gratitude — Andy James

a sermon on Matthew 14:13-21
preached on August 3, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Our beloved former member and ruling elder Jackie Acampora had a miserable dread of dealing with the church budget. She was one of the most gifted and talented ruling elders I have ever known, but church finances were not among those gifts. I think Jackie would have preferred swimming in a pool of hungry sharks to being a part of most of our budget conversations, and more than once we playfully threatened to elect her treasurer, knowing that if we did she would have immediately resigned!

Jackie’s church financial philosophy can best be described, as she herself put it, as “loaves and fishes”—as in put in what we have, see that it surely can’t be enough to meet our needs, and trust that God will work out the details. It’s a wonderful philosophy in theory, but it rarely satisfies the accountants among us, let alone those like me who depend on the church to help pay our bills, but for better or worse, we had to admit that Jackie’s philosophy was often about as good as a more structured approach, because at the end of the year the numbers usually came out better than we ever imagined they could.

Our reading from Matthew this morning directly references that miracle that Jackie regularly referred to when it came to church finances. This strange and wonderful miracle of Jesus feeding a crowd of thousands with just a few loaves and fish is one of the few stories told in all four gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and ministry. It all began with a tired Jesus and a hangry crowd. One of my pastor friends who is also a mother recently introduced me to this new word “hungry,” a mix of hungry and angry that makes things particularly miserable but is such an accurate description of what happens to us—and what I think was happening in that crowd that day.

The disciples sensed what was going on in the crowd, and they asked Jesus to call it a day and send everyone away to get something to eat in one of the nearby villages. Jesus would have nothing of this, though. “You give them something to eat,” he told them. Now this seemed preposterous and crazy. While many of Jesus’ followers in our time have developed incredible skills in preparing meals for churchgoers on short notice, the first disciples were not quite as gifted, and there were no professional caterers in the Yellow Pages of Palestine! Even more, the disciples seemed ready to get away from the crowd, too. They had not expected Jesus to welcome this hangry crowd of thousands to their private retreat by the lake, and so they had no confidence that even the amazing healer Jesus could pull off such a massive meal on such short notice!

So the disciples took inventory of the food they had available—five loaves and two fish—and reported their supplies to Jesus. But instead of giving up on what seemed to be an impossible challenge, Jesus took what they had, “looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds.” Along the way, somehow, someway, something happened. The five loaves and two fish multiplied to be enough to feed the crowd of five thousand men—the only ones who seemed to count in those days!—plus the accompanying women and children, with twelve baskets full of leftovers, too.

Did the crowd manage to order delivery to their picnic blankets via their iPhones and so eliminate the need for the disciples’ small stash to feed everyone? Did God miraculously multiply those small provisions into enough to feed such a large crowd? Or did something change the hearts and minds of the crowd and convince them to share the food that they had brought along with those who were not quite so prepared? Whatever happened, it was another triumphant moment for Jesus. The hangry crowd was calmed, empty stomachs were filled, and another miracle added to the books.

This feeding of the crowd of five thousand plus is absolutely amazing, but like so many of Jesus’ miracles, it isn’t always so clear what this means for us today. What do these loaves and fishes matter for us today anyway? Is there anything more to this story for us than yet more proof of Jesus’ abilities to make things work despite the bungling of the disciples? Does this miraculous meal suggest that our approach to church picnics might need to be changed a bit, with the menu made a bit more limited and supplies trusted to go further? Can we carry anything more from this than that sometimes we should back down from stressing out over the details and trust that God will provide?

I for one surely hope that there is more to this story for us than any or all of that. All too often I look around and see our world filled with the mindset of scarcity brought by the disciples, with concerns that we simply don’t have enough to go around and so we shouldn’t even try to share, with fear that we must preserve what we have and use it only for ourselves rather than offer it generously for the good of all. Far too often, our default response is that there is not enough to go around—not enough bread and fish to feed the crowd, not enough wealth to support those who are in need, not enough security to treat others with the full dignity of humans created in God’s image, not enough food to share with those who are not just hangry but truly hungry, not enough resources for us to welcome a few more children who face danger and death in their homelands. Some days I think it would take a miracle in our own time to set aside our risk management and fear-mongering so that we can live like people who have enough to share.

