First Presbyterian Church
Sermon
July 29, 2012
Scripture Lessons: 2 Kings 4:42-44 Ephesians 3:14-21 John 6:1-21
“The Last Diet”
I spent some time trying to find out if anyone actually knew who first said “You are what you eat.” I couldn’t. There are quite a few theories, but no one really knows who first uttered this gem. Then I went to Amazon.com to see how many diet books they have. They have almost 175,000 different books related to diet.
You probably know some of them: The Atkins Diet; The Zone Diet; The Three Hour Diet; The South Beach Diet; The Rice Diet; The Shangri-La Diet. That last one caught my eye since I’m old enough to have read Lost Horizon and have some frame of reference for Shangri-La. You may remember that it was a place in which physical illness didn’t happen. Unfortunately, sin was present. The diet is one that is focused on your metabolism and the health of your brain – in case anyone is interested.
But the title – or rather the subtitle – of one of the books really caught my eye. The title is “The Fat Smash Diet” but the subtitle is “The Last Diet You’ll Ever Need.”
“The Last Diet You’ll Ever Need.”
In John 6:35, Jesus says, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” That’s the last diet you’ll ever need.
These three scripture lessons this morning are about spiritual nutrition, or the lack thereof. The Old Testament lesson tells us of a feeding miracle overseen by Elisha. The epistle lesson tells us that in Christ we will receive the strength, the power, the spiritual nutrition to do things that we could never imagine our having the ability to do if only we would abandon ourselves to the extravagant love of God. And in the Gospel, we have the contrast between human hunger and the faith that knows that God will provide.
I’m sure that you’re familiar with the story of the miraculous feeding of the crowd on the hillside. There are many theories from it being a purely supernatural supply of food to the crowd being shamed into sharing the food that it had probably hidden in their garments. Have you ever stopped to wonder about that little boy who was the first one to give up his own food? This miracle starts with a little boy willing to give up his own lunch in the faith that Jesus would do something special with his sacrifice.
Whenever we think about this feeding of the mob, we think of the miracle performed by Christ and we overlook the role that this little boy’s faith played in the whole affair. We do that a lot. We focus on Jesus to the exclusion of those people whose faith and trust make his ministry possible. We ignore the nourishing food that fed this child’s faith. This mob was not fed solely on the strength of Christ’s gifts but also on the strength of the boy’s generous trust in the powers of God’s blessings and grace.
Would you have been the first one to step forward and give up your lunch? Would I?
When it comes to making sacrifices in our lives – whether of our time, talent or treasure – we are often haunted by that selfish fear that haunts us all every day: Will there be enough left for me?
The Ephesians lesson says: “I ask [God] that with both feet planted firmly on love, you'll be able to take in with all Christians the extravagant dimensions of Christ's love. Reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God.”
God in Jesus brings us an extravagant love. To truly understand and experience that love we need a spirituality of extravagance, of wild generosity, of unbridled trust in the resources of God that leads us courageously to carry out our roles in building the Kingdom of God.
As the old saying goes: you can’t walk on the water if you don’t get out of the boat! It is difficult for us to let loose such extravagant generosity in our setting of wealth and abundance. Ironic isn’t it? It seems that the more we have the more desperate we become to keep it to ourselves.
We have reached the point at which we believe that we can calculate and control the outcomes of the world around us and the lives we lead. In the years leading up to September, 2008, financial analysts believed that they could find an equation that would allow them to predict how to keep the world’s wealth growing endlessly. How to predict what the markets would do next. They called it: “Seeking Alpha.”
We think that we can take care of ourselves, thank you very much, and we’ll just thank God that other people have so much less. We are not grateful for what we have: we’re grateful that we have so much more and we need God’s help in keeping it!
It is not a coincidence, I think, that the only poem I could find that deals directly with this story is from the late Archbishop Dom Helder Camara, whose ministry served the poorest of the poor in Brazil. He recalled the extravagant generosity with which the boy in this story imitated the generosity of God:
If you share your bread in fear,
mistrustfully,
undaringly,
in a trice your bread
will fail.
Try sharing it without looking ahead,
not thinking of the cost,
unstintingly,
like a son of the Lord of all the harvests in the world.
“The Last Diet You’ll Ever Need.” "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” That’s the last diet you’ll ever need.
Paul wrote: “God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams! He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us.” God can do anything when we allow him to work within us multiplying our gifts and talents and treasures for the work of God’s Kingdom.
Through the grace of God we have been fed by the extravagant generosity of Jesus. Caring for the gifts that we have been given is called stewardship. It’s not “stewardship season” yet in the Presbyterian calendar. That comes in October. As Christians, stewardship has no season. It’s a very large part of our Christian life. Whatever your excuse is for your lack of stewardship, it is costing you the joy-filled knowledge of the extravagant generosity of God.
If you can but seize the gift that we have received – not the material benefits, not the physical security, not the level of comfort that makes it impossible for us to even grasp the reality of poverty in the rest of the world – if you can but recognize the depth and breadth of the love which God has bestowed upon us, then you will recognize that gratitude is the only root of any genuine response. Imitating the daring openhandedness of God is the first step in our faithful and grateful response.
Nourish yourself with the bread that will always fill your hunger. That nourishment will lead you to the joy of a life of sharing that doesn’t look ahead or calculate the cost, not thinking of the cost, unstintingly, like a child of the Lord of all the harvests in the world. Like the miracle a boy willing to give his food to Jesus so that thousands may be fed.
It is we who invite God’s miracles by the way in which we respond with faith and stewardship, knowing that God will provide. All of God’s miracles are waiting to see which of us will step up first and return our blessings to the Lord from whom they came.
Amen.
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