The hands of the many must join as one

Inks Lake © Casey Clough

title credit and inspiration: the humbling river – puscifer


In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I would like to ask you to join me in imagining a scene. Jesus has just found out from his disciples that his friend, his mentor, a man he admired very much, is dead. His friend did not die of illness, or old age, or even by accident, no. His friend had been murdered, the result of a reckless promise made by a politician to a young woman who charmed him with her dancing—a young woman with secret instructions and a secret plan to ask for John the Baptist’s head on a platter. Matthew tells us that when the disciples told Jesus this terrible news, he climbed into a boat and found a deserted place to spend time by himself.

What must that time alone have been like? The news of the death of a friend rips through us when we hear it. It knocks the breath out of us and changes our world in an instant. I picture Jesus, feeling the hollow ache of grief in his chest, turning towards the boat with a very human desperation to seek privacy to feel his emotions, to mourn his friend, and I feel certain, to pray to his Father the kind of prayers we pray when we are grieving. Prayers of grief are raw, unfiltered, full of pain and love and loss. These are the prayers in which we cling to God, yearning for comfort and mercy, for what has been done to be undone, that the inevitability of what comes next comes, if it must come, do so only after a reprieve. We plead for God to be with us, please, to lend us the strength to carry on. Perhaps the prayers of Jesus were not so different than ours.

We aren’t told how long Jesus stays on the boat, or what the weather is like. I picture Jesus spending a sleepless night on the water, weeping and praying against the background of the sound of the water lapping at his boat, insect noises, and the nighttime rhythms of the towns on the shore carrying across the water. I imagine Jesus’s prayers carried on breezes that smell of the water, only slightly salty—a smell of minerals, mud, and the fetid scent of lake plants growing and decomposing in their cycles.

Each of us has had or will have our turn to pray this kind of prayer. Crisis and loss spares no one—not even Christ. Each of us will have long nights of the soul, sleepless and straining toward God. It can be in these times when we can experience God’s presence. When we weep, God is weeping with us. When we are a puddle on our living room floor, God is puddled next to us. This divine presence, the love of God that is always with us, is the source that gets us moving again. It is where we find the strength, after a long night spent restless and struggling, to get up,  bedraggled and sore, to do what needs to be done for the children.

When Jesus comes ashore again, I imagine that the sun has risen, and the cool of the morning is giving way to the scorching heat and intense sun of the desert. I see Jesus pulling the boat onto the land with puffy eyes and tear tracks on his cheeks, exhausted and sad. He knows he is being watched, because he has seen the crowd that gathered in the place where he was going to reach land, a crowd of immense size for the time and the region.  

These people have walked a long way from the towns to meet Jesus here, bringing with them their sick and disabled loved ones for the chance that the miracles they have been hearing about are true, and that Jesus really can heal people. It is difficult enough to travel by car or plane when we are sick, injured, or living with a disability—how much more so to travel on foot? People came either carrying the people who need to be healed, or matching the slow pace of those walking through their pain, whether it be chronic or acute. These were not people who met Jesus at the shore out of casual curiosity. These were people in their own desperation. Being disabled or sick meant not being able to work, or not being able to produce nearly enough to be able to afford the most basic of necessities. These were people who lived in a region with periodic famines, who were used to surviving in the desert, and who knew that they could not continue without help.

On that spot of shore on the Sea of Galilee, two kinds of human desperation met one another face to face, and Jesus responded with compassion. Gut-wrenching, aching compassion that could not be denied or postponed in the face of the need of the people before him. He knows what needs to be done for God’s children, and despite his tired human body, he does it. He heals the sick, and does so late into the day before the disciples approach him, recommending that he send the people into the towns to buy food. Jesus dismissed this idea outright.

These were people very familiar with the desert. They knew how dangerous it was to walk long distances and spend extended hours outdoors without water and food. Those in the crowd had likely brought what they could, but these were not wealthy people. They had already walked a long way to this place, hoping they or their loved ones could be healed. They had been on the shore for hours, consuming the supplies they had brought with them. Sending them into the towns as evening descended on the chance the markets were open and had food to sell was a risk to their safety. Jesus had another plan.

It is here that we get to the miracle in this story. Rather than send these people to whom he had been ministering all day to fend for themselves, he took the paltry five loaves and two fish the disciples had and blessed them. Then the disciples distributed the broken loaves, and everyone was fed. Every single person.

The Episcopal Diocese of Texas has chosen this Sunday, when we are reading Matthew’s version of the feeding of the 5,000 to ask for the parishes of the diocese to join in an effort to help mitigate the impacts of cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (usually referred to as the SNAP program) in Texas. About 5.4 million people in Texas face food insecurity, and recent changes in program funding and qualification requirements have resulted in some of those people who rely on SNAP losing their access to assistance. The diocese has declared today to be A Call to Feed the Hungry Sunday, and has asked as many people as possible to join in an effort to let our lawmakers know that we support food assistance programs.

Churches cannot replace programs like SNAP, because the amount of resources needed are simply too much for places of worship to raise. Ninety percent of the people who need food assistance access that help through SNAP. Churches and charitable organizations supply about ten percent. While we cannot fully bridge the gap left by assistance cuts, we can add our names to the list of others who want to tell our representatives that we stand with hungry Texans, and support the SNAP program. This card can be found on the website calltofeedthehungry.org, and there is information available here at the church today—please feel free to ask Rev. Peggy or me for help during coffee hour if you have questions.

We live in an overwhelming time. I feel like I say this sentence every time I preach, and it remains true. Many of us are less secure than we were a handful of years ago, and we are peppered with requests for our time, for our attention, and for our money everywhere we go and everywhere we look—every article we want to read seems to be behind a paywall, we have to pay subscription fees for things that we used to purchase once and own, the news of war and tragedy clamors for our attention at a high emotional cost, and some days it feels like the ground lurches under us several times between our morning coffee and dinner.

It is understandable that we feel compassion fatigue sometimes, that we look at the world around us and feel exhausted. The need of the world, the need of the people in our communities, can feel overwhelming and unsolvable.

Faced with a large crowd of hungry people, do we feel that gut-wrenching compassion? I imagine for most of us, truthfully, the answer is sometimes yes, and sometimes no. Sometimes, our exhaustion wins. We are not Jesus; we are regular people. This reading directly confronts the idea of scarcity in a miraculous way, and we are not capable of working that kind of miracle—but I think there’s a clue in the way Jesus asks the disciples to distribute the bread with their own hands. It is the hands of regular people, trying to follow the way of Jesus, that serve the bread and fish that have been multiplied by God. The disciples aren’t perfect—far from it, as the author of Matthew tells us several times in his gospel—and neither are we, but together, our hands are capable.

There’s a song I’ve been listening to a lot lately, called The Humbling River, and it has this line: “The hands of the many must join as one.” This is how we get up in the morning and do what needs to be done for our fellow children of God. We coordinate, and we cooperate, and we organize. We add our names to the ranks of others who want to see His people fed. When we can, we give of our time and of our resources. When we can’t, we let others take our place. We yearn for mercy and for comfort for our neighbors, wherever they may be.

Let us love one another as Christ loved us. Let us help one another do so.

Let the bread Jesus multiplied then in the wilderness be broken and shared among us now. 

Amen.