When Words Fail: The Practice of Feeling Pain

A sermon by Jennifer W. Davidson, Ph.D. | August 21, 2011

Throughout the summer, Shell Ridge has been moving its way through Barbara Brown Taylor’s book An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith—each Sunday devoted to a chapter in this book in which Barbara Brown Taylor introduces us to various everyday experiences and suggests how we might engage them as spiritual practices that draw us closer to an experience of the Holy in the midst of the Everyday.

This week’s theme is an odd one, in some ways. Barbara Brown Taylor calls it “The Practice ofFeeling Pain.” She shares with us some of her own experiences of physical pain—and reflects on the Book of Job.

But the idea of feeling pain as spiritual practice is a strange one for many of us. Many of the practices Taylor writes about have some element of choice to them—we can choose to encounter others in a way that helps to cultivate community; we can choose to incorporate more Sabbath moments into our lives. But pain is something that happens to us. And, whenever possible, most of us would rather choose not to experience pain. Pain is, for the most part, an unwelcome experience. More, pain can be tremendously isolating, disorienting, and frightening. Pain can be something over which we have no control. Worse, pain can be something inflicted upon us by someone else—by someone we don’t know, or by someone we love. Sometimes intentionally. Sometimes ruthlessly. Nonetheless, pain is something everyoneexperiences in one way or another.

Pain is one of those topics where in order to say anything about it, it seems we have to say many things about it—and to say them all at once; because to say any one thing about pain atone time is to seem like you are lying about the other aspects of pain. In other words, it’s hard to say one thing about pain without saying it wrong. And a lot of what feels like the truth about pain depends on one thing: are you currently in pain? Pain in retrospect is something entirely different from the experience of pain in the moment.

So because this is summer, and we can do things just a little differently. And because pain is such a multilayered, multifaceted topic—I want to do something just a little differently in this morning’s sermon. I’m offering this sermon in three movements. Each movement says something about pain, but none says all that could be said. I’m also not going to try to resolve the movements, or to tidy them up in a way that gives us all one solid thing to hold onto at the end.

My hope is, in offering a sermon in this form, that we end up saying some true things about pain. And, more, some true things that carry us ever into a more intimate, more sustaining relationship with the Eternal, Loving One.

Movement I: Anguish

On the fourth Sunday of Advent, eleven years ago, my friend’s daughter was driving to a church potluck, her brother sitting beside her, when a drunk driver plowed into their car and killed her instantly. Heather was an honors student in her senior year in college. She’d just come home two days earlier for winter break. She was engaged to be married, the date set for shortly after graduation that May.

That same morning, Heather had stood with the rest of her family at the front of the church, lighting the Advent candle. My friend, her father, was the choir director there. He had been my piano teacher, but also a mentor, and a confidante.

At Heather’s funeral, three days before Christmas, I watched as the family recessed after the service. Heather’s brother, just out of the hospital himself, with long months of surgeries and recovery stretched before him, walked slowly beside his mother. My friend Tom walked alone behind them. Anguish.

The book of Lamentations from which we read this morning’s scripture is a slim volume, only five chapters long. It is a book of poetry—passionate, evocative, powerful.

As laments do, the poems hold God by the collar and call God to account for the reality of death, destruction, violence, sickness, hunger, torture, and abuse. The overall tone is one of communal mourning—the City Jerusalem speaking for the whole of its people.

But the third chapter marks a significant break as it moves from the communal lament to the personal. It’s opening line—“I am the man who has seen affliction”—alerts us immediately to this shift. It is no longer Jerusalem speaking, but one man speaking for himself, recounting what he has seen with his own eyes. We are in a new vein, the intimate realm of the heart.

Several months after the funeral, I sat across from Tom in a diner. He told me that for days, he kept trying to physically shake the words of the police officer out of his head. He felt like he was going insane with it, just trying to get away from the words that had informed him of his daughter’s death. Then he looked me in the eye and said, in a voice held barely in check, “I don’t know if I believe in God anymore, but if God exists, I hope we never meet face-to-face.”

“God has made my teeth grind on gravel and made me cower in ashes; my soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is; so I say, ‘Gone is my glory, and all that I had hoped for from God” (3:16-18).

That day, Tom told me he’d been reading Shakespeare lately. “I find a lot more in Shakespeare than I do in scripture.” He said. This is what happens when scripture is sanitized and expurgated of anything visceral as it is in so many congregations—when we do not read together the texts of Lamentations and Job. In Tom’s experience, he was the first one to levy accusations against the divine. So he carried the even greater weight of particularity on his shoulders: the first and only one to rage at God.

Yet Tom wasn’t the first and only one to do this at all. The book of Lamentations, and Job, and many of the Psalms, provide us with models of just such behavior. What kind of God would allow such accusations to remain a part of that God’s Holy Scriptures?

For me, the answer is clear: a God who remains with us unflinchingly when we rage in despair; a God who absorbs in love all the blows we can muster; a God who desires and longs for us when we no longer know what we are capable of doing; a God whose ‘steadfast love never ceases, whose mercies never end, but are renewed every morning” (3:22-23).

All of this is true. But equally true was the rage and despair expressed by Tom and the poet of Lamentations 3. God’s love does not solve our anguish. Nor does our anguish unravel that love. Hope begins in the juxtaposition of the two, in the very collision of human anguish and God’s love. The swirling confusion, indeed the grace, is that neither one is diminished in the presence of the other.

A couple weeks ago I saw Tom again for the first time in ten years. As we sat together, talking about all that has happened over the years, it became quickly evident that Heather’s death—and his experience of grief—has been woven into the warp and woof of his everyday life. It isnot that the pain is diminished so much as it is always a part of everything he does.

The chord remains unresolved in Tom’s life, and always will be. Tom pointed out to me the photograph that hangs over the sofa in their living room. It’s a brilliant, vivid photograph of a tall tree, its branches sweeping down, a weeping willow. Tom tells me that their son John gave it to them at his wedding only a few months before. “I didn’t know what it was,” Tom said, “Until he told me. It is the tree they planted in Heather’s memory at her high school.” We gazed at the photograph for a while in silence. What is striking about it is not only how beautiful it is, but how tall the tree is.

Loss and grief—and anguish—and the passing of time. [1]

Movement 2: Isolation

When words fail. And they do fail. Harvard professor Elaine Scarry wrote a remarkable book called The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, in which she highlights for us the utter inexpressibility and incommunicability of pain. Pain defies description and therefore defies language; and in some cases erases language—reducing the sufferer to moans, groans, screams or whimpers. We don’t know how to tell others about our pain—words come up short. Even the doctor who asks us to measure our pain from 1 to 10 knows that everyone’s 1 and everyone’s 10 is different. And a number says next to nothing about how it actually feels.

