Does anybody here know about or remember a TV show from the 1960s called “The Addams Family?” It was a sitcom about a suburban family that lived a normal suburban lifestyle except that they lived in a creepy mansion that looked like a haunted house and each member of the family was supposed to be one of the kinds of monsters that were common in monster movies of that era. It was really a spoof on that genre of movies. Actually I was never a big fan of this program but when I was preparing this sermon I remembered one of the characters whose name was “Thing.” I found this picture on Google that shows what Thing looked like. Thing was just a hand in a box. In different episodes of the show Thing could be seen doing things like adjusting the radio or the TV set or tapping people on the shoulder, but obviously there was this limitation that because it was just a hand in a box the things that it could do were limited to whatever it could reach. And so except for its gag effect, it was essentially useless.
This week I want to focus on a passage in Luke that shows the miracle of Jesus feeding the five thousand. I am going to relate the passage to the Lord’s Supper we just celebrated. You might wonder what feeding the five thousand has to do with communion. You may wonder even more what it has to do with Thing. But before I’m done here today I think you will see its relevance.
10 When the apostles returned, they reported to Jesus what they had done. Then he took them with him and they withdrew by themselves to a town called Bethsaida, 11 but the crowds learned about it and followed him. He welcomed them and spoke to them about the kingdom of God, and healed those who needed healing.
12 Late in the afternoon the Twelve came to him and said, “Send the crowd away so they can go to the surrounding villages and countryside and find food and lodging, because we are in a remote place here.”
13 He replied, “You give them something to eat.”
They answered, “We have only five loaves of bread and two fish—unless we go and buy food for all this crowd.” 14 (About five thousand men were there.)
But he said to his disciples, “Have them sit down in groups of about fifty each.” 15 The disciples did so, and everyone sat down. 16 Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke them. Then he gave them to the disciples to distribute to the people. 17 They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. (Luke 9:10-17 NIV)
The passage we are looking at this morning begins with the apostles returning and reporting what they had done. Earlier in the chapter we are told Jesus had given the Twelve “power and authority to drive out all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal the sick.” (Luke 9:1-2 NIV) When they came back he took them away to a remote place to rest, but the crowds followed them and so instead of being able to have their little retreat Jesus spent his time ministering to the people who came to him: teaching and healing.
At the end of the day the apostles urged Jesus to send the people away so that they could get something to eat, and Jesus challenged them by telling them “You give them something to eat.” Those of you who were here last week hopefully remember me talking about what faith is and how difficult faith can be, because it requires that we trust in something that our rational minds tell us is impossible. I think all of us have trouble with faith, but we shouldn’t be discouraged about it because the gospels tell us that those people who lived with Jesus and watched his miracles also had trouble believing, just like we see in this story. Luke records the incident in a more elegant way but you can just imagine the apostles’ reaction. “What? Are you kidding? We don’t have enough food to feed five thousand people! And we don’t have enough money to buy that much food either!” You can imagine that the apostles must have though Jesus was crazy.
But Jesus tells them to take what they have, have faith, and perform a miracle. I want us to notice here that Jesus took the bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to his disciples to give to the people. There is a lot more to this story than Jesus performing a miracle. Jesus is revealing the pattern for his and our ministry in the world.
Let’s look a little bit further ahead in Luke and look at where he writes about the Last Supper. There he writes about Jesus, “And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.” (Luke 22:19 NIV) Here we see Jesus taking the bread, blessing it, breaking it, and giving it. And this becomes the model for the Lord’s Supper that has been celebrated at Jesus commandment throughout the history of the Church and which we just celebrated. I’m going to take up a theme introduced by Henri Nouwen in his book Life of the Beloved and consider what it means to be taken, blessed, broken, and given.
At the Last Supper Jesus says “This is my body….” What can this mean? We can think about this in a number of ways but we can consider in at least one way by looking at Jesus’ life and ministry in the gospel story. Jesus himself was taken by God, blessed, broken, and given. So Jesus is comparing himself to the bread that gives life to the people.
