Pentecost 9A (lectionary 18A)
Text: Matthew 14:13-21
Sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
August 2, 2020
Bring Your Nothing, to Me
There are times these days when I feel like I’ve got nothing left to give. No gas left in the tank. No more ideas for fresh new home-cooked meals during the Covid time. No time to catch up with all kinds of things that need a lot of attention. I’m called to speak, but I feel like I’ve got nothing to say.
But even when those feelings of nothing left come over me, you know what? My life doesn’t stop. Emails keep dribbling into my inbox. The phone keeps whining for attention. The next sermon – that would be this one! – has got to get written. I need to talk to so-and-so, and we need to get that other thing off the ground.
My to-do list looks like 5,000 hungry people coming at me.
But it’s not just me. You know how I know to say that, that it’s not just me? Because though it’s true that I’m living through pandemic, it’s also true that I’m lucky enough to be doing it without kids in my household. I talk to you folks with the young kids at home and, man, your households sound more like Ten thousand hungry people.
If like me you’re living through days of what I will call emotional scarcity, it’s probably good for us that this day we remember the story of the feeding of the 5,000. But wait! Will you look at that! Though we call it the feeding of the 5,000, Matthew notes that there were “five thousand men, besides women and children!” So even this gospel notes that there’s an even greater load than you think, when you’re dealing with families!
This is a good story for us, for us who know emotional scarcity right now. This story reminds me of a fundamental truth about my life: that the ministry I serve in Christ turns not so much on how much I have left, or what I can give, but rather on how much God gives by multiplying what I have.
You know this story; it’s one of the most familiar in the Gospels. It begins, interestingly enough, after Jesus hears of the murder of his friend John, and Jesus retreats, we are told, to a deserted place by himself. Makes a lot of sense. Something like that happens and you lose a lot of your sense of hope and purpose. The wind just gets knocked right out of you.
But the locals get wind!, that Jesus has come. The crowd, they find him and they rush forward, and they are overwhelming, and they are needy: they bring that long to-do list. Jesus responds, and he heals with compassion, we are told. The crowd stays late, and the disciples by that time are spent and empty; they want to send the people away, so they can get something to eat.
But Jesus has another idea. This is what the schoolteachers in my life have taught me to call “that teachable moment.” Jesus here wants to teach his disciples something fundamental about the nature of God. It’s a teaching that, if we take it seriously, may be just enough to feed us, even in this old pandemic world that is leaving us so drained, and so hungry for something else.
Jesus says to the disciples, “You feed these people.” I imagine the disciples are stunned. John is dead, murdered; we are all living under threat. People keep coming, needing this and needing that. There’s no gas in the tank. No more ideas for home-cooked Covid meals, not for 5,000. No reserves.
So the disciples talk back to Jesus: “Jesus, we’ve got nothing to give, man! All we got is five loaves and two fish!”
….
And Jesus says, “Bring your nothing, to me.”
If there is a word that I need to hear from Jesus right now, a word that is a Word of Gospel Good News for me, it’s gotta be right there: “Bob, … bring your nothing, to me.” And I want to respond, “I’ll do that, Jesus. That’s what I’ll bring to you. Because, oh, hey!, would you look at that!: turns out that nothing, is exactly all I’ve got to bring.”
And maybe you, too.
• Are you worn down, maybe worn to nothing, by the weeks passing by with bad news, and the months ahead looking no better?
• Does it drain you to empty, the fights about what school is going to look like next month?
• Are you one who has lost someone during these months, someone whose life trusted the shape that would call for family and friends to gather and mourn and worship and remember, and instead because of Covid, you get nothing like that?
If that’s you, then you listen to this Gospel Word, too. Jesus says, “That nothing that is all you got anymore? You just bring that nothing, to me.”
Jesus blesses the bread and the fish and they are distributed to the many. Five thousand men, and the women and children, too. And as Matthew tells the story, all were filled.
Sometimes these days Jesus is asking you just to give your nothing – what little loaves and fishes that you got – and then, stand back and watch Jesus work a different kind of economy, an economy filled, not with all the things that you think you oughta be able to bring, but with the abundance of what God can do.
It’s a different kind of economy. It’s not an economy that depends a whole lot on what you’ve got to contribute yourself. You get all kinds of down on yourself – I know I do! – when you know that you just don’t have enough to bring. Bring it to me, Jesus says then. Bring to me, that not-enough of yours. And let’s see what happens with an economy that depends on God.
A couple of examples from my own life as a pastor. The first one happens all the time: someone will tell me, Bob, I always remember what you said in that sermon, because when such-and-such comes up in my life, the way you suggested we think about the way of God right there, that has changed how I think and what I do.
And you know what I’m doing while I listen to this, right? I’m thinking, you know, if the sermon was really that good, you would think I would remember preaching it, wouldn’t you?
But that’s the point exactly, that the sermon wasn’t all that great; – much as it pains me to say that! – but what was great, is what God did with it later in this person’s life. What I brought to it was nothing, compared to what God did with it. “Bob, you bring that nothing, to me.”
And another illustration from my pastoral life: people tell me all the time how important it was, that I was there. That you were there in the hospital that time. That you preached that funeral sermon for my friend. That you came to my baseball game.
And again I want to respond: you know, all I really did was show up.
But then, what Jesus teaches the disciples in this Gospel story was just how important that is, and what God can do with it. The disciples wanted to vamoose, but Jesus said, “No. You feed them.” In the end all the disciples really did was listen, and obey. All they really did was hang in there, instead of skedaddling. All they really did, was share.
But don’t belittle that “all-I-really-did” stuff. Because what God can do with “all you really have to bring” … oh my, what God can do, when all you really do is show up.
It’s a time of emotional scarcity, I call it; I know. Plenty of times we’re frustrated these days by the inability to DO anything. We are can-do people, and here we are living in a time of can’t-do-much. We’re living in an only-five-loaves-and-only-two-fishes kind of time, right here.
But not all the stories of this time are stories of scarcity and emptiness, are they? We are inspired and blessed and given hope, over and over, again and again even in these days, by the inklings we get and the rumors we hear of what God can do, even when times are tight, when things are scarce, and even in days like these.
• Again and again I’ve heard stories of small kindnesses people have received, which in a time like this are such great blessings.
• And though our communal Covid response is not by a long shot what we need it to be, yet have we not known it as communal, indeed? We’ve learned behaviors we could scarcely have imagined six months ago, and we do them because we want to keep one another safe.
• There’s even ways, some people are telling me, people who serve in such poverty ministries as Respond Now and South Suburban PADS, in which our social and charitable response to the poorest among us has ramped up during this time – and, yeah, that means ramping up with new resources and new money and new gifts and blessings, even at a time when so many are out of work, or cut back.
You say you got nothing much left, these days? Jesus says, you bring me that nothing. And then wait and see if God does not in the end make it into a great and abundant blessing.