It is in this sense that pain is unshareable. Virginia Woolf writes, “The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her, but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor, and language at once runs dry.” Elaine Scarry goes on to add, “True of the headache, Woolf’s account is of course more radically true of the severe and prolonged pain that may accompany cancer or burns or phantom limb or stroke…Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it." [2]

One of the (many) unfortunate consequences of the inexpressibility of pain is that the one who is feeling pain, knows it is there. But the one who is not feeling the pain, can’t quite be sure.

Many, many times as a mother, I have wished that my son and I each came with dataports where I could plug a usb cord into his dataport and then plug it into my own and then feel exactly what he is feeling. I thought of it a lot when he was only an infant, and couldn’t tell me why he was crying or where he hurt. But it is really no less true today if he comes home with a sore shoulder after pitching—just how does it hurt? I want to know. Is it a dull ache? or a sharp one? Is it sustained? In the front of the shoulder? Inside the shoulder? He will try to tell me, but the truth is, I can never know.

“To have pain is to have certainty,” writes Elaine Scarry. “To hear about pain is to have doubt.”

Pain isolates because words fail. This is such an important thing to remember for those in our midst who are in the long, lonely wilderness of pain—whether it is the pain of a diagnosis, the pain of sustained illness, the chronic pain that some of us live with, or the pain of mental illness or addiction.

But there are also those who exploit the extent to which pain isolates—on the personal level—by those who abuse others. And on a communal/political level, by those who perpetrate torture. Pain in these contexts is deployed in order to separate people from one another. In order to break down relationship and connection. To isolate.

This is the pain experienced by Jesus who faced the torture perpetrated by the Empire of Rome. On the night before he was tortured to death, Jesus knew very well that the community that had formed around him was about to be torn apart. He was aware already that one of his disciples had been so gripped by anxiety that he had betrayed Jesus to those who would soon torture him. But more than that, Jesus knew that the dis-integration of his whole community was about to take place: his followers were about to abandon him and one another.

The effects of torture in the first century were the same as they are in the twenty-first century. The Center for Victims of Torture puts it succinctly: “Torture is the deliberate and systematic dismantling of a person’s identity and humanity. Torture’s purpose is to destroy a sense of community, eliminate leaders, and create a climate of fear.” [3]

It was precisely these forces that Jesus was confronting as he entered the week of his suffering. Jesus warned his disciples that they would all desert him because of what he was about to go through. He urged them to recognize that when the leader, the shepherd is eliminated, then the community, the flock, will be destroyed. Jesus knew that the torture he would face was intended to dismantle his identity and his humanity.

So he did the most remarkable thing. Before his humanity and his identity could be stripped away from him at the hands of the Empire, he gave himself away.

“This is my body,” he told his disciples—and they ate. “This is my blood,” he declared to them. And they drank. And in eating and drinking, they became—and we continue to become—the body of Christ. No longer an isolated individual, Jesus gave his identity away to his community of followers in such a way that—though they may disperse for a time—the Empire could not ultimately break that community apart.

As followers of Christ, we participate in the pain of one another—even in the midst of the isolation it perpetuates. Whether illness, abuse, or torture, to be the Body of Christ is to be present to one another, to refuse to give in to allowing another to be cast off and isolated. To be truth-tellers even when it is unpopular or even unsafe to do so. To provide places of safety, and places for story-telling, even unspeakable stories.

Movement 3: Power and Presence

It was in the experience of giving birth that I came to know, vividly and unforgettably, the power that resides in pain. In the weeks leading up to my due date, the midwife coached my birthing class, to understand that everything in Western culture teaches us to resist pain. We are taught to fight pain, to defeat pain, to defy pain. But labor pains are different, she said.

You should not resist labor pains, but enter into them. To fight pain, we tense up our muscles. But to work with pain, we must relax into it. One way to know if you are fighting pain, she advised us, is to notice if you are clenching your teeth or not. If your teeth are clenched, you are fighting the pain. You must instead relax your jaws, keep your teeth apart. Though your lips may be closed, your jaw should be slack.

You can also tell by the way you are vocalizing during labor. There is possibly no more resonant a sound than that of a woman groaning in labor pains. These groans arise from deep inside the laboring woman’s body, and accompany each wave of every contraction. As the contraction’s power rises and falls, so also do the groans—rising and falling in volume, but not, when most productively sounded, in pitch.

Groaning in labor pains, as my midwife coached, is part of what powers forth the birthing moment. Unlike the high pitched screams often heard in popularized, Hollywood depictions of labor, the groaning of labor pains are at their most powerful when the woman’s jaw is relaxed, and her pitch is low, deep, and rich. If the pitch rises, this a cue to the midwife that the laboring woman is tensing up, resisting the pain, and fighting the contraction rather than working with it.

The pain of labor, in my experience, creates its own space and its own time. But it is a space and time that is also utterly aware of this space and time. The contractions, as they grow in force and power, become absolute. They are all. Everything. There is nothing else but the contraction, the sound of the labor groans, the entering, the heart, the easing, and the absence.

The pain of labor is different from other pain because it is meaningful from the start—the woman in labor knows why she is in pain. It is a hopeful pain, though by no means danger-free—the hoped-for outcome is life, though many of us have known deeply painful other endings of labor.

But the force embodied in that pain is nothing less than the force of life. The pain of all of life is distilled in those contractions. The birthing woman must find a way to work with that power, not resist it, indeed become pain and power itself to bring forth life.

“We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:22).

The early Christian mystic Paul wrote this to the Christian believers in Rome. All of creation groans with the resonant groans of labor. We are all caught up in those labor pains those contractions of a cosmos longing to birth forth loving relationship and reconciliation.

The groans ride on the power of the birthing cosmos. It is a pain that is absolute. It is everything. And like every pain, it defies language. In fact, at times, our prayers themselves come to a place of utter wordlessness, and it is at these times that the Spirit prays on our behalf. Paul goes on to say, “The Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8:26).

Creation groaning, the absolute power and pain of labor, the failure of words, the threat of annihilation, and the Spirit who prays on our behalf, with sighs, not words.

“Ah,” says Pat as she lays on her deathbed, holding the polished stone with a hole through its center: “Now I see. This is the way through.” [See Barbara Brown Taylor’s “The Practice of Feeling Pain” in Altars in the World, pages 107-108 for this story.]

The Spirit, praying with sighs too deep for words, carries us through (not away from, notaround) but through the pain, with hands that press down on both our shoulders so we can feel how heavy love can be. [Taylor, pages 107-108].

When we midwife one another through the painful moments we know something more of God’s faithful presence and promise. When we rage, when we feel alone, when we ride into the heart of pain, when words fail, the Spirit sighs—and in all of these: God.

____

[1] Much of the above story comes from an article I have published previously under a pseudonym.

