Strangely Familiar: Scarcity and Abundance (2 Kings 4:42-44)
Ordinary Time
A man came from Baal-shalishah, bringing food from the first fruits to the man of God: twenty loaves
of barley and fresh ears of grain in his sack. Elisha said, “Give it to the
people and let them eat.” 43 But his servant said,
“How can I set this before a hundred people?” So he repeated, “Give it to the
people and let them eat, for thus says the Lord, ‘They shall eat and have
some left.’” 44 He set it before them, they ate, and
had some left, according to the word of the Lord. (NRSV)
Toward the beginning of lockdown last
year, it seemed that everyone and their mother was making bread. Hands up, how many of you had sourdough
starter? I didn’t get on that train but
oh, how many people I knew did. I
remember my poor friend Sid grieving over having accidentally killed his
sourdough starter and my friend John delighting in everyone finally joining him
in the bread-making hobby. There was
bread everywhere and everyone had an opinion about how to make it, how to
shepherd the starter, how to preserve the loaves, whom to give it to when there
was simply too much bread in your own house to keep anymore.
Too much
bread; what an interesting problem to have.
Today’s story
is not about too much but about just enough—and the fear of too little. If the rhythm of today’s very-short text
feels oddly familiar, good; the gospel text for today in the lectionary is John
6:1–21, a story of just enough that appears in all four gospels; verses 1–14 go
like this:
After this Jesus went to the other
side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias. 2 A
large crowd kept following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing
for the sick. 3 Jesus went up the mountain and sat
down there with his disciples. 4 Now the Passover,
the festival of the Jews, was near. 5 When he
looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where
are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” 6 He
said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do. 7 Philip
answered him, “Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of
them to get a little.” 8 One of his disciples,
Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, 9 “There
is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among
so many people?” 10 Jesus said, “Make the people
sit down.” Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat
down, about five thousand in all. 11 Then Jesus
took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who
were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. 12 When
they were satisfied, he told his disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over,
so that nothing may be lost.” 13 So they gathered
them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who
had eaten, they filled twelve baskets. 14 When the
people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, “This is indeed the
prophet who is to come into the world.” (NRSV)
A boy is pulled from a crowd and has
five barley loaves and two fish; a man comes from Baal-shalishah with twenty
loaves of barley and fresh ears of grain.
Jesus asks the disciples to seat 5,000 people and they say there will
surely not be enough food; Elisha says give the bread to the 100 men and the
servant says this is too little.
Jesus knows His Hebrew Bible pretty
well; throwing back to this moment of the prophet Elisha is not an opportunity
He’d pass up. Elisha was the successor
to Elijah and prophesied under the reign of King Ahab—yep, the one who married
Jezebel. Because of the king’s
leadership that pulled people away from God to the worship of Baal, Elijah and
then Elisha spent a lot of their ministries reminding the people of the
covenant they held to be God’s people and for God to be their God.
Such reminding is something that has
to happen over and over—it’s a human thing to need repetition. Elisha’s story of barley and grain comes after
a series of miracles having to do with provision; Elisha is saying over and
over here in chapter four, “see the God Who provides and provides enough.” It’s not Baal.
There’s an old and somewhat terrible
saying that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach; this is true in
the sense that it’s hard to pay attention to anything when you’re hungry. All humans need to eat first—it’s at the base
of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, right next to water, sleep, and shelter.[1] So when Elisha takes the offering of grain
and barley and makes it enough; when Jesus takes the offering of loaves
and fish and makes it enough, it is a miracle that comes into the most
basic space of being a living creature. It
is a reminder by Elisha and, later, by Jesus that God understands and hears
what we need, what we need to keep going in the world—it’s not flashy,
but it matters.
“A man came from Baal-shalishah.” “There is a boy here who has five barley
loaves and two fish.” The promise of
which Elisha is reminding the people—of which Jesus is reminding the disciples,
in a slightly different way—is one of provision, but that provision doesn’t
come from God miracling elements out of nowhere. That string of wonders Elisha’s been performing
includes purifying a poisoned stew, making sure a widow has enough oil so she doesn’t
have to sell her children into slavery to cover costs, and raising a young man
from the dead. After that, sharing out
bread would seem to be too little of a miracle—we’ve all figured out how to
make ingredients stretch in creative ways.
But all these miracles work with something given: stew, flour, oil, barley loaves. The miracle is making twenty loaves enough
for 100 people, sure, but it’s also this man from Baal-shalishah being willing
to listen to Elisha’s command to give it to the people. It’s the boy being willing to give his bread
and fish to the Guy speaking to thousands on a hillside.
