the miracle of the loaves and. . .loaves

The miracle of the loaves and. . .loaves. (Luke 6.30-44)
Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church

November 15, 2020

When the groceries arrived, we were eager to unpack them. We only ordered about once a week and by the end of the week supplies ran low. So it was with some excitement that we began to pull things from the bags, washing the fruit, stacking the dry goods, and so on. 

Often what we most looked forward to was the fresh bread. I always ordered sourdough from the bakery. Pulling it from the bag, the smell filled the air. I placed the bread into the basket on the kitchen counter. I wasn’t surprised to find another loaf, this one a seeded wheat. We usually ordered a couple of loaves because they went so quickly. Then I produced some bagels from the bag. Oh yes, I thought. These will be nice for breakfast. I placed them into the full basket.

As we continued to unpack the groceries, we found more bread. There was another loaf from the bakery. Then there were English muffins. After that I believe more bagels. We began to lose track as loaf after loaf was produced. At about the fourth or fifth, we began to worry. Where would we put all the bread? Was there room in the freezer? By the seventh or eighth, we began to laugh. Where is all this bread coming from? And how on earth? 

In the end, there were ten loaves. But we laughed for more than ten minutes. It’s one thing to add an extra loaf by mistake, I thought. I mean, I could see getting three loaves instead of two. But ten? Ten loaves? I was certain I hadn’t accidentally added ten loaves. Was it a computer glitch? A shopping error? Someone in the family wryly referenced the parable of the loaves and fishes. Perhaps it was a miracle. Only instead of five loaves and two fishes we had ten loaves and no fishes. Enough bread, anyway, to feed a multitude.

I think we managed our way through nine out of ten loaves before discovering that the final package had gone bad. A good effort, we thought, but the question haunted me. Or rather the number. Ten loaves, I mumbled out loud, on and off for days. My family just giggled. They were standing by the toaster.

I share this story because it has already become a favorite. Remember that time Dad ordered ten loaves of bread by mistake? Every week since I have been relieved to find a normal amount of bread in the grocery order. Yet I also share this storybecause I think it reveals something very simple and true about this year. As we laughed and laughed about the error, I realized that we were laughing at a great deal more than the bread.

 Kurt Vonnegut once said, “Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.” Unpacking loaf after loaf of bread was a visible reminder of just how frustrating and exhausting this year has been. My flooding our basket with bread without knowing it was a classic grief mistake. Owing to the amount of suffering and stress I have absorbed this year, I had done something that made absolutely no sense. It was a harmless mistake, but it was also a sign of a very tired mind. And I know I’m not the only one. When I shared the story with several of you at the time, you immediately responded with similar stories of very silly and obvious mistakes. 

So here we are, eight months into a pandemic, after a summer of protests for racial justice, a gauntlet of hurricanes, and an incredibly stressful election, making mistakes because we’re tired and frazzled and realizing that everyone else is making mistakes, too. And not because we’ve been through something, but because we are still going through it. We are a people who are experiencing grief, which comes to us in many different ways and places, as we try to take in all that has happened and all that we have lost. Yet we are not only experiencing grief; we are experiencing a level of trauma. 

In her book, Trauma and Grace: Theology in a Ruptured World, Serene Jones reminds us of some of the characteristics of trauma. More than a physical wound, trauma causes harm to the psyche, its damage is internalized. Relying on the work of clinical psychologists, she explains, “A traumatic event is one in which a person or persons perceives themselves or others as threatened by an external force that seeks to annihilate them and against which they are unable to resist and which threatens their ability to cope.” It’s a lengthy definition, but Jones points out a few of its salient features. What makes something traumatic is the scope of the threat. The threat is total. People are traumatized when they feel the threat is to their very lives. Traumatic events, as Jones understands them, may be experienced not only by individuals, but by those who love them and also by larger groups. Yet the most devasting feature of trauma may be the final part of the definition: the feeling that the threat is overwhelming and the inability to find a way forward. 

