Henrietta United Church of Christ

Rev. David Inglis October 2, 2005

John 6:1-15

“One Bread, One Body”

I read something recently that really stuck in my craw. Dick Cheney sent out Christmas cards that read, “If a sparrow cannot fall from its nest without God’s knowledge, can an empire rise without His aid?”

I’m not preaching against Cheney or the Bush administration. Every president in the past 200 years has felt a strong seduction to build an America that would dominate the world militarily, economically, and/or politically, not to make other people free, but so we could press our own advantage to the detriment of other countries. And every president has gotten in bed with that mistress to one degree or another. But to justify being an empire on biblical or theological grounds is absurd and very dangerous. When a nation unilaterally works to control the markets, politics, and militaries of other countries, that is not the work of God; it’s the work of greed.

Maybe Mr. Cheney has forgotten that the Egyptian Empire held the Hebrew people in brutal slavery. The Assyrian Empire conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel and destroyed it as a Jewish nation. The Babylonian Empire crushed the Southern Kingdom, destroyed the temple, and took the Jews into exile. The Greek Empire suppressed Judaism 160 years before Christ and provoked the Maccabean revolt that is remembered at Hanukkah. And The Roman Empire squeezed the spirit out of the Jews of Jesus’ day, and eventually sent Jesus to the cross to die.

Jesus knew very well the power an empire has to control people, define people, divide people, and disempower people. And he knew how powerless people felt over it, which is why they were always dreaming of a miracle-working messiah to rescue them from Rome and make Israel into a kind of empire itself.

But Jesus had an answer. The Greek word for empire is basilea, which is also translated as “kingdom” in our Bible. When Jesus talked about the kingdom of God, his listeners heard it as the “empire of God.” Jesus offered them a blatant alternative to the empire of Rome.

In the empire of Rome, the rich had everything, while the masses were always scraping and struggling and competing for enough food. Jesus often described the basilea of God as a banquet, where everyone can come and there’s an abundance for all. The basilea of God will someday be realized fully, Jesus said, but he kept telling people that felt so powerless that they could also enter it, and they could create it right where they were, when they were in God and God was in them.

You know, I doubt that many of them believed him. But this week I started looking at today’s story about the feeding of the 5000 as Jesus’ attempt to help them not only believe it but taste this alternative reality for themselves. John tells us that this event took place around Passover time. Thousands upon thousands of Jews from many different countries, who had adapted to different cultures and ways of life, were converging on Jerusalem to celebrate their liberation from slavery under the Egyptian Empire. Many of them would have been crossing the Jordan River right where Jesus was in this story to bypass Samaria, so they wouldn’t be contaminated by “those people”. 5000 men and an unknown number of women and children, many of them Passover pilgrims, thronged around Jesus, probably to see if he indeed was the one who might liberate them from their current oppressor.

And the problem that came up was the problem that seemed to always hound them under Rome’s rule. Some of them were hungry, probably many of them. There were so many people there, how could they possibly feed them all? Philip sized it up correctly, if your possibilities are determined by how much you can buy: “Six months’ wages wouldn’t buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.” That was true in the empire of Rome and the system we’re used to. But there was a little boy there who was willing not to sell, not to bargain with, not to trade for, but to share all he had--five barley loaves and two fish. The loaves individual-sized rolls of barley, the food of the poor who couldn’t afford wheat). The would have been little pickled local fish much like our sardines.

With these in his hands, Jesus had the people sit down in groups of 50 or 100, according to Mark’s account. Now imagine that you’re at a Redwings game, with thousands of people, and during 7th inning stretch the announcer says for everyone to come down to the field and sit down in groups. Once you were in a group, what would you do? Probably introduce yourself to the people around you. Ask what you think of the game so far. Wonder together what was going to happen next. You’d no longer be strangers in a crowd, but a feeling of connectedness would begin to happen across your unfamiliarity. You would belong to the same group now.

Now imagine that happening after hearing Jesus speaking to you of God’s amazing love and challenging you to love God and others with your whole being, and after being moved to see blind people given sight and sick people restored to health, and while pondering this kingdom of God that excludes no one. Don’t you imagine that your spirit would be full and your heart would be open?

We don’t really know what happened in the grass near the Sea of Galilee. But when everyone saw Jesus lift up the little boy’s humble barley loaves and little fish and give genuine thanks for these gifts, and when his disciples took little pieces and gave a little to each group, don’t you suppose that those who had food for their journeys safely tucked out of sight felt moved to bring their offerings out to share with their new neighbors?

If you believe that more barley loaves and little fish kept appearing in Jesus’ hands as he gave out what he had, or maybe it became more like Montana Mills Woodstock bread and smoked salmon, who knows--that can be a beautiful kind of faith. But I believe that something more significant than food was changed that day. I think people’s hearts were changed, and their experience of what was possible was changed. Willa Cather said, “Where there is great love, there are always miracles.” There was enough love that day to change scarcity into abundance, and to change the chattel of the Empire of Rome into joyful citizens of the kingdom of God.

The people wanted to make Jesus king, to put him in charge of the way things were run. But Jesus refused. He was trying to set in motion a spiritual revolution that would span all places and all time. He would leave it to us to change the way things are run.

And so as Christians today, God is calling us, not to create an empire of American greed, but the kingdom of a radically loving God. And today we know that the people that this kingdom needs to include are not just people in our church or neighborhood or even our country, but the people with whom we share this world, because it has become clearer than ever before how interdependent we are and how completely we will share the same future, for good or for ill.

So how do we start changing a world of divisions and strife and poverty and competition for resources into the kingdom of God? Maybe we begin the way Jesus showed us when he had people sit in groups. We can start by getting to know our neighbors.

Andy and Kaitlin Meyer had an interesting experience of doing that this past summer. (They were invited up to describe their experience at a Heiffer Project camp in Maryland where they lived in houses like people in Thailand and Peru, trying to get enough food based on the average daily wage.)

I think every American youth should have an experience like that, if not visiting a third-world country. As we become aware of our neighbors, we feel God’s call to create a new order with them.

Thailand was one of the countries hit by the tsunami last winter. And so we created a bridge of love with them right here through our prayers and generous offering. International relations were re-ordered on the basis of compassion.

Many Peruvians work 12 hours a day 6 or 7 days a week in the sun and mosquitoes picking herbicide-sprayed coffee beans, and earning a pittance for their labor. Some people here are talking about spending a little more money and buying fair trade coffee for our coffee hours, which compensates coffee pickers more fairly for their labor. Wouldn’t our coffee taste better knowing that our buying it actually helped the workers who picked it have a little better life? It would re-order economic relations on the basis of justice.

Some people here try to avoid buying clothes that are made in stifling, unsafe sweat shops. Some people here sponsor a poor child in a third world country and help them get an education. Some people here eat lower on the food chain to make more food available for more people. Liz Pixley just got a hybrid car, which will help ease the demand on fossil fuel and emit far fewer greenhouse gasses. Many of you conscientiously recycle to conserve resources.

When we do these things, aren’t we replicating today’s story from the Bible in our own time? Aren’t we looking around us and seeing neighbors instead of alien strangers? Aren’t we pulling out some of the resources that we’re carrying and sharing them in a spirit of generosity? Aren’t we acting in partnership with God to create a new order, of love, justice, faith, hope and joy?

Jesus showed impoverished, oppressed, powerless people that God’s kingdom of abundance, generosity and joy was within their ability to create right in their world––not only by what was in Jesus’ hands, but also by what was in their hands. Are we faithful enough and courageous enough and compassionate enough to create it in our world, with what is in our hands?