The Feeding of the 6,000

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
September 27, 2009

The Feeding of the 6,000
Mark 8:1-10

6,000 children.
The number is probably higher than that,
but still, 6000 children!

Six thousand children have passed through our doors
over the past 46 years
to spend time in the classrooms of our Early Learning Center.

The first batch of students are now adults themselves,
men and women in their late-40s.
They went on to elementary school, Middle School,
High School,
perhaps college,
then on to vocations as teachers, engineers, scientists,
police officers, nurses, carpenters, plumbers,
lawyers, doctors.

Some probably still live in the community,
others live elsewhere –
in other parts of Virginia,
other parts of the country,
perhaps even in other parts of the world.
Wherever they are now,
they are still our neighbors –
just as Jesus teaches us.
And we hope they think of us as their neighbors.

We have no alumni/ae society as most colleges do,
to keep track of students once they move on to other places.
My guess is that most of our alumni/ae don’t have much of a
memory of their time in our Early Learning Center.
The memories of things we did and learned
when we were 3, 4, or 5,
are not as vivid as our memories of things we did
at ages 15, 25, 35…

Still, while they may not remember all that clearly,
I have no doubt that they learned important lessons
that they carry with them to this day,
that even in the short time they were with us,
even at such tender ages,
we helped them grow,
we helped shape them,
we helped them to have a little stronger foundation
than they would have had without us.

It wasn’t that we taught them to read,
or had them memorizing multiplication tables.
No, our teaching is and always has been so foundational:
we teach love,
we teach goodness,
we teach kindness,
we teach sharing;
we teach each child that he or she
was created in the image of God.
We don’t teach them the Bible,
but our teaching is grounded in the Bible.
We teach them what God spoke through the prophet Isaiah,
words God speaks still to all his children:
“you are precious,
you are honored in my sight,
I am with you,
I love you.” (Isaiah 43)

We do not teach them about Jesus;
we leave their religious education to their families
and whatever faith practices each family has.
But we do teach Jesus
as we model Jesus, every teacher,
every assistant,
the staff, the Board, all of us.

As we teach these precious children, we feed them,
feed and nourish them spiritually and emotionally,
feed their sense of self,
even as we help them to learn their A-B-Cs
and their 1-2-3s.

Everyone here helps feed these children.
You and everyone who has sat in a pew over the past 46 years,
have helped feed the 6,000.
Imagine the pastor standing in this pulpit
some 47 years ago
and saying to the congregation:
“Here’s an idea;
Here’s something we can do, do together:
We can feed 6,000 children!”
I am guessing that the reaction would have been
disbelief,
and yet, that’s what we have done.
And it won’t be that long before we’ll be able to say
“we have fed 10,000 children”.
Every year, another group,
another 180 children fed.
And even as we are feeding the children,
we are also feeding their parents.
It is miraculous how God works!

We all know the story of the miraculous feeding
we find the Bible: the feeding of the 5,000.
All four of the gospels include the story.
But there is a second story of a miraculous feeding
that is easy to overlook,
the story we heard in our lesson,
the feeding of the 4,000.
Only Matthew and Mark include this story;
Luke and John chose not to include it.

The facts of the feeding of the 5,000
are pretty straightforward.
Mark tells us (Mark 6:30ff),
that Jesus took his small band of followers
on what we might view as a retreat:
“come away to a deserted place,
all by yourselves and rest a while.”
But Jesus’ reputation had already grown so
that when he and his group arrived
at what they had thought would be a deserted place,
there was already a large crowd,
eager to hear the good news Jesus was preaching.
When it came time to eat,
Jesus had the crowd sit in small groups,
and then he took five loaves and two fish,
and blessed them and broke them,
and everyone ate “and were filled”,
and there was so much left over,
that they filled twelve baskets.

That’s chapter 6 in Mark’s gospel.
Now, jump to chapter 8 and what do we find?
The same basic facts centered on
“a great crowd without anything to eat”.
This time Jesus found there were 7 loaves of bread
and “a few small fish”.
And once again Jesus blessed the food
and had it distributed among the crowd,
and once again there was enough
so that all “ate and were filled”
and this time there were 7 baskets of leftovers.

