Scarcity, Abundance, and the the Broken Pieces

Men's Lenten Breakfast 2016
John 6:5-14

            You can only make everybody happy if you’re Jesus. We are scarcity people, by which I mean we are people worried about what might come who store up what they already have. Some of this comes from being part of an agricultural community who is very much aware our dependence on the weather and various things outside of our control. Some of it is fiscal conservatism. Some of it is that ol’ Scandinavian tendency to put something away for a rainy day.

            Whatever it is, my great uncle Walt had it in spades. My great-uncle Walt spent his life farming the same plot of land near Blacktail Dam, north of Williston, North Dakota, up until his death at 95 years old around a decade ago. When he died, his family (meaning our extended family) discovered he had an account in a Williston bank with six figures just sitting in a checking account from which it appeared he never made a withdrawal. And no, for those of you who just got the brilliant idea that this pastor doesn’t need to be paid quite so much, no, I didn’t see any of that money, though my mom did, split about forty ways.

            There is something about my great-uncle Walt that is symbolic for me of a life of scarcity. Here was a man who spent his childhood in the dust bowl, who knew real poverty, who valued money so much that he never spent it, and here he was at the end of his life, in completely different circumstances, keeping the exact same philosophy even to his death. There’s something noble about that. There’s also something foolish about that. Maybe both in equal measure.

            When Jesus is presented with a moment of scarcity.—look, Jesus, we only have five barley loaves and two fish!—he turns scarcity into abundance. What they expected: To be out of food, to struggle to make people happy, to have a bunch of grouchy people stranded on a hillside, ended up being the very stage needed for Jesus to demonstrate what the kingdom of God looks like. It looks like abundance.

            You know scarcity well in this community. For this month’s newsletter article here at Grace I spent some time researching worship attendance numbers for the hey-days of the 1960s, because I always hear about how many people there were, how full it was, how much more was happening, etc. etc. So, I looked it up, and the average worship attendance here at Grace peaked in 1965. Every Sunday. That’s a little more than four times what we have today. There are reasons for this that you all know. Some of it is less people living in the area. Much of it is also that religion is no longer the center of our community, as it once was, so there are fewer people going to church generally. All of this leads to a feeling of scarcity and fear and tightening the belt, and putting aside more and more for a rainy day, because things today feel worse than they were once upon a time—and it’s only getting sparser and sparser.

            It is to places like these that Jesus appears. In fact, I’m going to suggest something that isn’t really radical but it might sound that way. Our problem is not that we don’t have enough people or time or resources or money. Our problem is that we still have too much. A few loaves and fish? Jesus can work with that. God is always working with very little. It’s those that have much—and have much stored up—that Jesus passes by. Why do those who have much need a Savior?

            But, actually, it doesn’t stop there. You see, after miraculously feeding the five thousand Jesus gives a command that is easy to overlook. He tells the disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” This is scarcity and abundance wrapped up in one small action. Jesus is telling us to trust in the absence of what we need, but he is also telling us to value every little fragment that we have. He’s telling us that all that little stuff matters because God does something with little things, with little people even. God doesn’t discard the remnants; he values them above and beyond the really good looking, new stuff.

            God can do something with the broken pieces. We see death, God sees new life. We see decline, God sees opportunity. We are people broken and given to the tendency to store away just in case, but Jesus shows us how patently unnecessary it is, because even our brokenness is of use in the kingdom of God. Every little thing, and nothing, is something that God can and will use.

            Every bit of you—the parts you like, the parts you don’t—and everything you have. That’s what God will use.

It's not that you can't walk on water. It's that, eventually, you will sink

Scripture from Matthew 14:13-33

It’s not that you can’t walk on water. It’s that, eventually, you will sink.

When it comes to miracles Christians have wildly varying opinions. Some people put a ton of emphasis on the experience of miracles while others are forever trying to explain miracles away. Some can’t get enough of people talking about how God lifted so-and-so out of their particular impossible situation, and many of these folks have their own stories of something incredible happening to them. Others go out of their way to dismiss anything miraculous, spiritualizing miracle stories in the Bible and treating prayer as a psychological tool rather than a thing that might lead to God actually doing something. These folks are cautious about anything that crosses the bounds of what we know and are even more turned off by personal accounts.

Firstly, I should say that both groups have their points and their reasons for where they stand, and both are based very deeply on personal experience. Also, it’s perfectly OK to use personal experience to see God at work. It’s also OK to understand that the world tends to work in a certain way most of the time, and so it’s natural—and not unfaithful—to be skeptical when others claim a mountain top experience to which you cannot relate. Many of us stand somewhere in-between, living lives in a world that functions one way 99.9% of the time with the occasional eye toward the miraculous, but all of us need to be reminded, more often than not, that these waters are mysterious, deep, and the moment we think we have it all figured out, like Peter, we start to sink.