As a theologian, Serene Jones wants to know what role the church might play in a culture that has been traumatized by violence. She draws on concrete examples from her own experience and the deep traditions of Western theology, but it’s difficult not to hear her words in the light of the past few years. Think of how many groups have felt under threat. Immigrants and refugees, who have been the subject of bigoted bans. Women and girls, who have seen sexual predators elevated to the White House and the Supreme Court. People with pre-existing conditions watching politicians try repeatedly to take their health care away. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+ people wondering if the hard-won gains for equal rights will hold. The most vulnerable to Covid-19 seeing neighbors unmasked, officials pushing to get back to normal and the infection rate rising in a country that has already lost hundreds of thousands of people. Or all of us, who know that families have been separated at the border and we are now unable even to find the parents of hundreds and hundreds of babies. My God, what a trauma we are experiencing. Not only the ones most directly affected, but all of us with a shred of human empathy. I think it’s important to acknowledge that not only are we grieving, we are traumatized. And when we receive ten loaves of bread that we don’t really remember ordering, then along with the laughter, we might also feel the frustration, the exhaustion, the trauma of these times, and we might just admit that we’re not really okay. How could we be? 

Serene Jones works hard to move toward a theology of grace for a traumatized world. If I read her correctly, then she understands grace as the thing that disrupts that inability to find a way forward. Grace is imaginative. It is the possibility, not the certainty, but the possibility of healing. Holding on to this possibility, and laboring to realize it, not only for ourselves but for a traumatized world, is our work to do, according to Jones. 

Part of this grace, of course, is laughter. As my family laughed at all the bread I bought, it was a graceful way of keeping it from feeling like a total mistake. And part of this grace includes our tears. It was Van Jones on CNN breaking down as he talked about how hard it had been to be a parent during these past few years. Oh, we have all been traumatized. And we are all in search of a little grace. 

I’ll be honest. I never understood grace very well growing up. I thought of it as a churchy word and didn’t much like to use it. Other people said it, but they didn’t say what they meant by it,and it sounded a little too pious to me. It wasn’t until later in life, when a dear professor who had become a friend, a man named Jerry Stone, told a deeply personal story about grace that it began to make sense. Jerry was a hard-headed empiricist, a philosopher who meant exactly what he said and said exactly what he meant. No false piety in him. He once spoke of grace as something that was outside of himself, a resource that was beyond his control yet available when he most needed it. It came to him as a surprise, during his lowest moment, he said. As he worried about a son who was struggling with addiction, even fearing for his son’s life, he sat quietly alone on the brink of despair. He felt overwhelmed and couldn’t see any way forward. Until his granddaughter came into the room, climbed into his lap and gave him a hug. That was it, he said. It was what he most needed and it came at just the right moment. He explained that the love of a child gave him the strength to keep going. Simple, ordinary, human grace.

Perhaps you wonder when I’ll get to the parable or how I intend to use it. And the answer is that in the parable of loaves and fishes, here known as the feeding of the five thousand, we might hear a moment of grace. Not something supernatural, as in a miracle that defied the laws of nature. The ancients almost certainly weren’t telling a literal story so much as a more deeply symbolic one. Rather, they were imagining a different kind of miracle in the sharing of what was on hand. The story says that the crowds that gathered around Jesus grew hungry by the end of the day. When pressed for food, all that Jesus’ friends could come up with was a handful of loaves and a couple of fishes. Yet when they began to share what they had, they found that somehow there was enough. Nobody went without. There were baskets leftover. The miracle was that where they had seen scarcity, there was abundance. Where they had seen no way forward, there was a way. The story evinces other Biblical narratives and symbols: the provision of manna in the wilderness, the sharing of communion, the twelve baskets of fish, the twelve tribes of Israel, the twelve disciples, and so on. All of these are meant as graceful cross-references, tying the stories and symbols together in imaginative, not literal, ways. Yet the more concrete lesson seems to be in the sharing itself. Jesus was sharing wisdom. The people were sharing an experience. All of them shared a meal. At the end of it, they could imagine a way forward together. A different way. 

I don’t know about you, but I believe the way of Jesus offers a possible way forward in a broken and wounded world. It doesn’t offer miracles that you’ll never see happen, like bread and fish magically multiplying, but it does offer miracles that are much closer and more important, things you just might see. Like a new path to abundance, a way of sharing, and the inbreaking of small moments of grace.

Sometimes this grace comes through our laughter, as we find we have ordered far too much bread. Sometimes it comes through our tears, as we make ourselves vulnerable and wear our hearts on our sleeves. And sometimes it comes as quietly as a child with a hug. 

However it comes, may we make a place for such grace todayand for every ordinary miracle that brings it.

Amen.