[2] See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, introduction. In this astounding book, Scarry investigates the intersections between the inexpressibility of pain and the political implications of this inexpressibility. William T. Cavanaugh drew powerfully on Scarry's work in his own remarkable book Torture and Eucharist.

[3] “Effects of Psychological Torture,” The Center for Victims of Torture,http://www.cvt.org/page/36, accessed August 21, 2011. For more information about psychological effects of torture, see the 135-page report Break Them Down: Systematic Use ofPsychological Torture by U.S. Forces from Physicians for Human Rights, available in pdf fromhttp://physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/reports/us-torture-break-them-down-2005.html, accessed August 21, 2011.

Lay Aside Every Weight

A sermon by Jennifer Davidson preached on August 19, 2007

Texts: Isaiah 5:1-7 and Hebrews 11:29--12:2

“Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard:” begins the Prophet Isaiah in our first text this morning. Immediately we are swept into the poetic: awash in imagery of vineyards, a fertile hill. We see the Beloved working in the vineyard, back bent, digging in to the deep, aromatic soil. We watch as the field is cleared of stones, cleared of anything that will impede the growth of healthy plants. The Beloved, we see, plants the field with the best vines, with red grapes. The Beloved pours himself out into this fertile field, his heart is in his work, his sweat falls into the soil and waters it.

Occasionally he straightens up from his bent posture and gazes across the land, drinking in the sun, the distant hills, the very landscape itself. He is not merely a man standing in a field, he is now a part of the field, his work—even as it transformed the field, also transformed him. He is not the same as when he began. The aches in his back, across his shoulders, the deepening brown of his skin are inseparable from the turned soil, the pile of stones on the edge of the vineyard, the tender, planted vines. He is in all of them now.

The Beloved’s hope for a rich and abundant harvest is what hews out the vat for the wine. As he waits for the grapes to ripen, he smoothes the inside of the vat. Watch him as he does his work. He is full of expectation.

But this love song is one of heartache, not fulfillment. This love song, like so many, has loss at its center: disappointment, unmet expectations. The voice, in Isaiah’s poem, at verse 3, shifts from that of Isaiah to the voice of the Beloved--now the Lover--himself. He cries out when he sees the yield of the choice vines he planted, the vines he had loved, the vines that are a part of him now: They are not red, succulent grapes but wild grapes. He moves through the vineyard, disbelieving what he sees, “What more could I have done?” he asks, with his fingers trailing along the leaves of these unfamiliar grapes. All is lost.

We see him gaze out across the field again, out toward the distant hills, and his vision now cannot distinguish between the once-cultivated field and it’s wild surroundings.

He pours out his anguish in the remaining verses of the love song. His grief is real because his love for the vineyard was real. He falls to his knees, grasps a handful of soil in his hand, and lets the soil run through his fingers. His tears fall into the soil and water it.

Where does the vineyard end and the Lover begin? Where does the Lover end and the vineyard begin? Can you say for certain?


There is no one quite like Isaiah who can lay bare the heart of God in such a way as this: God, the Beloved; God, the Lover; whose heart breaks for God’s people; whose heart breaks for God’s cosmos.

God, the Beloved, God, the Lover, who pours out God’s very self in the sweat of grace in the tears of mercy.


This glimpse that Isaiah gives us into the heart of God is a passionate God: a God who suffers, whose heart breaks for creation, a God who deeply cares. One who is moved by the cries of the people.

Many of the images surrounding God throughout both the Old and New Testaments are of God’s passionate concern for creation. Despite this, a strong tradition rose up in early Christianity which depicted God as passionless. In fact, the Jesuit Philip Sheldrake points out in his book Befriending Our Desires, that God’s perfection was perceived to be precisely in the absence of passion.

Likewise, human passions became deeply suspect. So that some people came to believe that the more we can divest ourselves of our passions, the more closely we will draw to the heart of God.

Perhaps it is the remnants of these beliefs that cause us to recoil when we read passages like we did this morning. God’s passionate disappointment in the vineyard is all too easily cast as “that Old Testament God”—as if God’s rough edges get smoothed out in the transition from Hebrew to Greek. We squirm in our seats when God cries out a lament over God’s people, like the one we heard in Isaiah’s love song. God’s anguish is too raw, too close for comfort.

I think this is because we sense that if God is passionate, then God must also be vulnerable. It is evident in the tears we imagine seeing on the Lover’s face as he fingers the leaves of the wild grapes.

All love comes with risk— we know this to different degrees through out our lives. One of the most profound ways I’ve experienced this risk was when Doug and I became parents. The presence of our infant son and the love we felt for him made us suddenly and powerfully aware that we had opened ourselves up to the possibility of the greatest pain we could imagine: the possibility of losing this one we loved so deeply.

To love passionately is to open ourselves – to become vulnerable to – the possibility of loss. We cannot love without also being vulnerable.

The more we pour ourselves out into love, the greater our risk and vulnerability And so God’s vulnerability is evident in the Isaiah love song not only in the experience of grief which closes out the song, but perhaps even more so in the image of the one who was digging in the soil and clearing stones: for it is the one who dares to hope, who is the vulnerable one.


The 11th chapter of Hebrews begins, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” It is the Lover working in the vineyard, tilling the soil, removing the stones, hewing a vat for the wine.

And it is the Israelites passing through the Red Sea. It is Rahab providing hospitality to the spies. It is the Great Cloud of Witnesses we surrounded ourselves with this morning—grandmothers and grandfathers, poets and public figures, prophets and midwives—who dared to make themselves vulnerable, who were passionate enough to hope for a world that would heal rather than break hearts.

Emboldened by those who have gone before us, the writer of Hebrews invites us to lay aside every weight and the Sin that clings so close so that we might be able to move unencumbered in our life of faith, indeed, into the very heart of God.

Therein lies the invitation for us this morning: Are we willing to open ourselves up to the Passionate, Vulnerable God? And are we willing to allow ourselves to be passionate and vulnerable as well? These questions are ever before us: can we lay aside every weight—even the ones which seem to define us—Can we open our hands and let go of every weight?

These questions are ultimately about our posture before the Living God.

It is no small thing to open ourselves to the presence of God in our lives. Learning to trust God, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable to God’s presence, is not a once-in-a-lifetime lesson—rather it is something that must be learned and re-learned throughout our lives.

With every invitation to deeper intimacy with God, no matter how many times we have accepted that invitation before, we become frightfully aware of the risks involved in letting God in. But what a beautiful thing to consider that God is risking all for us as well!

There is perhaps no better way to allow our intimacy to deepen with the Passionate, Vulnerable Divine than through the practice of prayer.

Henri Nouwen, in his book With Open Hands writes:

Praying is no easy matter. …The resistance to praying is like the resistance of tightly clenched fists. This image shows the tension, the desire to cling tightly to yourself, a greediness which betrays fear.

