“Nothing”

¹³Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. ¹⁴When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. ¹⁵When 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.” ¹⁶Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.”¹⁷They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.” ¹⁸And he said, “Bring them here to me.” ¹⁹Then 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. ²⁰And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. ²¹And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children. – Matthew 14:13-21

“Nothing” is possibly one of the most overused words in our everyday speech. How often do you hear someone talk about “nothing”? We say to one another, “It’s nothing,” as a way of dismissing a kindness or excusing an inconvenience. Do we mean that? Is it really nothing? Or when you find someone doing something suspicious and ask them what’s going on. “Oh…nothing.” Or when asked what’s new, or what we’ve been up to lately, we respond “Nothing much.” I’m guilty of that one – as soon as someone asks what’s new, I usually can’t think of a single thing. We often say “nothing” but we don’t always really mean absolutely nothing.

That’s the disciples’ response to Jesus when he asks them to feed the crowd. It has been a long day at the end of a long week. Did you catch the beginning of the reading? Jesus has received news that his cousin and friend John the Baptist is dead and he tries to find some quiet space to himself. Instead he is confronted by a crowd of people in need, a crowd on which he has great compassion and cannot turn away. But if Jesus still has any energy left, the disciples are ready for a break. At dinner time they are ready to call it quits and send the rest of the crowd away. When Jesus tells them to feed the crowd they respond, probably out of exhaustion, “We have nothing…but a few loaves and a couple of fish.”
Nothing. Well, almost nothing, they say as an afterthought, dismissive of what they see as a meager offering in comparison to the need. And it doesn’t really matter so much how you understand the miracle that follows. Whether Jesus makes more molecules of bread and fish appear – after all, as Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber is fond of saying, “Nothing” is God’s favorite material to work with – or whether in another more recently popular interpretation you see the miracle in the possibility that sharing those first loaves and fish that then others began to share what they had until there was more than enough for all. Because the “how” isn’t so important here. What matters is that God saw a possibility where the disciples did not. The disciples looked at 5 loaves and 2 fish and saw nothing. God looked at it and saw a feast.

Now I think we can make come pretty quick comparisons to our modern lives. When it comes to money, who hasn’t at one point or another looked at his or her finances and saw what amounted to nothing. To be fair, sometimes that’s pretty close to the truth. But for others of us, it’s really a matter of how we see what we have, a matter of rejecting the societal impulse to always want a little more than we have.  Even in the church, we look at what we have and wish we had more of it, forgetting what God has promised to do to transform all we have. That God has promised to lay out the most expensive offerings for us who have no money to buy food and drink.

And we could make some quick comparisons to our efforts to combat hunger. When we look at the little bit we give in food and money to the Survival Center, the area food bank, and our church’s global hunger ministries, it can seem like 5 loaves and 2 fish in a crowd of thousands compared to the actual need that exists. And yet God uses it in ways that begin to transform. These small things begin to take on a life of their own making dents in the need that is indeed still great. God sees our meager offerings and sets the table for a feast. Those are some of the more obvious connections to our lives, but I think there’s more in the story that the disciples call “nothing.”

Before they even identify the loaves and fish, the disciples look out at a crowd of hungry people and they see a problem. They see nothing good coming from a hungry mob. But Jesus’ invitation to feed them rather than send them away indicates that he looks at the same crowd and sees the possibility of a celebration. Thousands of hungry people are not a problem but an opportunity for God to work.

We look again this week at a world in turmoil, with more conflicts that we can remember all at once and we see nothing, no hope for peace. Many days it seems like we are staring down a hungry crowd with nothing but 5 loaves and two fish. But somehow with all of it we trust that God sees fighting people and helpless bystanders and activists who go unheard and sees yet the possibility of peace and justice. Where we see nothing, God is already planning the feast that will host Israelis next to Palestinians, and Ukrainians next to Russians, and Syrians from both sides next to one another.

And how often do we look at people and see nothing, people who are not enough? It happens most often with people at the margins. People we see as too young or too old, people we label as disabled. We forget that infants have something to teach us about God. That people in nursing home beds who can’t always remember what day it is and people in ICU beds who can’t speak for the breathing tubes, they have something to teach us about God. We forget that people whose abilities are different from our own teach us about God, too. God invites us to see not another problem but another person to join the feast.

This “nothing” thinking has been true of every congregation I’ve ever experienced. People in churches at one time or another, including pastors, look around and see the equivalent of the disciples’ “nothing.” Too small, too big, too many programs or not enough. The people are too old, or too young, overly-friendly or not friendly enough. Too much this or not enough that. Have you said it or thought it about our congregation? If only we had more people… or more of a certain kind of person…or more energy or…you get the idea. The problem is that every church is imperfect. In every church there’s a way to look at the crowd of people and see not enough. But when God looks at it, God says “Look at these people! Let’s have a feast!”

And let’s not forget the leftovers at the end of the story. Who hasn’t looked at a pile of leftovers and thought – now what are we going to do with all that!? In this case it’s the opposite of nothing. But sometimes we have the potential to see that as a problem, too. It’s the end of a long day and a long week for Jesus and the disciples. If it were me, I’d be tempted to leave the leftovers on the ground and head off to bed. But they take the time to gather them, yes, as a sign of the abundance of the feast, but also perhaps as a sign that there is more abundance for the next crowd – that there is more to be shared another day. God’s bounty is more than a single feast can hold.

All this seems like a foreshadowing of what is to come. Because at the end of the gospel of Matthew, the disciples will again see nothing. They will look at the crucified Jesus and see nothing but a dead body. And three days later they will stare bewildered at the empty tomb shocked by the sheer abundance of what it represents. A reminder for us, that all the moments when we see our “nothings” transformed into “somethings” beyond our belief that it is a promise to us that when some day we stare into the future and see nothing but death, that even there, God is transforming it into something new.

When we see nothing, or almost nothing, God gives us a new set of eyes to see that nothing as something. So whatever we don’t see enough of today, God still sees something and with a little bread and wine, nothing really, God invites us again with the hungry crowd, that in our nothingness we might become the body of Christ. Let’s have a feast!

-Pastor Steven Wilco