Why two stories?
Were Luke and John right to leave the second version out
since it seemed to cover the same ground as the first?

Mark and Matthew leave out one importance difference
in the second story,
one that is not at all obvious.
In fact, I was not aware of it until a former professor of mine
pointed it out the other day at a Presbytery meeting.

In the first story, Jesus is on home turf,
in the land of the Israelites.
But in the second story,
Jesus has moved to the land of the Gentiles,
to men and women who were not Jewish as he was,
men and women who were not followers of the Lord God.

Jesus treated them no differently;
He walked with them, talked with them,
shared the good news with them,
and when he saw they were hungry,
he had compassion and fed them.

In this second story
we see Jesus practicing radical hospitality.
Jews and Gentiles kept their distance,
living their lives as separately as possible,
especially at mealtime.
But Jesus shows here as he does in so many other places
that he had no use
for the artificial boundaries and barriers
that we humans create:
marking differences based on geography,
or ethnicity, or religion, or culture.
Jesus brought Jew and Gentile together in community.

Jesus walks through barriers
as though they did not exist,
which for him they didn’t.
And in the process he teaches us
that we should do the same thing:
remove barriers, tear them down,
pay no attention to them.
Our neighbor is anybody and everybody:
a hungry person should be fed,
a sick person should receive medical care;
a homeless person should have shelter;
a cold person should be clothed and warmed.

The color of a person’s skin;
the accent in their speech;
the way they dress –
none of that mattered to Jesus.
Why does it matter so to us?
Weren’t they created in the image of God,
just as you and I were?

That’s just what we teach our children in the ELC.
We teach them to care about one another;
to share with one another;
to look after one another;
We teach them to play fair and be nice,
to say “I’m sorry” when they need to,
and to say, “I forgive you”
to the person who says, “I’m sorry.”

The children in our ELC have an advantage over us
in that they are too young to have built boundaries and barriers;
they don’t see differences,
and if they do, they don’t care.

The very business we are in as followers of Jesus Christ
is boundary breaking, barrier smashing.
We are in the “reaching-out” business:
even though we often behave as though
we are in the “hunker down” business,
the “separate ourselves” business,
the “build the walls” business.

We teach our children to reach out,
to be neighbors to and for one another,
and we hope the lessons remain with them.
I have pointed out before the T-shirt,
the bumper sticker,
that says, “No child is born a bigot.”
Children are born with love and grace;
our ministry is to nurture that.
That’s how we feed them.

in the process of feeding the children,
these precious children,
we too are fed,
for those little children teach us,
teach us lessons we might once have learned,
but have forgotten.

Last year I was invited to join one of the classes for snack time
after we all had been in Chapel together.
One little boy was upset that I had not called on him
in Chapel and the tears just flowed
even as the other boys and girls ate their crackers
and drank their juice.
The teacher tried to comfort the boy;
I tried to comfort the boy,
but the tears fell like the rain on Noah’s Ark.
Another little boy finished his snack,
got up from his place,
carried his trash to the wastebasket,
and then on the way back to his seat,
stopped by his crying classmate,
and gave him a hug.
It was a wonderfully “all-boy” hug,
more headlock than embrace,
but the message was clear:
he wanted to comfort his friend,
reach out to him.
That’s what we want all our chidlren to learn!

The poet T. S. Eliot wrote,
“Love is most nearly itself
when here and now cease to matter
here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
into another intensity
for a further union, a deeper communion”

Poetic words, perhaps a little cryptic,
but we are called to move,
move to a deeper union, a deeper communion,
with God, through Christ, with one another,
and we do this by breaking down barriers,
building community,
feeding one another,
feeding all who hunger.

In the process we too are fed,
nurtured and nourished,
those we feed
feeding us in return
and we build on what we have built,
and miraculously we have baskets of leftovers,
and no one is left hungry.
AMEN