Choosing to be who we are choosing to be...

          I'm just ending a two week stay-cation.  I really needed the break.  This time has called forth a lot from me, people are stressed and acting that out, and I needed to step back, remember who I am and, more importantly, Whose I am, regroup, re-center, re-focus.  I've had many thoughts emerge that I will be writing about over the next few weeks, but for today I want to talk about people's behavior once again.

          I was driving down the road a week ago with my family.  The kids were in the back seat, David and I in the front.  Someone pulled up next to me and started screaming at us " *&!-ing homosexuals!"  I don't know why.  The kids just laughed: they aren't sure why that would be considered an insult, which I take as a good sign.  But whenever extreme anger comes my direction, it tends to upset me and I sit with it and in it for some time.  I can't just shake it off, or laugh it off, as the kids did.  I want to know why people are so angry.  I want to know what about my family of five just driving in our little car offends them.  I want to know why they chose those particular words.  

          Inevitably I also come to a place where I wonder about what the angry people were hoping to accomplish by screaming at strangers and just calling them names which can give us no possible understanding of why they are angry or what they are wanting to be different.  And I come back again to the thought that we have a choice about what we contribute in this life-time.  On the balance sheet of life, do we give more positives to the world or more negatives?  Do we empower, support and lift one another up with kindness and love, or do we squash, harm ,and destroy?  What do we want our legacies to be?  What do we want to choose to leave here as our mark on this world?  We don't get to live forever.  We have little time with which to grace the lives of those with whom we travel.  So what do we want our contributions to be?

         But as I sat with it this time, I thought about my own actions in this world.  I often think big-picture about my own actions: what kind of carbon foot-print am I leaving?  How am I contributing to the over-all health of the planet by driving my car or planting trees?  How do my shopping purchases help or harm the poorest of the poor?  How can I be part of the solutions when dealing with climate change rather than adding to the increasing destruction of a fragile planet?  How can I confront racism in my almost-entirely-white congregation?  

       But this time I found myself thinking instead about littler things.  I heard echoed in a comment of one of my children negative words that I said first: words that were judgmental and attacking, that encouraged looking at the faults of another rather than the gifts, words that were dismissive and pridefully self-righteous.  I heard a stance of annoyance and frustration with the inevitable challenges in life, rather than wonder and delight at the beauties of our world and the gifts of the people in our communities.  And I realized that we do indeed develop habits, fall into patterns, that determine our influence in this life time; an influence of good or an influence that is more negative.  Do we focus on what is wrong about others, what is irritating to us, what is a problem for us?  Do we condemn and put down those who are different from us?  Or do we seek to find the good, the wondrous, and emphasize it and support it?  Do we teach our children to be negative and catty about others?  Or to look for what is beautiful and true and good in our differences?   This isn't to say that we ignore problems.  But can we reframe them in terms of judging actions rather than people, and on what we can do to help, rather than on what is bad and feels unsolvable? 

      When we have been challenged and attacked, it is easy to respond in kind.  But is our goal to return what has been given to us, or to rise above, to be better, to grow and contribute what is right and good to our world?  To make changes based not on judgements, but on wisdom, learning, and a desire to contribute what is good?

        I recognize in my own life that this is a growing edge.  I need to be better at focusing on the good, at rising above the hate and anger that is around us, at choosing in my interactions with the world to give what is grace-filled and loving rather than what is defensive, destructive, angry, or harmful.  This has to start with the little things.  And it has to begin with "me."

Giving Hearts

 

2 Corinthians 8:1-15

Matthew 14:22-33

               Today’s passage from Corinthians is profound as it talks about a depth of giving that we can only imagine.  “While they were being tested by many problems, (their extra amount of happiness and) their extreme poverty resulted in a surplus of rich generosity…. They gave even more than they could afford and did it voluntarily.” We hear this kind of giving and generosity from Jesus as well.  He says that the widow who gave everything that she had out of her poverty gave so much more profoundly than the rich man who had given substantially more, but out of his abundance.  And we hear Paul refer to it here in terms of Jesus’ own life as well, “You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Although he was rich, he became poor for your sakes, so that you could become rich through his poverty.”  And I wonder if anyone who is hearing this sermon today can really relate to this level of giving, this kind of giving at all.  We here in this place give out of our abundance.  I give out of my abundance, and I know this.  Do we know what it is like to give out of our need?  Have any of you ever given out of a place of great need?  Have you ever been deeply generous in times of want, hunger, or true financial struggle?   And if you have, how did that feel?  What was that like?

