The Importance of Giving Up (Tenth Sunday after Pentecost)

Sermon Reflections

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Many years ago, when I was involved in a Capital Campaign to raise funds for a building project, some of the stewardship folks who were helping us told the story of a Pastor who was involved in a similar project.

This Pastor got up one Sunday and told the congregation, “we have a huge and expensive challenge in front of us, but I’ve got good news – we have the money we need to do this project!  There’s just one challenge left.  The money we have is all in your pockets and you need to give it!”

I’m not sure if that was a true story or not, but it’s encouraging and inspirational, because it reminds us of something that’s very often true.  If we’re all willing to work together, and to give and to help do the work, it’s amazing what we can do.  That really is often the case.

In fact, we always want it to be the case.  And we resist the notion that we can’t do something, because we just don’t have:

  • The money or the resources – surely, we say, we can find it somewhere; or at least, somebody out there must have what we need, if we can inspire them to give it…
  • The time or the energy – yes, we’re all tired (especially after a big event like VBS or Yard Sale), but maybe through herculean effort we can push through and do one more thing…
  • The people to help – there must be more people out there.  And I’ve sometimes been in church groups where we all want to convince ourselves that if we just made better or more compelling announcements, hundreds of volunteers would jump up and do things nobody’s been willing to do for years…!

And I know that I often resist believing that the resources just aren’t there, because I feel like if I can’t do it – or we can’t do it – all is lost.  And that certainly is the way the disciples felt as they approached Jesus in today’s Gospel reading.  In today’s reading, people have been chasing Jesus and his disciples around the lake because Jesus had been healing the sick.  Probably, many of these folks were on the road anyway, because they were heading to Jerusalem for the Passover.  And there were a lot of them.  And many of them didn’t have food with them. And Jesus and his disciples were all tired and probably hungry as well.

And so Jesus asks Philip, “where are we to buy bread for all these people to eat?”  Jesus knows the answer, and so does Philip.  Even six month’s wages wouldn’t be enough and all of us together don’t have that much money.  It’s not in our pockets.

Then Andrew chimed in and said, there’s a kid here who has five barley loaves and two fish (which are good for about one person for one day).  So even if we take what we have, we can’t do it.  We’re sunk.

Now the story of the feeding of the 5000 was so significant even in the first century that it’s the ONLY miracle of Jesus that’s reported in all 4 of our Gospels.  And so probably we’ve all heard it many times before.  And often, we read this as encouragement not to give up when we only have small amounts with which to work.  And surely, that’s part of the story.

But for a moment, I want to consider how important it was – paradoxically – to give up.  To recognize that there was no viable way forward.  And for Philip and Andrew to tell Jesus that they just couldn’t do it.

Because actually, they were right.  THEY couldn’t do it.  They didn’t have the money, the energy or the help needed to feed 5000 people on the hillside.  They recognized their limits.  There was no human way they could do it.

And I say paradoxically, because the way forward that Jesus offered began by a bunch of human beings recognizing that they COULDN’T do something by their own money, efforts or willpower.  And they take that helplessness and give it over to Jesus, instead of forming a committee to argue about how maybe with a better program or organization they might be able to pull off something that they knew they couldn’t do.

And the admission that they can’t do it is the first step in moving forward.  Giving up on themselves and their own abilities is the first necessary step for them to:

  • Seek Jesus’ help, instead of telling Jesus how they want the problem solved … (which is sometimes what they do in other places!)
  • Be open to doing things they hadn’t considered … (because, after all, what Jesus tells them to do makes no logical sense…)
  • Be agents of a great miracle, even when they didn’t realize at the moment, how they were living into that miracle… (they went about handing stuff out, probably wondering all the while when a fight would break out because the bread had run out…)

And so I think part of the message of the story of the feeding of the 5000 is that sometimes, for us to be agents of what Jesus is doing in the world around us, we need to give up on our ability to do stuff, and actually admit that we can’t do all this stuff just by trying harder.

And that’s because, often paradoxically for us, that’s the first step for us to be agents of Jesus’ love and blessing in ways we can’t imagine.  Of course, like those first disciples, giving up on our own abilities to control the situation is the first step, not the last!  And like those first disciples, the next steps often involve being willing to:

  • Really be open to new ways forward, which we may not have considered before; and that may involve doing something different than what we had been imagining… (I am still kind of amazed at the reach we have with streaming our services; it’s something I wouldn’t have imagined years ago when church growth folks kept telling us their various and sundry ideas for getting more people to show up at a particular hour on Sunday morning…)
  • Sharing what we have, in spite of the temptation to hold onto the few loaves in our hands; this had to have been a temptation for the disciples as well.  But today, we handed over a huge check to Gaithersburg HELP because a whole lot of people came together and shared their items for an auction and bid on things without any idea of how much we could raise. We just focused on sharing…
  • Offering to serve Jesus in our lives, without knowing at the moment what it is that God is doing with us or through us; the feeding of the 5000 clearly made an impression on the crowds.  But it made an impression on the disciples, too.  And that impression probably wasn’t, “hey we have a new way to figure out how to feed multitudes with next to nothing!”  Instead, it was the impression that Jesus could work through them to do amazing things that they’d only recognize in retrospect.  And that’s sometimes the way it is for us, too.  Jesus does great work through us while we’re busy doing things that sometimes seem like just meeting the need of the moment; just as they say “life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans”, so too, sometimes Jesus is at work in us when we’re just busy handing out bread to others…

Sometimes, miracles begin with giving up, not on God, but on ourselves.  And sometimes, when we give up on ourselves, we can truly be open to God’s new directions in our lives.  Sometimes, when we give up on ourselves, we can focus on other’s needs instead of our need to control the situation.  And often, when we give up on ourselves, we can be people through whom Jesus works to do things that we could never do by ourselves.

Amen.