More Than Enough
John Wilkinson Third
Presbyterian Church August 8, 2003
Matthew 14:13-21
Charlie Croker is a man in full. Charlie Croker is the central
character in Tom Wolfe's latest work, A Man in Full. Set primarily
in Atlanta, A Man in Full attempts to paint with broad, outrageous
strokes a portrait of the late, consumer-driver 1990's in much
the same way Wolfe's A Bonfire of the Vanities did for the fabulous
New York City of the 1980's. Sometimes both of those eras seem
so very long ago.
And yet Charlie Croker is a man in full. He is 60 years old,
a highly successful real estate developer. A former two-way
football player at Georgia Tech, Charlie Croker is a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps,
good-old-boy from below Georgia's gnat-line. And he likes "things."
Listen to Tom Wolfe's description of his plantation, called
Turpmtime: "Twenty-nine thousand acres of prime southwest Georgia
forest, fields, and swamp! And all of it, every square inch
of it, every beast that moved on it, all fifty-nine horses,
all twenty-two mules, all forty dogs, all thirty-six buildings
that stood upon it, plus a mile-long asphalt landing strip,
complete with jet-fuel pumps and a hangar -- all of it was his…to
do with as he chose." (page 4)
And it gets better: "three BMW 750:L's…two BMW 540:A's…a Ferrari
355…a customized Cadillac Seville STS." And there is more: "two
Beechnut 400A's, a Super King Air 350, a Gulfstream Five with
a custom cabin interior featuring tupelo maple designed and
furnished for $2,845,000." (p. 51)
Tom Wolfe offers a gross caricature, of course, but not quite
a parody. Because there is more for Charlie Croker. His knee
aches constantly from a football injury, and vanity prohibits
surgery. He drinks too much. His company, Croker Global, is
in debt for $800 million dollars; he himself personally liable
for $160 million. He misses his wife, whom he has unceremoniously
dumped for a woman nearly as young as his son, and now he is
an embarrassment to family members, business associates, and,
finally, himself. Charlie Croker was a man in full.
Tom Wolfe offers a gross caricature, of course, but not quite
a parody. We may relate to Charlie Croker, in part, in totality,
maybe not at all. But his issues, even when approached with
an economy of scale, are real and human and at the heart of
the story, our story.
Acquisition and consumption are easy targets from pulpits.
But this conversation is not about consumption, or acquisition,
not really, and not directly. It is about much more, about the
meaning of finding meaning, about when the things you have control
you, or when the things you don't have control you, about what
is missing and what is present, about an alternate way of approaching
life's biggest questions and being transformed by the very simple,
very real, very abundant proposition of faith.
Jesus had just heard the news about the beheading of John the
Baptist. He retreated to grieve, in a boat, to a deserted place.
But the crowds would have nothing of it and tracked him down.
And he had compassion on them, even in the face of his own grief.
He healed them.
And the disciples -- that great chorus of spin doctors and
handlers and rationalizers, among whom might have been a Presbyterian
minister or two, I suspect -- the disciples get nervous. They
are not in control. They are off away from civilization. Night
is falling. There is no food. Their plan, therefore, which they
present to Jesus, is to send the people away, to the villages,
where they can find something to eat.
Makes sense to all. But not to Jesus. In response to the practical
questions, writes Garret Keizer, "the answer Jesus gives is
always the same.’Let's see.'" (Christian Century, July 14-21,
1999, p. 707) Jesus says, "Let's see." Jesus says, "They don't
need to leave just yet, these people I love so dearly. You give
them something to eat."
This story is told in each of the gospel accounts. In John's
version, a small boy provides the means of grace, a wonderful
illustration about the unlikely vehicles of abundance. Here,
a meager bit of food shows up -- five loaves of bread and two
fish. And hear this: Jesus took the food and blessed it and
broke it and gave it to the disciples and they passed it out
to the crowd, five thousand men and countless women and children
who didn't count officially but who had hungry bellies nonetheless,
and all ate until they were filled, like a never-ending church
potluck. They were filled.
