Properties of Light

Properties of Light

A Sermon Shared at the Suttons Bay Congregational Church

October 20, 2019

Scripture: Matthew 5:14-16

         When I was a boy, my grandfather and I often watched a show called “big time wrestling” together on his tiny plastic black-and-white television set. To help retrieve the weak signal that floated elusively around our neighborhood, he had wrapped balls of aluminum foil around the ends of the rabbit-ear antennas—but, alas, this had absolutely no perceptible effect. My grandfather was an enthusiastic and committed viewer of the program: although he was a devout church-goer who sang the old hymns in the shower, he resorted to somewhat saltier forms of expression when the static grew so loud that you could no longer hear the announcer or when it looked like some villainous wrestler might get away with a dirty move.

The stark symbolism of these battles made an early impression on me: the good guys were very good and wore the light-colored shorts and masks; the bad guys were very bad and wore the dark-colored shorts and masks. A decade or two would pass before I came to three realizations: first, clothing is an unreliable indicator of moral integrity; second, these men were not actually fighting; and, third, the snow on the screen was the result of dreadful reception and not because the match was taking place during a blizzard.  

You have no doubt noticed that our faith makes a lot of use of those same two symbols of darkness and light. The Bible strongly and consistently associates darkness with evil, or at least with the absence of God. And it strongly and consistently associates light with God’s presence, guidance, and grace.

This imagery recurs throughout the Old Testament—right from the start. The book of Genesis tells us that in the beginning “darkness was over the face of the deep.” In Exodus, the Lord tells Moses to stretch out his hand so that darkness will fall over the land of Egypt—a “darkness to be felt,” he adds ominously. Adjectives multiply, with the book of Isaiah saying that the lost will be “thrust into thick darkness” and the book of Proverbs declaring that “[t]he way of the wicked is like deep darkness.” The book of Psalms uses a common metaphor when it says that those of us without understanding will “walk about in darkness.”

We find identical imagery throughout the New Testament. The Gospel of John tells us that people were evil and “loved the darkness.” In three of the gospels, the sky becomes suddenly and mysteriously dark during the crucifixion of Jesus. The First Epistle of John tells us that in God there is “no darkness at all.” Colossians says that Jesus delivered us from “the domain of darkness” and First Peter says we have been “called out of darkness.”

On the other hand, the Hebrew Bible repeatedly employs the image of light as a metaphor for goodness. The book of Genesis tells us that the first words God spoke were “let there be light.” The twenty-seventh psalm begins with the famous invocation “The Lord is my light and my salvation.” Isaiah is rich with such language, including the prophetic statement: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” The book of Daniel declares that “those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above.”

The New Testament uses the same imagery—indeed, we might even say that it turns the lights up a bit. Such symbolism abounds. To give you some idea of how densely the New Testaments packs its references to light, just take the Gospel of John alone.

In that gospel, Jesus says (more than once) that he is “the light of the world”—hold on to that point, I’ll return to it. He warns his disciples that the light “will be among them” for only a little longer, and he tells them: “While you have the light, believe in the light.” John begins his gospel by saying of Jesus: “In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” And he reassuringly adds words often translated this way: the “light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

We find the same sort of language throughout the New Testament. Paul’s writings contain numerous examples. A familiar one comes in his letter to the Romans, when Paul urges us to “put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light”—the “armor of light”: a gloriously mixed metaphor.

This imagery has crept out of the Bible and into our everyday religious language, our traditions, and our literature. We refer to Jesus as “the Lord of Light” and Satan as the “Prince of Darkness.” We put lights up at Christmas and light candles at Christmas Eve services. If we plunge into John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, we discover that he describes the pit into which God cast Lucifer and the other fallen angels as having “no light, but rather darkness visible.” It was a concept that Milton—blind and impoverished when he wrote those words—could fully understand.

Now, here’s the thing. All of this imagery could leave us with a simple message etched in our mind: darkness bad, light good. But, of course, things are more complicated than that. This morning, I want to suggest to you that—if we pay attention to those complications—we might learn something not just about darkness and light …. but about God, about ourselves, and about what God asks of us.

Let’s start here. One risk in thinking in these simple “darkness bad, light good” terms is that we may come to view all existence as ruled by two conflicting, opposed, and equal forces. There is a religion that holds such a belief—but it isn’t ours. Manichaeism, which flourished between the third and seventh centuries, endorsed a dualistic model along precisely these lines. Indeed, religious historians tell us that Manichaeism actually gave us the phrase “Prince of Darkness.”

 The early church leaders did not just question Manichaeism—they declared it a heresy. I’m not big on calling people heretics, but the critics of Manichaeism had a point. After all, one of the fundamental tenets of our faith is that we believe in one God; we are happy monotheists; and dualistic belief systems see things very differently.

