Pentecost 8

2 Samuel 11:1-15
Psalm 14
Ephesians 3:14-21
John 6:1-21

How much is enough? Living in a culture in which people have had to recalibrate their expectations rather dramatically in the last year, we hear a lot about how and where there isn’t enough: the budget wrangling in California, arguing in congress over what to do about health care and how much that’s going to cost, coping with a spouse’s layoff. We hear a lot about where and when and how there is not enough, but what really is enough?
In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus asks Philip – “where are we going to buy bread for all these people.” Philip answers a completely different question. Jesus asks about method. Philip’s reply is about feasibility – he tells Jesus there’s no way because the resources aren’t available; six months wages wouldn’t buy enough food for this crowd. Andrew finds a kid with a few loaves of bread and some fish. Jesus gathers the people together, gives thanks and everyone has enough to eat.
What is the real solution to our feeling of emptiness? It’s no surprise that many religious traditions express their most profound realities with ritual consumption of and abstention from food. Being hungry is the simplest and most obvious reminder that human beings have empty spaces within that need to be filled. Our fasts and our ritual meals heighten our awareness of that inevitable sense of space that cries out to be filled. We 21st century westerners have been encouraged to fill that space with the desire for and consumption of things – cars, houses, phones, fast food. Most of us here at least had a feeling that unfettered consumption really wasn’t going to be the answer. So what would it mean to have enough – regardless of how difficult things get, regardless of the extent of our personal losses, regardless of whether the communities from which we gather our meaning and identity disintegrate, is there something that could still fill the empty places within us?
The text from Ephesians gets at that. The letter to the Ephesians speaks to a maturing, self-aware faith community than Paul’s letters of a decade or two after Jesus’ death. The church in Ephesus has seemingly moved beyond the urgent preparation for Christ’s return that consumed the earliest churches. When it didn’t happen immediately, they began to look elsewhere for meaning and purpose. Today’s epistle text invites the hearer to look within – to be strengthened in his inner being with power through the indwelling spirit of Christ which is realized through faith and rooted and grounded in love.
What would it mean to be filled with the fullness of God. How would we do that. Is there a way for us to carry God in those empty spaces inside us. Can doing that create in us a sense that whatever else we have or don’t have, that fullness of God is enough?
I admit, I struggle with achieving that sense. When I realize the needs of this parish, the uncertainty of our ability to go on given the resources available to us, the demands of this building and the work we have undertaken it feels like I am faced with a bottomless well of empty space. I am like Philip saying to Jesus – who cares where we would buy bread for all these people if we don’t have the money to do it.
But when I take a moment to consider what God has accomplished in this parish, not just in the time I’ve been here or even in the time Dick and Betty Herndon have been here, but over 150 years, I begin to understand what faith, rooted and grounded in love can accomplish. In the last two years, we, as a community have experienced substantial growth. We’ve made a start on another major effort to preserve this building as a reminder in space and time of the richness of God’s glory. St. Mary’s has never been a wealthy parish and has only on relatively rare and fleeting occasions been financially comfortable. But somehow those who were here before us found a way to carry on.
Their legacy to us is the challenge to find that sense of being filled with the fullness of God, as one of those families in heaven and on earth that bows before and takes its name from the Father whose power, working within us is able to accomplish far more than all that we could ask or imagine.