Third Sunday in Lent
“Impossible?” — Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Ephesians 3:20-21/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Mark 6:32-40/NRSVUE)
When I left the finance business to do this ministry thing I thought I’d also left behind that industry’s obsession with numbers, but I hadn’t. As it turns out, churches care an awful lot about numbers too, albeit different ones: pledges, donations, expenses, membership and, of course, attendance are the ones that tend to matter to folks in settings like this. And while I understand why they matter, at least to some extent, it often strikes me as strange that they seem to matter as much as they do.
The church I served before coming here, took attendance really seriously. Here we keep track of how many people are in the sanctuary and how many people are online any given Sunday because we’re asked to report such statistics to the denomination annually. But in my last church the ushers (what we refer to here as “greeters”) actually had a printed spreadsheet grid with all of the members’ names on one axis and dates on the other axis so they could keep a running record of who was at church and when, which was a little intense.
At the conclusion of worship an usher would fill out a little summary slip containing just three pieces of information: the date, the total number of attendees and, strangely enough, the weather. When that slip was completed, it was placed in a clear plastic holder on the wall by the door for folks to peruse on the way out and, let me tell you, some of them sure did peruse it. Left to my own devices I probably wouldn’t have been overly concerned with that attendance number on a weekly basis but, because so many of them were concerned with it, I’m embarrassed to say, I found myself being concerned with it too.
Now, why did the weather matter enough to record it on that slip you might ask? As far as I can figure, snow or sleet or excessive heat was a way of explaining low attendance. However, no one ever bothered to explain to me why the church was so fastidious about this whole process in the first place; it was just one of those “well, that’s the way we’ve always done it” things that often happen in churches, and so they just kept doing it. But, at the end of the day, it wasn’t really all that tough figure out. Whatever that number was, it should have been higher; whatever that number was, it was never enough. The implication, of course, being that we didn’t have enough and that we weren’t enough.
One Sunday in the middle of January I woke up and looked out my window at home. Knowing what the date was and what the weather was, my mind jumped to what the third piece of data on that slip might be in a few hours, and my heart sort of sank. About a foot of snow had fallen overnight and it was still coming down pretty hard. Thankfully, I lived about four blocks from church and could easily walk there, but I didn’t figure we’d have many folks in the pews at 10:30 and I was right; we typically had ninety or so but that morning we only had about fifteen.
Our organist lived on a farm a long way from church and couldn’t get there to play because the roads were terrible, so Valerie grabbed a hymnal and took a stab at playing them on the piano, which worked out okay. At the very least she got us all in the right key at the beginning so we could take it from there.
The passing of the peace took a little while longer that morning than it normally would have but there were so few people there that everyone was able to greet everyone else, which was nice.
And after worship, this small but faithful remnant gathered down in the social hall for a while to share some coffee and hot cocoa and some stories of great snowfalls in the town’s history before heading back out into the snow (in retrospect, I think most people lingered so long because they didn’t want go home and shovel).
The usher who was responsible for keeping score of attendance couldn’t get out of her driveway, so no one bothered to fill out that slip and put it up on the wall that day. Funnily enough, though, no one really seemed to care — I know I didn’t. We were so busy singing and praying and laughing and telling stories and eating and discussing which snowbound neighbors we were most concerned about that it just didn’t matter. It was one of the most memorable Sunday’s I’ve ever spent at church.
Because sometimes it’s less about how much you have and more about what you’re able to do with what you have. Then again, maybe it’s really about what God is able to do with what you have, which is, of course, wonders. And that seems to be the point of today’s gospel passage, which is Mark’s version of the miraculous feeding of the five thousand.
As the story begins, Jesus and his disciples are in need of a break from all the ministry work they’ve been doing for all of the people who have been following them around; so Jesus suggests they sail off to a deserted place by themselves and rest for a while. But someone must have known where they were headed and that someone mush have told someone else, who told someone else, and so on because when their boat came ashore there was already a huge crowd waiting for them there.
