Leftover
night
The week before last I was on vacation with my wife’s family. We have rented the same two houses at the North
Carolina shore for the past eight or nine years and every night we all get
together at the bigger of the two for dinner.
Meg and I cook dinner one night, and her sister and her husband cook
dinner another night, and so on, and it is a very satisfactory
arrangement. Nobody has to do too much
cooking, but we can each focus on the one meal we are responsible for, and we
all eat very well indeed. There is just one
problem-- we have enough conjugal units, if you pardon the expression, for five
nights’ dinners. But what to do about
that sixth night, Friday night?
The obvious thing to do would be to eat the leftovers and the
unused food, of which there is always a lot, and which otherwise has to be
transported all the way back home (arriving much the worse for wear) or thrown
into the garbage. Every year we run into this problem and every
year someone suggests the obvious solution and every year someone loses their
nerve in the end and runs out for pizza or barbeque or something and we end up
with even more food than we had before.
Every year, that is, until this one.
This year we finally just emptied the refrigerators and put all the food
out on the counters in the big house and rubbed elbows in the kitchen for an hour
or so, taking turns at the microwave until everyone was fed. At the end of which, we congratulated
ourselves and asked “why didn’t we do this before?”
Not the
right question
Sometimes "Where are we to buy bread for these people to
eat?" is not the right question.
Jesus knows that it’s not the right question when he asks it of Philip
in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John, but Philip doesn’t know that, and
that’s why Jesus asks it. And when
Philip protests that "Six months' wages would not buy
enough bread for each of them to get a little," it’s not clear whether
he’s contesting the implied premise in the question, that “these people are
hungry and it’s up to us to see they get fed,”
or whether he’s pointing out the practical difficulties in carrying it
out. Either way, he’s taken the bait,
and he’s stuck.
Just then up pops Andrew and the boy with the five barley
loaves and two fish. But where did they
come from? Surely Andrew wasn’t going
through the crowd, demanding to see people’s food. He can only have known that the boy has them
because he come forward and offered them.
The boy doesn’t look at his five loaves and two fish and ask, as Andrew
does, “What are they among so many people?" He just knows that the people are hungry. He has a little more food than he needs, and
he trusts that Jesus will know how to put his surplus to the best use.
Celebrating
what there is
And he’s right. That
kind of trust, that generosity, that simple willingness to respond to a situation
of need is something that Jesus can work with.
And what is his work? It is the
work of celebrating what there is, of giving thanks to God for the five loaves
and the two fish, and for the generosity of the child who brought them forward. Jesus gives thanks--eucharistei, as the Greek has it, which is of course where our word
“eucharist” comes from, and he breaks the bread and he passes it around to the
hungry crowd.
When we gather for the Eucharist, we continue Jesus’ work of
celebrating what there is. We aren’t
worrying for the moment about our personal finances. We aren’t wondering if there will be enough
cookies at coffee hour—not yet. We aren’t
thinking about what it’s going to cost to put a new roof on the church. We are just thankful to God for what is
here. We aren’t anxious because there
aren’t 100 people in church this morning, we are thankful for the thirty or
forty who are. We are thankful to be among
them, thankful for the gifts that each of them brought to share, thankful for
their faith, for their friendship, for the gift of their stories and their
prayers and their presence in our lives.
And, of course, we are thankful for Jesus.
New and different
bread
When I first came to St. John’s somebody asked me if we could
use home-made bread for communion in place of the mass-produced wafers, and I
said “sure—why not?” So we’ve been using
it more or less every Sunday since. There
were some people who didn’t like the bread at first, and some who still don’t,
which is fine—I understand and respect that.
And some of those who didn’t like the new bread at first were
children— some of them even refused to take it.
But then it began to dawn on these children that actually the new bread tastes
pretty good. And gradually their
attitude changed, so that now sometimes when I’m distributing the bread at the
altar rail I’ll see them looking at each other’s hands to see who got the
bigger piece. Some of them will even (and
I have to confess that my own daughter is one of the worst offenders in this
regard), hold out their hands and look up at me imploringly as I’m coming toward
them with the bread, and whisper “big piece, big piece.” And who can really blame them? Who doesn’t want a big piece of God? Don’t we all want a big piece of health, a
big piece of life, a big piece of peace, and joy, and love?
Only a
little piece
But I think spiritual maturity comes when we no longer need
to look over at our neighbor’s hand to see how big her piece is. The Eucharist has a lot to teach us about
this. We don’t complain because we’re
only getting a little piece of bread and a little sip of wine, because it is
still the body and blood of Christ. The
whole person of Christ, the whole life of the Trinity, the whole incarnation
and teaching and death and resurrection and ascension, his whole gift of the
Holy Spirit and promise to come again to fulfill God’s loving purpose for creation;
it is all present in that little crumb, that tiny sip. The fact that we go away from the table hungry
only tells us that we are now part of the Christ story and it is up to us to go
out and help to tell the rest of it.
In Jesus’ own time it wasn’t always clear that his life was
worth much. Certainly there were some
people who didn’t think it was worth anything at all, and in the end it was
sold cheap. But the very heart of Jesus’
teaching to his disciples was that when we start counting the relative value of
a life, even of our own, we are lost.
Because life is not something to be priced. It is not to be hoarded, and it cannot be
sold at a profit. Every life belongs to
God, and so each one is of the same ultimate value. But we can only comprehend life’s true
magnificence, the true breadth and length and height and depth of it, when it
is given away. Spent. Down to the last penny. Jesus understood this and he spent his life
lavishly for the love of this world and we who live in it, and when it was gone
it didn’t seem like it had really amounted to much. Not at first.
Just one young man’s life; one body; some words, a few deeds; a bitter
and pointless death.
God can
work with that
But history shows that God doesn’t need much. God says “five loaves and two fish?—I can
work with that. The life and death of Jesus
of Nazareth?—I can work with that. A
little piece of bread, a tiny sip of wine, Mary Magdalene and Simon Peter and
Philip and Andrew, and Julian of Norwich and Francis of Assisi, and you and me?—I
can work with that. St. John’s Episcopal
Church in Petaluma?—sure, why not? God
doesn’t say “why isn’t there more?” or “what am I supposed to do with that?” God
says, “thank you. Thank you for being
here. Thank you for coming forward with
what you have. What tasty looking loaves! What fresh, tender fish! Thank you—that will do nicely for all my
hungry guests.
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