Mark 6: 30-44
Mark 8: 1-8
May 6, 2007
Blessed and
Broken
Rev.
Elizabeth Macaulay
One of the
richest and most challenging learning opportunities I ever submitted to was
Clinical Pastoral Education. It was a
part of my seminary experience. For a
semester, I spent a day at St Mary’s Hospital in
But really,
the most crucial learning I did through CPE was about myself. In the company of an incredibly gifted
supervisor, Sr. Judith Oland, myself and a group of five other learners had the
opportunity to peel ourselves back a bit and see what it is that makes us soar
and what it is that makes us crash in life.
People who
go into helping professions, including clergy often do so because they have a
great need to heal themselves and the world in which they find themselves. And people who go into the helping
professions often spend themselves in their efforts so fully that they dry out,
burn out, or develop what a Unitarian Universalism pastor friend of mine calls “compassion
fatigue”.
So a lot of
CPE and a lot of life (you would probably agree with me in this, whether you
work in a helping profession or not) is trying to find the balance between
lending your heart to the world while lending the same hugeness of heart to
yourself.
All of this
depends on a core belief:
That there is enough.
That there is enough grace and enough good and enough God.
Sister
Judith would often say to me while I was tilting at the many windmills of my
ministry and life:
It is the
message Jesus sought to teach his disciples as they grappled with the seemingly
impossible: how to feed the hunger of
thousands with the meager bit they thought was theirs?
In the
midst of their own, as in the first feeding account, and in the midst of the
alien, as in the second account of abundant sharing, Jesus makes it so very
clear that the disciples, any who seek to follow and live and be in the way of
Jesus, the disciples had more than enough to share.
They and
the seemingly meager and not-enough gifts they had were enough. Enough to be magnified into amazing
power. Enough to feed the bellies and
hearts of their neighbors with leftovers for the next time.
Enough to
be testimony to the ways that focusing on what we cannot do is killing us and
the tens of thousands who die daily for want of body and soul food.
We are
enough. And when we come together in our
enough ness and live our witness we “are the change we want to see in the world“,
and the Gandhian phrase becomes more than a T -Shirt logo. It becomes flesh and dwells among us.
Here’s a great metaphor.
Yesterday
was “clean up the campus” day at church.
The Trustees throw this really great party with doughnuts and coffee and
great conversation and those of us who come enter into the fun of caring for
this ministry outpost we share.
One of the
areas that gets a lot of attention is the gardens. Have you ever looked at the gardens around
this church? They are beautiful and they
are demanding. It takes hours of care a
week to keep them looking happy, and every spring they take intensive care to
prune off the dead materials in order for the new to grow. Anytime you feel a need to get close to the
earth, please come on by and pull some weeds…..
So
yesterday I was out front working on a patch of garden with Marie and
Mike. Now, I’m not much of a gardener,
and I was feeling pretty overwhelmed by the amount of work that needed to be
done. It seemed impossible.
Mike had
this to say: it IS impossible if you
think you have to do it alone. What this
work needs is a lot of people concentrating on one area at a time. And then, after you have done the work you
can do, you have to let it go. God has
some work to do in this, too.
Jim
Mulholland has written a book called Praying Like Jesus: The Lord’s Prayer
in a Culture of Prosperity. In the
portion of the prayer that says: Give us
this day our daily bread” he cites the passage we read this morning, in which
Jesus so clearly turned to his disciples and said “you do it” when they became
aware of the hunger of the crowd.
Mulholland
wonders what it would mean if the church took that way of doing discipleship to
heart. He reflects:
“What would
it mean if Christians and churches took the money we have hidden in bank
accounts and guarded by mutual funds and offered it to the hungry of the
world? In 1998, it was determined that
it would take only thirteen billion dollars to eliminate starvation in the
world. In 1999, the American church
spent six billion dollars, (nearly half
the amount it would take to eliminate starvation, addition mine), just
on new buildings. Imagine“, says Mulholland, “how would the rest of the world
react if they saw churches committing themselves to feeding the world instead
of building luxurious sanctuaries, gyms, and family-life centers?” (pg. 81)
We are
enough. We have enough. Jesus turned to his disciples and said “you
do it” knowing full well that they could.
So too can we be unleashers of miracle when we remember that we work in
concert with God and each other in order to be bread and grace and balm and
prophet and healer and lover and multiplier of miracle.
For some
reason, God spoke to Nancy Dierauer’s musical heart and said “you do it” and
she does: she leads us in music and
worship every Sunday and thank God she believes in the abundance of God because
we are fed through her. She is bread for
our souls, no?
For some
reason, God spoke to Jerry Burmeister’s fix anything and build anything heart
and said “you do it” and he does: he
builds from wood and he shares his wry wisdom and he and Steve Kirchner side
garages for a member that needed a helping hand and don’t tell me that he and
Steve aren’t unleashing miracles because they are. They are bread, broken, blessed, and shared.
And so you are. Each
one of you. You are blessed and broken
and you are the Body of Christ.
The work of discipleship?
You do it. Unleash a miracle.
Amen