Enough

John 6:1-21

I have lost count of the times I have heard someone ask “Will there be enough?” in the hours before a church event. As bodies flow into a potluck and the dishes on the table don’t seem to keep pace, we bite our nails and check the freezer for a backup plan. As cars pull up to the food distribution and we finish arranging the last of the produce, we fret and count again how many baskets and bushels we have. As the clock ticks closer to the start time for youth group or vacation Bible school or book club, we check and recheck the donuts and the juice boxes and how many coffee mugs are clean. As we prepare to open the doors for the fundraiser, we fret about what will happen if it’s a bust. What if no one shows up? What if we’ve done all this work and barely raise enough to break even? Did we advertise enough? Did we invite enough? Did we do enough? Are we enough?

What I have never once experienced at a church event, and I have been to a LOT of church events in my short life, is truly not having enough. I have never been at a potluck where there was not enough food to go around, even if some folks forgot or someone brought an unexpected guest. I have never been to a coffee hour or a fellowship meal where anyone had to leave hungry. I’ve never been to a food pantry or an outreach event where we had to turn people away. I’ve participated in church services where we ran out of bulletins, but there were always enough people willing to share that I didn’t know we’d run out until after the fact.

Of course, I have experienced the moments that didn’t go as planned. I’ve celebrated an entire service, only to find out the battery in my microphone was dead and no one past the third row heard a word I said. I’ve run a youth camp where no matter how many checklists and inventory spreadsheets we made, I still had to send camp staff to Walmart 45 minutes away for socks or sharpies or water balloons. I’ve been the first vegetarian priest at a church whose main fundraiser involves hams that are smoked in a custom smoker next to the parish office. I’ve been the intern doing a mad dash to the printer to make more copies of the funeral bulletin because it turned out the family way underestimated how many people would be attending the service. I’ve led classes and book studies that had to be moved to smaller rooms because the small number of participants made the parish hall feel cavernous. I’ve even set up for a Eucharist only to end up putting it all away and saying Evening Prayer by myself because no one else showed up. I would be lying if I said there are never disappointments or false starts or conflicts in the life of faith. We are human, and sometimes our dreams don’t quite translate to reality. But the miracles happen just often enough to keep us dreaming.

The feeding of the 5000 can be thought of as an impromptu coffee hour, the Church’s first parish picnic. The people have come from all over to hear Jesus and to be close to him, and after the sermon they are hungry for brunch. Jesus looks to his disciples expectantly, and they miss the hint of humor in the question “Where are we to buy bread for all these people to eat?” The exasperated disciples don’t immediately come up with a creative solution. Still, we know that someone does step up and offer a few things, basic ingredients for a simple and solitary meal packed lovingly by a mother for a young boy. There are five thousand people at the potluck, and only one person brought a dish to share. The disciples fret, as all us church people are wont to do, because this is obviously insufficient to meet the needs of the crowd. Perhaps they are just genuinely concerned for the welfare of all the people, or maybe they are worried about what might happen among so many people when stomachs start to growl and tempers grow short. Maybe they just want to sit and listen to Jesus like everybody else, and they’re disappointed to have yet another task to accomplish first. In any case, they get to work arranging tables and setting up folding chairs and figuring out the best configuration to fit the most people comfortably on the lawn. Somehow, Jesus manages to stretch that little boy’s lunch to feed every person at the picnic, and once he starts to see folks put down their forks and pat their full bellies, he sends the disciples back around to collect the leftovers. Somehow, everyone is full to bursting and still the parish hall fridge is stacked high with leftovers.

Those fish and loaves of bread were not somehow different from other fish and bread. The fish was not the size of a whale and the bread was small enough to fit five loaves in a child’s lunchbox. The people in the crowd were not somehow less hungry than other people, or more prone to fullness, and the field was not secretly also covered in manna and undisclosed fruit trees to fill the gaps in the bread baskets. It was an ordinary picnic, with an extraordinary host.

What God can do with loaves and fishes, God does every day with potlucks and folding chairs and juice boxes and food pantry inventory. In all of our fretting and planning, we often forget that we are not the ones who will be multiplying the loaves and fishes. We are not the ones guiding total strangers to try out church for the first time, or inspiring leaders to step forward and offer their gifts. God is at work in every life, and because of that we witness miracles every day. The miracle of a young mother being helped by a stranger who saw her trying to balance plates for her small children and herself. The miracle of neighbors running into each other while they wait in line for much-needed fresh food, exchanging prayer requests and swapping photos of grandchildren. The miracle of people who do not speak the same language showing up in the hospital at the same time to visit the same friend. The miracle of people of different generations singing together, laughing together, praying together. God is working this same feeding miracle in our lives every day, if we lay aside our worrying long enough to notice.

As disciples of Jesus, we are called to notice when we have a few extra loaves, who in our midst might have a fish to share, and to trust that God will make sure it is enough. As disciples of Jesus, we are sometimes meant to simply marvel at how full our baskets still are at the end of the day, how God has somehow made abundance of what we once believed to be “not enough.” As disciples of Jesus, we cannot forget that we are invited guests at the meal too. Jesus fed the crowds, and he fed his disciples too. God may use us to feed the world, but we too are meant to join the feast. So come to the table and be filled. There will always be enough for you.