               I’ve shared before that studies show that people are so much more generous in their poverty than we are in our comfortable lives and much more so than the rich are in their wealth.  Truthfully, there is an inverse proportion of giving to how much people have.  Greed is a disease that accompanies and intensifies with wealth.  This has been found in study after study.  The more we have, the more we believe we “need.”  We recognize it also in the joke about the poor man who begged God saying that he would happily give 10% of everything he was given if God would just allow him to have a little.  He immediately found a $10 and out of joy turned around and gave $1, his 10%.  He kept doing this and soon found that he was making more money.  When he made $100, he still joyfully gave $10 out of it.  When he made $1000, he gave $100 but it stopped feeling as “joyful” and felt instead more like a duty.  This was even more the case when he made $10,000.  But the time he made $100,000 he started to resent how much money he had to give back.  And when he made his first $1,000,000, the idea of giving $100,000 back was just too much.  So, he went to the priest and asked if there was any way he could get out of his deal with God.  The priest responded, “Well, I don’t think you can get out of your deal.  However, if you only want to give $1, I’m sure God would be more than happy to have you back to making only $10.”

But many of us who have worked with the poor have also experienced how true this is.  I want to share some stories that came out in my lectionary group meeting this week.  One of my group shared about her experience in Nicaragua.  She went down with a group and they ended up visiting a village that was not expecting them.  They came very late in the evening, but the village none the less came out from their tiny one or two room adobe and grass huts, someone killed the village’s only chicken which they cooked for my friend’s group.  The local pastor invited them all to stay in his tiny hut while he stayed on the floor of a neighbor’s home. They all came with an abundance of food, though the group learned that food was scarce here and that people were truly sharing out of their poverty rather than their abundance.  Still, they shared with great joy and celebration.  I had a similar experience in my time in Central America as well.  The giving and the generosity were astonishing.

               Even in this country I have seen and experienced that kind of generosity of our most poor.  Another pastor in our lectionary group shared that her church has been helping a homeless man – providing food, allowing him to be inside the building on the coldest and hottest days and nights, giving him a place out of the elements for a time.  She shared that one day while he was in the building, he found the pew envelopes that all of our churches have.  The man asked what they were for.  My friend shared that they were there so that people could give to the church: these were envelopes for people to donate money to the church.  My friend shared that the man lit up.  He said, “I want to give to the church, too!”  He dug through his pockets and found six cents. Six cents!!  That was all he had in the world.  But with pride and joy, and apparently even a few tears, he put the six cents into the pew envelope and handed it to my friend.  And she found that his giving of this to the church was worth more than the thousands that the richest member of the church gave because again, the unhoused man had given out of his poverty instead of out of his abundance.

               This is not just about giving money, though.  It is giving in all of its forms.  Our church has supported for several years now the Dougbe River Presbyterian School in Liberia.  This school was started by one of my lectionary group friends, Pastor Francis, as well as a member of his congregation, Isaac, who was from that community in Liberia.  They chose to build this school in a very remote region where the people are, again, extremely poor, and where education was not easily accessible.  But the people who began that school came with a few strong rules.  They approached the village and offered to build and support the school, but there were some trade-offs.  There were a few practices that would not be acceptable, ever, for Isaac or for the Presbyterian church supporting this school.  The practice of  female circumcision, and the marrying off of young girls – neither of these practices could continue if they were going to accept the help of the building and supporting of the school.  These were long-standing traditions, practices and rituals of importance in that community.  But it was made clear to the community that these practices had to stop if they wanted this school.  And they chose to do that.  Isaac, again, a member of their community, was able to frame and explain the necessity of these choices in such a way that the people understood the choice they were making and saw their decision as both a way for them to give back and to participate in the work of the Spirit.