Let’s look a little closer at this. To take something is to choose something. Something that is taken is something that is chosen. In the gospel story we know that Jesus is called the Christ or the Messiah. That means the “Chosen One.” There are literally dozens of places in the Old Testament where God promises through his prophets to send a Chosen One to restore God’s Kingdom of righteousness and justice on the earth. Here is one where we see a direct reference in the New Testament. Earlier in Luke’s gospel, where he records the beginning of Jesus ministry, he tells this story:
16 [Jesus] went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, 19to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
20 Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. 21 He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:16-21 NIV)
In this scripture at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry he identifies himself as the promised Messiah – the anointed or Chosen One predicted in scripture – by proclaiming that he is the one promised by the prophet Isaiah. He also reveals here the nature of his mission, beginning with “to proclaim the good news to the poor…” Jesus was chosen.
When Jesus was baptized by John in the Jordan we see his anointing by the Holy Spirit and the blessing of the Father. Luke writes, “21 When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened 22 and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: ‘You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.’” (Luke 3:21-22 NIV) Jesus was blessed.
In the gospel according to Matthew we read about the brokenness Jesus had to experience in order to bring us healing, “Why have you forsaken me?” Jesus cries out from the cross, quoting Psalm 22, and signifying the most desolate state that any human can experience: being abandoned by God. This broken relationship with God is the death that is the consequence of sin. But Jesus didn’t sin. Instead, he experienced this brokenness for us, so that we do not have to pay the price of our own rebellion. Jesus was broken.
Finally we see the consequence of the gospel story in the end of Matthew where Jesus tells his disciples “19 ‘go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.’” (Mt. 28:19-20 NIV) Jesus gives himself to the world through those of us who are in him to restore the creation and establish the Kingdom of God’s eternal peace. Jesus was given to the world.
Taken – blessed – broken – given.
When we practice the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper like we did today we are reenacting the life of Jesus so that we can remember who we are in Christ. We do it because Christ commanded it. He tells his disciples “do this in remembrance of me.” (Lk. 22:19 NIV) One of the things we believe as Presbyterians about the Lord’s Supper is that it is an actual encounter with Christ. We meet Christ in and are blessed by partaking of the sacrament. There isn’t anything magical about the ritual or the words or the elements – the bread and the wine. Instead it is a remembrance of a condition that already exists – that we are in fact blessed by Jesus and he is with us right now.
When we partake of the sacrament we acknowledge the reality that because of our identification with Jesus’ death on the cross we are united with him in his glorified life. Being united with Christ means being united with his earthly life, death, resurrection, and ongoing mission. That is why Jesus tells his disciples “go and make disciples of all nations.” And that means that we too are chosen, blessed, broken, and given.
When we think about the idea of being chosen we tend to look at things the way the world looks at things. Certainly when we think about Jesus as the Chosen One we are thinking in exclusive terms. Jesus was the Chosen One; by his very nature no one else could do what he did to bring about the restoration of the broken relationship. We all too are chosen by the Father. But we must not think about our chosen-ness in the same way we think of Jesus being chosen as savior, or even the way we choose as human beings.
In economics there is a concept called “opportunity costs.” Opportunity costs essentially represent all of the things we must give up in order to make a choice. Today when you chose to come to church, at the same time you gave up the opportunity to do a whole universe of other things. Because you are here, you cannot be physically anywhere else right now. You can’t be at the beach, or shopping, or watching TV. By choosing to come to church you automatically rejected literally thousands of other things.
We think that is what it is like to be chosen, too. If we choose one person to be president, we reject everyone else. If one team is chosen by their performance to be the champions, every other team is rejected. So we think that if anyone else is chosen for anything and we are not, we are rejected. This feeling leads to isolation and competition, envy and loneliness.
But God does not choose the way we do. When God chooses to love you with the love of a parent for an only child, which he does do, he does not reject anyone else. Because God is so great, he can love each of us with that great exclusive love. And when we realize how blessed we are in his love, we too can begin to see the chosen-ness in our brothers and sisters. As we are more and more conformed to the likeness of Christ, we begin to see others as he sees us, and we lose our sense of isolation and loneliness. Instead of seeing others with envy, as people we have to compete with for attention and blessing, we begin to see them as like us, chosen and loved by the Father. And so we are drawn to them in love rather than separated from them by rivalry.
Each of us is also broken. The life of the Christian is the process of moving away from the life of sin and temptation more and more toward identification in Christ. We have already discussed how being a member of the church means being a member of the body of Christ. Being a member of the church is not like being a member of a club or a political party, it is like being a member of a body. It is like the relationship of the hand and the body. The hand cannot live by itself. Even if it could, it would have no purpose. And the body, although it can live without the hand, is crippled without it. The hand needs the body, and the body needs the hand. We need the church, and the church needs us. This is what it looks like to be separated from the body.
