Once upon a time,
there was a girl who lived in a lovely little cottage made of gingerbread and
candy. She was always asleep. One day, she woke up, and the candy had mold on
it. Her father blew her a kiss, and the house fell down. The girl started
running, and she realized she was lost. She was on a crowed street, but the
people were made of paper, like paper dolls. She blew them all a kiss goodbye,
and watched as they all flew away.
Strange as that
story may seem, it's one of my favorites. It's from the TV show My So-Called
Life, which was tragically canceled after being on the air for only one season
when I was in high school. The story was written by Angela Chase, the main
character of the show, as an assignment for her English class. Their regular
English teacher was out and Mr. Racine, who always wore one white sock, and one
black sock, was their eccentric substitute teacher.
The story may not
seem to make any sense, but it's filled with emotion. As Mr. Racine says in the
episode when the story is read out loud to the class, 'It does better than make
sense. It makes you feel." To this day, My So-called Life remains my
favorite TV show of all time, in no small part because of that story.
Stories are
important. They help us make to sense of the world, help us to process the way
that we feel about things; they record the great events of our lives, even
though they sometimes do this allegorically. Stories can help us to understand
things that are sometimes too complicated for simple explanation. I think this is
why Jesus told so many parables. He was trying to share things that our minds
could only grasp in story form. Stories have a way of conveying multiple levels
of meaning, with fewer words, almost like a secret code, but a code that's
alive and breathing. Stories survive us. They're around long after we're gone,
telling succeeding generations about who we were, what we stood for, what we
believed.
Our scripture
reading today tells us the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000 with five loaves of
bread and two fish. Later in the story Jesus walks on water, and his disciples
are afraid because they think he's a ghost. These stories are filled with
mystery and wonder. We're transported back to an ancient time, when miracles
happened and gods walked the earth. These stories are filled with magic.
I was drawn to
talk about this passage today precisely because of that magic. I've gone to
church almost every Sunday of my life, and I have to admit that I can't
remember 99.9% of the sermons that I've heard, but I distinctly remember two
different sermons about this passage. The first one was about the feeding of
the 5,000 with the fives loaves of bread and two fish that a little boy had
given them when they were wondering about where to find enough food to feed so
many people. They were up on a mountain, there were no stores nearby, and even
if there were, what store was going to have enough food for 5,000 people? Can
you imagine if you were one of the disciples, and a little boy had come up to
you with his little bag of food to help feed everyone? It's so precious, it's
so sweet, but ultimately useless, because what is five loaves of bread and two
fish against 5,000 people? And so, we come to the miracle. Jesus blesses the
loaves, and he blesses the fish, and they pass the food around, and everyone
gets to eat as much food as they want. And after everyone has eaten their fill,
they collect all of the leftover bits of food, and they fill twelve baskets,
full of food! It's a miracle! Five loaves of bread and two fish fed this horde
of 5,000 people and multiplied to the point that they had leftover food, more
food left over than the amount of food they had started with in the first
place!
But, what happened here?
Exactly what kind of miracle had taken place? Did the food actually multiply,
as the writer of this story seems to imply, or did something else happen? The
person who gave this sermon said that what really happened was that all 5,000
of the people had actually brought food with them, that a person in that time
and place would never go on a journey without bringing along some food, because
there was no guarantee that you'd be able to find food along the way. And,
because there was no guarantee that you'd be able to find food along the way,
you wouldn't just give your food away. You'd keep for yourself, to make sure
that you had enough food to eat for that day, and perhaps for many days to
come. So the real miracle was the fact that Jesus had somehow convinced the
people to let go of their food, to share their food with each other, and come
together as a community. I'm not going to say definitively one way or another
whether or not this is what really happened, because even though it's certainly
possible that this is what happened, it's just not in the text. I makes for a good
story about Jesus inspiring compassion and building community, but just I think
the story looses something when we look at it this way.
The other sermon that I heard
had to do with Jesus walking on the water, and maybe some of you have heard
this before, but the person that gave that sermon said that the disciples only
thought they saw Jesus walking on the water, and he was actually just walking
along the shore, or maybe he was walking in the shallows. Why do we do this? We
take two wonderful, magical stories, and we suck all of the wonder out of them.
It's part of our nature, I guess, to try to make sense out of the things we
encounter. We can't allow things to be wondrous, or mystical, because we've
been taught that there is always a rational explanation. It's even worse now
with all of our scientific advances and the level to which we educate
ourselves. We've stopped believing that there could be things that are too
mysterious or wonderful for us to understand. We don't believe in magic.