Of course, we understand that God gets a lot of opposition here on earth. As C. S. Lewis observed, we live in “occupied territory.” But make no mistake about it, our faith believes in one God and, to quote Luther’s great hymn, “on earth is not his equal”—or anyplace else, for that matter. I think that, in this sense, many translations of John’s gospel don’t get the sense of things exactly right: it’s not just that the darkness has not overcome the light; it’s that in the end the darkness cannot and so will not overcome the light.

There’s another problem with this simplistic “darkness bad / light good” dichotomy: darkness has a natural place in the very order of things. God may have brought forth the light and declared it good—but notice that God did not obliterate the darkness. To the contrary, God gave the night a proportional role and preserved it. Indeed, we cannot have days without having nights.

This means that darkness gets its seasons and we will inescapably spend some part of our life there,  like it or not. “There is a time for everything,” Ecclesiastes tells us, and that includes the dark periods and places of existence. If something bad happens to us, or to someone we love, or to an individual or group for whom we care, it makes no sense to say we shouldn’t go into the darkness—we will and, if we are compassionate human beings, we probably even should.

Whether we should stay there is, of course, a different question entirely. That’s where the redeeming forces of hope and grace and salvation come in. Sure, the Bible candidly recognizes that the valley of the shadows exists and that we will walk there. But it also promises that we will not walk alone and that, with God’s help, we will pass through it.

Still, darkness is more than just an unavoidable lapse in our otherwise well-lit lives. Sometimes darkness has important lessons for us. A spell in the darkness can help us recalibrate our thoughts, our behaviors, and our priorities. Being the weak creatures we are, sometimes we need the darkness in order to appreciate the light and to take a fresh new pleasure in it. The Prodigal Son had to wallow in the dim and filthy corners of a pig sty before he could return to his father’s warmly lit home—and to himself.

We can even have a little fun with this idea. Before we buy into the “darkness bad / light good” cliché, think of all the physical places in your life that you do not want to be bathed in light. Your bedroom at 2:00 AM. A restaurant on Valentine’s Day. A movie theatre once the film has started. The other night I was driving down a pitch-black road and accidentally hit the button for the dome light inside my truck. I immediately started scrambling to restore the darkness—since I thought it might be a good idea if I could see where I was going. I needed the darkness inside to see the light guiding me outside.

So: darkness bad? It’s a useful shorthand symbol. But there’s more to it than that.

Now, with respect to light, I want to make a somewhat different point. And I want to get at it by starting with a foundational question: what is it about light that makes it such a powerful, compelling, useful symbol of goodness? After all, life has many other good things in it as well—cheeseburgers, for example. And yet Jesus does not caution us against putting our cheeseburgers under a basket. What are the properties of light that give it such awesome theological utility?

Before getting to that question, it may be worth noting that thousands of years ago something was true about light that is no longer the case: it was precious and almost entirely outside of the control of human beings. Today, with the flick of a switch or push of a button we can light up a house, a backyard, a highway, a football stadium—we can even connect a lamp to Alexa and call out “Let there be light!” and play god in extreme miniature.

For the vast majority of human history, however, this did not hold true. We urgently needed the light—to grow crops, to work by, to find our way, to travel safely, and so on. But it was hard to make and hard to come by. Whenever the power goes out we get a tiny taste of the helplessness with which the authors of all these biblical texts lived on an hour-by-hour day-by-day basis.

So, today, we tend to take the magic of light for granted. Rather than thinking of it as a wonderful and important thing we may scarcely think of it at all. Perhaps we can regain some of our appreciation for light—and why it meant so much to the authors of the Bible—by remembering how precious it once was and by looking closely at its properties.

A fairly obvious property of light is that it affects other things. It warms them. It pulls them out of the shadows. It illuminates them. Numerous biblical texts make this last point—that light can show the way for us and keep us from getting lost, or worse.

We’ve all had these sorts of experiences. I recall a few years ago staying out a bit too late on our boat on Lake Leelanau. It was an extraordinarily starless night and as we approached the shore I could barely make out our dock. Fortunately, we had a good strong flashlight on board, and in short order I could see where we needed to go. That same light led us down the dock, along the path through our woods, across the road, and safely up the farmhouse steps. Right in my hand I held a nascent sermon, complete with rechargeable batteries.

 

And, of course, light does not just affect things—it affects people. Like plants, we naturally bend toward the light. In the introduction to his brilliant translation of the gospels, the poet Stephen Mitchell refers to this as the “irresistible phototropism of the human soul.” I suspect it explains why a ragtag collection of hardboiled fishermen would leave their nets and immediately follow Jesus; they saw the light in him and rushed toward it.

