Beyond Our Expectation

2 Kings 4:42-44; Ephesians 3:14-21; John 6:1-21

What did you expect when you came today? I’m guessing that you expected the usual. Three hymns, some musical responses, some sort of special music, offering and prayers, fantastic organ music, and another stellar sermon. Right? I hope the sermon is stellar. We’ll know in 18 minutes.

Did you expect to be spiritually fed? Did you expect to be blessed by what transpires here? Did you pray last night or this morning that God might use the words spoken, the songs sung, the prayers offered, the people present to do something blessed for someone in these seats or outside of these walls? Did you expect the Spirit to be present powerfully?

I’m sure each of us expected something. Did we expect enough? The account in John’s gospel about the feeding of the 5,000 and the brief account in 2 Kings both deal with low expectations. Neither the disciples with their five loaves and two fish nor Elisha’s servant with the donated 20 barley loaves expect enough.

Why is it that we think God is stingy? Our God is not a parsimonious God. We are the children of a generous God. God fed the Israelites in the wilderness with manna for 40 years. No one had too little and no one had too much. Elisha’s mentor, Elijah, stayed with a non-Israelite woman in Zarephath. She had enough flour and oil to make one dinner’s worth of bread. Neither the flour nor the oil ran out and the widow, her son, and Elijah ate for many days (1 Kings 17:8-16). God delivers what is necessary when it is needed.

I think that we are afraid of plenty. That is, afraid of the plenty that God wants to give us. The plenty that God wants to hand us isn’t a free handout. It’s a burden. That’s how we feel. The love, the mercy, the grace, the redemption that God wants to give us is a burden because we have to act responsibly with it. We have to receive it. We have to respond to it. All that God lavishes on us can’t be stored up, set aside for a rainy day.

We say the words quickly and absent-mindedly, but every time we say the Lord’s Prayer we are hit square in the gut with one aspect of the burden of God’s generosity: “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” This responsibility gets to us in other ways. Be merciful as you have received mercy. Do to others as you would have them do to you. You have received without having to pay, therefore, give without demanding payment.

Our three verses about Elisha and bread don’t deny the presence of suffering. God does not ignore suffering. God may not always address it in the ways we humans being think that it needs to be addressed. Suffering does exist. And it is not just attacks in movie theaters or car bombings or Christian pastors accused of sedition by the non-Christian majority elite. Suffering isn’t only 20 hours a week at $7.35 an hour or having to buy school uniforms or choosing between food and medication.

Suffering is acute loneliness. Suffering is the inability to find a way to fit in with others. Suffering is ethnic or racial or gender discrimination. Suffering is fear of one’s own shadow. Suffering is having to hide one’s opinions, ideas, identity. Suffering is feeling so burdened by guilt and remorse that there is no hope. Suffering is not knowing that there is a God, and that God is truly gracious, desiring to give salvation to all who are moved by the Spirit to recognize and accept God’s redeeming work in Christ.

There is no scarcity of suffering. There is also no scarcity in God’s blessings.

People felt pretty low in the time that Elisha lived in Gilgal. The land was beset by a series of wars between Israel and Syria, and a famine as well. Suffering reigned. But the divine message is clear. It is signed in the name of the prophet: Elisha, which means, “God has granted salvation.”

Scarcity was the only game in town. The man from Baal-shalishah was tremendously generous. Elisha chooses not to receive the gift for himself but to offer it to God’s people in need. Elisha’s servant sees the 20 loaves as an impossibly small amount to meet the needs of a hundred people, the “sons of the prophets.” Elisha tells him to do it anyway. The people will eat and there will be leftovers. And it was so.

The disciples acted the same way with their trove of five loaves and two fish. The crowd was 5,000, as if everyone in Waverly had gathered at the high school football stadium.

We don’t know if Elisha’s servant was convicted by the prophet’s invocation of God’s word or if he simply acquiesced to the prophet’s command. The same wondering could be made about Jesus’ disciples. Did they believe or did they pout?

In both cases the word of the Lord is true. To try and figure out the mechanics of the miracles is to miss the whole point of either event. What is clear is that in the midst of human need an individual is generous in offering the best that is available and the gift is given to God’s people. The result is beyond human expectation. That is the point. God always works beyond our expectations.

So why don’t we raise our expectations? Who do we doubt? Why do we short-change God’s intent and ability to be generous, merciful, and gracious to us? In the words of British theologian N. T. Wright, “We have seen the future in the resurrection of Jesus and it is real.”

We are very good at budgeting our resources and our time with a careful eye to the limitations that we perceive. There are only so many hours in a day. There are only so many pennies in a dollar. There are only so many people. There is only so much energy and physical capacity. We go overboard counting the cost of doing anything and so we budget shortfall, and believing shortfall we lower our vision and reduce our passion.

We need to be honest about our needs – as individuals, as God’s people in this place. But we also need to break out of our self-imposed prison of poverty (in heart, soul, mind, and strength) and trust the unlimited God we serve.

God has called us to holy work of proclaiming the gospel for the salvation of humankind; sheltering, nurturing, and fostering the fellowship of the children of God; maintaining divine worship; preserving the truth; promoting social righteousness; and exhibiting the Kingdom of Heaven to the world. Yet we are afraid to ask God for the basic necessities that God provides.

When we are totting up our resources for any activity, we fail to include God’s contribution. How many times have we been contacted by a college, a charity, even a political party with the message that our gift will be matched two for one or three for one? God is the original match giver. Only we don’t know the ratio. We don’t know the threshold at which the match kicks in. We only know that we don’t have enough by ourselves. And we forget that God wants to use what we have and make it go farther than we can imagine.

You probably think that I mean money. Money is only one resource. God wants us to offer the best of everything we are as well as what we have. God wants our best faith. It is not too small that God can’t use it if we give it over to God. God wants our best praying, however humble and tongue-tied it might be. God wants our best attempt to grapple with the words we call the Bible and believe that the Spirit will take our scripture wrestling and use them to open our hearts and minds to new vistas of God’s activity in the world. God wants our best attentiveness to God so that God can make visible in small ways through us the grand and glorious love that God lavishes all around.

Elisha and Jesus may seem to be cavalier with the way they nonchalantly tell the folks around them to distribute the goods. The truth of the matter is that they are being very prudent. Elisha and Jesus are able to recognize the presence and will of God. Elisha and Jesus challenge us to put on prophetic eyes to see beyond worldly estimations of resources to God’s abundant blessings at work in the world. We can raise our expectations as well as discover how we can participate with God in holy work.

Who knows what will happen? And that’s all right when God is in charge. Let it be so! Amen.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com. 
Copyright © 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.