Sermon for Sunday, November 25, 2007

A Theology of Leftovers

Rev. Cindy Bates

Scripture: Luke 9:10-17

¹⁰ On their return the apostles told Jesus all they had done. He took them with him and withdrew privately to a city called Bethsaida. ¹¹ When the crowds found out about it, they followed him; and he welcomed them, and spoke to them about the kingdom of God, and healed those who needed to be cured. ¹² The day was drawing to a close, and the twelve came to him and said, "Send the crowd away, so that they may go into the surrounding villages and countryside, to lodge and get provisions; for we are here in a deserted place." ¹³ But he said to them, "You give them something to eat." They said, "We have no more than five loaves and two fish unless we are to go and buy food for all these people." ¹⁴ For there were about five thousand men. And he said to his disciples, "Make them sit down in groups of about fifty each." ¹⁵ They did so and made them all sit down. ¹⁶ And taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke them, and gave them to the disciples to set before the crowd. ¹⁷ And all ate and were filled. What was left over was gathered up, twelve baskets of broken pieces.

Last Sunday evening I came out of the grocery story and made my way to the car with my recently purchased 20 lb turkey.  As I was struggling to load it into my car, a very friendly young woman with her toddler in her arms was getting out of the car next to mine.  Seeing my obviously large Thanksgiving purchase she started a conversation and asked how many people I would be having for dinner.  I said, “Well, only 11 but everybody always wants leftovers.”  She laughed and responded, “Yes, leftovers, they’re the best.”  I smiled all the way home.  First of all, people aren’t always friendly when you encounter them in the grocery store parking lot and it’s so nice when they are.  But, what made me smile even more was thinking about leftovers.  Do you still have some at your house?  Even when we eat more than our fill at Thanksgiving the bounty of the meal usually produces an abundance of leftovers that are consumed for several meals thereafter or sometimes left in the refrigerator for so long no one wants to consume them!  What do you think about leftovers?

I have to admit that I think differently about leftovers than I used to partly because of Jerry and Laura Herships.  Several years ago Jerry and Laura realized a couple of days after Thanksgiving they were still eating the remnants of their Thanksgiving meal and were frankly getting pretty tired of those same old leftovers.  So they devised a plan!  They called up several of their friends and invited them to a “Leftovers Party.”  The idea was to have friends bring what ever leftovers they had, which would be a brand new taste commodity to everyone else at the party.  What you were sick of could be turned into a brand new meal for others.  The result was another abundant feast for everyone.  They turned leftovers into a party.  A scarcity became an abundance!  I think a leftovers party is very theological!

The Gospel lesson today from Luke tells a story about a leftovers party.  Jesus and his disciples had gathered a crowd and the crowd wouldn’t leave, they wouldn’t go home. As usual, the disciples weren’t getting it.  They were getting a little irritated and they wanted Jesus to tell the crowd to go away, to find something to eat and a place to sleep on their own.  Maybe they were feeling the way you can feel when you wonder if the guests will ever go home and instead they stay, hoping the food will come out the second time!  But Jesus, never ready to ask the guests to leave the table said to the disciples, “See what we have to share, and we’ll make it work.”  So as the story goes, Jesus took five loaves of bread and two fish and fed 5,000 people.  And not only did he feed thousands of people but when everyone had eaten their fill, there were twelve baskets of food left over!  There was enough to go around and then some.  That is a miraculous story told about Jesus’ ministry.  But what if the miracle Jesus wanted us to “get” was not that he could magically multiply the loaves and fishes but that when everyone shared what they had, there was more than enough to go around.  I think that is what the theology of leftovers means…there is enough…there is more than enough to go around.

Theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, offers a twist on the perspective of how Jesus fed the 5,000 with five loaves and two fish.  In Matthew’s version of the story it ends by saying there were 5,000, not counting the woman and children.  Ruether’s feminine perspective says, “The reason there was so much food was that all the women, as women are wont to do, brought picnic baskets, food enough for themselves, their children and one or two neighbors.  So, of course, there was enough for all.  But since the woman and children were not counted, the writer of the gospel really didn’t know where the food came from and presumed it was a miracle.”  I think that interpretation might make Jesus smile… just as long as we got the point that there was enough to go around because people shared what they had. 

Do we really believe there is enough to go around?  Sarah Ban Breathnach in her book Simple Abundance, says, “Both abundance and lack exist simultaneously in our lives as parallel realities… When we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance… the wasteland of illusion falls away and we experience Heaven on earth.

