A Sermon on Matthew 14:13-21
by Rev. Chris Bohnhoff

Will you pray with me? Holy one, we thank you for stories of surprise abundance: stories of moms emptying their purses, dads ponying up their personal snacks, kids sharing their precious treats to generously feed another. Help us to comprehend the vast impact of small acts of giving, each bag of chips thrown onto the table of your sacred potluck. Amen.

I love the story of the feeding of the 5,000. As Jesus stories go, it’s so relatable! Who doesn’t have a story of throwing together a last-minute dinner for unexpected guests, or the party that becomes so much bigger than you thought it would, and somehow the food is still enough, or the potluck where people just keep bringing delicious things, so many more things than you expected? It’s amazing how consistently abundance appears as soon as hospitality is genuinely offered.

Maybe the miraculous thing in this passage isn’t that everyone was fed, but that a potluck popped up in the first place. After all, Jesus didn’t wake up that day with Feed a big ol’ crowd on his calendar. No. He had just learned that John the Baptist had been killed in Herod’s custody. His intention had been to leave the disciples and crowds to pray, then travel to be with John’s followers. But the crowds found him, and he put down his plans and instead spent the day healing the sick. Around suppertime, the disciples finally caught up. They wanted to pack things up so everyone could get along to some food.

With what must have been a heavy heart knowing what happened to John, and after a long day of sickness and need, Jesus did what so many community leaders with limited resources throughout history have done: he brought everyone together, gave thanks for what they had, and shared it. He didn’t hold back or shoo the hungry crowd away because he couldn’t cater dinner for 5,000; he didn’t turn rocks into bread or perform some other flashy miracle to fix the problem. Instead, he modeled humility: he acted from a place of love and compassion as he always did, he owned the role of host, he thanked God for being the source of all food, and he left space for the answers to come from someone other than him. And somehow, the everyday miracle of the potluck delivered unimaginable abundance that we still talk about today.

I’ve been reading lately about the Rule of Benedict: the set of guiding principles that distinguishes the Catholic monastic order founded by St. Benedict. Joan Chittister, a former Benedictine Prioress, describes the Rule of Benedict as a guide, not a law; it’s a set of wisdom meant to change the heart and turn the mind towards deeper relationship with God, not a system for keeping score.

As you might imagine, humility shows up in the Rule of Benedict. See, in our common understanding, humility knocks a person down and makes one small. That’s how humility is viewed by a culture that, like the honor-based Roman culture in Jesus’ time, values self-importance and taking up as much space as possible. The Rule of Benedict offers another way to think about humility. Chittister writes, “Benedictine humility frees the spirit; it does not batter it. Humility, the Rule implies, is the glue of our relationships. Humility is the foundation of community and family and friendship and love. Humility comes from understanding my place in the universe.”[1]

The Rule names twelve degrees of humility that mark a growing understanding of one’s true place in the universe. Good news: I’m not going to talk about the twelve degrees. But I’ll cut to the finish, because the reward for embodying all twelve degrees of humility sounds pretty great! “Having discovered who we are and having opened ourselves to life and having learned to be comfortable with it, we know that God is working in us,” Chittister writes. “We know, most of all, that whatever happens we have nothing to fear.”[2] It sounds so beautiful, doesn’t it? And almost impossible, because of fear’s prevalence in our lives.

For Benedictines, humility is a lifelong process of deprogramming the expectations we hold for ourselves that we be bigger, more self-reliant, and more in control than is our actual capacity in the universe. Because the only one truly in control is God, and even the control God wields is mysterious and unknowable to us. The Rule of Benedict teaches that as we grow in humility and come to terms with all the ways that we can’t be as important as we might think we are, our fear diminishes and our freedom to love and allow God’s Spirit to flow through us increases.

What if feeding a crowd wasn’t the only problem that could be solved, as Jesus did, by approaching it with humility? What if the everyday miracle of the potluck could be applied to systemic racism, or climate change, or the rise of authoritarianism? Where in your life do you have an unrealistic, over inflated sense of your place in the universe and an under appreciation of God’s place in it? Where do you fear that you have less power than you should have, and what would it feel like to release that expectation and leave space for others and for God? And what is the small dish that you can bring to the potluck of the world’s great need? My friends, you do not – we do not – need to do it all. Your small, humble contribution is worth more than you know. Let us commit to the work of growing in humility, looking to Jesus for our inspiration. And as our humility grows, may we witness to God’s growing work within and through us. May our faith grow that we have nothing to fear, so long as we claim our rightful place in the universe, not as gods, but as righteous, compassionate, flawed but beloved creatures. May it be so. Amen.

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[1] Joan Chittister, Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: Living the Rule of St. Benedict Today, (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990), p. 55.

[2] Chittister, p. 65.