Think about that first fall day when the sunlight makes the leaves glow orange and red and yellow. Think about that first winter day when the sunlight dances across the crystalline snow. Think about that first spring day when the sunlight teases the crocuses out of the ground. Think about that first summer day when the sunlight flashes over the waves on the water. “It’s beautiful outside; I’m going to go sit in my closet,” said no one, ever. We are hardwired to move toward the light. As Mitchell says: like plants, we are phototropic.

But light has other instructive properties as well. It can be dispersed—meaning that it can be broken down into its constituent colors. We see this when we put light through a prism or when the sunlight gives us a rainbow after a storm. In other words, it is through a diversity of colors working together that light is achieved. There’s a powerful lesson embedded in there, although we human being seem to have a lot of trouble getting it.

But the properties of light have still more to tell us. Light can be diffused—meaning that it can be spread out and scattered—and it can be diffracted—meaning that it can be bent. Unleashed and directed, light finds its way into the darkest and most remote corners. In the example of his life, Jesus shows us exactly how that works—and how it changes everything.

As some of you know, my wife Lisa is an avid photographer. A few years ago, she was watching an excellent instructional video by Joel Sartori, who has had a long and storied career taking pictures for National Geographic. At one point, he said something like this: “Everyone takes photographs of sunsets. Next time, turn around and look behind you and see where the light from that sunset has gone. Often, it is a better and more interesting shot.”

Throughout the gospels, Jesus tells us the same thing: “Turn around. Look at the neglected places. Watch how the light can go there, too. See how it makes things beautiful.”

  

Light has an additional property as well: it can be reflected. Light can make contact with something and return to its source. Light comes back.

Jesus understood this, a basic principle of the physics of divine light. If we send ours out into the world, we will get the benefits of it as well. As we give, so shall we receive. The brighter, the better, for the other, for us.

We need to pause and notice here that our understanding of the source of the light has shifted. In much of our religious language, the light comes from outside—from God, from Jesus, from the Holy Spirit ... like the headlights on my pickup. But Jesus plainly declares that the light comes from within us as well. As I noted earlier, in the Gospel of John Jesus declares “I am the light of the world.” But in our scripture reading for today, he also says “You are the light of the world.” This makes perfect sense coming from the one who said: “The Kingdom of God is within you.”

Permit me a brief detour on that phrase. The biblical scholar C. H. Roberts points out that the words usually translated as “within you” here literally mean “in your hands” or “within your power.” Theologian Charles Dodd explained the implications of that meaning: “That is, the Kingdom of God is not something for which you have to wait anxiously … but is an available possibility here and now, for those who are willing to receive it as a little child.”

This idea gets at such a universal truth that devout followers of other faiths have embraced it. Mahatma Gandhi wrote: “My experience tells me that the Kingdom of God is within us, and that we can realize it not by saying ‘Lord, Lord,’ but by doing His will and His work. If we wait for the Kingdom to come from outside, we shall be sadly mistaken.”

Think about it. You are the light of the world. The Kingdom of God is within you. That is what Jesus says to us, in as clear, unmistakable, and well-lit a way as he knows how. What good news. And what a daunting responsibility.

Because this, then, is what Jesus asks of us: What will you do? Where will you shine your light? How will you spread it, disperse it, bend it, diffuse it, refract it, direct it, share it? Who is the person, now sitting in darkness, who will lean into your light if you offer it? When will you toss away your bowl and give your internal dimmer switch a good, hard twist to the right?

         In 2010, a mine in northern Chile collapsed, trapping thirty-three men inside. It took sixty-nine days to rescue them. During that period, helpers were able to send food down to the miners and the miners were able to send videos up to the surface so they could communicate with their families. Perhaps some of you recall watching this drama unfold on television.

         Once supply lines were established, the miners asked for something else, too. Most of them were deeply religious men, so they requested Bibles, crucifixes, rosaries, small statutes of the Virgin Mary—whatever could be provided. The rescuers found a way to get these things to the miners, who built a shrine in the blackened space where they were huddled. There, 2,300 feet underground, three miles from the entrance, in the very heart of utmost darkness, the light went on … and those miners assembled a remote outpost of the Kingdom of God.

         There are no limits to where the light can go. There are no limits to where we can send it. There are no limits to where we can bring it. There are no limits to the places, the lives, the circumstances that the light can reach.

         And this is so because, through God, all things are possible. Even the most impossible things imaginable. Even that the Kingdom of God would be within us. Even that we would be the light of the world.

         Praise God that it is so.

         Amen.

