Feeding Abundance

 A Reflection on The Feeding of the Four Thousand

A friend of mine is the chef at a non-profit organization here in Kansas City called Safe Home. Their mission is to serve as a safe place for adults and children who are victims of domestic violence. They help them to break the cycle through shelter, counseling, education, and prevention. My friend shared with me that it usually takes about 6 cycles of 90 days at Safe Home before someone is finally able to completely cut ties from their abusive environment. These are incredible odds to overcome. It is an uphill battle. For my friend, the uphill battle is providing 3 meals a day, every day, for 27 people with a grocery budget of just $366 per week. Every week he makes his grocery list and meal plan knowing that his budget will not be enough. Some weeks he needs 10 more boxes of cereal than he has. Some weeks he needs 10 more pounds of meat than he has. Every week he worries about how to stretch things in order to feed these families. But he puts one foot in front of the other, makes the best plan he can, and begins working with what he has. When I asked him how his job was going, he began to tear up as he shared that what he has experienced has been nothing short of a miracle. He shared that, every week, just as he is scrambling to figure out how to make these meals stretch, what he needs always seems to show up. One day he walked into his kitchen and 20 pounds of meat had been donated and left there for him. Another week he walked in to find 20 boxes of cereal. He loves his job because every stressful day is a miraculous intersection between overwhelming odds and miraculous abundance.

This is no coincidence. At Safe Home,  in the desert with Jesus and the hungry thousands, and in the desert places of our own lives, we are faced with a choice about how to respond to overwhelming odds. The disciples raised very realistic concerns—there isn’t enough. “We can’t waste the little we have and end up with not enough later. We just can’t take this on right now.” Jesus responds to them, not with numbers and a bottom line, but with a call to compassion. He reminds the disciples of the pain and struggle the thousands are facing. He reminds them of how the people’s physical exhaustion is fast becoming spiritual exhaustion. Jesus understands that these people need a miracle, but that miracle is much bigger than a the number of loaves matching the number of bodies. Jesus understands that his people need to know that He cares for them, that the disciples care for them, and, most importantly, that God cares for them. Compassion is different than sympathy. When Jesus has compassion for them, he is not simply feeling bad for them. He is feeling hunger, pain, sorry, and helplessness with them. He has walked with them, talked with them, laughed with them, heard the stories of their children’s tummy aches and hurting feet. He has overheard them whispering to each other that “maybe God doesn’t care for us after all.”

So when Jesus rallies the disciples to gather everything they have and start to distribute it, God miraculously intervenes with the real miracle—the miracle of God’s compassion poured out through the hands, feet, words, arms, and eyes of all those who shared what they had that day. The real miracle is that the famine of both body and soul was met with compassion, love, service and thanksgiving. The disciples said, “there’s not enough.” We worry that there is not enough. Jesus proclaims that there is always enough when we open ourselves and feel with those in need. Christ calls us to participate in the miracle of God’s abundance. He calls us to surrender our fear and our focus on what we don’t have. He calls us to stop dwelling on what we can’t do. He calls us to set out in faith, preparing a feast with what we do have, fully expecting that God will meet us there and provide for us—not only for our physical needs, but for our spiritual needs as well.

The Good News is that when we look in the face of overwhelming odds and say, “how can I help?”, “What can I share?”, “What can I give?” it’s contagious. Compassion in action is catching. It transforms hunger into nourishment, fear into hope, and scarcity into abundance. So as we leave this place, let us go out and participate in the miracles of abundance all around us. Let us not ask ourselves, “Is there enough?” but rather “What can I give?” Let us step out in compassion, taking the risk of feeling others’ pain with them, and walking the desert places beside them. For it is not just the physical care we all need, but the soul care. We all need to know that people care for us, that the church cares for us, and that God cares for us. Go from wherever you are and be the hands, feet, arms, and eyes of God’s care, fully expecting God’s abundance to help you build a safe home for his Kingdom of love there. Amen.