With the sudden (if
brief) arrival of summer, today feels like a good day to hear the
story of the most famous picnic of all time.
We all know it so well
– and it may be tempting to just enjoy sitting on that sunny
hillside, part of the crowd that listens to Jesus....knowing that we
can trust him to feed us when the time comes.
That's good – and
true.
We DO need to take time
to sit still and listen to Jesus – and he WILL ensure that all are
fed, if we trust him to do so.
But there are other
parts of the account that are also worth our time.
Jesus worked the
miracle – but he needed that little boy, who gave everything that
he had with him.
He didn't stop to think
about practicalities, to ponder the impossibility of that small
packed lunch feeding the assembled multitude...He was instead,
impressively impulsive...just the way that younger children always
are when you ask for a volunteer.
Sometimes God needs us
to be wildly impractical, to allow ourselves to be swept up in his
vision, to offer ourselves to attempt the impossible...and always,
always, he takes the little that we offer and transforms it beyond
our wildest dreams.
But we do need to be
obedient...Jesus asked the disciples to get the crowd seated – and
they did their part, as did the crowd, before there was any evidence
of food on the horizon.
Too often, I fear, I
limit God's work in my life by assuming that nothing is going to
happen.
Instead of sitting down
expectantly, I'm the one arguing about how it can't really
work...insisting that really we ought to have a plan, should maybe
send a group to buy supplies...missing the miracle by my own stubborn
insistence that it cant really happen.
To live in obedient
hope leaves the way clear for God to do great things in the most
unlikely situations...
And God's generosity is
unstinting, limitless
When those gathered on
the hillside had been well and truly fed – there were twelve
baskets of fragments left.
Jesus took the little
that was offered and transformed it into enough and to spare.
He still
does...whenever we let him.
You see, we really
don't need to view the world from a perspective of scarcity.
So often we live as if
we must, above all, protect ourselves and those dear to us.
We plan our living and
our giving as if there is not enough to go round – though we know,
if we stop to consider, that there is enough for our need, if not for
our greed...that even today, it would not take a huge effort to
redistribute wealth & resources to ensure that everyone had
sufficient.
But we cling on,
worried that we might go short...and we are no better in the things
of faith – for we assert the claims of our own brand of belief in
ways that suggest that we can't cope if God loves others as well as
us.
Like a child again, but
this time one intent on attention seeking we jump up and down
demanding that God notices US...engages with US...over HERE...We're
the real Christians, the true Church.......
We forget that God so
loved the WORLD – each and every man, woman and child who has ever
lived...so much that he sent his only Son.
There are no
limits.
I
pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints,
what is the breadth and length and height and depth....
NO
LIMITS.
God longs to fill us,
as Paul grasped after his own vision expanded to include those
whom he'd once seen as beyond God's reach
“that you may be filled with all the
fulness of God”
Fulness of life.
Fulness of love.
Love without conditions, limits or end.
Love that enfolds each
one of us here.
Love that transforms
us...and our half hearted, inadequate offerings, just as a fragment
of bread and a sip of wine are transformed through God's grace into
His Body & Blood – all that we need to sustain us as we journey
in faith.
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