Ecclesiastical Anxieties

I preached on the Feeding of the Five Thousand in Mark 6:31-44 yesterday. I was taking services for Jennifer Barrows at Ascension, West Park and Holy Trinity, Highland, NY, the Episcopal churches closest to the Monastery. Jennifer is a goodhearted, hardworking priest, whose career before ordination included organizing social services and practical necessities for homeless people in midtown Manhattan. She deserves her break.

These two churches are yoked, and share the common problems of smaller, underfunded churches everywhere. They have beautiful buildings which need attention. The congregations are small. There is no substantial endowment. The bulletin listed a need for $7,000 to replace the "air handlers" at Holy Trinity. We had a little fun playing with those words. What it comes down to is that the blower system for the heat needs help.

This is a story that can be observed in thousands of churches. It is one of the stories that underlines the narratives of the recent General Convention: not enough people, not enough money, old structures needing maintenance.

I enjoyed preaching to these two congregations. I gave them a bit of historical cultural background for interpretation, and suggested that we always are interpreting on three levels simultaneously: what the text meant to its earliest hearers/readers in the context from which it originally came; how the text has been normatively proclaimed in the practice of the Church over time; and what it might mean to us in our particular and present situation.

I found the Gospel story especially interesting on the third, present, level. Here you have thousands of people running after the disciples and after Jesus, tracking them down in the wilderness, demanding teaching. This event is not a carefully planned attempt to get a large crowd to come to your special event. Quite the opposite. Its success brings the problem to the fore.

The people have left everything to seize this opportunity to hear the good Word. And their trust has left them unprepared for the practicalities: there is no organized food event. Visions of potluck planning meetings that take longer than the potluck rise before me, as a sort of counter-image.

Note that the concern is not coming from the people. It comes from the leaders. Here the background gives us a clue. The key passage is Mark 6:34: Jesus is concerned about the people following him because they are like sheep without a shepherd. My Jerusalem Bible study edition, usually so diligent in its marginal notes, fails to point to the OT referent for this passage. But the wonderful commentary by Francis J. Moloney, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary, does. In Numbers 27:17, Moses, having learned that he is not to enter the Promised Land, asks the Lord to appoint Joshua to be Israel's new leader, so that they may not be like sheep without a shepherd. This passage introduces the two key image clusters that lie behind Mark's story: the Exodus and the figure of the Shepherd, which help to explain the seemingly extraneous bits about the people being divided into hundreds and fifties, and the green grass on which they are invited to recline. Mark is not one to waste details.

So: Exodus (Moses morphing into Joshua, people out in the wilderness seeking their new life) and Shepherd (the inescapable comparison with David, and the inevitable reference to the 23rd Psalm) form the background to this story. The feeding miracle is thus linked to the manna in the desert as well as the shepherd leading the sheep to pasture. God will provide.

And so on to the General Convention moment: Anxiety. So many anxieties. Budget cutting. Structures that are too large -- talk of combining small dioceses at GC. Cutting the size of the national Church staff. Trimming GC itself from 10 to 8 days. God created the world in 6, so maybe we could improve our own processes a little. No in person meetings for the many groups that do the planning work of the Church next year, but relying on electronic communication. Not printing so much next time. And so on. Good, sensible, practical responses from good, practical people to real, practical problems.

Jesus does not enter into their anxiety. He simply looks at them (I had fun imagining his facial expressions, the pause as perhaps he recollected that a first, uncensored, response might not have been helpful. One has had such moments.) And then he says, "Give them something to eat yourselves." What?!! The leaders provide what the followers need?? It's supposed to be the other way around. It's like the national Church giving money to the dioceses, not the other way around. Clearly impossible. But a VERY instructive challenge to the leadership!

But where will we get bread to feed all these people? 200 denarii wouldn't be enough. If you calculate the value of the 2 denarii that the Good Samaritan gives to the inkeeper for 2 nights lodging and care at a minimum of $100 a night, 200 works out to $20,000. How can we possibly get so much for this great need?

So then Jesus sensibly asks, Well, what food is there here now? What actual resources do we have? And, famously, they turn out to be more than enough.

So many lessons here. But two principally come to me this time around (one does preach this from time to time, and it is always different!).

First, whatever we really need is already present. The Lord's example is first to challenge the leadership's assumptions about what is needed and where it is to come from, and then to look for what is already present and share it creatively, trusting that if we do so, God will provide. He will. He really will.

Second, this time the miracle seemed to me not to be the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, but the spontaneous assembling of this huge crowd -- 5000 men, implying women and children, probably 15,000 to 20,000 people. The Word they are seeking and which Jesus is preaching is so powerful that they rush out into the countryside to hear it, leaving the cozy security of regular meals behind, at least temporarily.

Maybe the Church should look to what it already has and use it creatively, expecting that what is truly needful will be provided when the time comes. Maybe the Church should concentrate its energies on the quality of the proclamation, listening to the people's deepest yearnings (enslaved Israelites hoping for freedom, sheep needing pasture and good trustworthy shepherds) and finding the answer in the liberating Word Himself. Preach that and people will come looking for you. When is the last time a crowd showed up at your church wanting to hear the Word so much that it forgot to think about lunch? May it be.

For the moment, there were 6 at Ascension and 13 at Holy Trinity. Good, solid, friendly, faithful people. It doesn't seem many. But it is what the Spirit drew that morning. They are God's gift to each other, to the Church, and to me. They are enough, for this moment. And for next Sunday the 26th and for August 9, this disciple will work on a Word of salvation that will justify their journey to hear it.

Faithfulness in little. Planting seeds that will grow. Slaves who become the nation of God's own choosing. Flocks of sheep needing shepherding. I love the ministry in small places that don't seem to have very much. You never know how many baskets will be gathered at the end of the meal.