What comes after feeding 5000 people?

Pentecost X sermon, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY
Text: Ephesians 3:14-21, John 6:1-21

A long time ago, in a university not too far away, I failed calculus. Twice. As I stand here before you today, I can say that in the long run, it didn’t really matter, even though at the time it was a big deal to me. I was a student and I was focused on succeeding at what I thought I wanted to do, not on what I was capable of doing. I didn’t have the advantage of experience to know that there were second, third, and even fourth chances to find success where I had failed. And I can say that it ultimately didn't matter from the advantage of hindsight. But what about today? Am I going to say something today that will have a negative impact on my life later on? I hope not. Will a decision that I may make this week change my life in some unexpected way sometime in the future? I don’t know. If I dwell on this too long, I can start to have a deer-in-the-headlights reaction that can lead to a paralyzing fear of failure. What if I fail, again, and what would that mean to me?

The situation that the disciples are facing in this morning’s Gospel is not just about a fear of failure, but about a certainty of failure. They know that they only have enough bread and fish to feed themselves and Jesus. Failure to feed the crowd would mean a failure to show that Jesus was the Son of God because the crowd would expect him to get enough food for everyone to eat. A failure would lead everyone to believe that God, or Jesus was untrustworthy. The disciples are faced with a crisis of faith when they think that he will let them down. But when they listen to Jesus, and participate in a miraculous event, they see that they will not fail, and perhaps even succeed. The only thing worse than a fear of failure is a fear of success, because that means meeting expectations, responsibility, and going through the effort of chasing success over and over. But that’s not how success often is, because sometimes success comes when we are not trying, and at times when we’re focused on something else. Hopefully, we learn from our failures and successes, and sometimes we do learn, the hard way.

If you have succeeded the hard way more than once or failed more than once, it is easy to lose faith in yourself and assume that you’ll never learn. There is a temptation to step back and expect a miracle because that takes the pressure off of failing or succeeding. We can say that God did it, it was God’s Will, and we were just passive witnesses to it. A deeper truth is that we define failure by defining what success has to look like, and we can become very good at setting impossible goals. With impossible goals we will always fail, proving that we are not capable and we lack faith, so the pressure is lifted from having to make any effort at all. It’s a very safe thing to do that guarantees that we will never make a difference in the world. But then we are confronted with Jesus feeding so many with so little because he trusted in God to work through him, to use his ability to show people that God was at work in the world. And that’s not too far from our efforts that also show that God is at work in our world. We are capable of achieving some pretty amazing things, things that can look a lot like miracles. The line between what Jesus could do himself and what we accomplish together is pretty clear, but that doesn't mean that we accomplish any less. We are called to succeed at what we can do rather than failing at what we can’t do, which is to try to feed 5000 people with food for five. I can’t do calculus, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t deliver a message to you this morning.

When the disciples distributed the bread and fish that Jesus had blessed, the bottomless baskets that kept giving was truly a miracle to the people who were fed, and a sign that God was among them. I would hazard a guess that in our food collection service for Calvary’s food pantry, us showing up week after week with food also seems like a miracle to Calvary. But, there’s more to that miracle than food showing up. Calvary does not know the details of our Sunday-to-Sunday experience. Their experience is that food just appears from St. Paul’s every Thursday, and then they give it to the hungry. Our experience is people in our part of the city discerning a call from God and faithfully, maybe even miraculously, bringing us food every week. Likewise, the people who come to Calvary for food aren’t aware of all that goes into collecting it, so it appears to be given to them from constantly filling shelves. The mystery of Jesus’ miracle is making something substantial appear from very little, and the mystery of our food collection is bringing a lot of food to Calvary from smaller individual contributions. Even with this knowledge, we can still marvel at the miraculous acts of God in the world with us as Jesus’ disciples, knowing that we are involved in the feeding of the hungry in our part of the world. Miracles can be found by different people looking at an event from different perspectives, so we should not take our effort for granted, or feel that we failed by not reaching a self-imposed goal. There is a miracle happening here.

Failure and success both take effort, but not quite the same effort. From failure we can choose to set aside judgment, understand what happened, and discern another way to succeed. From success we can choose to humbly acknowledge what we have accomplished, and discern another way to succeed. What Jesus showed the disciples was to have faith in themselves to feed 5000 people, rather than faith in performing a miracle of feeding 5000 with five loaves and two fish. It is a difference between what we want to accomplish and what we are capable of accomplishing through faith. Paul sums this up nicely at the end of the epistle reading where he says “Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine…” When we get out of our own way and stop fretting over how we are going to avoid failure, we make it possible for God to work through us to succeed at just what is needed. We, as a parish, would fail if we set our goal on ending hunger throughout the city on our own, but we have risked failing to do anything at all and embraced the mystery of food appearing. We, as individuals, have succeeded and failed, and we carry some burden of those experiences with us. But, there are other challenges, other calls to us that we may fail or succeed at, and it makes me wonder what else we could do, what other miracle we could be a part of. Do we have the courage to try?