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Supply and Demand
Matthew 14: 13 – 21 |
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Supply and Demand If I were to announce that today’s sermon is about tithing, you would likely expect that my main point would be that we should all do it, right? But what if instead, I said, tithing is just a concession to how far we have fallen from whom God made us to be? What would you think then? Actually, today’s sermon is not about tithing. In fact, it’s not about money or the church budget, though you may want to apply it that way. But I want to start by talking about tithing, and I do mean to say that tithing is a concession to our sinfulness. Consider that in the Garden of Eden before the fall of humankind, there was no mention at all of tithing. God certainly didn’t tithe. He put Adam and Eve in a beautiful garden and said, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden.” God went on to warn them away from one tree, “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” but that was not because God wanted it for himself, but because it was not good for them: “for in the day that you eat of it,” God told them, “you shall die.” God is giving generously, you see, withholding not one good thing. But one result of the fall is that that generous spirit does not easily flourish in humankind; it is more natural for most of us to consider how much we can keep for ourselves. Thus, God gave the instructions about tithing so that when we are calculating how little we can give away and still consider ourselves as righteous, we have a figure to work with. And we need some guideline, for in our world, there are serious issues of supply and demand — often not enough supply to meet the demand — or at least not enough that is routed by those who control it to meet every need. And thus, thousands of people die of hunger around the world every day while others try to figure out how to keep from eating too many calories. But in the beginning, it was not so. In that place of no sin, there was no need to talk about tithing, and there was plenty for everyone. That was the ethic of the garden. Back to the garden ethic Although we may not at first recognize it, our gospel story for today takes us back to that garden ethic. That story is pretty familiar to churchgoers. Jesus is speaking to a massive crowd by the seashore one day. As the day wears on, the disciples urge Jesus to dismiss the crowd so they can go to the villages and purchase food. Instead, however, Jesus tells his disciples to feed them, and they reply that it is not possible for they have only five loaves of bread and a couple of fish. But Jesus blesses the food, and the disciples distribute it. Everyone gets something to eat, and the leftovers fill 12 baskets. I’ve abbreviated the incident a bit, but if you read it from the Bible, it may strike you that as miracle stories go, there is unnecessary information provided in this one. If we stopped the account right after the words, “And all ate,” we’d still have a miracle story. Jesus took what was barely enough to feed a hungry family and made it enough to feed a “great crowd.” That by itself is a miracle, and so, at first glance, it doesn’t seem that the rest of the story is needed. But the details pile up. Not only does everyone eat, but, they are “filled.” And if we read the story as Matthew told it, we don’t find out until the end that there were 5,000 men there plus women and children. Matthew’s conclusion is more like this: “Everybody ate until they could eat no more, and even then, there were 12 baskets chock-full of leftovers! And the crowd numbered 5,000 men ... and that’s not even counting the women and children! And every one of them had all they wanted to eat.” The feeding of the crowd illustrates abundance, and that, you see, is the ethic of the Garden of Eden ... and of God’s kingdom to come. The real miracle of that day is not so much that everybody got a square meal but that Jesus took what was not enough and made it more than enough. More than enough “Abundance,” “more than enough,” “profusion,” “plenty”: All of these terms are descriptions of the world as it would be if all of us on this planet were committed to love our neighbor as ourselves. But they are also realities that can be overtaken by selfishness. Remember that one of the temptations Jesus experienced in the wilderness concerned abundance. The devil took Jesus to a high mountain from which Jesus could see all the kingdoms of the world. Satan then said to Jesus, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Satan was offering Jesus abundance, but it was selfish abundance. It was abundance as in “Plenty for me; sorry about the rest of you.” God’s abundance is different. He shows us his bounty and says, not “All this I will give you, if you bow down,” but “All this is already yours and everybody’s.” On a spiritual level, we discover that when his help comes to us in the dark moments of our lives. On the physical level, that abundance becomes everybody’s as we all share out of what we have. One of the interpretations of the feeding of the 5,000 parable that