               We experience this here now as well.  There are so many people who are choosing to work – especially our health care workers – despite the fact that they know they are putting their own lives at risk in doing so.  I saw a comment this last week that said “Another word for ‘essential’ is ‘expendable’” and what the author meant was that we have put some people in the category of “essential workers” and we are willing to risk their lives for the rest of us who are more privileged to be able to work from the comforts of our homes.  Sometimes there is no choice for those workers and they must do the work they are given to do.  But other times they are choosing to do the work out of love, out of care, and out of a commitment to serve one another.  They are giving out of their abundance of time, energy and love in support of the community.

               But what I find more interesting in all of this is the joy and the love with which people give.  Even more than this, what people discover to be the gift of giving.  The deep, spiritually transformational gift of giving out of poverty.

 One of our group shared a story of taking a very broken shoe of hers to a poor local cobbler when she lived in a tiny village for a few years.  She brought in her shoe and returned in a week to be told that the cobbler had not yet fixed it because he had been tending to a sick relative.  She returned in another week and found that it still was not fixed as the cobbler had had to catch up on other work.  When she came back the third week, the shoe was beautifully fixed.  But when she went to pay for it, the cobbler refused to take payment for it because it had taken him so long.  My friend insisted saying that he had done the work, she had not needed the shoe and she wanted to pay for the hard and beautiful work that had gone into fixing the shoe.   My friend shared that his response was one she will never forget.  He said to her, “Please do not rob me of my opportunity to give to you.” 

And this too matches what we heard from Paul today when he talked about the giving of the Macedonians: “They urgently begged us for the privilege of sharing in this service for the saints.” Paul names this giving by people as the action of God’s grace. And people who give out of their need experience it as such.  It does not feel like they are giving away something that is theirs, depriving themselves of something that they have earned and worked for.  Instead, giving out of need in this way is often experienced as a gift to the giver for two reasons.  First, they recognize that everything we have: our money, our talents, our time – is not ours.  These are resources entrusted to us for the service of all.  We are to be stewards of what is not ours, to share all of it with those who need it most.  But secondly, what people find in giving from that place of great need is that they experience that grace of God through the giving.  They experience trusting and having faith that their gifts will be used for the good of God’s people.  They experience being part of the movement of the Spirit, feeling that Spirit blow around them, through them and within them. 

And that brings us to the gospel reading for today.  When we hear this story, we generally think of the storm and the waves as the enemy out of which Jesus appears.  We usually think of God as being in contrast to the waves, in contrast to the storm.  But what I want to point out to you today is that, as I’ve said before, there is one word in Hebrew – Ruach, that means Spirit, breath and wind.  In today’s story we are told, “Meanwhile, the boat, fighting a strong wind, was being battered by the waves and was already far away from land”.  And so what I want to suggest to you is that perhaps the “kingdom of God” in this case is the storm.  C.S. Lewis in his Narnia stories illustrates the God character, Aslan, as a Lion.  And we are told throughout the series that Aslan is “not a tame lion”.  We want God to be tame, to be easy, to come to us in the stillness (as God does), and ONLY the stillness (which does NOT happen).  It is in the storms themselves that we often see God and are invited by God to step into faith, to step into generosity, and into being the people God calls us to be.  Jesus tells Peter to step out of the boat.  To “Come” onto the water, keeping his eyes on Jesus, despite the strong wind, despite the ways in which the Spirit moves, despite the poverty, or oppression or challenges that each of us must face.  Peter became afraid when he stopped keeping his eyes on Jesus, on the deep and true love of Christ.  That is when we become afraid as well.  Keep your eyes on that love, keep your faith deep and strong, and you will not sink when you step out of the boat, when you take the risk of trusting in the Spirit even when it is not “tame”.  As Augustine said it, “Pray as if everything depended on God.  Act as if everything depended on you.”  Acting is stepping out of the boat.  Acting is taking the risk to live the lives God calls you to live in the storm, because of the storm, for the sake of the Spirit that is the storm.