Nouwen goes on to share the story of a woman who was brought to a psychiatric facility. She was very agitated, “swinging at everything in sight, and scaring everyone so much that the doctors had to take everything away from her. But there was one small coin which she gripped in her fist and would not give up,” Nouwen writes. “It was as though she would lose her very self along with the coin. If they deprived her of that last possession, she would have nothing more, and be nothing more. That was her fear.”

We are often like the woman clinging desperately to her coin, thinking it has something to do with who we are. Frightened, perhaps, that God will force us to give up what feels most central to who we are. Afraid that if we open our hands, then God will see every last little thing we’ve ever held on to for dear life. Perhaps afraid, through and through, of God’s judgment.

But Philip Bennett, in his book Let Yourself Be Loved, assures us that “The judgment of love never injures our true self; it only releases it from constriction so that we may be the person we were created to be.”

The diary of Etty Hillesum, leading up to her departure for Auschwitz in 1943, records her painful yet joyful struggle toward spiritual wholeness. She describes the process this way:

There is a really deep well inside us. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too. But more often stones and grit block the well, and God is buried beneath. Then [God] must be dug out again. (44)

Are we able to bring ourselves to trust in the presence of God? Are we able to allow the stones and grit that block the well to be carried away? Are we able to open our hands?

After all, we will need to open our hands in order to lay aside every weight; in order to be passionate; in order to be vulnerable.

“When you dare to let go and surrender your many fears,” writes Henri Nouwen, “your hand relaxes and your palms spread out in a gesture of receiving.”’


I misspoke a little while ago when I said there is no one like Isaiah who can lay bare the heart of God. In fact there is another. And the writer of Hebrews reminds us of him: “Look to Jesus [who] endured the cross.”

Likewise, Philip Sheldrake writes:

“It seems that we desperately need to recover a sense of God who is not so much ‘power and might’ as vulnerable. Jesus, the image of the unseen God, “did not count equality with God something to be grasped. But he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,” as it says in the hymn of Philippians (2:6-7).

“If we accept that both the incarnation and the cross reveal the very heart of God, then we are bound to say that the nature of God is not to cling but to be self-emptying and to be nonpossessive. God continually risks a pouring out into the cosmos.”

God meets us in our vulnerability with God’s own vulnerability. God is tilling the vineyard even now, laying aside every stone, even as God invites us to lay aside every weight.

God never stops risking God’s self in relationship with us. This is the promise of the incarnation, the cross, and the resurrection. And it is God’s invitation, a gentle invitation, not one of force or demand.

We started with the poetry of Isaiah of the Beloved, the Lover, in the vineyard. Because some things of love can only be said adequately in poetry.

So let’s close with poetry as well. This poem is by someone who peoples my Great Cloud of Witnesses: May Sarton.

The poem is called, “Of Molluscs,” and it takes us from the soil of the vineyard to the undulating waters of the ocean. As you listen to the poem, hear God’s invitation to you to surrender, to be passionate, to be vulnerable, to open yourself to the presence of God who loves you, to lay aside every weight, to be nourished on the tide of love:

Of Molluscs

As the tide rises, the closed mollusc
Opens a fraction to the ocean’s food,
Bathed in its riches. Do not ask
What force would do, or if force could.

A knife is of no use against a fortress.
You might break it to pieces as gulls do.
No, only the rising tide and its slow progress
Opens the shell. Lovers, I tell you true.

You who have held yourselves closed hard
Against warm sun and wind, shelled up in fears
And hostile to a touch or tender word—
The ocean rises, salt as unshed tears.

Now you are floated on this gentle flood
That cannot force or be forced, welcome food
Salt as your tears, the rich ocean’s blood,
Eat, rest, be nourished on the tide of love.

The Abundant Enough

A Shell Ridge Sermon by Jennifer W. Davidson preached March 11, 2007
Third Sunday in Lent: Gifts in the Wilderness

Sermon Texts: Isaiah 55:1-19; Psalm 63:1-8; Luke 13:1-9

We are now, already, at the half-way point of Lent, believe it or not. It has been a somewhat unusual Lenten season this year, as we have immersed ourselves not in penitence and self-denial but in the promises of God:

Through all of Lent we are keeping in mind God’s comforting words spoken by Isaiah: “I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” We have listened to the flowing water in our fountain, and we have allowed ourselves, perhaps, to be drawn into the wilderness time, at the least to remember the occasions when we have been in the wilderness places of life—and to remember the gifts that God provides even where all seems desolate, lonely, and lost. “A way in the wilderness; and rivers in the desert.”

On Ash Wednesday a number of us gathered around the fountain and saturated ourselves with God’s promise that “You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail.” The first Sunday in Lent we lavished ourselves in apples and honey as we remembered God’s promise to the Israelites to lead them to a land flowing with milk and honey. Last week we feasted at the banquet table of communion as we renewed our confidence, along with Abraham, that we will see the goodness of God in the land of the living.

Our hunger comes in many different forms.

Elliot was about three years old when I found myself suddenly overwhelmed one morning by all that I needed to do in order to properly equip him for this world. I must have made the mistake of venturing “up the hill” from our humble, seminary housing apartment in the Mt Airy section of Philadelphia to the prestigious, wealthy enclave Chestnut Hill only a mile or so away—though light years in terms of income and class--along Germantown Ave. Occasionally Elliot and I would ride the bus up the cobblestone street and debark at the neighborhood-built, all-wooden playground. After a hearty playtime, sometimes we would walk on up to the shopping district, gazing in the windows of the boutiques, and occasionally stopping for a coffee and apple juice at Starbucks.

I must have picked up the Parents Express newspaper on our latest excursion on a beautiful spring day—and I found myself on this particular morning before work paging through the dozens of pages of advertisements for children’s day camps being offered around the Greater Philadelphia region that summer. The choices were endless, but the cumulative effect, at least on this particular Mom, was that I would hopelessly fail my son if I didn’t sign him up for one of these Summer day camps immediately.

There was the Settlement School, where he could begin his life as a musical prodigy; or maybe he needed to develop his physical prowess in this dog-eat-dog world and I ought to sign him up for Soccer or Baseball camp (or both!). Maybe he needed to get a headstart (hardly a headstart already at age three, the newspaper seemed to imply) in computers—and I should send him to the camp to teach him programming. Or, given that there was hardly a day that Elliot went without wearing a cape, maybe I should send him to Drama Camp. Weren’t acting lessons long past due for this three-year old?