Jesus seems unperturbed by this unexpected turn of events (then again, he’s Jesus, so he probably knew this was going to happen). Mark tells us that when he saw the crowd “he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.” The disciples, in contrast, end up being kind of annoyed (in fairness, though, they thought they were going on vacation and ended up back at work instead).
And so after a while the disciples come to Jesus and encourage him to wrap it up; they basically tell him, “Hey boss, it’s getting late, were out here in the middle of nowhere, these people are really hungry, we don’t have enough food for all of them, and the restaurants in town are going to be closing soon, so let’s send them on their way, shall we?” But Jesus is having none of it; his terse response to his disciples: “You give them something to eat.”
You can practically feel the disciples’ anxiety leaping off the page as they consider what to do next because they think they have so little to give. And then, all of a sudden, the numbers start flying around — it’s funny how anxiety and numbers often travel together, isn’t it?
“Are we to go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread, and give it to them to eat?” the disciples ask (fun fact: a single denarius was roughly one laborer’s total daily wage). It’s pretty clear that this is a rhetorical question, one intended to underscore the absurdity of Jesus’s request, because they sure didn’t have that kind of money kicking around in the church’s general fund at that point.
“How many loaves have you? Go and see,” Jesus responds.
“Five, and two fish,” they answer (notice: more numbers). But there’s no way that’s going to feed all of those people, it’s not nearly enough.
Jesus simply tells the disciples to divide the crowd into groups of fifties and hundreds (again, more numbers) and get them to sit on the grass.
He then takes the five loaves and two fish (you guessed it, more numbers), looks up to heaven, blesses and breaks the loaves, gives them to the disciples to distribute to the people; then divides the fish amongst them too.
After all ate and were filled, they took up twelve baskets (yup, more numbers) and collected all the leftovers.
And how many people were fed, pray tell? The answer, as Mark tells us, is five thousand men (which is, of course, another number).
Was that the exact attendance there that day? I have no idea. Was one of the disciples actually walking around the crowd with a clipboard counting heads? I doubt it. What was the date on which this all happened? No clue. And what was the weather? I will take a stab at that one: given the region in which all of this is taking place, I’m going with “hot and dry.”
What was the actual temperature? No one knows because the thermometer hadn’t been invented at that point but, if it had been, I guarantee you someone would have kept track and written the number down, because that’s what people do: we measure to see if we measure up, but we never really do, we never really could, because with us nothing is ever enough.
All four of the gospel writers say that the disciples were able to score five loaves and two fish, but if they had been able to come up with eight loaves and four fish, wouldn’t they have seemed like better stewards of resources? Come on, five loaves and two fish was really the best they could do? I bet they were wondering whether a different group of disciples could have done better than they did.
Would it have mattered if there were five thousand two hundred and thirty six people there that day instead of just five thousand — a bigger crowd would have been better, right? And were there only men there, as Mark and Luke say, or were there women and children too, as Luke says. Luke’s version is better, right? I mean we all know we need young families to grow the church.
And if Jesus had divided them into groups of twenty five instead of groups of fifty or a hundred, there would have been two hundred groups instead of somewhere between fifty and one hundred groups, and more groups would have made the ministry activity appear even more successful when the disciples reported it to church headquarters, right? Isn’t that the way it works?
Well, it might be the way it works in our world, but it’s not the way it works in God’s reign — and that’s whole the point of this story, I think. Come on, do we really believe that things would have turned out any less miraculously that day if there had been twelve people in attendance with nothing at hand but a can of Spam and a half-eaten bag of Doritos?
In his letters to the Philippians and the Corinthians, the apostle Paul speaks about the need for believers, for disciples, for us to have “the mind of Christ,” and today’s story gives a glimpse of what that might actually mean:
While other folks are preoccupied with the numbers, Jesus just feeds people;
while other folks are fretting over how much they have (or don’t have, as the case be), Jesus does the best he can with whatever is there;
while other folks are concerned with limitations, Jesus sees possibilities — and remember, with God all things are possible.
And so, I wonder: What would church be like if we were to stop worrying so much about numbers and act as though we actually believed that?