More Than Enough - John 6:1-15

I believe it was a Thursday afternoon.....lunch time. Thursdays are my days off and I stay at home with the kids while Amy works. And wouldn’t you know that the weirdest things happen with the kids when I am at home with them, by myself. It was lunch time and there was only one more piece of pizza in the refrigerator. When I asked everyone what they wanted everyone said: Pizza! What to do? How am I going to multiply one piece of pizza to feed three hungry kids? I kinda wished then that I had the power of Jesus so that after all were fed and satisfied I would have enough pizza for me as well. Pizza is my favorite too!
It seems that in many parts of our life we do not have more than enough. When it gets towards the end of the month and Amy and I are looking at our checking account we don’t have more than enough. When I’m driving down the interstate going to a conference meeting I soon find out that I don’t have more than enough gas to get there and on the larger front we are beginning to see from the price of gas that our world does not have more than enough oil to satisfy our cars and vans and SUVs. When it is getting towards the end of the day and I still have a lot of things on my to do list, I find that there is not more than enough time to get those things done. In our world we know that there is a limit to everything that goes on in our life.
That is what the disciples faced when they were looking at feeding all those people. In today’s lesson, Jesus is on a mountainside with his disciples. The Jewish Passover Feast is near. He looks up and sees a great crowd coming up the mountain. A small army really. Five thousand men, and an untold number of women and children. That’s kind of scary. How are they going to take care of all those people?
We’ve got the Tennessee Wesleyan back to school concert coming up in a few weeks. We’re preparing for about 300 people. What do you think would happen if five thousand people showed up? We would be scurrying around, probably in a panic. That is what the disciples are feeling about all this. They are probably beginning to get into a panic. But, Jesus had it all under control. Jesus didn’t panic. He turns to his disciple Philip and asks, “Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?” The writer of John says that he asked this only to test Philip, for he already had in mind what he was going to do.
Philip answered, “Eight months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!” Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, spoke up, “Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?” As far as the disciples were concerned, the problem was resources. They didn’t have enough. Jesus knew better. What they had was not a resource problem, but a faith problem.
Is that not what we run into when we begin to get worried about things? We know there are not going to be enough resources, so why worry about that? What we need to be focusing on is the question of faith. Not necessarily faith in that God is going to land a pile of cash in our laps, or give us more time to do things, or even remove the cancer in our bodies. Because if we expected that from our faith to do those things, then we are going to be very upset when those things do not happen. Upset with ourselves and upset with God.
When we look at the Scripture I just read; the story of the feeding of the five thousand, it’s easy for us to focus directly on the miracle. And we’ll even focus on it so much that we will try to figure out how Jesus did it. Maybe they broke off the bread into very small pieces. Maybe some of the people weren’t hungry so they didn’t eat. Maybe there really were not five thousand people. We could go on and on with the maybes. On and on until we make ourselves dizzy.
You see, we’ll do that because that is what we do with other people. We’ll go on and on with people to try and prove them wrong. I never was one for debate. I had class mates in high school who could debate for hours and hours on any subject you give them. I found it as kind of a waste of time. I had better things to do and more fun things to do than sit and argue about subjects. We have our general election coming up in a few weeks and we starting to see the debates come out from the candidates. There they are trying to prove why the other candidate is not fit for the job. It can even get a little nasty and down right petty. “So and so should not be a senator because he has not served in the military.” “So and so is not telling the truth in his commercials.” And then later, the only thing the candidate says is: “I approve this message.” We think we are always right and even if we are not we have a hard time admitting it. Instead, we go on and on trying to prove things wrong.
The same thing goes for our Christianity. Instead of worrying about how things happened, how Jesus did things, whether or not certain situations occurred, we need to look at the example Jesus and/or the Scripture writer is trying to tell us that points to the bigger picture of the Lordship of Jesus; that Jesus is the Son of God; that through Jesus we have what we need to be children of God and inherit the Kingdom of God. All the other stuff doesn’t matter. All of the other stuff is just stories and examples.
One problem we run into is this issue of skepticism. We live in a skeptical world. A world full of fact and truth. Skeptics think like that. Nothing ever changes. TAKE GRAVITY. Heavy objects fall toward the earth. Always. So a builder can construct a house and never worry about his materials floating away. Count on it. TAKE CHEMISTRY. Mixing certain elements in precise proportions yields the same result. Always. So a doctor can prescribe a medication with predictable confidence. TAKE ASTRONOMY. The sun, the moon, those stars work in perfect harmony. Always. Even the mysterious eclipse comes as no surprise. TAKE ANATOMY. Whether it's the pupil of the eye expanding and contracting in response to light or our skin regulating our body temperature or our built-in defense mechanism fighting disease, we operate strictly on the basis of facts. Hard, immutable, stubborn facts. Reliable as the sunset. Real as a toothache. Absolute, unbending, undeniable.
And the disciples say, "Jesus, what do you mean, give them something to eat? We have only five small loaves of bread and two fish. Those are the facts. Five and two. No more, no less. Send the five thousand people home; we can't take care of them today."
If we let the skeptical, factual, resource minded way of the world control our lives, the same thing will happen in our spirituality. “We don’t have enough room, send them away.” “We don’t have enough money, let them go without food.” “We don’t have enough time, let them find someone else.” I see it happen, even in my own office. Because we live today with the limitation of resources.
But that is not what Jesus taught. For he wanted our faith to overcome our resources. He even tells us that if we have the faith of a mustard seed, then we can move mountains. Now, does he really mean that we can move a mountain? No. But, he does mean that we can do some remarkable things. Faith can change lives.
The summer camping season is coming to an end and our kids had a lot of fun this year at Camp Lookout. Bradley had the privelidge of attending a couple of sessions this year (his first year). He absolutely loved it and is already looking forward to going a whole week next year. Camp is where I believe faith moves mountains. Don Washburn, our director at Camp Lookout, has stories every year of changed lives. One such story came directly to the director of Holston Conference Camping Ministries, Randy Pasqua.
A mother wrote in to tell us about her child who came to camp this summer. She started the letter by saying that her child had some depression/anxiety problems due to a number of reasons and that her child had a lot of anger problems. She went into more detail about the child’s problems but the overall story was that he had faced a lot of hard times and had a lot of negative emotion as a result of it. She then proceeded to say that she decided to take her child off of his medication before coming to camp. That can make any camp director have a heart attack! She went on into the letter saying that her child had a wonderful time at camp, did not even need the medication, and that something happened in the week that change her son’s life. He no longer has the anxiety/depression or anger attacks. He has gone back to being a normal child. Her words in her letter was that “her child has been healed.”
There wasn’t enough time for people to reach out to that child. There wasn’t enough money to get the child the professional help he probably needed. There wasn’t enough medication that could make him better. But, there was more than enough grace, more than enough faith, more than enough love to help him recover. And now he is healed.
In a world that constantly tells us that there is not enough, Christ is there and he is saying, “through me, there is more than enough.”