The longer I sat considering these options, none of which we could afford in the first place, the more discouraged and depressed I grew. And the more Elliot’s future seemed to loom before me in grey colors of misspent potential. It was clear to me on this particular morning that his could hardly be a childhood future full of lazy summer days, reading by the open window, playing hide and seek until dark with the neighborhood kids, shaping mudpies, playing street hockey, or seeing who could make the longest skid marks in the streets with their bikes (as my childhood was)! No, it was clear to me on that morning that if I didn’t send Elliot to camp that very summer to develop and hone some important life skill—and not only that summer but every summer after that, no matter what the tuition might drain out of us—well, then I would fail him as a parent.

It was all too much, but somehow we were going to have to figure out a way to pull it off—if we wanted our kid to have a rosy future, not a grey one, some competitive chance at making it in this society.

I’d no sooner resolved myself to this thoroughly depressing acceptance of reality, when I glanced up and saw my kid, still only three years old, hungrily gazing up at me—all packed up and ready for daycare. Doug’s hand was on the door as they were hurrying off for the day. Elliot looked at me a bit confused and asked me glumly: “No breakfast today, Mom?”
I hope I never forget that day—when I got so overwhelmed by the pressure to provide the best future possible for my child that I completely forgot to take care of him in the moment he needed me. I sent my kid off to daycare that day without his breakfast. I knew his teacher kept oatmeal on the ready for the families that mismanaged their time on any given morning. He would be okay. But for me, the lesson was stark. I was so concerned with the future, I forgot to be present to the moment.

I tossed that Parents Newspaper into the recycling immediately after Elliot and Doug left. Elliot would be all right with lazy summer days, I decided, just as I had been when I was growing up. What he needed was a family that cared about him here and now. And in every here and now to come. That would be abundance enough.

This morning we have the offer of great abundance from the hands of God in Isaiah 55:8 “Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat!” Here is a true invitation to fullness of life, and all of it gift!

Just as God’s promise of a land flowing with milk and honey came to the Israelites while they were wandering in the wilderness, after their exodus from Egypt and their liberation from slavery, so this promise recorded in Isaiah comes to God’s people just as they are preparing, once again, to embark on a long journey—this time heading back to the Promised Land after generations of being in exile. Truth is, many of the exiled Israelites weren’t too sure this was good news. They’d gotten comfortable in their new land, and many of them felt settled there. Though they were in exile, they only knew of the so-called promised land from the stories of their grandparents. Going home wasn’t really going home for them. It was going to a place they’d never seen; a place that had been ransacked and destroyed years before; a place they would need to rebuild from the ground up: from city walls to the walls of the temple, everything lay in ruins back there.

God’s promise, in this case, is only good news for those who were indeed thirsting: for those who had no money to buy what they needed to eat. But many of the Israelites at this time seemed to have enough money to waste. Abundant enough money that God is compelled to ask them, through Isaiah: “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and labor for that which does not satisfy?”

The question continues to have resonance today. At least it does for me. That morning, when I imagined Elliot’s future, all looked bleak. Because suddenly I’d gotten completely swept up in the belief that in order for Elliot to succeed in life, there were certain things we had to do, ways we would be compelled to spend our money in order to invest in our child’s future. My hunger for his success in the world obscured my ability to perceive his actual hunger in the moment for the nourishment he needed to grow that very day.

Thomas Merton called such desires social compulsions which are manifested in the continuing need for success and approval caused by the lurking fear of failure. As a result there is a steady urge, a compulsion, to prevent failure by gathering more and more things to oneself: whether more work, more money, or more friends. All of this acquisitiveness is done in an effort to bulwark ourselves; in an effort to keep ourselves from truly facing the hunger within.

Henri Nouwen points out that one of the main enemies of the spiritual life is greed. When our sense of self depends on what we can acquire, then greed flares up when our desires are frustrated. The more work, the more money, the more possessions, the more people we can pull into ourselves, then the more we are able to make a case for our success in life. Unfortunately, these are exactly that which does not nourish us and what does not satisfy.
Far from it, in fact. Because in our consumerist society we are kept in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction and desire. It is to our economy’s benefit that we are always dissatisfied with what we have. The lure of new and supposedly improved draws us irresistibly to the mall on Saturday, or to i-tunes, or Amazon from the comfort of our own couch. A consumerist economy, such as the one in which we live, thrives when people spend their money on that which does not satisfy. Because if we were to realize that we had enough already, and abundantly so at that, then what would become of the Gross National Product?

This past Wednesday evening, a group of about twelve of us gathered in the sanctuary to experience contemplative prayer together. We started our time out by reflecting on the wisdom of the Desert Mothers and Fathers. These were women and men who lived in the desert of Egypt beginning in the third century. They modeled their spiritual lives after Jesus’ time in the wilderness (from which we have the temptation narrative that opened us into our Lenten journey this year) and Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist—about whom we read in the gospel of Luke this past Advent.

Not a lot survives from these Desert Mothers and Fathers, but we do have collections of their sayings which, when taken together, form what is called a Desert Spirituality.

A man named Arsenius is one of the most highly revered of the Desert Fathers. He lived from the mid-third to early fourth century, for fifty five years in solitude, in the desert of Egypt. Once a Roman educator who had considerable wealth and status, Arsenius gave all of that up in order to descend into his own sense of hunger for God’s presence in his life. When one morning he prayed, “Lord, lead me into the way of salvation,” he heard a voice saying to him in response: “Be silent.”

To descend into silence, as some of us experienced this past Wednesday, is not really the easiest or most comforting thing to do. In fact, it can be deeply unsettling. Because when we descend into silence, when we seek to clear out the constant noise, the clutter, the never-ending wordiness of our lives—we are often forced to confront precisely the things we’ve been keeping ourselves so busy to avoid! Our own sense of emptiness, our own profound hunger for God’s healing presence, our own unquenched thirst for God’s living, loving waters.
Our psalmist this morning surely had descended into that silence before: “My soul thirsts for you,” the psalmist writes: “My flesh faints for you. As in a barren and dry land where there is no water.” To know our need for God as a deep and aching thirst, to know our desire for God as a terrible, longing ache—these are not comfortable places to be. And very often, when we begin to practice a form of prayer that does not fill up the space between God and us with an endless stream of words, requests, and petitions—then we are forced to confront that terrible longing, that yawning ache for God.

Years later, when Arsenius asked a second time: “Lord, lead me to the way of salvation,” the voice that spoke to him not only said: “Be silent,” but also “Pray always.” Henri Nouwen writes that:

To pray always—this is the real purpose of the desert life. Solitude and silence can never be separated from the call to unceasing prayer. If solitude were primarily an escape from a busy job, and silence primarily an escape from a noisy [world], they could easily become very self-centered forms of asceticism. But solitude and silence are for prayer. The Desert Fathers [and Mothers] did not think of solitude as being alone, but as being alone with God. They did not think of silence as not speaking, but as listening to God. Solitude and silence are the context within which prayer is practiced.

