SERMONS

By The Rev. Alston Johnson

With a show of hands - Who has bought a lottery ticket in the past month?

Have you wondered, "What would I do if I won the lottery?" How a well timed lottery ticket might make "all your troubles seem so far away."

There is something in most of us that likes to believe that a sudden windfall, cashing in on the lottery, having "more" in terms of the currency of this world, would alleviate our cares, our worries, our struggles. It is a kind of hope against hope that if I just had this one thing, that would make all the difference.

It is true in the spiritual life as well; looking for the golden ticket. Thomas A’Kempis, a Fifteenth century German monk writes of a man a prayer in his famous book, "On The Imitation of Christ."

This man was known to waver between hope and anxiety, one day full of confidence, the next struck with doubt; he never seemed to be able to find an even keel amid all of the highs and lows, twists and turns, of his life.

So one day he was kneeling in the Church to pray before the altar, trying to bring something up, or bring something down, that would give him some relief, some direction, some sign as to how to move forward in his life.

He found himself repeating a phrase. "Oh, oh, if I but knew whether I should persevere to the end! If I only knew if I were going to make it! If I knew if things would turn out all right! . . . if I just had that "lottery ticket," that certainty, out of all my troubles . . . Then, then . . .all my troubles seem so far away."

"Instantly he heard within the divine answer - If you knew this, what would you do? Do now, what you would do then, and you will be quite secure."

C. S. Lewis later phrased this question: "If you knew that all was well, what would you, today, do? Or stop doing? When you have found the answer, do it, or stop doing it." 

In today’s Gospel we are still early in the ministry of Jesus among the people of Israel. From the outset of John’s Gospel, Jesus is a wonder worker. Jesus makes present a power of God that the people have perhaps imagined or intuited, but perhaps have never actually seen. There is the water into wine at Cana, the healing of the official’s son in Capernaum, the healing of the sick man at Bethzatha, and perhaps other signs of Jesus’ power have been shared.

There is a buzz in the countryside about what this man can do.

Throughout the beginning of John’s Gospel, Jesus is giving himself away to the people as the food they so desperately crave. In his teaching, preaching, in his miracles, Jesus is doing for the people what they have found that they cannot do for themselves. He is giving them a doorway through which to discover God anew. He is like no other they have beheld.

And so they follow him from towns and cities, like starving people looking for crumbs and grains of rice in a season of famine. They chase him back into the hills around the Sea of Galilee. They are forgetting themselves; they are hungry.

And so a benevolent God turns in their direction. Jesus Takes, Blesses, Breaks, and Gives this little boy’s loaves and fishes. It is not for the sake of magic, nor to mesmerize. There were already plenty of magicians in the land. Jesus shares with the hungry crowd that actions that will become his life: Taking, Blessing, Breaking, Giving.

The deep, deep significance of these loaves and fish is that God means to feed his children when they forget to feed themselves. The significance is that Jesus is showing all of them what will happen He becomes their food himself as the Bread of Heaven.

Jesus is opening the Kingdom Way to his followers; giving a sliver of a glimpse of the power of God that is His home.

We are all apt to be Philip. "There is not enough . . . we are going to run out . . . we are going to perish . . . we are sinking," as though the construction of this universe depends upon our own strength and know-how. Or that we will need a lottery ticket worth six month’s wages to solve this problem.

Like Philip, each of us, perhaps looks at our problems and our resources, and says, "It is too little . . . the problem is too great, and what I am, and what I have, is too little."

So many moments when we feel we are not enough; what we have is too little. That we have not been the person of character that we thought ourselves to be.

That we have not been the wife, husband, father, mother, that we thought ourselves to be. That we have perhaps missed our chance at love, true love. That we have missed our vocation, our calling. That we have missed our chance at joy. Missed our chance to live.

We forget that God means to have us. God comes for us, and seeks to win us, not merely with the threat of an eternal punishment, but also, and more sincerely, through giving us the gifts that we cannot give ourselves; food, life, love, and hope in the very moment we are unable to manufacture them ourselves. God means to care for us. God means to care for us.

There are fishes and loaves in each of our lives, a little bit of something, that when Jesus Takes, Blesses, Breaks, and Gives opens up doors on a new view of life. In the places we are hungry - that is where Jesus would invite us to sit on a hillside and witness what we thought was unimaginable. There is enough, and we are enough, for God to touch our lives.

"If you knew that all was well, what would you, today, do, or stop doing?" If you knew that God had fishes and loaves in store for you? What is preventing you from doing it or stopping doing it? What is preventing you from living?

That man in that Fifteenth Century German chapel found his fishes and loaves. "Immediately consoled and comforted, he resigned himself to the divine will and the anxious uncertainty ceased. His curiosity no longer sought to know what the future held for him, and he tried instead to find the perfect, the acceptable will of God in the beginning and end of every good work."

For the burdens of the human heart, the world will never be able to cough up enough lottery tickets. I read an article lately about eight lottery winners whose lives actually got worse rather than better after their lottery win. The ticket away from all of their anxieties and worries actually became their nemesis over time. "I wish it never happened. It was a total nightmare," said one.

For the burdens of the human heart, it is only a matter of fishes and loaves, the "little," that we bring and give to the one who is the source of all true abundance. God is trying to take our broken and "too little" lives, bless them, and given them back to us so that we might live.