Walking on water: Thoughts on Peter and discipleship

           This year at Grace we’re reading though the Gospel of John, and the story of Peter's denial, which we read the Sunday before last, jumped out at me on the topic of discipleship, because Peter is pretty much our classic example of a disciple and yet he is probably most famous for two episodes: 1. trying to walk on water and sinking, and 2. denying Jesus three times. Neither of those things sounds all that disciple-y, but I kind of like that. I mean, if Peter were some character completely above reproach none of us could really relate to him. The temptation would be to hero-worship this guy, but instead the Peter we get is relatable and far from perfect—a really interesting case study in what it means to be a disciple.

            So, this morning I’m going to talk about the two Peter episodes and what that can teach us about being disciples ourselves. The first is Jesus walking on water. Probably you have some notion of how this story goes. Jesus walks on water out to the boat where the disciples are fishing, Peter sees him coming, leaps out of the boat—well, first he puts clothes on because he was naked, which seems backwards, but whatever—and then he attempts to walk out to Jesus. The crazy thing is that he’s doing fine at first. This is a better result than I would have expected, especially for a guy whose name means “Rock.” That rock was walking on water—at least for a couple steps.

Fun things make Lutherans anxious: Miracles, enjoyment, and the purpose that holds it all together

 Scripture: John 2:1-11

            The wedding at Cana is something that Lutherans don’t much care for, because it is something that sounds potentially fun, and we are nothing if not deeply suspicious about anything that might be fun.

            I figured that was a nice, stereotypical half-truth to get your attention, so I’ll get back to that in a minute, but first I’m going to take a detour to confirmation class last Wednesday. Our discussion topic with the 9^th graders was miracles.
            I asked, "What is a miracle?" But I didn’t anticipate at all what they were going to say. Their answers were very interesting. They said a miracle is something “meaningful”; something with a “purpose” behind it; something “good.” I was expecting a definition of miracles that had something to do with impossibility—that they would say that miracles are things that cannot be explained or things that violate the laws of nature. But, whether they knew it or not, they actually saw through the question to the part that really matters. It’s not the possibility or impossibility of miracles that makes them significant but the meaning behind them. This gives me a good deal of hope, because when Jesus does something miraculous in John’s Gospel it is not called a miracle. Every healing and raising of the dead, every feeding or walking on water are just called “signs”—semeion is the word in Greek. They are events that point to something greater.

            A miracle is a thing with a purpose behind it, something meaningful, and good. It’s unlikelihood (or impossibility) is really only something that magnifies the meaning of it. What matters is the purpose.

Remembering our past: Easter-life

Text: Luke 24:1-16

The History Channel’s six-week mini series on the Bible is wrapping up tonight and, in spite of the fact that it’s gotten good reviews, I won’t be watching in large part because when Jesus rises from the dead there is no way the producers of that series are going to capture the look that I imagine on the disciples’ faces. Somebody in charge of production is going to be way too pious about this and direct the actors who play the disciples to look completely dopey in an attempt to convey awe. But I know how they really looked; it’s the way somebody looks when you tell them something and they think they know where you’re going with it. “Yes, yes, tomb, Jesus, gardener, yeah, yeah… resurrection… Wait, what?” That’s what the History channel isn’t going to get—that “wait, what?” moment. How could they? The actors know the script and, let’s face it, the History channel isn’t budgeting for A-list actors to play Jesus’ disciples. Anyway, none of us can put ourselves in the place of those disciples that first Easter morning.

Art and the Probable-Impossible: Thoughts on miracles and Madeleine l'Engle

"That which is probable and impossible is better than that which is possible and improbable."-Aristotle in Poetics

Madeleine l'Engle is a hero of mine. In fact, I count her on a very short list of authors, alongside Wendell Berry, who have influenced my perspective on God and the world more than any others. So, when l'Engle wrote that she had been pondering this Aristotle quote from the time she was in college until near the end of her life I set it aside as something worthy of my own time and interest. Today, as I prepare to lead a discussion on miracles with our 9th-grade confirmation students, I find myself returning again to what this means for me and for all of us trying to understand this world.

I recognize firstly that both Aristotle and l'Engle were writing on art, but if you've read much of l'Engle you also should know that she believes art is not a discipline of escapism but a primary means of truth-telling. She is a scientist, an artist, and a poet, but you don't get a sense in her work that the three are separate; they are, in fact, equal, integrated and integral to the whole picture she is painting. So, when l'Engle talks about her favorability towards the probable-impossible it is in the sense of making good art but also telling something that is fantastic and true in the world, something that can't be told with such ruthless efficiency as we might like. The probable-impossible is for her (and for me) a world where miracle and God are the ultimate reality, while the possible-improbable is this world that we see which so often cheapens everything down its most banal and self-gratifying nature.