I've always believed in the
power of story, and recently, I've actually started to talk about it. Sometimes
when I'm feeling down or burned out, I'll actually think to myself, "I
need story," and it doesn't matter what form it takes, it can be a movie
or a novel, a TV show, or even a comic book, it doesn't even have to reflect my
life at all, as long as the story is good, it will make me feel better. It will
somehow get inside of me and let me know that everything is going to be okay.
And, I don't think I am alone
in this. Stories are pervasive, we're surrounded my story. Storytelling has
endured since the dawn of humankind, and it's not going anywhere. God has given
us an incredible gift. Our minds are capable of such rich and wonderfully
creative stories, and we've been given language to share and record them. This
may be stretching the definition of magic a little, but I do think that stories
are magical, that they heal, they are the tools that God has given us so that
we would be able to create out of nothing, tools that everyone so that we can
connect with each other.
And with that, I would like to
leave you with a story from my life. The title of this story is: Weed Seed.
In the time before,
When children were playing in the
shadow of a seemingly benevolent tyrant king,
And their mother was too afraid to
do anything about it,
The creator of all the world
decided to bestow unto us a gift,
The gift of indestructible
resilience in the face of insurmountable odds,
And now that tyrant has
decided to become a father,
And although it is far too
late to erase the damage done through years of negligent abuse,
And the fragile earth has
been unmercifully scorched almost beyond repair,
My siblings and I have
decided,
That although our gardens
may be too infertile to bear fruit,
We will collect all the
seeds of our experience and see what we can grow.
But what came up,
Was weeds,
But what is a weed but a
plant growing where someone decided they didn’t want it?
So we have to decided to
want them,
We have decided to embrace
them all,
Making our gardens lush and
beautiful,
Where my mother’s pink
flamingos and windmill sunflowers have a place to call home,
And my father is free to
harvest his kumquats, and loquats, and jujubes,
Where,
A sparkling musical
waterfall that mists when the wind blows,
Splashes gracefully into a
colorful koi pond that,
Flashes,
In the sunlight,
And while we are all
working in the garden,
Trying to grow as much as
we can,
There is still the
inevitable weed that needs to be pulled.
Not the weeds that we have
embraced as our own,
No!
These are the overbearing
kind of weeds that grow way too big!
Greedy!
Hogging up the sunlight,
With their long sharp
thorns and serrated leaves,
With sticky brown sap and
bright red fruit,
That looks pretty,
But is far too bitter to eat.
These are the weeds that
need to be pulled.
These are the weeds that
threaten to overrun the garden,
So with heavy gray suede
garden gloves,
We grab these at the base
and we pull,
But the roots of these
weeds are deep,
And if you leave even the
smallest bit of root in the ground,
The weeds will come back
bigger,
Threatening the serenity
our sacred space,
But as long as we are
diligent,
The gardens remain lush and
vibrant,
And the views from the
house will be stunning and beautiful,
And even though sometimes,
The house itself is just a
bit too dark,
And even though sometimes
the house is just a bit too quiet,
And even though sometimes
you can sometimes hear the echoes of the past threatening to overcome your
fragile sensibilities with overwhelming force,
You can always escape to
the garden,
Where the sunshine falls
and wipes out all of the shadows,
Even the seemingly
benevolent tyrant ones,
And you can like your
weeds,
And you can eat red fruit,
And you can hold your
stomach and grimace through the pain,
Because, even if the
nourishment is poisonous,
It’s better than starving
to death.
And since the fruit that
doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,
Since,
We have somehow managed to
eat it and survive,
My siblings and I have made
a pact,
That we will one day raise
our own generation of gardeners,
And their gardens will be
lush and beautiful,
Filled with fruit trees,
vegetables and flowers,
Not weeds,
And our mother will no
longer remain silent,
But her laughter and
singing will,
Fill the gardens of her
grandchildren,
And,
Even though we have to eat
red fruit to ensure this future,
Even though our hands will
be stained brown by sticky sap,
And,
Bloodied by sharp thorns,
We will eat the fruit,
So that they will never
know the taste of bitterness in their mouths,
And we will stain our
hands,
So that they will never
know the chill,
Of the shadow,
Of a seemingly benevolent
tyrant king falling over them,
And we will bloody
ourselves,
So that they will never
have to plant weed seed for lack of anything better to plant,
For we will have eaten all
the bitter red fruit,
And we will grimace through
the pain for them,
And we will not leave even
a single,
Sticky red weed seed to
threaten the serenity of our sacred space,
And we will bask in the
sunlight.
Amen.
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