Great Expectations

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Scripture: Luke 12:48

“From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required;

And from the one to whom much has been entrusted,

even more will be demanded.”

         At age seventeen, I had five great passions.

Four of them included: tinkering with the big blue 1955 Buick that I’d bought for three-hundred-and-fifty dollars; fishing for bass on the small and weedy lake where I grew up; writing for my high school newspaper; and trying to get a member of our high school’s cheerleading squad named Heidi to go on a date with me.

I quickly discovered that I was mildly competent at the first three and wildly clumsy and incompetent at the last. This is not modesty on my part. In my early efforts to woo Heidi I pointed out that she had the same name as our dog. You can imagine how that played.

         My fifth great passion—which I believe to be common among teenagers—was sleeping in late on Saturday morning. At this I excelled—I might even have been a prodigy of sorts. Left to my own devices, I would have blinked myself awake at around 1:00 in the afternoon, poking around in the refrigerator for breakfast just as my parents were finishing lunch.

         Alas, as things turned out I had precious few opportunities to exercise my special genius for slumber. My first-generation German-American father, the very embodiment of the storied Protestant work ethic of which sociologist Max Weber wrote, had other plans for me. God made Sunday for rest—but Saturday for labor—and my weekends always began with a long list of chores.

         I therefore did not hasten from bed. My father would call “Time to wake up!” and I would yell “I’ll be right down!” and go back to sleep. He’d call again “Let’s get at it!” and I would shout “I’m on my way!” and roll over. “We’ve got lots to do!” he would persist and I would call “Coming!” and adjust my pillow. The fourth call finally bestirred me with its inescapable logic: “Nobody else is going to do it for us!” “Okay,” I’d think to myself, “I give up. Fortunately, I left my clothes here in this convenient pile on my floor.”

         And work we did. Docks had to go in. Docks had to come out. The anchor on the raft needed re-setting. The pump needed priming. We had a shed to build. We had brush to clear. The grill wanted cleaning. The garage wanted sweeping.

“Somebody” needed to fix the fence. “Somebody” needed to haul two-hundred pounds of salt to the water softener. “Somebody” had to go to the nearest gas station—a forty-five minute round trip—to get fuel for the boat. I feel for those people whose fathers viewed them as nobody—but, at the time, I found being “somebody” no great honor.

         Cutting the lawn undoubtedly qualified as the worst chore. To save money, my father had cagily invested in a used Sears lawnmower that might have once belonged to Julius Caesar. It started reliably, somewhere between the two-hundredth and three-hundredth pull.

         Our lawn, which sat just a foot or two above lake level, routinely had snakes in it. And not just a few. Garters, racers, black water, Eastern hognose snakes—if it slithered its way around Michigan, we got them. So, while I mowed, I had to maintain a vigilant serpent patrol—because if I ran over one, I knew “somebody” would have to clean that mess up.

As a result, I developed a little ritual. If I saw a snake, I’d stop cutting, walk around the mower (this was before the days of the automatic shut-off safety feature that we now find on these machines), grab the snake behind the head, and throw it over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. Sometimes, later in the day, I’d see our neighbor’s son mowing their yard and tossing the snakes back.

         I carried all of these responsibilities heavily. My father expected so much of me. Why wouldn’t he just let me sleep? Was that so much to ask? Who was I hurting?

         Responsibilities tend to land in our lives with a thud. Sigmund Freud wrote that most people are frightened of responsibility, and we can understand why. Responsibility sounds hard. It sounds wearisome. And, perhaps most importantly, it sounds like it includes the possibility of failure and embarrassment and judgment and shame. Who wants any of that?

         We may feel these anxieties amplified when big responsibilities get joined with great expectations. In our good intentions, we sometimes say things like: “I know you can do it!” “I believe in you!” “You’ve got this!” And, I suppose, these sorts of statements sit much better than something like: “You, my friend, are destined for failure.” But I suspect that, at some point in our lives, each of us has felt a little uneasy when someone expressed much stronger confidence in us than we had in ourselves.

         We can imagine, then, how the followers of Jesus might have felt when he said to them the words we read in Luke chapter 12: “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.” That doesn’t sound very comforting, consoling, or carefree. That sounds like whopping big responsibilities and whopping great expectations—coming from no less an authority than the Son of the Living God.

         “I expect a lot of you” unsettles us when it comes from a parent or a teacher or a coach. Imagine it coming from the Savior of All Humankind.

What happened, his followers may have wondered, to the Jesus of Matthew chapter 11, who declared: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Now that sounds like someone who would let you sleep in!

It turns out, though, that on closer analysis we can reconcile these two themes of Jesus (“I expect much of you” and “my burden is light”)—and that doing so conveys an important lesson. To get at this, we will need to look at today’s scripture from Luke in its context. As is often the case, context provides our best tool to achieve clarity and our most effective weapon against confusion.