The command that Arsenius hears is the very same invitation that God extends in our Isaiah text: “Incline your ear, and come to me, listen, so that you may live.”

This is the marvelous wonder of God’s love for us: it is in the experience of our hunger that we are fed; it is in the realization of our thirst, that we know it quenched. So much so, that the Isaiah text equates listening to God with eating well: in verse 2 God says: “Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.”

In fact, it is the same for the psalmist who writes: “My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips when I think of you on my bed, and meditate on you in the night watches.”

In our hunger for God, we are fed. In our listening for God, we eat well. In the silence of our prayers, our souls are satisfied with the richest of feasts.


Listen and Eat. Taste and See. Be silent. Pray always. The Desert Mothers and Fathers literally walked into the desert and remained there for year after year. Carlo Carretto, who became a desert monk in 1954 at the age of 44, acknowledges that not everyone is called to a desert life. “But if you cannot go into the desert,” he writes, “you must nonetheless ‘make some desert’ in your life. Every now and then leaving others and looking for solitude to restore, in prolonged silence and prayer, the stuff of your soul. This is the meaning of ‘desert’ in your spiritual life.”

A final image: a fig tree that has yet to produce fruit. An impatient land owner. And a compassionate gardener. The landowner, frustrated by the fig trees aberrant behavior, demands that the tree be cut down. The landowner, like John the Baptist in Luke 3, has no patience for trees which do not bear fruit. And like John the Baptist, he urges the use of the axe, which even now lies at the roots of the tree. But the gardener, like the Compassionate Christ, has other plans: “Another year,” he pleads.

And in that year, we get the sense, this gardener will lavish that tree with more tender loving care than that fig tree has ever known before. He will nourish it, dig around it, love it, and urge it to fulfill its potential. I like to think of that year ahead as the tree’s wilderness year: the making of the desert, the abundant enough in the life that fig tree.

We don’t know the end of this fig tree’s story. But that’s because the ending is not the important part here: it is the tending, the listening, the tasting, the hunger and the thirst, it is the abundant enough of God’s lovingkindness that is the real story here.

Be silent. Pray Always. Be hungry. Eat richly. Taste and See that God is good.

God is in Our Midst

With joy, you brood, do not fear...
A Shell Ridge Sermon by Jennifer W. Davidson

Isaiah 12:2-6; Zephaniah 3:14-20; Luke 3:7-18

I’m going to start off with a strange suggestion this morning. I want to invite your mind to wander in the next little while. Don’t stay with me here. If a word or phrase or a thought arises in you, I invite you to go with it. Tune me out. I invite you to hold two questions in mind as I’m speaking:

What is the Word that I am hearing?
And what is the Word that I most need to hear?

Hear again, some fragments of the Word around which we have gathered ourselves this morning:

Surely God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid, for God is my strength and my might;

The king of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more.

Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees;

Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.

“You brood of vipers!

the people were filled with expectation,

the Lord, is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more.

Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

The Lord has taken away the judgments against you

With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.

His winnowing fork is in his hand

Soldiers also asked him, “And we, what should we do?” He said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.”

The Lord, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory; he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love;

At that time I will bring you home, at the time when I gather you;

let this be known in all the earth

all were questioning in their hearts

but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.

“You brood of vipers!

With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.

Do not fear, O Zion; do not let your hands grow weak. The Lord, your God, is in your midst

With joy, you brood, do not fear…

If there is anything these scriptures from the lectionary tell us right off the bat it is that Advent is a difficult season to cozy up to. It falls across our skin like the camel’s-hair clothing of John the Baptizer.

It takes us to places we’d really rather not go. I mean that literally, even. Last week we read from the book of Malachi. The week before that we shared our communion meal around the words of Jeremiah. And this week, we turned to Zephaniah. Zephaniah! When was the last time you thought of turning to that book, tucked nearly invisibly into the last pages of the Hebrew Scriptures? Advent takes us places we wouldn’t normally go.

When I read the texts for this morning, they made me swoon.

These are the words I hear: With joy, you brood, do not fear, draw water from the wells of salvation.

We started Advent with the words of hope that carried us into exile—The Days are Coming, we heard! Jeremiah gave us words of hope to sustain us for the long, hard journey. We ate our communion meal together, planting these seeds of hope and salvation within ourselves.

When the people of Israel were wrenched from their homes and their temple, they didn’t only have comforting words to carry with them. Their cup was bitter, indeed! The prophets had long warned the Israelites to shape up, to do justice, to walk humbly, right? to remember the widow and the orphan, to feed the poorest among them, to be fair in all business transactions, to remember the Lord their God who brought them out of the Land of Egypt. The prophets spoke the most dreadful, sharp-edged, wounding words—often to a people who had grown content, satisfied. The people didn’t only carry words of hopefulness in to the exile, but they must have also been haunted by words of judgment.

This Sunday is like an echo to our first Sunday of Advent. Here, again, we have the words of Promise that the Israelites will be gathered again. This is the Return from Exile, the homecoming, where they will draw from the deep wells of salvation. This is the Advent Sunday of Joy!

Oh, how tempting it was to dive into the refreshing waters of Isaiah and Zephaniah. Do not fear…I will trust and will not be afraid. God is in our midst.

But John the Baptizer, baby no more, had something else to say. I stood among the crowds and heard him shout, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” And I was struck silent—as silent as John’s father Zechariah had been when he encountered God’s messenger. “When Zechariah came out of the sanctuary, the people realized he had seen a vision. He kept motioning to them and remained unable to speak.” Struck silent at the good news.


The first time I read from the Bible with interest was when I was about twelve years old. I had recently committed my life to Christ, and I turned to this ancient book to see what it would tell me about the one I’d encountered on my own. I read the book of Genesis because, you know, you have to start somewhere. I read the books of Acts because it’s a great action book. And I read the books of Ruth and Esther because they were the ones written by women, I figured. And I read the gospels. Which really tripped me up.

Because every time I encountered a word of judgment, whether John’s “brood of vipers” or Jesus’ “You faithless generation, how much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I put up with you?” (Mk 9:19), I would internalize them. I would see Jesus turned to me, saying those words to me. I was faithless. I was the one Jesus couldn’t stand to be around anymore. I was the brood of vipers. I was the one who could not flee the wrath to come. I couldn’t hear the good news for the words of judgment intermingled there.

What is the Word that you hear? What is the Word that you most need to hear?

For whatever reason, sometimes the Word of judgment is the only one we can hear. And when this is the case, it makes it awfully difficult to open ourselves to knowing God’s presence in our midst.


The presence of God is a tricky thing this way. The presence of God cannot be tamed. At least not for long. The danger of taming God’s presence is no more apparent than when we celebrate Christmas every year—when we remember the infant Jesus, swaddled in cloth, with Wise Men offering their gifts to him, cattle lowing, and stars being birthed. Even Madison Avenue knows that babies and puppies sell products more than anything else. In some sense, the infant Jesus is the most unthreatening presence of God that we can imagine. Who wouldn’t approach that manger? Who wouldn’t want to hold that infant close?