But Jesus is always ready, even now, to step in and tell us that we already have enough to go around—enough bread and fish to feed the crowd, enough wealth to share, enough security to step back from our fear, enough food to share generously with the hungry, enough resources to let us be confident that we will have enough to care for ourselves and others. Jesus is ready to show us this miracle that we need in our world, the miracle of a new spark of generosity, the miracle of new care for those truly in need, the miracle of sharing amidst our fear and trembling, the miracle of an abundant feast that is enough to remake and reshape us and all creation.

And ultimately that miracle begins at this table. This table stands as yet another place where just like that grassy spot by the lakeshore Jesus can work a miracle. This is the place where bread and juice become something more than just the ordinary things that grace our table, the place where a little becomes a lot because we share it with one another, the place where we are mysteriously united with the women and men who have gathered here before us and beside us and will come behind us, the place where somehow we miraculously meet Jesus. God’s promise is made clear at this table: Jesus always brings us enough—enough to sustain us at this table, enough to carry us on the journey, enough to allow us to set aside our fears, enough for us to share with others who are in need, enough for everyone to gather and be fed.

So maybe Jackie was right. Maybe we don’t need to worry so much about how things work and how the bills get paid. Maybe we can trust that loaves and fishes will be enough. Maybe God’s abundance can be miraculous for us too. So may the strange miracle of the loaves and fishes be a miracle for us, too, so that we can share God’s miraculous abundance far and wide each and every day. Thanks be to God! Amen.

a sermon on Luke 17:11-19
preached on October 13, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Some things are just thankless tasks. You know the sort of thing I’m describing: the work that no one notices if it gets done but that everyone will notice if it goes undone, the tough words that must be spoken even if no one wants to say them, the little things that seem to just happen behind the scenes because someone steps up quietly to do it without expecting anyone to say thank you. But beyond thankless tasks, I think there are also a lot of thankless people these days. These are the folks who walk right past you without saying a word if you hold the door open for them, those who don’t notice when you do something nice to make life easier for them, or even worse, the people who find something wrong with everything, even the most generous gift. The southern gentleman in me, ingrained in my spirit from my earliest days, resists this sort of thanklessness almost to a fault, so I say “thank you” for nearly everything, and many times I’m afraid that I end up saying thank you a bit too much!

An overabundance of thank yous is not the problem before us in our story from the gospel of Luke this morning—in fact it is quite the opposite! In one of the last healing stories of Luke’s gospel before the narrative turns to the events of Jesus’ last week before his crucifixion, we hear of how Jesus heals ten lepers of their brutal and awful disease by sending them to prove their cleanliness and healing to the priests, and they discover that it has happened as they go on the journey. But unlike so many of the healing stories in the gospels, there is little or no emphasis on the healing itself—we know almost nothing about it! The village where it happened is not identified but rather vaguely positioned as in the region between Samaria and Galilee. The ten individuals involved are not identified in any way at the beginning of the story. While the lepers cried out for healing saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” I suspect they probably had said similar things many times before to many other people. And the specific process by which Jesus granted them this gift of wholeness and healing is not described as it is in other stories.

Instead of giving us all these details, this story focuses on one of the lepers who took a different turn. Rather than making his way quickly to the priest with the rest of them to verify their new status as clean, when this now-former leper discovered that he had been healed, he cried out with praise to God. He turned around, returned to Jesus, and fell at his feet to thank him. Jesus was surprised, but not by this man’s actions. This kind of thanksgiving was what Jesus expected from everyone, so Jesus’ surprise here was actually that this one leper was the only one who responded in this way. He expressed his skeptical thoughts out loud: “Were not ten healed? Where are the nine? Can none be found to come back and give glory to God except this outsider?” Only when gratitude was expressed do we learn that this one who had been healed and returned to give thanks was not just anyone but a Samaritan—an outsider among outsiders, one assumed to be perpetually ungrateful, the last one anyone expected would stop and give thanks for anything. After noting his surprising thankfulness, Jesus sent him on his way, reminding him, “Your faith has made you well.”

