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You don’t need a handout. You need a household. · Faith at Work

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: About 20 years ago,
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: give or take, Beth,
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: my wife,
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: and I were in ministry,
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: and we would wake up at 5 in the morning in a church kitchen
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: at Harrisonburg Mennonite Church,
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: and we would make breakfast for eight people who,
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: frankly, were not entirely sure why they were even there in the morning.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: It was a little program that we called the Timothy Project,
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: and it was designed for folks who were feeling a calling to ministry.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Nine people on typically a Saturday morning would come together and we had
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: a curriculum,
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: we had handouts,
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: we had books, we had all kinds of speakers that were talking to them.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: But we had decided that the first thing that we were going to do at five o'clock in
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: the morning was meet and open with eggs.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: We would cook them breakfast every single morning and have a common meal together.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I know something today that I did not know then.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: I love cooking that breakfast.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: I have always loved cooking the breakfasts and the lunch and the dinners.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: I still do.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: But what I have never been good at is sitting down at someone else's table
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: with nothing in my hand to give.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: I would rather be the host than the guest.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: I would rather be the one who provides than the one who needs.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hold on to that.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: We will come back to it later.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Matthew 14 has two banquets in it, and we almost never read them together, but we should.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: The first is Herod's banquet.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: It happens right at the beginning of chapter 13.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: It is a birthday party in a palace with gadgets and grand entertainment and
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: an oath sworn out loud in front of witnesses.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: It ends with a man's head carried in on a serving platter.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: John's head on a dinner plate.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Matthew wants you to remember the dinner plate.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then,
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: in verse 13,
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus hears about it,
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  SPEAKER_00: and he withdraws in a boat to a deserted place, he thinks, by himself.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: He is grieving John, his husband, the man who actually baptized him.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: So he goes where there are no people to greet.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: But the crowds walk along the way on foot and are standing there when he lands.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Matthew says he had compassion for them.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: Not irritation.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Compassion.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: The Greek word is .
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: Took me a week.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's got that gun roll sound because it literally means that it hit him in the gut.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: Down like the Greek.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: And then...
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: After he's healed people and called to people, it gets laid.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the disciples come with a proposal that is, at face value, entirely reasonable.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Folks, send the crowds away so that they can go buy food for themselves.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Send them away so that they can buy their own from the empire.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not a cruel sentence.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: It is the sentence that I would have said.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's the logic that most of us run our lives on.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone is responsible for their own dinner.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Or the government will provide for them.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the kind thing to do for people like that is to let them go in time so
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: that they can Get their dinner.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: Get their provision for life.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: And Jesus answers with eight words to his disciples that changed the whole world.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Eridine for the disciples and for these folk.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: He says, they do not need to go away.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Give them something to eat.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: In the world of Matthew,
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: in the world that he was writing into, feeding a crowd was never a neutral act.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: It was a signature move of an empire.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: Before he died in 14 AD, so...
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: About 40 years before Jesus is doing the things that he is doing,
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Caesar Augustus wrote out his resume and had it carved onto Ron's pillow
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: with copies posted on stone walls in all of the provinces.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: And we actually still have copies of this resume of the grand things that
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: the divine Caesar Augustus did.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: And in the middle of all of the wars that he won and the temples that he built,
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: he stops to talk about food.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well,
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: distributions of grain bought with his own money.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: These were cat handouts, reaching, he says, never fewer than 250,000 people.
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  SPEAKER_00: The great doll,
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  SPEAKER_00: it belonged in the city of Rome and There was no free bread on that Galilean shore,
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: but the story that Rome told about itself traveled everywhere.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: Not long before Matthew wrote this gospel,
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  SPEAKER_00: Nero, who was the Caesar at that time, put the grain supply on coins as a goddess.
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  SPEAKER_00: Holding out the grain to the people.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: So every time that you paid for something,
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: you handed a small metal argument about who keeps you alive.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Warren Carter reads this Gospel of Matthew as a protest.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: He says that God's purposes are carried out not by the emperor,
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: but by Jesus and the people gathered around him.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: So we have three sort of images all working here at the same time.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: Herod's table had a guest list, a display of power and a death.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: Caesar's table has a ledger,
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: a benefactor, and frankly, a quiet bill of dependence for everyone who buys into it.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: This table of Jesus out in the grass in the middle of nowhere, it seems, is a table.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it has small groups of gathered people dispersed together.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: With Jesus as Lord and twelve full baskets after it's all done for the future of the church.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now, you may want to know what kind of miracle this was.
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  SPEAKER_00: Bread appearing out of nothing or a Widely gathered,
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: opening their lunches to one another and sharing that becomes abundance.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: That reading goes back to sort of a 19th century rationalist who did not believe
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: in miracles at all.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: But notice here what Matthew never said.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: There is no word, no explanation at all about the mechanism of how this miracle happens.
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  SPEAKER_00: He tells us only what was in their hands, five loaves and two fishes.
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  SPEAKER_00: Fishes?
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: Fishies.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure what it is.
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  SPEAKER_00: And what Jesus did with them.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: The text says that he took and he
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: blessed and he broke and he gave.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: These are the same verbs that Matthew is going to use later in the gospel
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: when he describes what happens in an upstairs room on the last night of Jesus' life.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not going to try to tell you whether the bread was multiplied in Jesus' hands
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: or the disciples' hands or the crowd's hands.
