July 28, 2024 - The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
Good morning, Epiphany. Again, this week I’d like to invite any kids present to go with Miss Sheri to children’s church; we do need more volunteers for that, so if you’re an adult who would be willing to give one Sunday a month to help love our little ones at Epiphany well, please talk to me after service. As you might have heard, Abbey and I spent much of our week over at Peace Lutheran on Blue Star Highway helping with an ecumenical Vacation Bible School for elementary-age kids. I’m excited to see us at Epiphany grow together into our welcome to families and kiddos as the years go on.
I think the sermon for today fits into that welcome quite well, and it’s based both on our lectionary passages and on a phrase I first heard a few years ago related to children’s and youth ministry, but it certainly applies elsewhere. I couldn’t shake it this week, and so I’ll start the sermon with it, grammar errors and all: “What you win them with is what you win them to.” I’ll repeat it.
“What you win them with is what you win them to.”
I think this phrase is most often repeated in churchy circles, so if you haven’t heard it, that’s okay. I found it applicable even as a sportswriter... in the spring of 2023, the New York Mets professional baseball team installed a new jumbotron at their ballpark in Queens. Their press release bragged that it was over 24,000 square feet of LED, a little bigger than the TV you might have in your living room, and that made it the largest scoreboard across all professional ballparks. It’s absolutely massive, and the Tigers added one in their ballpark in Detroit this year that nearly matches it, though it comes in second place.
In the spring of 2023, though, I was struck by the idea that the Mets somehow felt like what was missing at their baseball games was another digital screen, and an enormous and inescapable one. Baseball, once the main event, was apparently no longer enough of an attraction to bring people to the game and keep them entertained in their seats... and they might be right, maybe our attention spans aren’t built for baseball anymore. But the sermon theme for today, “what you win them with is what you win them to,” certainly applies here: the Mets, I personally think, fundamentally undervalued and even undermined the reason some people go to the ballpark: to watch baseball. They were trying to win people with flashy graphics and state-of-the-art technology, and maybe it worked on some level, but to what end? Maybe they were “winning people to consume more entertainment and spend more money” and the baseball itself never really mattered anyway? Who knows.
If that example didn’t connect with you, that’s okay, because I do know that the phrase applies well to church ministry, to the way we as the body of Christ engage the world. Without knocking the megachurch model that has been so popular in the last few decades too much.... no, this is certainly a criticism of that model. If you get people in the doors of your church, if you “win them to Jesus” by promising them an endlessly happy life of prosperity and peace in exchange for their attendance and donations, they will be deeply confused when God doesn’t deliver that life of prosperity and peace. If you get people in the doors, if you win them with a flashy rock concert of happy and upbeat praise, they will likely be deeply confused when God’s presence is not loud, when life does not feel like a happy concert. I know this because much of my generation attended churches like these, and now, many of them are frustrated and “deconstructing” their faith.
For all churches, though, if you win people to Jesus by turning the church into a commodity they can consume and not a community in which to participate, they will be deeply confused when they no longer feel “fed,” and they will likely leave for another, easier option.
It might not surprise you, by my presence here, that I honestly think we in the Episcopal Church understand this pretty well. We provide a deep history and tradition that connects us with the bigger story of the global and historic church, connected back centuries and centuries, and we invite everyone to participate in those ancient and formative traditions in our services, from acolytes and lay eucharistic ministers to communal singing, with nearly all of our hymns older than anyone in this room. (I think that's a good thing!) We are also radically welcoming, pushing to make sure everyone understands they are loved, that they are welcome, just as they are, and that they are invited, as Paul writes to the Ephesians this week, to know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge and be filled with all the fullness of God... We really do pretty well here.
We could, of course, easily choose to take a different stance. The mainline church in America is shrinking, and pretty rapidly. I read an article this week that for 7,000 Episcopal churches in America, there are now fewer than 6,000 priests, with more retiring than being ordained each year. In the pews, the problem is even more pronounced: a priest wrote famously in December that if numeric trends continued, there would be zero Episcopalians by 2040... a bit alarmist, but the rapid decrease in numbers across our country is surely not encouraging. Now that could push churches to panic, to scramble to find what new and flashy thing might best win these confounding young people. Or it could cause us to live in fear, assuming that, like for the disciples in our Gospel today, the situation being faced seemed hopeless.
Though the Old Testament reading this week certainly includes a good and memorable example of a faithful man of God turning his back on the ways he was taught out of his own fear of being caught in sin... our Gospel reading narrows in on our fears and God’s response to them a little more directly, and with an equally famous story; it’s just an unusually rich lectionary this week.