Step out into risking giving out of your poverty rather than out of your abundance.  Step out no matter that you have limitations and have areas of poverty and are afraid.  Step out of the security of the boat because it is in risking taking that step, giving out of that poverty, and trusting in God’s love for you that you will deepen, grow and become part of being, living, and loving through, within and with the Spirit of God.  Amen.

Struggling with Forgiveness

         I've just finished reading Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice for the gazillionth time.  I don't really know how many times I've read it, but I seem to circle back to it at least once every few years, and each time I do, I hear and see new things in it.  This time I was thinking about how forgiving the family is of Lydia when she truly disgraces them all and puts all of their futures at risk.  Lydia has no concept at all of her impropriety.  None.  The mother, Mrs. Bennet, likewise has no concept at all of what Lydia has done to the family.  The trouble, intense shame and pain, the fears and struggles, as well as the huge expense that they cost a great number of people in the book has no physical or emotional impact on Mrs. Bennet, Lydia, or her new husband, Wickham.  It causes them no discomfort or regrets at all.  They are completely oblivious to their wrong-doing and their actions, their "silliness", their lack of sense, their ability (inability) to grow - nothing is affected by what they have done. And yet, despite all of this, everyone who sees this intensely selfish, unaware, unreflective, narcissistic behavior is ready and able to forgive them.  And every time I read the story I find myself saying, "I don't understand that.  How can they just let this terrible behavior go without any consequences?  How can they still be so very generous and caring to these people and let them get away without comprehension or cost to their actions?!"  I get upset every time, and not just at their actions, but at the lack of social consequence for those actions.
        And then this time, something struck me anew.  There is a ridiculous pastor in the book, Mr. Collins, who writes to Lydia's father after the event with these words, "...I must not, however, neglect the duties of my station, or refrain from declaring my amazement at hearing that you received the young couple into your house as soon as they were married.  It was an encouragement of vice; and had I been the rector of Longbourn, I should very strenuously have opposed it.  You ought certainly to forgive them, as a Christian, but never to admit them in your sight, or allow their names to be mentioned in your hearing." And what I heard in the words of the most ridiculous and insensible person in the book was a reflection of my own feelings and thoughts towards those characters.  It gave me pause to find my own thoughts put into the words of a supercilious, ridiculous pastor.  This was even more the case when coupled with Mr. Bennet's response of, "That is his notion of Christian forgiveness!" 
         It is not forgiving to insist that others suffer the consequences of their actions and behaviors.  It's not.  We all do it: we want others to pay when they make mistakes.  We want "criminals" to go to jail and pay for their mistakes.  We want crazy drivers on the road to pay for their insane and threatening driving.  We want people who we see as "wrong" to know they are wrong, to find it out, to have shame and pain around their mistaken behavior or even their mistaken thinking.  We want and expect consequences.  And while boundary setting is important, and natural and logical consequences make sense, especially when we are parents, the kind of "punishment" that we usually dole out or think of is about inflicting pain on the one who has hurt us: causing them to suffer at least the shame of their actions because they have caused us pain.  It is about revenge, it is about striking back when someone has struck us.  But this is not forgiveness.  It is certainly not what Jesus talks about when he mentions "turning the other cheek", or forgiving again and again.  We don't practice this, so we don't see it often.  When we do see it (like in this book), it often strikes us as frustrating and incomplete.  But that only shows, really, the depth of our "need" for others to pay for what they have done.
        As I talked about in a recent blog post, seeking revenge first and then "forgiving" is not actually forgiving and is not actually loving.  True forgiveness means letting go of the hope that the other will suffer punishment from what they have done or failed to do.  Truly loving another means loving and accepting the other despite the wrongs the other does, and despite, at times, a lack of suffering for those wrongs. 
        We hope for that kind of forgiveness for ourselves.  None of us is perfect.  All of us do wrong.  But we hope we won't suffer the consequences of those wrongs. We hope for forgiveness, even when we struggle to offer it to others in the same ways.
        Pride and Prejudice is just a story.  But I found myself challenged with the thinking that if I can begin by forgiving the characters in a story, perhaps I can learn to forgive more fully the real people in my life as well.  It certainly has given me a greater insight into one of my short-comings: the ability to always let go of a wrong once it has been done.  So for that insight today I am grateful.  And I will continue to work to step forward into doing better. 