 The twelfth chapter of Luke has a distinctive structure. It begins by telling us that a massive crowd—thousands of people—had assembled to hear from Jesus. In the ensuing verses, Jesus then has two conversations in this setting—one with the whole crowd, and another one with just his disciples. Let me repeat that because it really matters here: in Luke chapter 12, Jesus has two different conversations with two different audiences—sometimes he’s talking to everyone who has gathered, sometimes just to his closest followers.

The chapter moves back and forth between these two dialogues: so verse one says “he began to speak first to his disciples”; but then in verse thirteen someone from the crowd makes a comment and Jesus addresses everyone; verse twenty-two suggests that he then turns his attention back toward his disciples; and so on and so on.

These conversations culminate in verses thirty-five through forty, where Jesus offers up a series of closely-related parables on the theme of readiness. The parables teach that those who follow Jesus must stand in a constant state of preparedness for his instruction and return—like the servants waiting for the master to return from the wedding banquet, and like the owner of a house watching for the unexpected thief.

In the course of delivering these parables, Jesus utters one of my favorite lines in the entirety of the gospels: “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit.” Let me give you that again: “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit.” Or, if you will, watch out for the snakes in your path, and be prepared to toss them out of your way.

 

By verse forty-one, all of this back-and-forth between audiences has left Peter confused. So Peter—who has the endearing quality of pretty much always saying whatever is on his mind at the moment—asks Jesus a pointed question. “Lord,” he inquires, “are you telling this parable for us or for everyone.” He wants to know: “Are you talking to them, or are you talking to me?”

As we would expect, and in the best rabbinic tradition, Jesus answers this question with another parable. Now, let me be completely honest: to our twenty-first-century ears, this parable makes for tough sledding. Many parables serve as the centerpieces for lots of sermons; this one, not so much.

In the parable, Jesus contrasts two different slaves. In both cases, the master has given the slave authority over the other slaves during his absence. In the first case, the master returns unexpectedly and finds the slave hard at work doing what he was told. Jesus calls this slave “blessed” and says that the master will reward him by putting him in charge of all his possessions.

Things don’t go so well for the second slave. Here, the master returns unexpectedly to find the slave he left in charge beating the other slaves, getting drunk, and otherwise generally disobeying instructions. Jesus says that the master thrashed this renegade slave “severely” and then—he rather graphically adds—“cut him into pieces.” As easy yokes and light burdens go, this doesn’t sound like one.

But we can’t let the imagery of the parable—which, I grant you, may make us squirm, perhaps by design—overwhelm the message of the parable. Remember: Jesus shares the parable to answer a specific question. And the specific question he’s asking is: are you talking to them, or are you talking to me?

As happens so often in the gospels, Jesus resists the binary choice. In essence, he says: “I am talking to anyone who will take up my word and my work and who will tend them in the world. Those who do so will be blessed—they will be given more and more of the care of my kingdom.”

Now, notice that we can easily reconcile this message with the message from chapter 11 of Matthew. We can almost hear Jesus adding: “Oh, and by the way. Those good people who will care for my kingdom? Well, their burden will be light, because the most powerful and loving force in the universe will be laboring beside them. When they need it, I will give them rest. Much will be expected of them. But that’s okay. Because they will never, ever toil alone. They will never do their work without me.”

In my view, our text for this morning has much less to do with responsibility as a burden than it does with responsibility as a blessing. As psychologist and concentration-camp-survivor Viktor Frankl recognized, responsibility is the blessing that gives our lives meaning. In fact, Frankl believed so strongly in the idea that he once said we should complement our Statue of Liberty on the East Coast with a Statue of Responsibility on the West.

It can sensibly be argued that responsibility is the blessing that gives our lives its greatest potential—even heroic potential. As that great philosopher, Bob Dylan, once observed: “I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.” We might say that the heroes of our faith—including the everyday heroes—are those who understand the degree of responsibility that comes with God’s love for us. And they do not just understand it—they delight in it. That responsibility becomes a source of perpetual joy.

*

Let me conclude by returning to my own little parable—the one with which I began—if I may. For some reason no doubt associated with the mysteries of adolescence, at age seventeen I had lost much of the sense of blessedness I had known at sixteen. At seventeen, I became somewhat jaundiced.

But, at sixteen, I didn’t mind driving into town for gasoline because I was still intoxicated by the thrill of steering that formidable old Buick around our crazy dirt roads. At sixteen, I didn’t mind loading salt into the softener because I was still impressed that I was strong enough to drape a bag over each shoulder and walk down our rickety basement stairs with them. At sixteen, I didn’t mind fixing the fence or working on the shed because I was still astonished that my father trusted me to swing a hammer and that I knew how to do it.