We all know people who are afraid that if they do not hang on to everything they have, there will not be enough.  Seeing life as producing scarcity rather than abundance causes us to fear and living in fear is not what God desires for any of us.  It is very hard to have an open heart to be able to see abundance when our hands are closed so tightly around what we think we might lose.  You’ve probably all heard the famous Chinese story in which heaven and hell are nearly identical, each overflowing with sumptuous and plentiful food. All the guests are provided chopsticks six feet long.  The only difference between the two places is that in hell people try in vain to eat on their own with the enormous chopsticks; they find it impossible to put food in their own mouths and they go hungry.  In heaven they feed each other. 

John O’Neil who co-authored a book with Alan Jones entitled Seasons of Grace: A Life-Giving Practice of Gratitude, says there are two kinds of people, those who have a banquet mentality and those who have a fortress frame of mind.  “The fortress type finds it hard to be thankful because gratitude requires, in some measure, the gift of our unguarded selves.” There certainly are times when I have a “fortress frame of mind,” times when I wonder if I will have enough for retirement, times when I wonder what the economy might bring.  And then I begin to think I need to hang on to everything I have because the future is uncertain.  But that is not how I want to live my life. I don’t want to live out of fear.   I truly believe God wants us to have a “banquet mentality,” trusting that there really will be enough to go around.

A Catholic priest tells a story from his childhood when it was after World War II and they were living in Poland.  He remembered a time when his father was “thin as a rail” went off into the countryside alone to search for food for the family.  After a long trek he returned with many pounds of meat, peas and potatoes.  What the priest recalled most vividly was not the amount of food his father brought home but what his mother did with it.  Before anyone could say anything she put part of the food away for their hungry neighbors and said to her family, “If you don’t share with others, you die.”  Wasn’t that what Jesus was trying to say to the rich young ruler who had so many possessions?  If you aren’t willing to share the abundance that you have you will lose your life.  It is what we are called to do… see life from the perspective of what we have not from the scarcity of what we don’t have.

Thomas Merton once said, “A happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by not being shared is not big enough to make us happy.”

United Methodist clergy, Rev. John Blinn, told a story the other day about a little girl in Pueblo, Colorado who, a few years ago, was watching television with her father.  The news that night was telling of the plight of children who had been orphaned because of the war in Sierra Leone.  At the end of the broadcast the little six-year-old turned to her father and said, “Daddy, we have to do something about that.”  He rather reluctantly, dubiously said, “OK, what shall we do?”  She thought for a moment and said, “I’m going to collect your leftover change each day and send it to them.”  So, everyday when her father came home she asked him for any change he had in his pocket.  And then she shared what she was doing with her Sunday School class and they began to save their change as well.  And soon some of her neighbors and schoolmates were doing the same thing and in a few weeks they had collected over $700.00 to send to an orphanage in Sierra Leone, which translated into an abundance in that war-torn country. That little girl and her friends made a huge difference in the lives of some children on the other side of the world by sharing some leftovers.

In the book, If God is Love, authors Phillip Gulley and James Mulholland say, “When God looks on us, God smiles.  Pure religion is learning to smile back.”  We are a blessed people.  We have the good fortune of having been born in a time and a place that is beyond most people’s experience or even comprehension when it comes to resources and abundance.  Yes, we have things we can worry about.  Life brings challenges and hard times.  Living with an attitude of gratitude does not deny that life can be difficult.  But this season of Thanksgiving can be a powerful reminder that we have more than enough.  There is enough food on the table and a coat to keep us warm and a place to sleep tonight.  There are so many in this world who cannot claim that abundance. For most of us, there is a great bounty in life.  We are blessed whenever there is enough to share, whenever there is even some leftover.

The other day, I heard my very favorite song about leftovers.  Singer, songwriter Susan Werner on her CD, The Gospel Truth, sings a song entitled, “Help Somebody.”  The words go, “I got plenty and then some, what do I do?  Go out and help somebody, get plenty and then some too.  Got a roof over my head, what do I do? Go out and help somebody get a roof over their head too.  Got supper on the table, what do I do? Go out and help somebody get supper on the table too. Cause I got it to give.  I got it to give.  When you got enough to give away, it’s the only way to live.”

Most of us have leftovers.  In this life we are blessed in so many ways.  God truly smiles on us.  How do we smile back?

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