sermon preached
at Church of the Good Shepherd, Federal Way, WA
by the
Rev. Josh Hosler, Rector
The Tenth Sunday
after Pentecost, Proper 12B, July 29, 2018
Have you ever felt full to bursting?
I’m sure you’ve felt empty before: those
times are easy to remember. Empty of energy, empty of stomach, empty of options.
That’s a common enough human feeling.
But feeling full: well, that’s
another thing altogether.
I feel full today, and we haven’t
even had our picnic yet. I feel full to bursting, as if we’d already had loaves
and fishes and were just now gathering up the leftovers. I feel full to bursting
with welcome, and hospitality, and love. I hope you find that you’re being
offered some of that food, too.
You know, Jesus says to his
disciples at one point, “I have food to eat that you don’t know about.” This
kind of food is what I feel full of today.
First I felt full of busy-ness. First
came the moving in, getting reacclimated, making many trips to the hardware
store. Then came the balance of just spending some time at home with our two
kittens, getting reacquainted with old friends in the neighborhood. Finally,
now has come the first week in the office, filling out employee paperwork,
learning the wifi password, finding out the hard way that Good Shepherd has an
alarm system. I made my first pastoral visit, got the liturgical brain download
from Father Roy, and spent two and a half hours at the bank with Dilcia so that
I can spend money.
I also learned that many wonderful people have taken great care in preparing for
my arrival and that of my family. My office is painted—thank you so much! People
have been taking time out of their busy work schedules to meet with me and
brief me on everything I need to know. I feel full of abundance. I feel full of
the caring of this beloved community.
Now,
abundance feels great, but it’s not like I really need it. Enoughness is fine
with me. Actually, I think enoughness is the conversation I’m more interested
in having with people, because enoughness is what our whole culture needs to
work on. Our default setting, it seems, is that even when we have enough, we
keep wanting more. We want to sock some away, which is one thing—or we want to
be gluttonous, which is another. We do this out of fear, and the result is that
others don’t have enough. In contrast, our call from God is to carry each
other, to make sure that we all have enough. And from what I’ve seen so far,
the Church of Good Shepherd is doing this work.
You
know, the boy who offered his food to Jesus didn’t seem to worry about whether
there would be enough; he just gave generously without fear of missing his own
lunch. Centuries before, Elisha may have worried about whether there would be
enough, but he considered a factor that many of us would overlook: this unnamed
“man of God” had brought an offering from the “first fruits,” the earliest
reapings of his harvest, specifically in order to share it. Elisha expected
that wherever generosity is found, God will guide the process. It takes a child
or a prophet to see this. A child or a prophet can tell you that the only way you can have enough is
to give away what you have, freely, without fearful hedging, without an agenda,
but simply because your giving gives joy to others. Children and prophets can see
the enoughness.
But
what if we don’t have enough? Well, in that case, our challenge is to give from
the “not enough”—to trust that God’s abundance is not only a factor, but is the
main factor. Sometimes, in the short
term, we do indeed run out of things. And that’s when we need to count on our
community to sustain us. When we make our motto “I’ve got mine,” we get in
God’s way. But when we trust in God’s abundance and pair that trust with generosity,
God may well work through the process so that we find ourselves full to
bursting.
In
that “full-to-bursting” spirit, this passage from the Letter to the Ephesians
is precisely what I wish for all of us. Now, we don’t know for sure whether
Paul wrote this letter, or whether we should attribute it to someone writing in
Paul’s name a little later on. But whoever this person is, the longing is obvious:
a longing for the community of Christians in Ephesus to share a
“full-to-bursting” experience.
After
all, what do we do in the Church? We become “rooted and grounded in love”—not
just love in general, not just love as a random act of kindness, or a
thoughtful word, or even as genuine love between two people. In the Church, we
seek to connect with a higher love, a bigger love, a self-sacrificial love that
does not forever diminish the one who is sacrificing—the love from which and
through which all love proceeds. Why is there love? Because of the Love that
made us all. In the Church, we dare to believe in and trust this Love. And we
do it not merely as disconnected individuals, but by dedicating ourselves to a community.
My
desire for all of you, and for us together, is that we will comprehend “with
all the saints” the non-existent boundaries of this Love: the infinite “breadth
and length and height and depth.” My desire is that our minds be blown, and
that our hearts be blown open, by the knowledge of this Love.
We
begin this work together with our regular Sunday worship, and with a picnic.
While a church picnic may be only a poor reflection of God’s infinite love,
it’s a good, humble starting place. It’s a place to share and to experience
enoughness, or even abundance. I mean, honestly, how many church potlucks have
you attended where there wasn’t enough food? It can happen, but I think it’s
pretty rare. So let’s start with a picnic. Let’s start by feeding each other.
From
there, we can move on to carrying each other. I can already tell that there’s a
lot of that going on. Some have more, and some need more, and so we share what
we can.
But,
you know, I haven’t said a word yet about the other story we just heard. We
heard John’s version of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, yes—incidentally, one
of the tiny handful of stories of Jesus that appears in all four gospels. But
then we heard another story, that of Jesus walking on the water. In John’s
gospel it’s combined with the storm. But here, Jesus doesn’t calm the storm as
such. He just comes to be with his friends, and suddenly, they’re at their
destination.
I
think this is important, and you might not catch it if you’re not paying close
attention: “Immediately the boat reached the land toward which they were going.”
John is referring back to one of the psalms, which his community would have
known and cherished. We hear in Psalm 107: “Then they cried to the LORD in
their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. He stilled the storm
to a whisper and quieted the waves of the sea. Then were they glad because of
the calm, and he brought them to the harbor they were bound for.”
What
harbor are you bound for? This harbor may be any number of things, but you can
identify it by naming your deepest longing. Maybe you long for rest and
refreshment. Maybe you long for justice and peace in our nation and in the
world, for the hungry to have food, for the lonely to have companionship, for lost
children to be reunited with their parents. Maybe you yourself are facing injustice,
or violence, or famine, or loneliness. Your harbor may be clear and immediate
relief from these ungodly forces. Alternately, your harbor may appear at the
end of a long, satisfying career, or at the arrival of happier times, or in
renewed relationships with those from whom you have been estranged. At this
point in your life, your harbor may even be death herself, and the joyful rest
on the other side of her.
Whatever
your harbor is, know that Jesus is guiding you there, but that you’re not the
only one in the boat. You’re in the boat with all of us who belong to Jesus. Or
perhaps you are in a neighboring boat on the same waters, even if you haven’t
yet joined Jesus’ crew through baptism.
Plenty
of food, and safe harbor. These are the things I want for you, and for us at
Good Shepherd: to be rooted and grounded in love; to be full and satisfied,
replenished for the work ahead of us, and with leftovers to share; to
comprehend with all the saints the fullness of God’s love; to know Christ and
to make Christ’s love known to others; and through the storm, to reach the land
to which we are going.
Friends,
we’ve got this -- with God's help. And I feel honored to have been invited in. It won’t always be
easy or certain. I’m sure I’ll let you down more than once, and I’ll pray that our
relationships can grow deeper even in—or especially in—the fertile soil of conflict.
Be patient with your new rector. I’ll certainly do my best to be patient with
you.
I’d
like to close with a prayer from Thomas Merton. I prayed it most recently at
the occasion of the graduation of several university students, but I think it
also fits our situation. I hope it resonates with you, too.
"My
Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I
cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the
fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am
actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact
please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I
will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you
will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore
will I trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of
death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to
face my perils alone.”
Amen.
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