Faith Vs Sight

2 Corinthians 5:1-21

Matthew 14:13-21

8/3/20

               As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. has said, we are not in fact physical beings on a spiritual journey.  Rather, “We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”  I think we can see this to be the case at times.  I remember when we first got the three kittens that are now my kids’ cats.  I remember watching them “try on” their bodies.  At least that was how it looked to me.  They were figuring them out: figuring out how to make them work, how to walk, how to balance, how to use their paws.  I remember moments when they would do something and it would startle them – as if they were saying, “oh, so this is what happens when I do this!”   We’ve seen this with our human babies too, but I think because cats develop and grow into adults so much more quickly, it was all the more obvious to me with the kittens.  I saw that they were beings wearing cat pajamas and trying to explore the limitations and gifts of those pajamas as they navigated this new world for them. 

               In many ways we hear this echoed in Paul’s words.  He talks about God’s house as the real house, the house where we want to be, ultimately.  He talks about our human residence as a tent that weighs us down, a place away from “home”.  These feelings too are familiar to many of us.  I have lived in other places besides the Bay Area in my life, but each time I was in these other places, I felt this strong pull, this strong yearning within me, “I just want to go home” I would say.  But the reality is that whenever I would then move back here, back “home”, those yearnings were ever only partly answered.  There is still a strong desire within me to “go home”, to “be home”.  A spiritual being seeking for a physical home in a physical world.

               What is “home” for you?  Have you ever felt those yearnings to go home or be home, and if so, what did you mean by it?  What are the feelings that you associate with “home”?  If you were here, I would ask you to tell me, but since we are apart, I’m going to have to guess what some of those feelings are.  When people tell me about their “homes” they talk about warm fires and food, good conversation and music.  But the two feelings that I hear most are unconditional love/acceptance and safety.  Home is the place where you feel safe.  Home is the place where you are loved and accepted as you are, where you can be fully and wholly yourself without fear of pain or rejection.

               I’m part of a clergy group here in the Bay Area that meets for an hour every other week.  Most of the other people in this group are people of color.  The African American man who leads the group asked us this last week when and where we felt safe.  To a tee all of the black or African American pastors and faith leaders in our group said that there was no place here where they felt safe.  No place where they felt free to be themselves without threat to their person.  Can you imagine what that feels like?  I can’t imagine what that feels like in terms of physical safety.  I usually feel safe in my house or car, for example.  But I do know what that feels like emotionally.  There have been times in my life where there is no place that I have felt safe emotionally. There have been times in my life where I felt I had to be “on guard” every hour of every day, not knowing where the next “hit” would come, where the next slam would hit, where the next demand on my time, energy and personhood would be exacted.  And again, in all of those moments, I found my soul crying out “I just want to go home!”  And I knew that what that meant for me was that I just wanted to find that place that felt safe, where I would be loved and accepted as I am, where I would no longer be the spiritual being on a painful, intense, long and difficult human journey; but where instead I would be seen in fullness for all of who I am, and loved not just in spite of it, but because of it. 

               I think that because of this deep-seated desire for safety and unconditional love that some people describe another human being as their “home”.  My home is where YOU are.  My home is where THEY are.  But, as Meg Ryan said in the movie French Kiss, “There is no home safe enough, there is no country nice enough, there’s no relationship secure enough.”  And no matter how romantic and wonderful it is when two people stay married and in love their entire lives, those of us who’ve been divorced can tell you that every relationship has conditions.  “Unconditional love” in romance isn’t real.  There are conditions.  And if your partner has met them for the entirety of their life, then you are one of the lucky ones to have found that.  For most of us, the conditions have been found and named and fall short in human beings.  And I would say that even for those who’ve been married their entire lives, there have been moments with your partners that have not felt good, that have not felt emotionally safe or loving.  That’s part of being human.  No one is perfect and when you get two imperfect people together, there will be disagreements and times of pain.