Sometimes the process of realizing we are broken looks really dramatic. Sometimes it’s like being diagnosed with an incurable disease, or getting into serious legal or financial trouble, or losing a job, or having one of these things happen to someone we love. We suddenly find ourselves in very scary place where we feel our only hope is in divine intervention. So we turn to God. At the end of our own resources, we are left with nothing to rely on but God’s mercy, so we choose Him where before we might not have. It’s not without reason that there is the saying there are no atheists in foxholes.
But sometimes the process of realizing we are broken doesn’t look so dramatic. Sometimes it’s just the slow but steady progress toward living a more Spirit-filled life. Sometimes it doesn’t seem extreme at all. But in either case it actually is a profound experience because we are giving up our own lives of apart-ness in order to be grafted into the life of Christ. Paul writes of it in his letter to the Galatians: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” (Gal. 2:20 NIV) Becoming a member of the body I think might be something like a surgery that re-attaches a severed limb. Sometimes it’s done with anesthesia and sometimes not but the pain is always there. Life without Christ is loneliness. Live in Christ is wholeness. Because we all have to make that painful journey from isolation to communion, we all share the experience of broken-ness that Jesus lived on the cross.
Rather than being a curse, in Jesus this broken-ness becomes a blessing. Without Jesus’ suffering we could not be free. And, like Jesus, we are called to share our broken-ness with our fellows in order to bring about healing. Notice in the miracle Jesus performed of feeding the five thousand he called his disciples to be his coworkers. Whatever miracle happened when Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes occurred by some supernatural power that only Jesus possessed. But Jesus was gracious enough to allow his followers to participate in the miracle by distributing the food to the people. So in this case it wasn’t just the food that was given, it was the disciples. Jesus chose his disciples, blessed them, broke them of their pride and wrong ideas, and gave them to the people.
And we too, if we are his disciples, are also chosen, blessed, broken, and given. Every time we participate in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, we remember that each one of us is chosen by God as his beloved daughter or son. We remember that we are loved in a way that a parent loves an only child. We remember that we are blessed or found approved by God through Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. We remember that we are broken because we have to share in Jesus’ suffering on the cross. We have to give up our natural identity in order to be grafted into the body. We find the joy of life in communion with the whole church, the whole Body of Christ.
But let us always remember that the body doesn’t exist just to exist. We are all called to use our gifts to build up the Body of Christ; to make it whole and healthy. But that whole and healthy body exists to do the work of Christ in the world. The church is Christ in the world. So let us let this celebration of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper serve to remind us that we, like the bread, like the disciples in the story, like Jesus, are chosen, blessed, and broken to be given to the world. And let us allow ourselves to be given in the same way Jesus was given: to live lives that reflect his righteousness and justice and mercy and compassion and concern for our brothers and sisters. To live lives that reflect the self-sacrificing love of Jesus in our homes, at work, at school, and in our communities; to every one we meet. Let us do this this week, and every week.
Let us pray. Dear Heavenly Father, you are a great God. Your mercy and love are beyond our comprehension. We confess that we have failed to reflect your nature in the things that we do. We have failed to recognize you in our brothers and sisters, and we have relied on human means and resources rather than casting all of our cares upon you. We thank you that in your great mercy you have sent your son Jesus to make us friends with you again, so that when you see us you do not see our failures but his righteousness. We thank you for the sacrifice you made to restore us to your friendship. We thank you for the freedom to come together to worship you without fear. We thank you for the beauty of the earth that we so often take for granted. We thank you that you allow us to be members of your family. We pray that you will send your Spirit to fill us with your peace. We pray for those of us gathered here today who may be suffering from fear and anxiety for ourselves or our loved ones, who may be suffering from financial stress, or who may be suffering from some form of sickness or dis-ease. We pray that you will assure us in the knowledge that we are not alone, that you meet us at the point of our greatest weakness and need. We pray that you will give us eyes to see the world with the same compassion and love you see it with. We pray that we may be instruments of your peace in the world. We pray that you will send your angels to cover the earth with your peace. We pray that Jesus will come quickly. We pray that we will remember by our participation in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper that we, like the bread, like Jesus, are chosen, blessed, broken, and given to the world. And we pray all of these things in the name of your son Jesus. Amen.
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