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.
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