               So in the midst of that, where do we find “home”?  Where do we finally look for that place of unconditional love and safety?

               Many people look towards heaven for that.  This ties back once again to the idea of us as spiritual beings on a human journey.  The number of people who have said to me towards the end of their lives, “I just want to go home” is too many to count.  For them, “home” is that place after death: heaven, or rest, or a kind of Eden where there is no more pain, emotional, physical or spiritual; there is just love and safety. 

               But what I would challenge you with today is the idea that when we call the ones we love “home,” and when we talk about heaven as home, and when we see something beautiful in nature, or hear an amazing piece of music, or visit a country that touches us, or have those mountain-top experiences that feel like home – that all of these point to the same reality.  And that reality is that “home” is where God is.  This home isn’t created or limited by space or time, by life or death, by the people we are with or those we are missing.  And while Paul says, “we live by faith and not sight”, I would say that God’s presence is here for us to see as well as to have faith in, in every moment of every day.

               And that brings us to the gospel lesson for the day.  Jesus is trying to withdraw.  He is tired, he is wanting some space to himself.  But the people are following him, and despite his personal needs, we are told that “Jesus had compassion for them and healed those who were sick.”  Evening came and his disciples tried to get Jesus to send the people into the village and buy food for themselves.  Once again, I want to point out, God here, Jesus here, is not a good business person.  He could have sent them into the village to buy food for themselves, to “boost the economy” and to support local trade.  But he doesn’t.  He also does not “fix it” for everyone.  We tend to change this story in our heads into one of Jesus passing out the food which multiplies and multiplies in abundance.  That is how we tend to hear this story because that is how we’ve been taught to hear this story.  But that is not what happens.  Instead, Jesus says to his disciples, “There’s no need to send them away.  YOU give them something to eat.” 

               The disciples did not want to do that.  They did not want to share.  “We have nothing here except five loaves of bread and two fish.”  So, Jesus prays over the food and then, giving it back to the disciples, asks them to give it to the crowd, which they do.  We don’t know what happened.  We don’t know if the food did in fact multiply – the story does NOT tell us that.  What we know is that once people started sharing what they had, which began with a small group but grew out into the crowds, that there was more than enough for everyone.  And THAT is where we see God, and that is heaven, and that is the safe and loving place that we call home – it is all around us at all times.  But we do not see it because we do not truly believe in it, we do not act on it, we do not live it. 

               I'm reminded of the stone soup story from our childhood.  A man comes to town and, though he is very hungry, no one will help him, no one will feed him.  They feel they don't have enough to share, they don't have enough to give.  So he takes out his pot, gets some water from the local stream and begins to cook it with just a stone inside.  People are curious and come out.  He says to them, "I am making a wonderful, magical, amazing soup!  I will share it, but it surely could use a carrot."  One of the villagers thinks, "well, I have a carrot I could add" and he returns with carrots to throw into the soup.  Then the stranger says, "Hm.  It surely tastes good now, but it could use a potato or two," and one of the villagers remembers that she has some potatoes to throw in.  This continues until the stew is an amazing soup of everyone's ingredients which the stranger is then able to share with all.  They didn't think there was enough.  But together, there was more than enough for all.

               There is always more.  There is always enough, if we could choose to trust in it and share it.  Did you know there was a study out recently that was looking at how people use money?  No surprise, the more money you have, the less you share it.  What was so interesting though is that the poorest of the poor really were the first to share what little food they had.  Greed is a spiritual illness that grows along with how much people have.  The more a person has, the more they are afraid of losing it and less likely they are to share it.  We see this through our country, we see this not just as individuals but as groups, too.  We forget how to see God’s kingdom.  We forget to be “home” for one another.  The bottom line, we forget how much we have been given and how much we have to share.  This does not just apply to money, either.