This strange moment of thanks stands out even now. In our world where people just don’t stop to say thank you, it is notable to see this example of one who not only stops but goes out of his way to say thank you. As preacher John Buchanan puts it:

All we really know about him is that he recognized a gift when he saw and experienced it, that he returned to say ‘Thank you,’ and that Jesus said to him, ‘Your faith has made you well.’ (“Homiletical Perspective on Luke 17:11-19,” Feasting on the Word)

Luke makes it clear that this man’s life of gratitude is all that we really need to know about him. We don’t need to know anything more about his faith, his race, his cultural perspective, his religious practice, his ethics, his theology, his political ideas, or his moral values. What we need to know is that he has faith that gets lived out with gratitude. In her reflection on this text, Kim Long makes this abundantly clear:

In short, to ‘have faith’ is to live it, and to live it is to give thanks. It is living a life of gratitude that constitutes living a life of faith—this is the grateful sort of faith that has made this man from Samaria truly and deeply well. (“Pastoral Perspective on Luke 17:11-19,” Feasting on the Word)

He was healed of his awful skin condition before Jesus made this recognition, but his ultimate transformation came when he embraced this gracious gift for what it was and began to live it out in his expression of gratitude. Again, Kim Long puts it well:

Jesus reminds us that living out our faith—by revering God’s ways, by honoring one another, and by giving thanks in all things—we are given all the faith that we require.

In our world where there are so many thankless tasks and even more thankless people, what does this kind of deep gratitude that leads us to faith look like? It certainly has its roots in the kind of thanks that we offer to those who hold the door for us or that come out of our cultural exposure, but there is still something more. Deep gratitude takes “thank you” to the next level. Gratitude shows generosity beyond measure when others are in need. Gratitude sets aside our fears of the other and embraces those who are different from us as the beautiful children of God that they are. Gratitude gives first and asks questions later. Gratitude approaches others with kindness rather than suspicion. And gratitude looks ultimately for the good of the other rather than seeking our own self-interest. This deep gratitude emerges from the life of faith even as it enables the life of faith. Just as we don’t really know whether the chicken or the egg came first, we can never know whether faith or gratitude comes first, because they always come together.

Ultimately, though, this way of living with deep and real gratitude changes us. We stop noticing what we do not have but begin to embrace the gifts that we have been given. We set aside our concerns about what is in it for ourselves and begin to turn our hearts and minds to the gifts God has so graciously given. We stop giving thanks that we are not like those poor people over there and start to use the abundance that we have to transform all the world. We pray not just for healing and redemption and new life but to give thanks for all these things that we have already received, in whatever measure.

And when we do all these things, just like this healed leper, we walk away different. We are not afraid of what might come our way but thankful for all that has come our way and open to the things that God still has in store for us. We define our lives not by what belongs to us or what we wish belonged to us but by the recognition that we belong to God no matter what. We set aside our fears because we know that God has overcome our greatest fear—death itself—in Jesus Christ. And just like this healed leper, when we live lives of gratitude, we go on our way rejoicing, giving thanks for all that God has given us, offering our prayers for those places where we long for the fullness of God’s love and presence, and singing songs of praise wherever we go.

So may we go rejoicing all along the way, giving thanks to God for the incredible depth and breadth of healing, wholeness, and new life that is before us, and living lives of faithfulness and gratitude each and every day until we join with this healed man and all the heavenly choirs to rejoice all our days. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Loaves and Fishes

Rejoicing Along the Way