comes from people who are skeptical about miracles is that what really happened by the seashore was that when the disciples started passing out the pieces of loaves and fish, that inspired others in the crowd to open up their picnic baskets and start sharing what they had so that everybody got something to eat. I don’t buy that as an explanation of the parable, but I do think it can be a model of how God’s material abundance gets passed out in this world, this side of the kingdom of God. In God’s kingdom to come, I expect that we will not need the words “shortage,” “shortfall,” “scarcity,” “dearth,” “lack” or others like them, but I also think that as we sit with Jesus in our daily lives and see him take what seems like too little and turn it into more than enough, we don’t have much use for those words right now either. A parable And here’s a little story from writer G. William Jones to help us understand that. It’s called “A Bargain with God”: Simon Pure dropped in to Penny Poor’s store one day. He clucked his tongue at the dust on Penny’s showcases, and shook his head and sighed at the many bare shelves. “Why do you suppose it is,” he asked poor old Penny, “that your store isn’t as prosperous as mine? We both started out at about the same time, and with the same capital — almost nothing. But now I have a lovely store that nets me [$500,000] a year after taxes, and you have only this dusty, half-stocked hole which does well to pay your rent for you. Why is that, Penny?” Penny stared vacantly and shrugged his thin shoulders. “I’ve often wondered that myself, Simon, but I don’t know. Perhaps if I did know the answer, I could do something about it.” Simon studied his gold wristwatch with the diamond numbers on it for a second, then leaned close to Penny’s ear, whispering ... “I will tell you the secret.” Penny’s widening eyes swiveled to Simon’s face. “Please do,” he implored. ... “There’s one difference between the way you went into business and the way I went into business, Penny,” [Simon] said, smiling benignly at the poor little fellow. “When I started my store 23 years ago, I took God as my partner.” Penny didn’t know whether Simon was joking or not, but when Simon just let those words hang in the dusty air, and neither laughed nor qualified them, Penny swallowed and said, “Well, how did you do that?” “Easy.” said Simon, “if you know the Bible. There’s where the secret is. Twenty-three years ago I promised God that if he’d prosper me in my business, I’d give him a 10th of the profits and spend a month every summer doing missionary work for him.” “So that’s where you go every summer,” murmured Penny. “Yes,” beamed Simon, “and we’ve both kept our ends of the bargain all these years. Well ... I’ve got to be going now. But you know the secret now, too, so I’m expecting to see some changes around here next time I come to see you.” Laughing warmly, Simon left Penny to ponder his words. Penny did ponder. He thought of how he had supported his little inner-city church for those 23 years, sometimes borrowing off his insurance policy in order to pay some bill that the dwindling congregation couldn’t seem to pay. Penny supposed that he had spent more than a 10th of his time working to keep the little church going. Plus that, he had always looked upon his store-keeping as a sort of ministry, too — keeping people from buying things they didn’t need or couldn’t afford, extending interest-free credit to people who seemed to need it, and being a kind of resident marriage counselor to the young husbands and wives in the neighborhood. Penny thought about God and God’s abilities, and he was mildly surprised that it had never occurred to him to question God’s beneficence. But when he did think of it, Penny couldn’t bring himself to blame God for the dust on his showcases or the empty spaces on his shelves. The thought of himself praying to God to prosper his business crossed Penny’s mind unbidden. It embarrassed Penny, then caused him to shake with laughter at his silly old self. Three months later Simon Pure’s store burned to the ground, and the skimpy insurance policies on it didn’t pay off half the value lost. Penny tried to visit Simon to cheer him up, but after knocking at Simon’s door on three occasions and getting no answer, he finally sent him a letter of condolences. Penny wrote some things about God, and beginning again, and about how he would be glad to help Simon start a new store — such things as that. He received a one-line letter from Simon by return mail. It said, “There is no God!” Sharing God’s plenty As I said at the beginning, tithing is a concession to our sinfulness, and Simon Pure took it one step further, assuming it was also a bargaining chip. But when we join the crowd at the seashore, we come to understand that God’s way with us is not one of bargaining but of wild abundance and generosity. And when we see what Christ can do with even the little that we do offer, then and only then do we realize there is no bargaining needed anyway. The only thing that is needed is to figure out ways we can share God’s plenty with others. |
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