               I remember a time when my youngest child, Aislynn was just a baby of about 6 months old, Jonah, my son was 2 and my eldest daughter was 5.  I would not have been winning any parenting awards on that day, and at one point I even considered shipping off at least one of my lovely three children to someone who I knew would be much better capable of managing what I came to think of as my own personal monkey cage.  I had come to expect help on Fridays, but this particular Friday I was completely on my own all day.  The kids had been in rare form; all demanding things in temper tantrum format all afternoon.  By 7:00 I was a stressed-out mess.  With Aislynn in her bouncy chair, and Jasmyn in the shower, I was trying to get Jonah dressed for bed.  But when I tried to put his pajama top over his head I was greeted with yet another temper tantrum.  He would not tell me what he wanted, but instead ripped the shirt off and started to scream at the top of his lungs.  At that moment, Jasmyn called me to help her wash her hair and Aislynn decided this was the perfect moment to put in her two cents as well and she started crying like there was no tomorrow.  I explained to Jonah that if he was going to fight me I couldn’t help him, I left him in his room, went and picked up Aislynn who continued to scream, took her into the bathroom with me to help Jasmyn with her hair with my one free hand that wasn’t holding Aislynn, and I tried to take a deep breath.  When Jonah came running into the bathroom after me, it was all I could do to not snap his head off with a “What is it now, Jonah?” But instead of crying, or screaming, my two year old boy walked up to me, wrapped his arms around my legs and with a look of deep compassion said very simply, “I’m sorry I was fighting with you, Mama.”  In that moment I saw him again - my little, caring, sweet boy who needed my attention, who needed my love.  Yes, I could give it.  I had reserves that I didn’t even know I had, just for him, just for then.

               A friend of mine told me the story this week of his sister-in-law who is a doctor-of-all-trades whose primary job it is to fill in when other doctors can’t go in.  She’s basically on-call all the time at a particular hospital, for wherever she is needed and in whatever capacity.  Well, her husband died recently.  The day of the memorial service, she not only hosted the service, but hosted the party afterwards at her house.  Before everyone had even left, she received a call that one of the doctors who was supposed to give a lecture that day to a class of medical students just hadn’t shown.  The lecture was supposed to have started already and while the person calling understood she had just lost her husband and that the service was that day, she just didn’t know who else to call.  My friend’s sister-in-law thought for a minute and then realized she, too, had “more than enough”.  She chose to do the class because she had it to give.  That energy, that choice to share what we have whether it is resources, time, energy or money – that is where the kingdom of God, that is where “home”, that is where God, God-self is to be found.

               It’s not that faith isn’t important.  It is faith that tells us that there is enough for everyone.  It is faith that tells us to share and to give.  It is faith that hopes, trusts and believes that if we give what we have, there will still be enough for us.      

               We are, right now, in a time of increasing need.  While some people’s rents have been “put off”, they will have to pay them eventually and many simply won’t be able to.  The increase in numbers of homeless is growing exponentially.  The number of those who don’t have health care during this terrible time is growing.  The lines at the soup kitchens, the food pantries, the need-based agencies is growing exponentially.  This is a time when we need those loaves and fishes to go a long way.  But God gave us the ability to make that happen as God has given us the ability to share what we have, and not from our abundance, but from our recognition that these people are our brothers and sisters, our community, our family, who are in need.  The choice to believe that Jesus alone turned the bread and fish into a feast is a choice to abdicate our responsibility here.  We are not off the hook.  It was to his disciples that he said, “give them something to eat” and in this story from today it is the disciples’ own food that they are being asked to share.  Can God take that and make something amazing out of it?  Of course.  But it must start with our choice to share, to give, and to trust that there will be enough for us all.    

               “We walk by faith and not by sight”  Paul tells us.  But that faith becomes sight, and the world becomes “home” when we choose to follow in Jesus’ footsteps and to love fully, remembering that we are spiritual beings on this human journey together, called to live that out as the people of God that we were made to be.  Amen.