My father expected a lot of me. That was a great blessing. And, with the passage of time, it has become within my memories a great source of happiness. I was smarter at sixteen than seventeen—life works that way—and it can take a while to regain the wisdom of the child.

Oh, and there’s one other piece to this parable. All those chores I’ve described? I almost never did any of them alone. My dad usually worked beside me.

He even rode with me into town for gas. I didn’t understand why at the time—I did the driving and the pumping and he barely said a word. But now, at this age, I understand why. His simple act of being there made my burden easy and my yoke light—and he knew that. To paraphrase Jacob in the Hebrew Bible: “Surely, God was in that place, and I did not even know it.”

Sisters and brothers in Christ, everyone in this sanctuary this morning has their challenges, some very serious and daunting. That’s true. But it’s also true that everyone in this sanctuary is in their own way “dressed for action” and has their lamp lit. Much has been given to us. Jesus says: much is expected of us as a result. Importantly: he brings this to us not in the voice of tiresome duty but in the voice of blessing and of good news.

And so:

This morning, and every morning, may your blessings be an occasion for joy and delight.

But may they also be an inspiration to get out and get to work in God’s many fields with God’s many hands.

May we, every day, be “dressed for action”—because this tired old world needs our help.

And may we, every day, “keep our lamps lit”—because this dark old world needs all the light we can bring to it.

Or, as my plainspoken father used to put it:

“Time to wake up.

“Let’s get at it.

“We’ve got a lot to do.

“And nobody else is going to do it for us.”

And the people said: Amen.  

     

Of Loaves and Fishes and Grinches and Beads

Of Loaves and Fishes and Grinches and Beads

Len Niehoff

A sermon shared at the Suttons Bay Congregational Church

March 24, 2019

Scripture: Mark 6:35-44

            As some of you know, although I practice law and serve as an occasional itinerant preacher, my actual full-time gig is teaching at the University of Michigan Law School. My courses there include one in Evidence—the rules that determine what a jury may and may not consider during a trial. I’ve taught this subject for more than thirty years and I find it fascinating. If we’re ever seated next to each other at a dinner party, I will bore you senseless talking about it.

            Early in my teaching, I realized that many of my students assumed that the best evidence comes in the form of eyewitness testimony. In my experience, most non-lawyers think this way, too. If we want to know whether something happened, we often begin by asking whether anyone saw it happen. We tend to view eyewitness testimony as uniquely reliable.

            Social scientists and trial lawyers will tell you that it doesn’t exactly work that way. In fact, eyewitness testimony can suffer from all sorts of problems. A witness’s testimony can be distorted by their memory, their suggestibility, their assumptions, their biases, or their failures of perception—especially their failures of perception. Indeed, none of us is as observant as we think we are;  when Sherlock Holmes says to Dr. Watson “You see but you do not observe” he might as well be talking to everyone but himself.

            To make the point to my students, I engage them in a little exercise. At the beginning of a class, I hand out small pieces of paper for them to write on. I say: “Okay, I’ve been standing right in front of you for a few weeks and you’ve had plenty of opportunities to observe me. I’m going to leave the room. While I’m out, please write down your estimates of my height, my weight, and my age. And please describe the clothes I wore to class yesterday.” About ten minutes later I return and collect the results.

            Every year, things play out the same way: the students’ perceptions of me vary wildly. Guesses at my height range from 5’6” to 6’2”; my weight ranges from 150 pounds to 230 pounds; my age ranges from 50 to 70. And almost no one has the foggiest idea of how I was dressed the day before—even though I stood before them for more than an hour. (By the way, since you’re now all staring and trying to guess the answers to these questions I will tell you that I’m about 5’8, weigh around 195 pounds, and am 61 years old, which explains why the students who put me at 6’2 and 50 always receive A’s.)

Eyewitnesses perceive things differently—sometimes very differently. And having more witnesses does not necessarily help. Indeed, as my class experiment shows, additional witnesses can just mean additional variations.

            I think that understanding this reality about eyewitness testimony helps with the business of biblical interpretation. Religious skeptics sometimes point out that the scriptures give us inconsistent accounts of what happened around a particular event. For example, the four gospel accounts of the crucifixion and resurrection differ significantly in their details. And that’s a story we might think the Bible would report consistently given the fact that, well, it’s sort of important, being the foundation of our religion and all.

But those differences do absolutely nothing to undermine my faith. To the contrary, they are exactly what I would expect to find in reports of what eyewitnesses say they saw. If people did indeed see something, they will vary in how they describe it.

