"Stretching" - August 3, 2014

Matthew 14:13-21

            Antoine de Saint-Exupery was the author of The Little Prince, a wonderful book both for children and for adults.  Toward the beginning of it, he recreates a drawing that he made as a child and that is reproduced on an insert in your bulletin this morning.  He wrote,

And he shows a cross-section of the snake, where you can see the elephant in profile.

            Imagination is a wonderful gift.  We all have it as children but experience tends to suppress it as we grow older.  That is regrettable but inevitable.  Sometimes, though, the Lord in whose image we are made, and who created the universe out of nothing, calls on us to use our powers of imagination to see the miracles he wants to work.

            Hear Matthew’s telling of the one miracle that is recounted in all four gospels.  It happens when Jesus wanted to get away from the crowds and had gone out into the wilderness but was followed.

“When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.’ Jesus said to them, ‘They need not go away; you give them something to eat.’ They replied, ‘We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.’ And he said, ‘Bring them here to me.’ Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.” [Matthew 14:15-21]

It takes some powerful imagination to picture anyone feeding that many people with that much food.  I have a can of sardines here, and some hotdog rolls.  Do you think that we could all have lunch with these?  Now multiply that by fifty.

            And yet, placed in Jesus’ hands, it went farther than anybody could have possibly thought.  That is what goes on when we stop putting our limits on God’s readiness to bless.  It’s what happens when we let our imagination be stretched by faith, the way a boa constrictor stretches when it swallows an elephant.

            When I think about what that might mean for us, for the First United Methodist Church of Phoenixville, I think about what we are at this time placing in Jesus’ hands for him to feed his people, whether with physical food or with food for the soul.  After several years of putting the funds aside, work began this past week on renovation of the kitchen.  What could happen because of that?  How will what has been placed in Jesus’ hands be multiplied and shared?

            If you would, take the drawing by St.-Exupery in the bulletin and turn it over to the blank side on the back.  Take a moment and let your imagination run wild.  Then write on the back at least one way that you believe in your heart that the Lord would want us to use the gift of that new kitchen.  If you don’t have anything to write with, there are pencils in the pews.  When you’ve done that, fold it up and put it into the offering plate as the ushers pass them around in a moment or two.  Again, though, let your imagination go freely as you do this.

            Let me tell you another boa constrictor story.  Do you know how in some high school biology classrooms there will be a bank of cages and glass cases with rats and spiders and snakes and various creatures?  In ours there was one where a boa constrictor was kept, at least until the morning that the teacher came in and found the cover pushed off the top.  The snake was nowhere to be found.  Try teaching with that on your mind.   About a year passed and a new class was sitting there, learning about the stages of cell division and the chemistry of plant life, when one of the girls screamed “Mrs. Kreider!  There’s a snake!” and pointed up at the heat register by the ceiling. 

Now, again, put your imagination to work.  Don’t picture yourself as a human being suddenly confronted by a snake where a snake does not normally belong.  Try to see that year from the boa constrictor’s point of view.  Having left confinement and captivity, lost in a maze of HVAC ductwork for a year, you had found food and water and warmth and safety all that time, even if there were no elephants to swallow.

            When you and I go beyond the glass boxes that hold us, we also may discover that there is more out there than we suspect.  We may discover the miraculous ways that we are given real sustenance, and we may find that even when we share what we unexpectedly are given, there may be more leftovers to go around even beyond that.