{"id":927,"date":"2014-08-03T11:00:09","date_gmt":"2014-08-03T15:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=927"},"modified":"2019-11-05T12:13:53","modified_gmt":"2019-11-05T17:13:53","slug":"all-fed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2014\/08\/03\/all-fed\/","title":{"rendered":"All Fed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matthew 14:13<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear the full service.<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear the sermon only.<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

The Feeding<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Our Holy Scripture starts out so far from our immediate experience that it is perhaps by apocalypse, by revelation alone that its cargo of good news may be delivered upon the shoreline of our souls.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

All are fed.\u00a0 All are satisfied.\u00a0 All are commanded.\u00a0 All are responsive.\u00a0 All are addressed.\u00a0 All are addressable.\u00a0 All consume under the voice like none other and all are consumed by the presence like none other.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

His voice.\u00a0 His presence.\u00a0 Like none other.\u00a0 Jesus withdraws by boat.\u00a0 Jesus sees, has compassion, and cures.\u00a0 Jesus commands.\u00a0 Jesus rejects the disciples pragmatic suggestion that the crowd find ways to \u2018shelter in place\u2019.\u00a0 Jesus gives something to eat.\u00a0 Two fish and five loaves (or vice versa?).\u00a0 2. 5. 12. 5k.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Here is lasting and ultimate nourishment for all.\u00a0 Here is an audible trustworthy voice for all.\u00a0 Here is a meal set for all.\u00a0 Here is a gathering around a common need and a common prayer for all.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

No division, here.\u00a0 No separation, here.\u00a0 No doctrinal, religious, political, historical, ethnic conflict, here.\u00a0 One Lord.\u00a0 One voice. One gathering.\u00a0 One meal.\u00a0 One mysterious communion.\u00a0 All fed.\u00a0 All.\u00a0 \u2018All ate and were filled\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 That all were fed is astounding.\u00a0 That all were satisfied is miraculous.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We are closer in experience to the rest of chapter 14.\u00a0 John the Baptist\u2019s head delivered on a platter, at the request of a young woman prompted by her mother, produced in the middle of a feast as a gift consequent on beautiful dance and an uttered oath\u2014the brutality of the act, the tragedy of unexpected consequences to heartfelt offerings, the loss of prophetic voice, the portent of violence yet to come, the relative aplomb with which the news of his death is conveyed\u2014these we recognize from our own world.\u00a0 Likewise, not before but after our reading, \u00a0the anxiety and terror of those who are stumblingly trying to follow Jesus,\u00a0 the sinking of Peter as we tries to walk on water\u2014the Rock sinking like a rock, the evaluation of his faith as little faith, the failed return in soaking wet to the bark, the nave, the boat of the community (our walk on the Lord\u2019s day week by week)\u2014these we recognize from our own church.\u00a0 We are closer in experience to what comes before and what comes after.<\/p>\n

