred not to go so quickly to the other extreme.  But by Wednesday, our family was enjoying a dinner on the deck with a nice breeze to boot.  Right now it’s picnic weather—great weather to go outside and revel in the greenery and breeze.  We need to remember days like today in the middle of the winter. 

            I imagine people downtown being tempted to take their power lunches outside.  OF course, that would defeat the purpose of a power-lunch.  One is much less intimidating at a picnic than at a restaurant.  Maybe that’s why I love picnics so much—the smell of the grill, the fresh tomatoes, the sweet corn, watermelon and cantaloupe.  Yum.  I hear tell we’re going to have a picnic at UBC in about a month. 

            I dare say that whenever Jesus had a meal it was a power-meal.  I mean when you’re in touch with your holy side, then every meal is a power meal.   In Jesus’ understanding, real power is not one of dominance one over another.  Real power happens when people connect with the ultimate power of God and tap that power to make miracles happen.  Today’s scripture refers to one of those power-meals of Jesus.  But this one is held outside.  I guess that would make it a power picnic. 

You know the story.  It was dinner time on the evangelism circuit.   That's when Philip said to Jesus, "Hey will you look at all of these people?  Why, there must be 5,000 of them.  They're getting restless and we have to feed them, but 200 denarii, that is, 200 days wages, wouldn't even give them a morsel of bread a piece.  We're a poor church after all."

The disciples were left in a bind.  It was a church dinner and the pot-luck notices had not gone out.  How do you feed all of these people when there is not enough to go around?             "What are we gonna do?"  I can just hear the disciples whining.  Andrew scoffingly said, "Well there is one person with some food but shoot, he only has five loaves of bread and two fish, but that ain't nothin'.  It's too much, it's too hard.  Give us a break, man."

I can imagine people getting on each other's nerves.  Husbands telling wives, "You mean we came all the way over here to follow this guy, but you didn't bring any food?"  Then the wives shooting back, "Well, you could have come prepared too.." and on and on.  I can imagine people being in fights with one another because hungry people have short tempers.  I know I'm that way, isn't that right Kim?  The disciples had long lost control of the crowd and thought for this logistical oversight, the whole movement was doomed.

We know what happened next. Jesus called everyone together and tells all 5000 to sit down.  Can you imagine?  But, everyone found a place to sit on the grass, and Jesus gave them five loaves of bread and two fish and somehow everyone was satisfied. 

Matthew's account clarifies the number.  He makes it explicit that it was 5000 men "besides women and children." (Mt 14:21)  That means that the number could be as many as 20 or 30,000 people.  Demographically speaking, this number could represent ten percent of the population of ancient Palestine!  A representative tenth of Israel.  A tithe of the people.              People pooled their resources and did the impossible.  Five loaves and two fish were multiplied and all were content.  It is the only miracle story which appears in all four gospels.  We know it so well we can almost recite it in our sleep. 

This power picnic is the thing of legend.  But I don’t think the power of the picnic came so much in the mysterious multiplying of the loaves by Jesus.  While he may well have had that power, I think the miracle was in the sharing that happened on the grass. 

It was not so much that the people didn’t have anything, but they had not realized what they had.  That’s the real miracle.  That’s where the power lies, when people realize their own holiness and their import for someone else. 

Three years ago, a half dozen of us went to visit our sister church in Leon, Nicaragua.  Somehow this tiny poor church pooled their resources and made vats of food which they distributed to the scores of people living in squalor at the city dump.  At that power picnic, we witnessed a true multiplication of loaves and fishes.

As I was reading the newspaper in Colorado during the Sabbatical, I came across stories about the Rainbow family fixing to gather at a national forest.  When I graduated from college, a close friend and I took a trip across country.  One of the hitchhikers we picked up told us about the rainbow gathering.  Intrigued, we drove him all the way from Montana to upstate Michigan to experience this annual communal event.  As he suggested, it was filled with free spirits who forsook convention in order to live in community for a spell.  At the evening gathering, people made announcements about needing 40 cooks at the taco tent at 2pm and 50 cleaners at 5pm.  In the circle, we heard chiding about how people had been hording food they brought. The ethos was to share what you had with your brothers and sisters.  We did and all were satisfied.

Earlier on that same trip, we picked up a hitch-hiker by the name of Chet.  We spoke for hours about life on the road.  He said that he never went hungry as long as there was a McDonald's around.  You see, McDonald's has certain requirements concerning how long a burger can stay under one of those nuclear powered red lamps.  Chet said that there were always plenty of perfectly good wrapped burgers in McDonald's dumpsters. 

Statistics show that there is enough food to feed the world if we just find a way to equitably make it happen.  If we did this, we would be effectively fighting the breeding ground of terrorism.

When we pool our resources miracles will happen.  Community can make miracles happen.  But the miracle is not only that people are fed, but there is something that lasts after the meal.  The power lingers and shows forth again and again.

As the people are finishing up their meal, Jesus tells the disciples to gather up all of the leftovers.  In Greek, the word is klasmata which is also translated as fragments.  "Gather up the scraps and don't let anything go to waste.  And when they gathered up the klasmata, behold there were 12 baskets leftover, one for each disciple, one for each tribe of Israel.  And nothing went to waste.   

We need to remember the miracle of feeding the 5000, but we also need to remember the gift we have in those 12 leftover baskets.  I think that's where the real miraculous events happen.