            In this sense, inconsistencies serve as a paradoxical source of comfort. They reassure us that the thing witnessed actually happened. So, sure, my students may vary in their guesses about my height, weight, age, and clothing. But not one of them harbors any doubt that I am indeed the guy who has been standing in front of them for weeks, talking to them about Evidence. No student has ever written on their piece of paper: “I do not know who you are. I have never seen you before.” In other words, testimony from multiple witnesses can differ in its details—and it usually does—but it tends to be consistent with respect to “the big picture.” And that can also help us understand what the big picture is.

So it goes with the eyewitness narratives we encounter in the Bible. Stories may differ in their details, but often the details frankly don’t matter much. The point of the story is that something amazing happened, and the stories will align in general terms about what that something amazing was.

 

            This brings us to our scripture for today, the story of the loaves and the fish and the feeding of the multitude. The scriptures give us a number of different versions of this story. Some passages describe this as a miracle involving five loaves and two fish, some as involving seven loaves and a few fish; some say that Jesus fed five thousand, some say he fed four; some say the disciples collected the leftovers in twelve small baskets, some say they used seven bigger ones; some versions suggest we’re talking about one miracle on one occasion, others indicate we’re talking about two miracles on two occasions.

            Should these variations trouble us? I think not at all. As I’ve suggested, these sorts of differences in accounts are completely consistent with what we routinely find when multiple witnesses see the same thing. Besides, all of the versions agree that something amazing happened and agree in general terms about what that something amazing was. And remember: in life, we want to strive to become seers of miracles—not counters of fishes.

            But here’s the main thing: I believe there is one number that matters more than all of those others I just gave you—the number four. The feeding of the multitudes is the only miracle reported in all four of the gospels: Matthew 14, Mark 6, Luke 9, and John 6. Clearly, something very important is going on in this story. I can almost hear our heavenly parent saying—as parents around the world do with considerable frequency—“how many times do I have to tell you this?”

            It’s tempting to think that the importance of this story lies in the magnitude of the miracle. After all, feeding thousands of people with a handful of bread and fish makes for one impressive feat. But I don’t think that’s the answer. After all, raising Lazarus from the dead seems at least as remarkable and that story appears only in the gospel of John.

            No, in my view this story derives its importance primarily from the attitude of the disciples that prompts Jesus to perform the miracle. In other words, I think this story matters so much—and has so much to teach us—not because of what Jesus does but because of why he does it. Of course, to some extent he multiplied the loaves and fish because he had lots of hungry people on his hands and felt compassion for them. But I think he also did it (and perhaps mainly did it) because of something his disciples said that he felt compelled to correct.

            On this point, the gospel narratives are extraordinarily consistent. In every one of them, the disciples say it is impossible to feed the gathered crowd with what they have. The details vary: for example, in Matthew 14 the disciples say: “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish” while in John 6 they say “Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.” But the thrust of their remarks is identical in every gospel: we don’t have enough; it can’t be done. In each of the gospels, the disciples express an attitude of scarcity—and in each of the gospels Jesus shows them to be wrong. “Not enough? Here, start passing the fish.”

            Jesus conveys this anti-scarcity message over and over and over again throughout the scriptures. Indeed, it lies at the center of many of the most familiar gospel stories. Remember the story of “the widow’s mite”: A poor widow contributed all she had to the treasury of the house of God. She could have held back—after all, money was scarce. But she did not and Jesus blessed her for it. (Mark 12) Or this story: A woman broke open a bottle of costly ointment and rubbed it into Jesus’s hair. Some of those present complained that she had “wasted” it—after all, such ointment was scarce. But Jesus admonished them and blessed her. (Mark 14)

            Now, I want you to notice something about all of these stories—they involve real scarcity. In contrast, we human beings can sometimes indulge in an attitude of  false scarcity. We manufacture a scarcity concern that does not actually exist and then use it to justify our behavior. Let me give you a trivial—but pointed—example that comes from a recent experience … because, you know, when you do sermons you walk through life looking for parables. And you find a lot of them. So here’s my latest.

            Lisa and I love New Orleans and the festive weeks leading up to Mardi Gras. As many of you know, lots of beads get thrown during Mardi Gras, sometimes under circumstances that have given the practice a regrettably sketchy reputation. But here’s what you need to understand if you’ve never been: thousands and thousands and thousands of strands of beads get thrown to people during Mardi Gras, mostly during parades from floats. Late at night, the streets are littered with them—they crunch under your feet. And all you need to do to get someone to throw some to you is wave and yell.

