"God is in the Details"

This is the first of two related sermons given over Zoom to the congregation of St. Andrew Episcopal Church in Portland, Oregon on Sunday, July 25, 2021.

 Lessons:

2 Kings 4:42-44

Ephesians 3:14-21

John 6:1-21

 Psalm 145:10-19

First the Experience, then the Meaning

Let me say a few preliminary words before my reflection.

With the lifting of the restrictions and mandates we have lived with, most of us are processing at some deeper level all that’s happened to us during these past seventeen months of pandemic, racial reckoning, and economic upheaval.

We’ve had the experience, now we’re endeavoring to assess the meaning.

Curiously, this is the same pattern of the Sunday Gospel readings from John which begin today and continue for the next four Sundays. Together they might be called “the Bread Gospels.”

Perhaps we should remind ourselves that this year in our three-year lectionary cycle we generally follow the Gospel of Mark, but because it’s the shortest of the Gospels, portions from John’s Gospel are woven into the sequence. So for a time we’ll enter the mind and heart of another evangelist.

First the experience. Then the meaning.

Today we are given the experience—the story of the feeding of thousands on the hillside (with that miraculous encounter of Jesus with the disciples on a stormy Sea of Galilee thrown in for good measure). For the next four Sundays we will be given “the deeper meaning” of the miraculous feeding in an extended sermon about bread.

Close Encounters

One of my few low-risk pleasures during the early quarantine months was a daily walk early in the morning through the Irvington neighborhood where I live.

I found myself following the same path each morning as I tried to come up with my Fitbit goal of 10,000 steps a day.

Even though I’ve lived in the neighborhood for over 40 years, during these walks it was as though I was seeing it for the very first time.

For instead of driving through the neighborhood on my way to a parish commitment or an errand, I was “taking in” the neighborhood, house by house, block by block.

I watched as the succession of late winter and spring plants emerged—the euphorbia, the climbing roses, the irises and later the dahlias and hydrangeas.

I watched in June and July of last year as signs appeared on lawns and in windows affirming that “Black Lives Matter,” as children’s art appeared taped to windows or a birthday was celebrated with a flock of pink flamingoes on the lawn.

One of the most beautiful sights I saw was a simple message, written in chalk, in front of a home. Accompanied by two green flowers, the message read:

To: Mrs. Hirato -- I’m lucky to have a teacher like you! From: Ella

My heart skipped a beat a few days later on my walk when I saw that a new message appeared, also written in chalk:

Ella – Stay curious, always be kind, and share your wonderful talents with others.

Then came a little heart, followed by Mrs. H.

Through experiences like these I found that during the months of COVID and racial reckoning I had become a more careful observer of what was immediately around me.

I found that small observations were revealing.

They became grace-filled moments.

As a result of all of this I found myself reading the Bible differently, looking for the telling details I’ve often overlooked in pursuit of a larger theme, a bigger story.

I became intrigued by seeming incidentals. And somehow that seemed right, for “God,” as the saying goes, “is in the details.

In the big-picture view of the story of the feeding of the thousands, we might focus on that miraculous multiplication of the five loaves and the two fish.

And so we might explore the various ways this miracle can be understood by our post-modern minds.

But this time as I began once again to read the story, my eye stopped along the way to notice some of the details, the seemingly incidental moves that Jesus made.

The Queen’s Gambit

I found that watching the moves of Jesus with a careful eye was a bit like watching a chess match.

How many of you were transfixed, as I was, by viewing that Netflix miniseries, The Queen’s Gambit, where Ana Taylor-Joy played the youthful chess prodigy, Beth Harmon?

The series even inspired me to take out an old wooden chess board that one of my uncles had fashioned by hand and to sit down with my six-year-old grandson Eli to teach him how each of the players moved on that chess board and how an opening gambit worked—the move that might gain an advantage in the game.

As I watched Jesus move on the chessboard of today’s Gospel story, there were three moves that caught my eye.

They involved a mountain, a test question and an action.

But before we enter the story, we should remind ourselves that each of our four Gospels were not only written decades after the life, death and resurrection of Jesus but they were written to different communities of Jesus followers.

This story of the feeding of the thousands is of unique significance for it is the only miracle story which appears in all four gospels, but each telling and placement of the story was shaped by the peculiar situation of the community for which it was written.

The First Move

So then as we begin, we see Jesus’ opening gambit, his first move.

Upon arriving on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, we’re told Jesus goes up the mountain.

Was this going to be a quiet time of teaching with his closest disciples?

Hardly!

Of course there was a practical side to this move up the mountain.

For by this time in John’s Gospel Jesus had already attracted a sizeable following because of his acts of healing and astonishing teaching.

And a mountain was the perfect place for a large crowd to gather.

But to John’s audience and to the Jews following Jesus, a mountain was resonant with meaning.

They would recall that Moses received and brought God’s word on a mountain.

Might this mountain be a “Christian Sinai” where something significant was about to happen?

Two millennia later we still talk about our mountain top experiences.