In the movie Taladega Nights, the Nascar race driver Ricky Bobby, played by Will Ferrell, begins his nightly grace over their family meal by addressing “Dear Sweet, Tiny, Baby Jesus.” When his father-in-law complains and points out that Jesus isn’t a tiny baby anymore, Ricky Bobby clings fast to his tame, nonthreatening image: “That’s the Jesus I like best!” He exclaims.


But the presence of God cannot long be tamed. Because we know from the prophets’ cries in both the Hebrew and the Christian scriptures, that God’s presence with the people is intimately intertwined with God’s justice. God’s desire for the well-being of the least, the lost, and the little ones among us burns as brightly as God’s Love. To put it another way: God’s Love is not an abstract concept, divorced from our daily lives. God’s Love is the same as God’s Justice.

And, God’s Justice is also not an abstract concept—precisely because God is in our midst, God is With Us. The prophet Amos, for instance, declares God’s judgment against Israel because “they sell the righteous for silver” (which means people were being sold into slavery), “and the needy for a pair of sandals,” (which means so many people were being sold into slavery that the price of a human being had been driven down to the cost of a pair of sandals). God’s anger was kindled because of “They who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way.” And finally, “they lay themselves down beside every altar on garments taken in pledge” (which was an inequitable practice of money-lending) “and in the house of their God they drink wine bought with fines they imposed.” (which was an unjust worship practice.)

God’s presence with the people means that God notices the systemic negligence of the least, the lost, and the little ones among us.

This is precisely why, though they at first appear to be, our scripture texts this morning do not contradict themselves. John the Baptizer is, indeed, proclaiming the good news to the people!

John calls the people to repentance. And it’s very difficult for us to hear that word without loading onto it a bunch of our own associations. For too long, repentance has been understood to be about turning ourselves away from our “sins.” And for too long, our concept of “sin” has been strictly personal and moral—about how we conduct our individual lives and relationships. While personal misconduct can certainly be a part of our larger state of brokenness, John’s call for repentance has much broader and yet more particular implications. John’s call for repentance is a way of readying the Kingdom for the Presence of God—a God whose Love is intimately intertwined with God’s justice for the least, the lost, and the little ones.

“The Greek word repentance translates as “have a change of mind,” or “go beyond the mind you have.” Repentance depicts a change of life and heart evidenced in action as well as attitude.” [Seasons of the Spirit] John is concerned that the people’s actions must “bear fruit”—show evidence of a life lived in such a way that all people can thrive.

What should we do? asked the crowd.
What should we do? asked the soldiers.
What should we do? asked the tax collectors.

The repeated questions of the people listening to John’s call for repentance calls to mind the people’s questions to the prophet Micah in the verses leading up to the one we love to sing here at Shell Ridge from Micah 6:8. There the people begin asking in hyperbole: “What does God require of us? That we give a thousand rams? ten thousand rivers of oil? my firstborn? the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”

The people’s overblown image of a vengeful and capricious God who requires more than they could possible give, reveals a people who could hear nothing other than the word of judgment. They couldn’t open themselves to the good news that was already present to them. They couldn’t hear the Word they needed to hear. Their image of God was so unreasonable that Micah breaks it down for the people: “No.” Micah says. “God has already told you all that God requires: Do justice. Love kindness. And walk humbly with your God.”

In the same way, John the Baptizer answers the people’s questions with such simplicity that we are in danger of missing it every time we read it: If someone is cold, give them your extra coat. Do not charge someone more than what they owe in order to pad your own pockets. Do not bribe people with false accusations or threaten people for money.”


The Word of judgment is not more than we can bear. The wells of salvation are deep, full of refreshing waters that do not run dry. All people are invited to draw from these wells. God’s presence is in our midst—which means we need not live in fear, but are equipped to see the needs of the world and respond in hope and wholeness. The good news is that the One who judges us removes all judgment. The One who is coming is in our midst.

It is for this reason that we can sing and we dance. For the news is indeed good. God's presence in this world, now, matters. The One who is coming is here.

Amen.

We Are All Hungry

John 6:1-21

Many of you know that for the past couple weeks I have had the privilege of filling in at the church office while Lura has been on vacation. For the most part it has been a pretty quiet, uneventful time—just enough things to do and just enough people calling or stopping by to keep me from getting too lonely every day.

The first morning I started my substitute job, when I arrived I walked over into the courtyard and noticed that the little fountain out here was running for the first time since we started coming to Shell Ridge about two years ago. I was so delighted to hear the gentle sound of the running water, a sound that feels to me like an invitation to stop and rest a moment, to take notice of the world around me.

Knowing that the fountain gets overwhelmed with the leaves that fall from the Sycamore tree above it, I skimmed out whatever had fallen into the water, the leaves and some purple blossoms from the hasta plants beside it. After doing this, I placed my fingertips into the water where it burbles up at the top of the fountain, then I touched the water to my forehead and formed the shape of a cross there.

Coming from a family of long-time Baptists, this is a gesture my body is not familiar with—I can’t do it without feeling awkward, clumsy, or a bit like a liturgical impersonator. In the years when I was attending a Lutheran Seminary on the East Coast, I grew to envy my classmates who could so familiarly touch the water to their foreheads in an act of remembering their baptism (a baptism which most of them, of course, couldn’t in fact recall because they had been baptized as infants). To remember your baptism is very different from recalling the moment you were baptized. To remember your baptism is, in a very real sense, akin to the phrase that has sent many a child out of house in the morning: Remember Who You Are and Whose You Are. To remember your baptism is to remember you carry the name of Christ and that God has claimed you as God’s own. To remember your baptism is to remember that, no matter what, you are loved.

There was something about this fountain being in the courtyard of our Baptist church, something about my hand already being in water, combined with something inside me that longed to know in that moment God’s love for me, even for me, that made it seem possible for me to try on this gesture for myself—to touch the water to my forehead and remember my baptism.

It ended up that this was how I started each of my mornings these past couple weeks, carefully tending the fountain, then awkwardly touching the water to my head. Trying this new thing on for size.

****

This past Monday, a few minutes after I arrived in the church office, I received a phone call from our neighbor Betty who lives just up the road a bit. “I was just calling about the excitement at the church this morning,” she told me when I answered the phone.

“Excitement?” I asked cautiously, not wanting to commit to anything yet. “I haven’t heard about our excitement.”

“Oh! You haven’t heard!” she answered. “Well, a mountain lion was spotted in the church parking lot at about 6:30 this morning!”

