We’re launching the U2 book tonight at Louisville’s great indy bookstore, Carmichael’s, and I’m preaching Sunday morning at the 11 o’clock service at St. Andrews Episcopal, Louisville. A preview:Two weeks ago, I was nearing the top of a mesa in New Mexico, about 8000 feet up, and I was beginning to have some misgivings. I had been hiking for over an hour, climbing up from the desert floor 1500 feet below, and now, as I stopped, my heart pounding, and panted for breath, the altitude, my bad knee, and my two score and seven years were making themselves felt in a big way.
Then the U2 song on my iPod changed, and I heard these words:
And if your glass heart should crack
And for a second you turn back
Oh no, be strong
Walk on.
I am a big fan of what Anne Lamott has called God as Sam-I-Am, the Spirit popping up in billboards and skywriting and into my ears through my iPod, so I just smiled, and breathed a thank you prayer, and I walked on.
U2 has been coming to my spiritual rescue for a long time now, and so I’ve come to expect this help from these unlikely spiritual guides, although lead singer Bono would be the first to play down that aspect of what they’re doing in their work. When Bono spoke—preached, I think would be a better description—at the President’s Prayer Breakfast in February of 2006, in front of President George W. Bush and Jordan’s King Abdullah II, as well as senators, members of Congress, and 3000 other political movers and shakers gathered at the Washington Hilton, he acknowledged the possible cognitive dissonance involved in the world’s biggest rock star standing at the podium: “If you’re wondering what I’m doing here, at a prayer breakfast, well, so am I. I’m certainly not here as a man of the cloth, unless that cloth is leather.”
But Bono went on to show that he did know why he was there, just as he knows why he and the band have been involved with efforts around the world to feed the hungry, cure the sick, and help people rise out of back-breaking poverty, and they are reasons that speak to our gospel text today. Bono told the folks assembled at the Hilton that he was there because
Whatever thoughts you have about God, who He is or if He exists, most will agree that if there is a God, He has a special place for the poor. In fact, the poor are where God lives.
Check Judaism. Check Islam. Check pretty much anyone.
I mean, God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill… I hope so. He may well be with us as in all manner of controversial stuff… maybe, maybe not… But the one thing we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor.
And as Bono went on to talk with this room full of good-hearted and politically powerful people, none of whom, so far as I know, would comfortably fit into the category of “vulnerable and poor,” he was lovingly taking them—and us—to task for what we know we are supposed to do, and yet sometimes forget: that we are called to take care of each other, body and soul, just as Jesus did.
You remember, perhaps, the What Would Jesus Do? Bracelets, a Christian fashion craze of a few years back? Even then, I was telling people that a more important question was “What did Jesus do?” We understand that Jesus was—is—the model for our participation in God’s rescue effort; in Jesus, the abstract questions of what God is and what God wants were incarnated in a human story for us to observe. Origen called Jesus the “Auto Basilea,” that is, God’s Kingdom in Person—and in the teachings and works of Jesus, we see what we are supposed to be doing.
And in this sixth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, what we find Jesus doing is this: teaching people about the Kingdom of God, feeding those who are hungry, and healing those who are sick. The piece missing from our lectionary reading this morning is the feeding of the five thousand, the first of the feeding miracles in the Gospel of Mark; instead, we get the second feeding miracle in the lectionary in September, but since I won’t be with you then, I hope you won’t mind if I fold it back in, since it’s of a piece with the other things going on in this passage.
The feeding of the five thousand is one of the few stories about Jesus that we find in all four of the canonical gospels; clearly in these four very different communities of Jesus-followers, they all agreed that these memories of Jesus feeding the hungry were at the core of who Jesus was. In the Gospel of Mark, this act of power is a sign of who Jesus really is, and in our Eucharistic understanding of Jesus, who is made known to us in the breaking of the bread, we continue to see why this miracle matters.
But it’s with the miracle itself that lots of contemporary Christians wrestle. Perhaps you have some image of Jesus waving a wand, conjuring bread and fish like something out of Harry Potter. I myself have decided to suspend judgment on the signs and wonders; I’m a rational seminary-educated person, but I also think if God is God, then I can’t put rules on what God or Jesus can do.
However, if multiplying bread and fish form a barrier to your appreciation of this story—or to your appropriation of the lesson behind it—then it’s meet that I should offer a few thoughts. First, when the disciples tell Jesus to send the hungry crowds away to buy food, Jesus responds in a jarring—and telling—way: “You give them something to eat.” That is, Jesus commissions his followers; he finds out what they have available—five loaves and two fish; then out of those resources, Jesus sends them into the crowds, and somehow, out of seeming scarcity, God creates abundance.
Barbara Brown Taylor tells a story about this multiplying food that I think Bono would appreciate. Imagine, she says, that the crowd observes the disciples gathering what they have, their meager dinners, and offering them to the crowd. Now, if you were going to be away from home all day in the ancient world, she wonders, wouldn’t you sock away a little something? Some figs, a loaf of bread, some fish wrapped in a leaf?
So imagine that the people in the crowd see the disciples offering what they have—and moved by that gesture, and by the teachings of Jesus, as the basket comes around, they take a little something out to polite—but put in a little something else that they had squirreled away. As the baskets circulate, Barbara says, imagine all of these people discovering that they are called to be responsible for more than just themselves; imagine God moving so that each of these people—who individually had little—ended up with enough, and everyone was fed.
It’s a miracle you don’t have to have a wand for, a miracle that you and I can reproduce.
“You give them something to eat,” Jesus says, and I find it disturbingly hard to find any wiggle room whatsoever, which is probably as it should be. In our gospel reading from Mark two weeks ago, Jesus sent the disciples out to do the work that he’s been doing, the teaching, the feeding, the healing, the casting out of demons. He deputizes his followers, we might say, as Little Jesuses, and I think that’s also the message we take away from the readings today. If Jesus represents, as Rowan Williams says, “a human life so shot through with the purposes of God, so transparent to the action of God, that people speak of it as God’s life ‘translated’ into another medium”—then what Jesus does here meshes with what he says here to call us into action.
This past week, people at our Episcopal General Convention in Anaheim were exploring the concept of “Ubuntu,” a South African word that Desmond Tutu has often explained in this way: “a person is a person through other persons. It is not, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ It is rather, ‘I am human because I belong. I participate. I share.’”
Archbishop Tutu has also been opening for U2 this summer on their new tour, delivering a taped message about the One Movement to end world poverty—and he’s telling each stadium full of people exactly this: that our salvation is with our brothers and sisters; that only in community can we too be formed into the people God has called us to be; and that none of this happens without action on our part.
The way ahead is sometimes difficult. We can get short of breath and worried about the future and a little too focused on ourselves.
But Jesus calls us to follow him, sends us out to do his work, tells us: Walk on.
And with God’s help, we hear and obey.
AMEN.
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