Tenth Sunday After Pentecost (Mother Marisa)

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

At about 4:30 in the afternoon at my house, you can feel the tension growing. Snack time has passed, but my children don’t remember that. They think I’ve never fed them. 

Pepper paces the kitchen floor, then opens the refrigerator and looks my way. “Can I have a cheese stick? Can I have a chocolate croissant? Can I have a popsicle?” We both know the answer to every question; but she asks anyway because Pepper is an intensely hopeful person and thinks maybe Mom will change her mind this time. Simeon just bites my leg.

Day after day after day, the same routine. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner punctuated by an obscene amount of clementines (which may just be my house). Sometimes it feels like all we humans do is eat or think about eating or worry about thinking about eating — which is ironic given the number of grocery stores and restaurants in this town. 

Not that long ago, our ancestors would have marveled at the abundance we enjoy. Fortified breakfast cereal. Vitamin D milk. Fifty-seven brands of tomato sauce. They were one bad storm or one late frost away from disaster. A failed crop meant less food in the winter meant less calories for the sick baby meant poor bone development and so on and so forth. For us, though, storms don’t register unless they knock out the power, and frosts melt away before we look up from our screens in the morning. Very few of us worry about going hungry because most of us haven’t ever felt what that really means. 

Humans are curious creatures. The everyday details of our lives, the stuff we take for granted — the eating, the drinking, the getting dressed, the going to sleep — these things teach us something true about the total reality of our existence. 

We will always need. We will always need more. And we will always be confronted and curtailed and sometimes controlled by that dependence, no matter what we do or who we are. Try as we might, we cannot escape the fact of our own insufficiency. Nor should we — because that is precisely where God meets us.

When Jesus sat down on a mountainside to the east of the Sea of Galilee, he knew exactly what the vast crowds were seeking as they followed him. They were hungry for salvation — salvation from sickness and sorrow. Almost everyone there that day had heard that if you just touched the fringe of Jesus’ robe, the shake in your fingers or the pain in your side would disappear. Instantaneously. Who wouldn’t walk a hundred miles to find that relief? 

But now the sun was about to set and the nearest town was miles away and dinner was on everyone’s mind. 

“Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” Jesus asked, to the consternation of his disciples. No one had that kind of money. Not even half-a-year’s wages could feed the crowd gathered there that day. Besides, the question was moot because there was simply no food to be found — except for a kid’s lunch. “And what good is five barley loaves and two fish for so many people?” they asked. A question to which Jesus did not respond, though we know his answer in effect: It is enough.

And it was. It was more than enough. That evening more than 5,000 people ate their fill with plenty to spare. All because they had followed the path set down by their own neediness and formed by their own suffering and so had found God himself.

Surely, as Jesus walked among the men and women and children seated on the grass, the faithful among them would have been thinking, “The eyes of all wait upon you, O LORD, and you give them their food in due season.” 

That is not a truth we are accustomed to contemplating or even accepting nowadays. And why would we? We don’t wait for anything. Our food appears as if by magic on grocery store shelves. Every imaginable consumer good can be delivered to our doorstep in less than two days for the low price of $14.99/month. Modernity, in the West and especially in America, has done its best to eradicate human need and eliminate the minor and major suffering that goes along with it — which is a project that certainly has its place, but one that also has its dangers. 

People don’t look at each other any more when they meet in the grocery store or on the street. They don’t talk. They tweet. Somewhere in the mad rush to meet every physical need and satisfy every physical desire, we lost the other, more subtle essentials. It’s almost as though in this age of super-human intelligence and super-human abundance we’ve forgotten what it really means to be human. 

It’s a good thing we get hungry. 

It is a very good thing that we get hungry, that we get tired, that we feel the pain of not having what we need or what we want because those are signposts anchored in the present, pointing us toward the one who gives all, who makes all, who made us. 

We are his. We are not our own. And our limitations — our creatureliness — remind us of that in no uncertain terms. 

Every time we go to bed. Every time we get up. Every time we skip breakfast. Every time we eat lunch, God is there. The giver of every good gift is there because he designed us to find Him in all that we do and in all that we are. God designed us to live with Him and in Him, to taste of his love at dinner, to rest in his companionship at night, to wait on his arrival every time we wait in line. 

The great philosophers and sages, theologians and saints of history intuited this (some knew it): we are most ourselves not when we stay at home, but when we go out. When we look beyond ourselves for help of any kind, we meet the God who is near to those who call upon him. We meet him in the dimpled apple that is both tart and sweet. We meet him in the subtle word of a friend that soothes our fears. We meet him in that stillness that is peace beyond understanding. In the reality of our neediness, we meet God, a God who will heal us. A God who will feed us. 

We are not so far removed from that mountainside where the Bread of Heaven gave himself for the life of the world. God can do miracles. He still does. AMEN.

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