Here, in the mist, here, in the gathered community, here, in earshot of his voice like none other, here, now, we wonder at all fed.\u00a0 Voice.\u00a0 Command.\u00a0 Compassion. Presence. Prayer. Nourishment. Astonishment.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In this way we are like Jacob.\u00a0 Jacob is more at home with his experience before and after the angel.\u00a0 He has swindled Esau. He has feared his recompense from Esau.\u00a0 He has schemed to be returned to good graces with the one whom he fears will come and kill him.\u00a0 He assembles a massive bribe of animal husbandry.\u00a0\u00a0 Then, after the angel, Jacob and Esau make a kind of peace, settled with gifts and pledges, even though Jacob is virtually certain that Esau has come to rid the earth of him.\u00a0 Fear and miscalculation, fore and aft, Jacob knows, as do we.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yet it is from the nighttime tussle that Jacob gets his name, and not from the long trail of endless drama and conflict over land, progeny, cattle, and money.\u00a0\u00a0 All night, that night, Jacob has wrestled with a man, a presence, a being, who gives the blessing of a name but also the curse of suffering.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Week by week we too struggle to remember our rightful mind, our right name, known in presence, a presence that seems like absence alongside our getting and spending, fore and aft.\u00a0\u00a0 One who strives, one who struggles, one who wrestles with\u2026.Voice, Presence, Compassion, Command, Prayer, Nourishment. Astonishment.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Matthew has again fixed up Mark\u2019s earlier version of this account, as he does also in the next chapter with the second feeding story.\u00a0 Matthew gives a terse summary, a curt, shortened account, in his use of Mark.\u00a0 Every rendering of the gospel, unto this very morning and this very hour, takes the measure of a particular moment, location, community, and ministry.\u00a0 Matthew quickens the dramatic pace, tightening the introduction, shortening the story, moving quickly to the point:\u00a0 all fed, all satisfied.\u00a0 The terror in the reign of Domitian, perhaps on Matthew\u2019s horizon, near the year 90, may have influenced our gospel writer.\u00a0\u00a0 In moving to the conclusion, Matthew leaves out the ordering of seating, the throng\u2019s Markan self-selected arrangement by 100\u2019s and 50\u2019s, and refers to the guests as crowds not people.\u00a0 So doing, he further highlights the ordering command of the host.\u00a0 Is his sense of the church\u2019s own development on Matthew\u2019s horizon?\u00a0 In one sense, it is not so much the details in the changes that Luke and Matthew, writing 15 years later, inflict on Mark, as it is the very act of changing itself that carries the meaning.\u00a0 There is, there needs ever to be, freedom in interpretation, a freedom given and guarded by the Holy Spirit, working in and through the Holy Scripture.\u00a0 Given and guarded both.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Our reading today is one of very few found in all four gospels.\u00a0 John too carries a roughly congruent account, with 5 and 2, loaves and fishes.\u00a0 Our gospel today formed a center, one hesitates to say THE center, but a center in the earliest church\u2019s pronouncement of the gospel.\u00a0 All fed.\u00a0 All.\u00a0 All means all.\u00a0 All satisfied.\u00a0 All.\u00a0 All means all.\u00a0 Week by week we too struggle to remember our rightful mind, our right name, known in presence, a presence that seems like absence alongside our getting and spending, fore and aft.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Two Applications<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

All fed.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We may venture to apply the gospel today in two ways, one related to our Marsh ministry and our national summer preacher series this summer, and one related to our global experience of violence this summer.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Emerging adults need, deserve, receive, consume, and depend on Presence that seems like Absence.\u00a0 They are leading courageously faithful lives over against a panoply of chilling, prevailing winds.\u00a0 As a community of faith, we live and work in community with emerging adults.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Some will more easily and more readily avail themselves by their own volition of the means of grace offered here.\u00a0 Familiar words, music, hymns, architecture, time, place mode aid them on arrival.\u00a0 For others, and they are a part of the all in all as well, for our doors to be fully open will require a loving creativity, an earnest invitational spirit for us all.<\/p>\n

With courage, our soon to arrive guests navigate the swells and tides of what Christian Smith describes in Lost in Transition:\u00a0 The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood, (amoral sexuality, steady inebriation, rampant drug use, limitless greed, self celebration and adulation, and limited empathy for the hurts of others.\u00a0)<\/p>\n

With courage they navigate the swells and tides of millennial culture, what Charles Blow calls the \u2018self(ie) generation\u2019 (NYT, 3\/8\/14):\u00a0 (unaffiliated with religion, distrustful of politics, heavily indebted, largely unmarried, distrustful of others, digitally native:\u00a0 \u201call in all we seem to be experiencing a wave of liberal minded detachees, a generation in which institutions are subordinate to the individual and social networks are digitally generated rather than interpersonally accrued.\u201d\u00a0)<\/p>\n

We have a meal to prepare.\u00a0 Learning that begets virtue and virtue that begets piety.\u00a0 Knowledge that begets action and action that begets being.\u00a0 \u00a0For some, the offering may be the intervening word between illness and health, danger and safety, failure and achievement, loss and life.\u00a0 Salvus, salvus, salvus.<\/p>\n

An Atlantic Monthly article this spring ended this way:<\/p>\n

American higher education is the envy of the world.<\/i><\/p>\n

American higher education has, however, one glaring deficiency: it does not teach its undergraduates how to live. It teaches them when the French Revolution was, what the carbon cycle is, and how to solve for X. It does not teach them what to do when they feel confused, alone, and scared. When they break down after a break-up. When they are so depressed they cannot get out of bed. When they drink themselves into unconsciousness every night. When they find themselves living on someone\u2019s couch. When they decide to go off their meds. When they flunk a class or even flunk out of school. When they get fired. When a sibling dies. When they don\u2019t make the team. When they get pregnant. When their divorced parents just won\u2019t stop fighting. When they are too sick to get to the hospital. When they lose their scholarship. When they\u2019ve been arrested for vandalism. When they hate themselves so much that they begin self-mutilating. When they\u2019re thinking about suicide. When they force themselves to throw up after every meal. When they turn to drugs for relief from their pain. When they\u2019ve been assaulted or raped. When their mind is racing and cannot stop. When they wonder about the meaning of it all. When they are terrified by the question \u201cWhat do I do next?<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/i>Remember, revere, the presence that seems like absence, in community with young adults this year.\u00a0 Remember a promise of all fed.<\/p>\n

