Sunday 28th July 2024 – Family Service led by Revd. John Steele
It was good to have John back with us with fresh socks and his support team of wife Mary and mother-in-law Ann.
What a month we had just had! John thanked us for the invitation to our Anniversary Dinner. They had been disappointed not to have been able to join us, and – it being the theme of the day – he enquired whether there were any “left-overs” remaining, so they could judge the standard we set ourselves when offering a celebratory dinner (we did find a quality ‘left-over’ in a bottle).
The reading from 2 Kings 4, verses 42 to 44 was about feeding a large crowd with very modest resources, and it was, John said, the first time in the Bible that ‘left-overs’ are mentioned – something we’d come back to in our Gospel Readings. Both Bible stories were about eating outside, a picnic if you like, and this took us smartly into a poem of giving thanks to God for Alfresco Food.
The second occasion, the feeding of the five thousand, had been so special that all 4 Gospel writers had decided to include it in their accounts. John thought there must still be a reason for a story like that – a lesson to be learnt by the Christian Church of today.
In John 6, the writer calls this a sign, a sign to show who Jesus really is. A large crowd (13,000+ with wives and families) follows him around the lake. Why should that be? What is it about him that is so attractive? Perhaps they follow him to see more of his healing miracles; perhaps they sensed that this man was very special, that something momentous was about to happen with him.
It had been Passover time, the time when the Jews remembered how God had delivered them from slavery in Egypt. So if this man Jesus was truly God’s chosen one, and people believed that he was, then perhaps he would reveal himself in another spectacular manner. The centre of attraction was this man, 30 odd years of age, and a great deal was expected of him.
Was Jesus still the centre of attraction these days? Judging by the absence of those looking for him in church, we would probably say, “No, he’s not”. And that was a common feeling because our churches were empty: our churches had decided to close their doors because no one came anymore, and that was translated into the view that no one was particularly interested in Jesus.
Perhaps it was the problem that the Church had in representing him and introducing him to other people. There was still enough evidence, if we looked for it, that Jesus was still the centre of attention that he had always been. Interest in Jesus, who he was, what he claimed to be, what he brought to people of his day. People still saw the signs and recognised the truth of what Jesus had said.
St John’s account had placed Jesus at the very heart of that meal. He saw the people. He defined the task. He directed the disciples, ”You find them something”, and when that was found, he distributed the food.
We’d had a great month celebrating, and John knew by looking at the many of the things in our program of events that every interest and every concern has been catered for. But what had caught his eye was the headline on the cover, “Please come to be part of our celebrations. Come, if you know us. Come if you don’t know us”. All the things that we had done in our anniversary celebrations were a means to introduce people, or to re-introduce people, to our church. Our church had been on this site for 90 years. The message had come across loud and clear. Some had decided that this wasn’t what they wanted, but some had decided that it was, and we gave thanks to God for the way our mission had continued over that time.
But who leads it, John asked? We might look at one another, look at the people that had got a bit of energy left and say they were the leaders. No, they were not. The Elders were the leaders, weren’t they? No, they were not. Elders had a responsibility for the work and making sure that everything happened. The Church Meeting then? But that was not where the leadership lay. The leadership was the leading of our Lord, and that was at the very heart of the passage we were looking at.
St John told us that Jesus saw the people, and he already knew what he was going to do. But he had still asked Philip where they were going to find and to buy bread to feed all these people – a hint of the unique, collaborative style of Jesus. Together they would feed these all these people. We could see in the leadership of Christ that he was in control of the whole situation. And as we at Potter’s Bar said thank you for what was for 90 years and thank you for what will be in the next 90 or 100 years, we should say, “Lord, you are in charge. Yours is the mission, not ours”.
With all those men and their families, it was going to be a great big family meal. But 5 barley loaves and 2 fish in the face of such demand had been a drop in a bucket. And when we thought about the lesson from this reading, perhaps it was an image of a church that thought it wasn’t quite up to the job. So often we were faced with what seemed like insurmountable problems. When we thought about the journey of faith our Church had made over 90 years and our ancestors in the faith; if they had to try and grapple with the kind of realities that we were trying to grapple with, they might throw up their hands and say, “I can’t do it. It was tough enough then in my day, but your day is even tougher still”.
So often we allowed what we thought were our inadequacies and our deficiencies to prevent what God in His purposes had created the Church to do. The Church was not a part of the kingdom. It was a part of the struggle for it – a struggle consoled by the promise that the gates of hell would not prevail. What our Church was offering was not the answer to everyone’s deep felt questions. We were struggling with the rest of society to make sense of this world, trying to understand how best we could reach out to make life better for people. It was a struggle, but one we invited people to join us in, believing that God had a plan and a purpose in His love for all of us.
There was no Last Supper recorded in St John’s Gospel. This encounter with the crowd on the mountainside was as close as Jesus had got to the actions that we are familiar with. Jesus took the bread, broke it, gave thanks, and distributed as much as everyone wanted. And that had been all that Jesus offered these people bread (and if you were lucky a fishtail) – an Al Fresco lunch (Interestingly, no wine or even water – another colossal logistical challenge).
St John, in his Gospel recorded that Jesus had described himself as the bread of life, the bread that gave life to the world. What we were to feed people today with was the bread that God Himself, through Christ, gives for the nourishment of people – showing the love of God within our day-to-day lives.
And when the time came, once we had caught our breath, to think where the future was leading us and what would happen to the things in our church that were so important to many people.
A recap:
Jesus looked up, and he saw a large crowd. What did we expect to see when we looked up. Maybe things much the same as they’d always been. Maybe new needs that we thought we could do something about. The inspiration of God’s Spirit would guide all of us as we planned.
Jesus had a plan and knew how he was going to implement it. How would we ensure that our plan was his plan? We should rely on the Spirit of God to show us the way to go.
How would we involve other people? There were those of us who were part of the core of this fellowship but there were quite a number who were on the periphery. And in those words, “Come, if you know us. Come, if you don’t know us”, we recognised that the Church had lost touch with many that had seen it as being important in their lives. For us there was the need to reach out and invite them to take up their fellowship again with God’s people.
And the leftovers – those things that we thought didn’t really matter or would not be of interest to anyone – might very well be the means by which they were fed, by which their lives would be changed and enriched for the glory of God.
We were to accept the fact that change took place in all of us. We needed fresh eyes to look out on God’s world and see where we were to go. John prayed that God would guide us and give us His joy as we continued our journey of faith.
Potters Bar United Reformed Church 