After briefly considering investing in a couple of air horns to walk around with, I have to admit I found the news more exciting than frightening. Betty and I speculated together about what may have brought the mountain lion down into this fairly well-populated, certainly more-suburban-than-rural setting. Betty mentioned that the thermometer on her deck had registered 118 degrees the day before and she suggested, “I think the lion was looking for water.”

****

My thoughts immediately turned to the fountain in our courtyard, the delicious gurgle of water as it falls over itself. And I imagined the mountain lion hearing its sound, drawing cautiously through the terrible heat to its side, dipping his muzzle into the water and drinking deeply: The fountain of life.

We are a thirsty and a hungry people.

Our scripture this morning gives us Jesus feeding the multitudes and Jesus the Storm-Walker. The stories are fantastic—and stretch the limits of our imaginations, may even challenge some of our tolerance for what is possible in this work-a-day world. But “the miracle,” writes Tripp Hudgins, an American Baptist pastor in Chicago, is never the point of the ministry, [rather] the miracle points to God.” So we are invited to enter the story of this miracle with our eyes open to see the God revealed in it.

Jesus sits on the mountainside and sees that the thousands of people who had gathered there were hungry. He turns to Philip, and with a twinkle in his eye, asks him the pressing economic question of that day: “Where should we go to buy enough food for all these people?” Philip, clearly a practical man and a shrewd economist, answers Jesus very practically, one might even say prosaically: “Six months wages wouldn’t be enough to feel all these people!”

The economic system that shaped Philip’s imagination, though very different in time and place than our own, certainly seems very familiar to us. I remember years ago planning the reception for our wedding—everything eventually came down to calculating what the cost-per-head would be! Philip must have been doing his own figuring, as Jesus sat beside him, waiting for him to see beyond the hard, cold facts. Waiting for Philip to catch a glimpse of the kingdom of God.

It is Andrew who notices a boy with five barley loaves and two fish. It’s not much. It’s hardly worth noticing at all. Even so, he points the boy out to Jesus, almost with apology: “Of course, that’s not enough for everyone.”

But Jesus, delighted, instructs the disciples to have everyone sit down comfortably on the grass. The detail to have the people sit is an important one, because it has to do with social status. To have the people remain standing would be to treat them as a servant class, which many (if not all) of them most likely were. The difference between standing and sitting is much like the difference between a soup line and a dinner table. Jesus treats the people who had gathered with all the dignity they deserve, regardless of their social status.

With the bread and fish before him, Jesus gives thanks, (do you recognize the rhythm of communion in these words?), and he distributes the food to everyone. After everyone has had their fill, Jesus instructs the disciples to “gather all the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.”

****

“So that nothing may be lost.” The Greek word used here is the very same one used in the familiar passage from John 3:16—“For God so loved the world God gave God’s only begotten son that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” The phrase that nothing may be lost is the same verb translated here as will not perish.

This is the God who is revealed to us in this miracle—a God who will not let anything or anyone be lost. We discover in this story of the feeding of the multitudes a prodigal God who provides for the physical needs of the people, like manna in the wilderness—and a God who will not rest until all the fragments are gathered, until every lost soul is gathered in.

On some level, the miracle is that with such a small amount, vast quantities of food were provided—enough for twelve baskets to be filled. But on another level, the miracle is this: that God’s love will not let us go: no matter what we face, what hunger we bring, what thirst we may suffer, no matter what we’ve done—God’s love will not let us go. So that nothing—and no one—may be lost.

Either way, the miracle points to Life. And this is God’s invitation to us, and to all the world. “I set before you life and death. Choose Life.” “I am the bread of Life,” says Jesus. “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (6:35). “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came,” says Jesus, “that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (10:10).

****

It is important that we remember that Jesus gave the people real bread and actual fish out there on the mountainside. He did not merely pontificate or wax eloquently about spiritual nourishment for the hungry soul. Hungry people need to be fed real bread. But it is just as important for us to remember that fed people are hungry, too. We do not live by bread alone—we certainly do not live abundant life by bread alone. “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread?” asks the prophet Isaiah, “and you labor for that which does not satisfy? . . . Incline your ear, and come to me; listen so that you may live” (Is 55: 2,3).

The disciples were terrified when they saw Jesus walking toward them on the stormy, wind-tossed sea. But he said to them: “It is I; [or, in the Greek, “I AM”] Do not be afraid.”

To the Hebrew mind, the sea was a terrifying place—it was the site of chaos, the unfathomable, where the unknown threatened and overwhelmed. This is why the creation story begins with the Spirit hovering over the Deep—in Hebrew the word we translate “deep” is too-hoo-va-bo-hoo—it is a nonsense phrase meant to elicit the same gut feeling of dis-ease as the phrase helter skelter does for us today. When we hold in mind the tsunami that struck the Indonesian island of Java on July 17, we are reminded of the fear, damage and loss of life the sea can cause.

“I AM,” says Jesus—recalling the words that Moses heard out of the burning bush. I AM is the Liberating God who delivered the Hebrews from slavery. I AM will not rest until every fragment is gathered. I AM is liberating still. “Do not be afraid.” The invitation is to life, abundant life.

It is not a coincidence that we encounter these stories in the Gospel of John that focus on bread and water. The gospel was written late enough that the earliest Christians were already practicing baptism and communion. That Jesus give thanks over the bread and fish is meant to remind us of the last supper when Jesus gave thanks over the bread and wine. That Jesus walks on the stormy sea is meant to remind us of the waters of our baptism, when we took on the name of Christ.

Both stories confront us with the reality of death—when the people are hungry we can’t help but to think of the possibility of death by starvation or from utter lack of what we need, whether love, or shelter, or gentle words, or a safe home. When Jesus walks on the violent sea, we can’t help but think of death by drowning, or from being overwhelmed by things larger than us, whether the threat of downsizing, or fear of natural disasters, or the wave of dread with facing a new day, or the terror of war.

And yet the gift of abundant life is made all the more vivid in these direct confrontations. Not the least because Jesus Christ died the thirsty death. As the liturgical theologian Gordon Lathrop writes: "Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, is the bath that kills and makes alive, the hope for both the waters and the washed, the meal of God, the means for the nations to eat at Israel's table of salvation, the meal that says the truth about our death while transforming it into life" (Holy Things 101).

The fountain is right here. It calls to every thirsty soul. The meal is right here. We are a hungry and a thirsty people. Somehow the mountain lion heard the soft fall of water. It is a gentle sound. And it is a fierce love. It is the water that kills and makes alive.

Remember your baptism. When you were buried in the stormy seas of death’s chaos with Christ. Remember your baptism when you were lifted up to new life in Christ. Remember your baptism when you took the name of Christ for your own. Remember who you are—and whose you are. We are all beggers coming to the bread. We are all thirsty coming to the fountain of life.

Jennifer W. Davidson