St Paul s Lutheran Church Walkersville MD 6 Aug Cathy Feil

Transcription

1 Matthew 14:13 21 Pentecost 9, St. Paul s Cathy Feil 5000 people gathered to listen to Jesus and to have their sick healed. They brought their hunger for nourishment. And we all know there are many kinds of nourishment. For food - bread to eat. For spiritual nourishment - to have the deep hungers of the heart and soul fed. There is the hunger to be healed if one is sick, physically or emotionally people came to be fed. After a long day together, evening came, they were standing in a great field in a deserted place. The disciples reminded Jesus that people were getting hungry for the food which is bread. And they suggested he send them off to towns to find food. And Jesus said to them, They need not go away; you give them something to eat. One of the people commenting on this text called their commentary You Want Us to Do What?! Sounds like children doesn t it? But can t you just see the disciples thinking to themselves You Want Us To Do What?! And what I want to lift up to you was that Jesus was telling them You do it. I m going to interrupt this to tell you that this is the only miracle story that is in all the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Something about this story was so important that all the Gospel writers made sure to tell it. So, back to the story. Jesus has just told them, they need not go away; you give them something to eat. I want you to listen to all their answers. Mark says, Are we to go and buy 2 hundred denarii worth of bread and give it to them to eat? Luke says, We have no more than five loaves and two fishes unless we are to go and buy food for all these people. John says, 6

2 months wages would not buy bread for each of them to get a little. And finally, to Matthew the Gospel from which we are reading now, the disciples say We have nothing here but 5 loaves and two fishes. All the disciples were speaking out of their scarcity why, we don t have enough resources! Does it sound familiar to you at all? Before you had the Food Bank there was a lot of hunger even more than there is now in the community. I imagine there were people who said, we give all we can, we know people are hungry but there s nothing more we can give. These folks were acting out of scarcity. But there must have been a few who got together, and after researching the extent of the need in your community, and a lot of hard work, the Food Bank was born! They were acting out of a theology of abundance. They would begin doing what they could right in front of them and trust the Holy Spirit would help them to get others and do the rest. I was one of the persons who spent the night at the night shelter for homeless women that Luther Place opened up for 40 of their women from Oct. April in Washington DC. This was in They opened up a room on the first floor that could sleep 40 women on pallets on the floor. And one day as spring was approaching, was drawing near though still three months away, I asked the question why are we closing the shelter in April? The dangers of the streets still are out there in the spring and summer, and why would we think they do not need shelter, simply because the weather is better, they still need shelter. There were 4 of us involved with the shelter I said this to. And we all, it was like we all woke up. Of course, the women should have shelter all year long. But the large room was used for other

3 activities during the spring and summer. We sat there for a bit. And then someone said one of the houses across the street is empty. Tell them about the houses. And we all said yes!and while we sat there we came up with a plan. One person would make sure the building got what it needed up to code. I said I would be in charge of getting overnight volunteers. Someone else took on the finances. And someone had to find two persons to be directors to oversee the shelter and the women.we had three months until April. We began with nothing but the house and would the church let us do this?! But we got down to work. We had only a short time to put things together, to get the church to accept this as another of its missions, and to give the women a place to stay when the shelter at the church closed. I don t remember how we did it. But people hearing about it got on board, the church approved it, and amazingly we got money, volunteers, two Lutheran Volunteer Corps women chose this to be their work for a year. No, all the p s and q s weren t tied, No, the two directors did not have a neat office with file cabinets and clean white walls. More work to bring it vup to code had to take place. We threw it together, with the help of the Holy Spirt. People jumped in, the money came in - just so we could open it in April. We knew, that we d have plenty of work to do after that, to make it a solid ministry. But we operated out of a theology of abundance not looking at what we didn t have, but just starting to open the place for women to sleep that first night and onward in April, we just chose to use what we did have. I still have a picture of the dedication of it we called it Sarah House.

4 When the disciples had expressed their grave doubts about feeding the people. About the fact that they just had five loaves and two fishes. Jesus said, Bring them here to me. And you know the story so well, after Jesus had blessed and broken the five loaves of bread he gave it to them to distribute, and how did it happen? It just kept coming and all 5000 (that s only counting the men, there were women and children too, so lets say there were 15,000. ) And they were fed. And there were 12 baskets of leftovers. I m going to tell you another story of people responding out of a theology of abundance taking what they had and making a huge difference. Some of you may know this story its called the Miracle at Dunkirk and happened during WWII. Hitler and the German army had toppled Holland, Poland, Belgium and France and they were advancing in unstoppable lines on the British. The British were surrounded on all sides and their backs had been driven up to the Dunkirk beach, and the sea. They had no way to go. They had had to leave behind cannons and trucks, equipment vans trying to get out of Europe back to England. The British War dept. limited what they could send to get the men off the beaches at Dunkirk because they felt the British Isles would need all the help they could to defend their shores. 400,000 men then were stranded on those beaches. Winston Churchill who was their new prime minister got on the radio and sent out a call to the people of Dunkirk and neighboring areas, and as Nancy Rockwell said it so well,churchill dared them to rise up, to dream that they could do more than they could imagine with the small boats they had. Fishing boats, ferries, skiffs, yachts, canoes, life boats, a

5 paddle steamer did something amazing, courageous and magnificent in the next eight days. Men and some women went into this war zone, without protective gear or weapons, while enemy planes flew overhead dropping bombs, they sailed whatever they had to rescue as many of the men as they could. The Royal Navy also had some ships left to do work. 933 vessels went into this terrible situation. The soldiers on the beach had to wait patiently while they were being under attack by the enemy from the skies. Many had to stand in shoulder deep water waiting. Signalier Alfred Balm said, You had the impression of people standing and waiting for a bus. There was no pushing or shoving. Some small boats could go into the shallows to pick the men up. Sometimes they delivered them to some of the larger boats, but some took the men home.. A paddle steamer called the Medcast Queen made 7 round trips rescuing 7,000 men. The canoes picked up four men. One of the seamen said the little boats were dangerously listing to one side because of the heaviness of their cargo as many men as they could get on at a time. The RAF was having fierce fire fights against the Luftwaffe as this was going on, trying to protect this effort. More than 200 ships and boats were lost. 1,000 Civilians were killed. But on the eighth day the evacuation by all those people saved 338,000 troops. 338,000! This was between May 26 June 4, Ordinary citizens gave what they had for those they loved - husbands, sons, brothers, fellow British citizens, neighbors stranded on that beach. The people, all who participated were acting out of a theology of abundance. They chose to do what they could, and it was multiplied like the 5 loaves and two fishes. And 338,000troops were saved.

6 One of my favorite quotes is by Dorothy Day. Sometime I d like to tell you more about her. What she says is What we have is so very little, but like the boy who gave his five loaves and two fishes, he gave it. Christ took it and increased it. He will do the rest. The church sometimes acts as if its resources are too limited to respond to needs. The church quite often does less than I think God would want us to be doing about the crying needs of the world. I think we must think out of the theology of abundance and know if we are called like Churchill called those people of Dunkirk, if there is a crying need in front of us -we are called by Jesus to take courage and do with the little we have what we can. And trust that God will increase it. Amen.