We could use a measure of this gospel this summer as well.\u00a0 If your religious perspective and posture, if faith, if the community of faith mean anything, then surely they mean a voiced, steady rejection of the taking of innocent life, the slaughter of children, youth, women and men who become collateral damage in the course of violent conflict.\u00a0 At some visceral level we all can connect with what it would mean to have our own 7 year olds killed in the mayhem of warfare.\u00a0\u00a0 When we pause in the presence of the Presence, a presence that very much seems like absence, we are chastened, numbed, brought to our very knees..\u00a0\u00a0 One of the great and lasting shadows upon human history and experience is our common, shared ready willingness, time and again, to try to apply short term solutions to long term problems.\u00a0 Women, men, families, communities, colleges, businesses, governments, religions, and yes, nation states are all prone to think short term solutions will avail for long term problems.\u00a0 They will not.\u00a0 We are tempted to think that a hidden tunnel on one hand or a drone missile on the other that partly hobble an enemy will bring some solution, when the long term issues lie in the structure of relationship across and among divided peoples.\u00a0 Short term victories can be truly pyrrhic ones.\u00a0 A short term \u2018solution\u2019– that is no solution– to a long term problem –that has only become a greater one.<\/p>\n

Our gospel today promises nourishment for all. \u00a0All.\u00a0\u00a0 All fed.\u00a0 All satisfied.\u00a0 All.\u00a0 There are not expendable children, expendable only because they happen to be housed across some invisible line.\u00a0 It is the towering and powerful genius of today\u2019s ancient and central narrative in Matthew 14:31 that restores us to rightful mind, to a steady hope.\u00a0 All fed.\u00a0 Our gospel affirms gathering of all in the face of separation for some, a command to all in the face of desire to exclude some, a blessing of all in the face of arguments to limit such blessing to some, a nourishment of all in the face of a shared human proclivity to make that all \u2018all of our own not theirs\u2019.\u00a0 It is the towering and powerful voice of Jesus, and him crucified, whose own compassionate presence in absence feeds us still, feeds all still, feeds all to hasten the day that all, truly all, truly all, are fed.<\/p>\n

We sat in Lincolnville, Maine last Sunday, following worship, along a misty seacoast.\u00a0 We read the paper and were nourished in an old port side restaurant.\u00a0 Paper and food, word and table.\u00a0 Word and table, word and table, word and table.\u00a0 The news of the day, of these days, you know and well.\u00a0 You wonder sometimes, what is real and for real, what is the final realism.\u00a0\u00a0 A familiar voice, with a familiar tune, carrying a familiar poem came over the simple, inexpensive, medium of the radio (the medium of the poor, and our choice of media here at Marsh Chapel, in part for that reason.\u00a0 Our proud participation with and support for NPR for that reason.\u00a0 \u201cThe lamp of the poor\u201d, recently deceased Canadian novelist Alistair Macleod once recalled, is the translation for the Gaelic term meaning \u201cmoon\u201d, \u2018lochran aigh namb boch\u2019.)<\/i>\u00a0 \u2028Imagine all the people\u2028Living life in peace\u2028\u2028<\/i><\/p>\n

Take heart.\u00a0 Lift your hearts.\u00a0 Hatred does not kill the possibility of peace.\u00a0 Terror does not eliminate the potential for change.\u00a0 The collapse of civility today does not do anything to the lived memory and experience of past civility, except make it more precious.\u00a0 The unspeakable tragedy of innocent death does not mark the end of the capacity for co-existence, for managed, enforced co-existence. \u00a0Imagine\u2014a common faith, common ground, a common hope.<\/p>\n

Do you believe this?\u00a0 Will you live in such belief?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cTaking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds.\u00a0 And all ate and were filled.\u201d\u00a0 Matthew 14:19-20.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0~The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill,<\/em><\/p>\n

Dean of Marsh Chapel<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matthew 14:13 Click here to hear the full service. Click here to hear the sermon only. The Feeding \u00a0 \u00a0 Our Holy Scripture starts out so far from our immediate experience that it is perhaps by apocalypse, by revelation alone that its cargo of good news may be delivered upon the shoreline of our souls. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/927"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2679"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=927"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/927\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2382,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/927\/revisions\/2382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}