            A grand Mardi Gras tradition holds that if you catch a strand of beads, and you’ve already got some, then you look around to see if anyone near you needs any. If so, you give them away. On Mardi Gras itself—the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday—Lisa and I found ourselves in a parade stand surrounded by people who were giving beads away as fast as they could catch them—to strangers, to children, to the less mobile among us. An elderly woman visiting from England, who couldn’t stand up to catch any herself because of her physical limitations, laughed in delight as people around her draped dozens of strands of beads about her neck. “Does she have purple?” I heard someone yell. “I’ve got an excellent purple!”

            But then there was “that guy” and, as we all know, in life you never want to be “that guy.” He caught lots of beads, sometimes snagging them from the outstretched hands of others—and then kept all of them! He accumulated quite a stash, at one point bragging that last year he had brought home many pounds of them. Lisa leaned over to me and whispered conspiratorily: “We have a bead hog in our midst.” And here’s my point: the bead hog had brought an attitude of scarcity to an activity where there was anything but. My friends, whatever other shortages exist in the world, I’m here to tell you that there is no deficit of beads in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the days leading up to Lent.

            Now, contrast this with the Bible stories I referenced a moment ago. If you’ve got thousands of people to feed, then having a few loaves and fish is genuine scarcity. If you’re poor like the widow, then the money you give the church comes from genuine scarcity. If ointment is rare, then by definition there is a genuine scarcity of it. And yet, even in those circumstances where true scarcity exists, Jesus tells us that we must have an attitude of abundance.

            And Jesus tells us this—as he tells us all things—because he loves us more than we can imagine. He understood that an attitude of abundance makes our lives—and the lives of everyone around us—better. An attitude of scarcity, in contrast, breeds a smallness of heart and a corresponding smallness of life. Have you ever met a sad person who had an attitude of abundance? Neither have I. Have you ever met a spiritually mature person who had an attitude of scarcity? Me either.

            This is, of course, the point of one of the famous stories of that other great gospel writer—Dr. Seuss. The greedy Grinch that we meet at the beginning of his story has a shriveled, tiny heart that is “two sizes too small.” The generous Grinch that emerges at the end of the tale has a heart three times bigger—and, to go along with it, the “strength of ten Grinches, plus two!” We are all human beings and therefore, alas, full of Grinch potential. The question is: which Grinch are we going to be? The petty and childish one at the beginning? Or the spiritually mature one at the end … who gets to join hands and sing with Cindy Lou Who?

            Now, Jesus does not promise us that maintaining an attitude of abundance will come easily. He knew that genuine scarcity exists—indeed, he was surrounded by it. And he understood how easily an attitude of scarcity can infect our hearts and the hearts of everyone with whom we interact. He realized the temptations that exist to become that Grinch and that guy.

            But he also understood that an attitude of abundance has its own infectious quality. If we sow it, we will reap it. If we model it, others will embrace it. Many of us give to worthwhile organizations that try to address the genuine scarcities of the world—like Leelanau Christian Neighbors—because someone else pointed the way for us out of their spirit of abundance.

            And, of course, a central point of this message has nothing to do with material things. It has to do with things like patience, and forgiveness, and compassion, and empathy, and love—things that exist in infinite quantities, but that can become scarce if we choose to make them so. Jesus tells us they are plentiful, indeed they are inside us all the time. Let ‘em out, he says, and pass them around like loaves and fishes.

  

Going through life with an attitude of abundance is like riding along on a float and throwing shiny gifts into crowds of people you don’t even know. By this, Jesus said, everyone will know that we are his disciples. They will know that we are Christians by our love.

*

            Perhaps you’re wondering: what became of the bead hog? Well, he wandered away for a while, and I assumed he was gone for good, but then he came back. At first, I thought he seemed a bit sheepish because of his earlier bead-hoarding. But then he sidled right up next to the street, in front of everybody else, where the opportunities for catching things were the best. I thought to myself: “Wow. He’s watching all these people give all this stuff away and he still doesn’t get it.”

But then a very special prize much rarer than a strand of beads—a bright yellow plastic horn, ideal for tooting—flew from a float, passed through his fingers, and dropped at his feet behind him. He spun around, snatched it up, paused for a moment, and then handed it to me. Then he caught another prize—a foam football—and stuck it in the hands of a boy standing next to him. A whistle, a medallion, a coin … he caught them and passed them around! Sure, he still kept some beads—as did we all. But he was giving them away as well.

When last I saw him, he was headed away from the parade with his wife, working his way through the throngs of people. In addition to some strands of beads, he was wearing something else—something I hadn’t seen on him all morning long. It was a faint, but clearly discernible, smile. For the first time, he actually looked happy.

Who knows?

Perhaps it was because his heart had grown three times bigger that day.

Ah, praise God that it might be so.

And the people said: Amen.