Professor Elna Solvang points out
that “text does not provide [the man with the loaves’] name, only mentioning
the village he comes from. There is no indication of any obligation on the part
of this man to provide food to Elisha nor any mention that Elisha is in need of
food.”[2] Professor Dora Mbuwayesango continues the idea that, “The amount [the man] brings also seems to be a
departure from. what was originally instructed. It appears a bit extravagant if
he is representing just himself: twenty loaves of barley and fresh ears of
grain. It is not surprising that Elisha instructs that the food be given to the
people because we have already seen him concerned about the well-being of others…[yet]
the amount of the offering is disproportionate to the number of people at the
place—a context of scarcity.”[3]
Scarcity is something that we’ve
heard a lot about in the past year; however much sourdough we may have had,
there were plenty of moments where we didn’t feel we had enough hand sanitizer,
toilet paper, hospital beds, ventilator systems, vaccines, information. In the past year we have looked at the world
and demanded more in our fear that there would not be enough, and I
would love to think that’s because the pandemic caught us all off guard, that
this is not who we have been for a very long time.
This past week, two billionaires shot
themselves into space as test runs for so-called “space tourism” where a trip
to the ionosphere will cost a quarter of a million dollars.[4] I had to rewrite this part of the sermon
three times to tone down how angry I am about this so that it was still a
sermon and not a rant about the greed and selfishness of an industry that doesn’t
even pretend to be available to the vast majority of people doing the work to
pay for those who can participate, not to mention the waste of resources in
joyriding to space rather than using that science to address the problems of
climate change, global hunger, a still ongoing pandemic, and startlingly
disparate income inequality here on Earth.
“A man came from Baal-shalishah,
bringing food from the first fruits to the man of God: twenty loaves of barley
and fresh ears of grain in his sack.” We
who so easily fear that we will not have enough are given what we need; Elisha
reminded his people, Jesus reminded His people, the Spirit reminds us that God
provides. We can feed 100, or 5,000,
because here’s the thing about the man from Baal-shalishah—he brought the first
fruits.
This distinction matters. The first fruits are a holy offering, the
origin not only of the concept of the tithe that we usually talk about in terms
of finances but of the concept of what we owe to God. It is the first fruits that are behind the
story of Cain and Abel and whether they were offering things to God from the
top, from the best of what they had, or whether it was an afterthought. It is the first fruits that are behind many
of the sacrifices listed in the Hebrew Bible.
It is the first fruits that are behind the community in Acts that pooled
together its resources to have enough for all; twenty loaves of barley; five
barley loaves and two fish. Some shared
sourdough starter. The gains of a multi-billion
dollar empire.
Professor Solvang writes, “In the
Israelite calendar, the first fruits marked the end of the harvest. The
offering of ‘first fruits’ acknowledged that the land and its produce belonged
first of all to God. That reality was to serve as a reminder of God’s providing
and as a curb against selfishness and greed.
“The ‘food from the first fruits’ is
a holy offering (Leviticus 23:20). According to the festival
instructions, it is to be delivered to the priest who is to offer it before the
LORD. In 2 Kings 4, however, it is brought to the prophet Elisha who instructs
that it be offered to the people. The people will dine on the LORD’s meal.”[5]
“How can I set this before a hundred
people?” asks the servant of Elijah, calculating what he had and coming up with
the certainty that it was not enough.
How can you not, if it is freely given and freely celebrated? We have all we need, we have all we
need, we have twenty barley loaves, we have fish, we just need to actually
allocate it, we humans who live on Earth together. I am aware that none here are billionaires
courting space travel, and I’m fairly certain that none worshipping online fall
into that category, either, although I do hope that the billionaires listen to
someone at some point who calls them to task for their heartless avarice and callous
indifference. But we who are in the
Church are called to steward our non-billions, our twenty loaves, our two fish,
faithfully. We are called to see what we
have—money, property, food, time, talents, faith, hope—and to give of the first
fruits, the first fruits for the community of which we are part. We are called to share our sourdough starter,
to put feet to the faith that God, our God—not Baal or Dagon or Ashtoreth or Amazon
or Apple or Microsoft or whatever other idol, but the God we claim every Sunday
and all the days in between, provides.
It is enough; it will always be enough to take what is given freely,
what is given faithfully, what is offered by a man from Baal-Shalishah, by a
boy in the crowd, and multiply it to feed a world starving for want of bread,
of fish, of love.
May we have the faith to give freely;
the humility to receive faithfully; and the courage to call a selfish world to
account as we live together, eating and even having some left. Amen.
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