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  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't really matter.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Either way,
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  SPEAKER_00: something happened out there on that grass that was far harder
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  SPEAKER_00: than just making food appear.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was a greater miracle,
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  SPEAKER_00: and that greater miracle was that 5,000 people,
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  SPEAKER_00: along with women and children,
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  SPEAKER_00: stopped being the empire's crowd
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: and became a household of Jesus.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Let's break down a little bit how Jesus does all of this.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: He tells them to sit down on the grass, and Mark says that they said he proves of 150s.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: It was not a bread line.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was not a hue for some sort of distribution point.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was groups,
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  SPEAKER_00: small enough to see each other's faces,
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  SPEAKER_00: small enough to pass something to one another themselves.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Our word companion comes from exactly this kind of thing.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Companis, the person you share bread with.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's actually where the word companion comes from.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: Bruce Molina pointed out that in Jesus' world, only two institutions stood on their own.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: Government and politics, kinship, and the household.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: So when Jesus talked about the kingdom of God, nobody heard an abstraction.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: They heard a claim about which of the two they belonged to.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: A king asked, Who is over you?
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: Who's in charge?
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  SPEAKER_00: A kinship asked, Who are you responsible for?
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  SPEAKER_00: Jesus gives a kinship answer here, I believe.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: He puts the bread into the disciples' hands and makes them Walk it out to the crowd.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: He seats the crowd in circle, and so it travels hand to hand among them.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody receives from a distance or from an emperor.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody receives from a neighbor.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: Love thy neighbor as yourself.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: Willie James Jennings writes that the single greatest challenge facing disciples
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: of Jesus is to imagine and then in actual together life,
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  SPEAKER_00: life that interpenetrates
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  SPEAKER_00: one another, weaves together and joins us to the bone.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not proximity,
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  SPEAKER_00: not politeness,
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  SPEAKER_00: Bone to bone,
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  SPEAKER_00: joint to joint, ligament to ligament, muscle to muscle, where we become one.
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  SPEAKER_00: One body in Christ.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: At the end of all of this, there are 12 baskets left over.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: Are the 12 baskets one for every tribe of Israel?
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: A social, political commentary directed at Caesar of Augustus and Rome?
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: The arithmetic is about something.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just going to let you decide it.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: Can't give you all the answers, right?
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: You got to think a little bit.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: There was a study, the World Happiness Report.
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  SPEAKER_00: It found that in 2023,
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  SPEAKER_00: roughly one in four American adults had eaten every single meal alone the day
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  SPEAKER_00: before, more than 50% in 20 years.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the finding that is important in that study.
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  SPEAKER_00: How often a person shares meals predicted their satisfaction with life as much
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: as their income did.
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  SPEAKER_00: Friends, we did not decide to be lonely.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: We decided to be efficient as a culture.
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  SPEAKER_00: We decided to be independent.
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  SPEAKER_00: We have built a life where you can be fed without ever sitting down a cross
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  SPEAKER_00: from another human being.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: And we have not noticed the trade-off.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: It is epidemic loneliness.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: Young and old, please hear this clearly.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: That hollow feeling you get scrolling on your phone with food in front of you
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  SPEAKER_00: and nobody across from you, it is not a personal failure.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: It is what happens to a creature who is made for a table with people around it.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: And for some reason,
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: even knowing these things, we continue to build on this idea of efficiency.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: We continue to teach this generation that needing help is embarrassing.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: That must stop.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I told you I would rather be the host than the guest.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's just a confession.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'm working on it.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: But preferring that is not trying to be humble.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: It is that I prefer to be in control of things.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I would imagine that many of us sitting here like to be in control,
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: even in the midst of our service.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: But we need to remember this.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: As long as I am the one carrying the bread...
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'd never have to admit that I, too, am hungry.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: In 1938,
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: a Church of the Brethren relief worker named Dan West was in Spain during
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: the Civil War.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: He was ladling cups of milk to refugee children, and there was never enough.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: Every single day, he had to decide who got a cup and who didn't get a cup.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: And somewhere in that line, he thought, hey, these children, they don't need a cup.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: They need a cow.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: They need a cow.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the first heifers shipped in 1944 across the seas.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: It became Heifer International.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: The motto, do not answer a family's hunger with a fortune.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: You answer it with something living they can tend to and then pass on.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: My great uncle, M.R.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: Ziegler,
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  SPEAKER_00: ran the Brethren Service Committee in those years,
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: and he talked the United Nations Relief Agency into carrying livestock
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: when it had no intention of doing that, and he got cows onto those boats.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up downstream of these ideas without ever really knowing what was called.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it is the difference between a handout and a household.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: We as a church practice to love these in this tradition.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I've heard people apologize for how law loves these laughs.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: My apologies if I'm infending or hurting anybody's feelings.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: It runs law on purpose.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because the point, not the boo, that we're sharing.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's the companionship in the faith that we're fostering.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus did not send the hungry away to buy their own.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus did not hand bread down from a throne.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus put it into ordinary hands and made them carry it to each other.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that is still how it is supposed to work.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: The bread of life still moves the way it moved that afternoon.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: Out of his hands, through ours, to the person sitting next to us on the ground.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: With the reminder that we are all hungry and we are all not the host.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: So, bring what you have.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: Five loaves is not much.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Two fishes is not much.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: A casserole,
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: an hour,
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: a phone call,
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: a chair at your table on a Thursday night when somebody you know is lonely and needs
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: a family to be with.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's not much, but it was never meant to be much.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: It was meant to simply be shared.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: And if you walk in today with nothing at all in your hands, hear the better news.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: You are not the host today.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: You are guests.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: So sit down in the grass and let somebody pass you something.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: There was enough.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: There was more than enough.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: There were 12 baskets left over.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: And guess what?
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: There still are.