The disciples here in the Gospel of John have crossed the Sea of Galilee with Jesus and are now engaging a large crowd. I preached last week that in Mark’s narrative, the disciples were tired and then they rested as Jesus directed. But here in John’s Gospel, the focus is on what Jesus was up to while they did. Jesus is healing the sick – he is compassionate on the sheep without a shepherd – and it came time for the assembled masses to eat. But what were they to eat? The disciples had not planned for this... we’ve established that they were likely fleeing one side of the lake and then resting... and now, they were faced with a dilemma: they only had five loaves and two fish. The disciple Andrew asks Jesus with alarm, “What are these few among so many people?”
This miracle, the feeding of the five thousand, is the only miracle recorded in all four Gospels. It is a pivotal point in the text, and so it is much debated and commented on and preached on. You’ve likely heard or preached a good sermon on it before, maybe even better than this one. One commentary I particularly appreciate talks about this miracle primarily as Jesus testing the disciples’ faith. John says as much in verse 6, “for Jesus himself knew what he was going to do.” These disciples, then, are present on the far side of the Sea of Galilee with a man whom no one can explain, a prophet, perhaps, who is capable of amazing signs and wonders. They themselves just preached his name and performed miracles of their own around the region, and now... now, they are worried about dinner. Dinner.
In some of the gospel accounts of this passage, the disciples insist that Jesus send people away for their own good; there simply isn’t enough food to go around. In John, they’re simply flummoxed, they don’t know what to do.
But what the disciples fail to acknowledge here, and what I believe many of us Christians fail to understand today, is that with Jesus, there is always more than enough.
Jesus performed no flashy signs, he did not call everyone’s attention up on a stage and then queue the lights and the music and put the focus on himself and his magic tricks, of turning five loaves and two fish into food for thousands. He just gave, abundantly, as much as people wanted, and all somehow were filled, with plenty leftover.
Some commentators describe this as a miracle of community. I really like this... as the people saw that Jesus and the disciples were freely giving, then they too freely gave of their own secret just-in-case stashes, and all were fed. Others focus on the earthiness of this miracle: sitting in the “great deal of grass,” the “five barley loaves,” the fish, the baskets, the fragments... we can see and feel this story. This is God engaging in the real. Still others make a clear connection to our celebration of the Eucharist, how Jesus died once for all two thousand years ago and Christians are still breaking his body, the bread of life today.
All of those interpretations are really good, there’s simply a lot to preach with today.
But for me this morning, for us as the Church of the Epiphany, I want to focus on what act made the people so excited that, John says, they were going to take Jesus and force him to be king. The people were excited and amazed, I believe, by Jesus’s abundant, unexplainable, miraculous generosity in the face of apparent scarcity...
And they wanted to live into that for the rest of their lives.
See, fear and doubt led the disciples to think that it was impossible to feed the crowd, even after all they had seen. Fear and doubt led the disciples to focus on temporal details in the presence of the eternal son of God, to echo today’s collect. Fear and doubt led the disciples to forget who they were standing beside... to forget who it was they were following... to worry about minutia.
Now, they could have planned better. They could have had a well-orchestrated feeding program, they could have been working non-stop to have it ready instead of resting, they could have secured donations ahead of time and organized an orderly line. The disciples could have put up a 24,000-square-foot LED billboard advertising the program. But then... they would be winning the people with their efficiency, with their organization, with their details, with their marketing, instead of winning the people with abundant love. And, most importantly, they would be winning them to the same need for efficiency, marketing, and organization instead of winning them to a community of abundant love.
This church is a really remarkable place... Epiphany prides itself on its spirit of welcome, on its community brunch, on its open doors, on the general spirit of this place. And the Episcopal Church as a whole prides itself on its rich theology and forming liturgy, on its connection to centuries of church tradition, on its stance of radical love and invitation and inclusion. These are things worthy of pride, of living into.
If we keep these things at the center at Epiphany, the welcome, the love, the liturgy, the invitation, then when we interact with others, we will actually win them to something good and true, to a chance to live into the love of Christ in community, something we are all so grateful to be a part of.
And we do that not just as a community but also as individuals in our daily lives. We must not, like the disciples in our Gospel story this morning, live out of our fear and doubt and focus on minutia while forgetting that the miraculous Jesus is himself alongside us, capable of anything and waiting for us to join him in a different way of being in the world. We must instead remember that “what we win them with is what we win them to,” and when we model the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth in our daily interactions, in our radical welcome, and in our abundant and overflowing love, we are simply inviting all around us to join in on the goodness that God would have for us, today and every day.
Amen.
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