And so for us this opening gambit of Jesus can be seen an invitation to recall some of these experiences.

And our places need not be mountains, but simply places of holy encounter, where we receive the wisdom we need to carry on.

Do you have mountain-like places in your past?

Places where you made a discovery about life?

About God?

About something you were meant to do or to be?

The mountain became the opening move by Jesus from which so much insight will eventually flow to the disciples and the crowd of folllowers.

Now I think it’s worth finding a place of insight these days as we start to reenter a larger world.

I know it’s not a mountain, but recently I’ve found that walking early in the morning in Kelley Point Park to be such a place.

Standing there in the midst of God’s creation at the confluence of two great rivers, listening to the wind moving through the leaves of the black cottonwoods and to the bird songs I have received spiritual strength and wisdom for the journey ahead.

Where might that place of insight be for you?

The Second Move

There is a second move in today’s lesson that we should pay attention to: this one is a test.

Jesus in John’s Gospel account asks a strange question of the disciple Philip:

“Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?”

We quickly learn that this is a test question: John tells us that Jesus knew what he was going to do.

And Phillip utterly fails the test. He responds by giving Jesus an “off the cuff” cost estimate.

“Even six months wages would not buy enough bread.”

Andrew doesn’t do much better, but he’s moving in the right direction by discovering a boy with five barley loaves and two fish.

But like Phillip his faith also falters for he goes on to exclaim:

“But what are they among so many people?”

For us, this second move on the chessboard of John’s gospel can serve as a reminder that these times can test us:

Do we trust that the Holy One is present with us in the midst of all the challenges that we are now facing?

Diana Butler Bass has just written a remarkable book, “Freeing Jesus, on recovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way and Presence.”

Seeing Jesus as Presence is an invitation to find the gift of a holy presence in the midst of the everyday, the quotidian, the ordinary moments of our lives.

Bass talks about Presence using the language of mystery. She writes:

“We live the mystery, in ordinary days and extraordinary ones, whether rocking the baby or watching rocks crash to earth.” Quoting the ethicist Barbara Holmes “We come from mystery and return to it at the end of the life journey.” “If we are attentive enough,” Bass goes on to say, “we might awaken to the reality that everything in between is mystery as well . . . for many of us, that mystery bears the name Jesus. Where is Jesus? Right here.” [1]

That’s what Phillip and Andrew forgot—all evidence to the contrary—they were living in the presence of Jesus.

And that is the test for us.

To recognize that we are living in the presence of Jesus.

Right here. Right now.

The Third Move

This brings me to the third move of Jesus the chess master as narrated by John. Jesus had made the thousands sit down on the grass and taken the loaves and given thanks.

Here we come to what I think is Jesus’ master move in the entire narrative, what I find to be the most significant move of them all.

It is found in a subtle but telling detail in the way this story is given to us by John.

The other Gospel writers have the disciples distributing the food, John simply says Jesus distributed the loaves to those who were seated on the grass.

For John there is no intermediary.

Each person will receive the bread—directly the Gospel suggests—from the hands of Jesus.

This action points us ahead to the meaning of this feeding of the thousands that we will discover in the rest of the bread gospels.

But for today it is sufficient to remember that we who gather in Jesus name have become for our moment in time the body of Christ to our world.

To do the work we are called to do in these challenging days.

We worship and serve a God of open hands. As the psalmist declared in today’s psalm: “You open wide your hand and satisfy the needs of every living creature.”

So we can become the hands of Jesus to all who hunger in our time—whether that hunger be for food, for shelter, for health care, for justice long denied, for comfort in grief.

That I must say is why your ministry of the food pantry at St. Andrew is so essential to the identity of this parish community.

For it is the pattern for each of us to follow within our own spheres of influence.

To become the hands of Jesus, bringing the bread of life to our world.

These three moves of Jesus can help us:

To find our mountain, our place of spiritual wisdom and renewal.

To trust that the holy one is present with us, even here, even now.

And as the body of Christ, to become the hands of Jesus, reaching out in loving service to bring the bread of life to our world.

It’s our Move

In introducing my grandson to the various pieces on the chess board, there was one that seemed to most capture his imagination as it did mine so many decades earlier when as a small boy I sat in the living room of a friend of my father to be initiated into the world of chess.

That chess piece was the Knight, for the Knight is unique in that it goes around curves. The knight follows a set sequence with a sudden turn in the middle.

This element of surprise is what makes the knight, I think, a powerful symbol for the life of faith,

God desires to be at work through us in sometimes small, but often surprising ways in our world.

Jesus the master player has gone before us to show us the way.

The board is set. Many challenges await us.

Now it’s our move.

____________________

Endnotes:

[1] Diana Butler Bass. FreeingJesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2021), p. 256.

[2] I was inspired by the role of the knight in chess as developed by James E. Loder in The Knight’s Move: The Relational Logic of the Spirit in Theology and Science (Colorado Springs, Colorado: Helmers & Howard, 1992).