In the second century, we know that the word "leftovers" was important in the life of the church.  In the Didache, Christians began to use the word in Greek klasmata in parts of the celebration of communion.  The leftovers from those 12 baskets are right here.  We are the fruit that has been born out of that labor, out of that feast.  Every time 2 or 3 are gathered, we partake of the leftovers from that power picnic almost 2 millennia ago.  Leftovers are unexpected gifts.

John Lennon said “life is what happens while you are making other plans.”  Life happens during the leftover time.  Life and ministry happens in the gaps, in mundane moments between momentous events.  In other words, we need to look at the opportunities to use our leftovers while we can.   We need to put together the fragments of our lives and see what God will reveal. We need to take care of the fragments, the klasmata, the leftovers.

It's never too late to pay attention to the leftovers, the bounty of our lives.  It's never too late for us to look at what is really important.

The house in which I grew up back in Cleveland had a huge freezer in the basement.  For as long as I could remember, it has always been full of wonderful treasures.  There was some stuff in there that we would savor and some stuff so encrusted with ice that it never made it to the surface and year after year it would get covered up with another layer of stuff.  Like endless loaves of bread and foil-wrapped mystery meat.

Many of you know that my parents are both in recovery from alcoholism, one of the many shadows cast over my family of origin throughout my childhood.  The unearthing of that struggle and the process of recovery which I share with my siblings and parents is one of the real blessings of my life.  As part of the AA process, one is encouraged to make a searching and fearless moral inventory one's self.  In other words, this means dealing with the leftovers: dealing with anger, stuffed feelings, unspoken hostility, lurid looks, unspoken love, all of it. 

My mother tells of the story of when she cleaned out the family freezer, two years into her recovery.  One day, she just unplugged it and let it thaw.  What she came across was very revealing.  It became a metaphor for her recovery.  Sometimes it's easier to freeze something out in an airtight place than to really deal with it.  That freezer unveiled stuff that was saved for God knows why, but which that day finally needed to be discarded. 

Freezers are wonderful ways of tracing a family's history: a bag of clam chowder reclaimed from a cookout at the family farm years ago, when my grandparents were still alive; some lentil soup that was rushed to the freezer before it was finished resulting in another family fight; an opened bag of carefully concealed snickers bars for those midnight cravings; a perfect snowball made in adolescence and promptly forgotten.

My mom says that cleaning out that freezer was like reclaiming a part of her life.  It was a practice in not letting frozen stuff have control over her.  She kept what she needed, discarded most of it, and saved a bundle on electricity.  Literally and figuratively she decided not to pay for all of those leftovers.

Sure, there are lots more freezers to clean out, lots more layers to uncover, but that is part of the healing work of God.

Leftovers, memories all remind us of where we came from.  Put in perspective, they are what we need to confront and deal with as we move toward the future.  There is still a part of us all that has a leftover wound from a childhood trauma, an icy stare, a clenched fist, a time of difficulty.  But we need not be defined by that.  There are also leftover times of joy and love which we often need to integrate into our adult lives.

The disciples each took their baskets of bread, started their churches and claimed us to be a part of that original story.  But they did not only look back at the life of Jesus, they also looked at the present struggles with which we are confronted, and they looked forward to the time when those fragments might be reunited.

Sisters and brothers, we have leftovers with which we need to deal, issues which we need to confront.  I hope and pray that each of you will be able to look at those leftovers which you still hang on to.  I hope and pray that you will be able to let go of what you need to and hang on to what gives you strength.  And as far as it is possible, I hope and pray that this church community will be a place for you to not only deal with the leftovers of your lives which are painful, but it will also be a place where you can use the leftovers which overflow from you to encourage a sister or a brother in need.  God knows we all need that.

But it is more than that.  Our personalities and our faith which we get from one another and from our families, builds upon the leftovers of wisdom and life experience from past generations.  They help make us who we are, bruises and all.  Leftovers are not just something that we throw away, but they are something that empower us to carry on the work of God's reign.  We need leftovers.

One of the things I did on my Sabbatical was visit my younger sister Trish in Flagstaff, Arizona.  Many of you know that she has been dealing with major depression for a number of years.  Among her treatments was ECT otherwise known as electroshock therapy.  It effectively erases the painful moments of crisis.  What it also does is wipe out portions of memory, some of which can be reconstructed.  I cooked a few meals for her and we sat out on her porch sharing our own power-picnic.  I realized that there were portions of her life—or our life together that she had not remembered.  Many relationships have a core of common experiences.  You share memories and the retelling of those memories in which you share your own insights looking back on the common thread of history.  I have new profound respect for people with Alzheimer’s and the shifting of focus needed for a relationship to endure and thrive.  I found that my task at that power-picnic and many since then is to piece together the pieces of our common lives.  I was there to remind her of the leftovers that we share. Over those meals of steamed asparagus and watermelon, we put together the leftovers of our lives and committed to walking our path together in a profound manner.

So this summer, have a power picnic or two.  Gather those close to you and give thanks for the leftovers in our lives.  Let us commit to using them to do the work of God.  For life happens during the leftover time, while we're making other plans.  And a good power-picnic can give us some much-needed perspective.

Let's make the most of our leftovers, for when we do, we can bring healing to ourselves and thereby have the strength and vision to bring healing to this sin-sick world.  And that, my friends, is where the real miracles happen. AMEN.