And then there is this, what I have always believed to be a
lightly comic touch with divine implications; we are told that
there are twelve baskets of bread pieces, twelve divine Tupperware
containers of leftovers, just to underscore the point to the
disciples and to us who didn't believe that he could pull it
off and to demonstrate with clarity to the disciples and to
us the news of incomprehensible abundance. They were filled.
There was more than enough.
Like every Jesus story, we want to know how it happened. The
story itself does not seem all that interested in the question.
It spends much more time on the set-up and the aftermath, the
crowd's hope and the disciples' doubt, the filled stomachs and
the abundant leftovers. Meaning in the face of no meaning. Hope
in the face of doubt. Unpredictable blessing in the face of
careful strategizing. Abundance in the face of scarcity.
Walter Brueggemann writes that "The conflict between the narratives
of abundance and of scarcity is the defining problem confronting
us at the turn of the millennium…Whether we are liberal or conservative
Christians," Brueggemann writes, "we must confess that the central
problem in our lives is that we are torn apart by the conflict
between our attraction to the good news of God's abundance and
the power of our belief in scarcity…" (Christian Century, March
24-21, 1999, pp. 342-347)
Consumerism and acquisition are easy targets. This is more,
much more, what Brueggemann calls the "liturgy of abundance
and the myth of scarcity." I love that. The liturgy of abundance.
It is not about "stuff." It is about who we are, whose we are,
how we are, why we are. And to put the question in that context,
the gospel context, the faith context, is to say, simply, that
there is enough; there is more than enough. We will be filled.
The biblical story is clear, though never easy, about what
we used to call providence, God's intention to provide -- in
the face of our attempts to stock-pile -- God's habit to provide,
from the very moment of creation to the gift of the promised
land to the birth of the little baby to the empty tomb to the
whirlwind of the church; God's project is to gauge real human
need and to provide out of abundant generosity. So that we will
be filled. Because there is more than enough.
There is more than enough hospitality to heal the world's estrangement.
There is more than enough hope to restore the world's despair.
There is more than enough wisdom to redress the deepest of
our culture's challenges.
There is more than enough compassion to mend broken hearts,
and, it would seem to me as well, more than enough character
to say enough to senseless and random and easy and now nearly
acceptable violence, even in our own city’s streets.
I am just back from a meting of the Presbyterian Theological
Task Force on the Peace, Unity and Purity of the Church. As
you well know, our most pressing issue facing us is the manner
in which our ordination standards relate to our theology of
human sexuality. As we met this week, we were very aware of
what our Episcopalian friends were considering, the ebb and
flow of the debate, its resolution and aftermath. And it struck
me again that in this debate, for Episcopalians (though not
to meddle in their business!), and yes even for Presbyterians,
there is more than enough space for grace, more than enough
grace for people who hold deep disagreements on these issues
to find common ground for the sake of the gospel.
There are more than enough resources, honestly, financial,
physical, resources, to do what we need to do, what God is calling
us to do, even in this admittedly tough economy, when news from
Kodak and elsewhere leaves us feeling anxious, all of us.
There is more than enough "stuff," even.
Dorothy Day, whose wonderful book called Loaves and Fishes
chronicled the founding of the Catholic Worker Movement, wrote:
"When we were first starting to publish our paper, in an effort
to achieve a little of the destitution of our neighbors we gave
away our furniture and sat on boxes. But as fast as we gave
things away people brought more. We gave blankets to needy families,
and when we started our first house of hospitality people gathered
together all the blankets we needed. We gave away food, and
more food came in: exotic food, some of it -- a haunch of venison
from the Canadian Northwest, a can of oysters from Maryland,
a container of honey from Illinois…We've even had salmon from
Seattle, flown across the continent." (p. 84)
More than enough. Yet we cling to scarcity, hold onto fear
and anxiety, abide in distrust. We consume and acquire because
we are convinced such living gives us meaning. Like the disciples,
we ask "where's the food," and then set off on our own devices
to provide the answer, control the outcome, manage the product,
unwilling to let go of the myth of scarcity, unwilling to live
into, lean into, the generosity that is promised to us, unwilling
to leap into the abundance that is the very heart of our story.
Walter Brueggemann reminds us that "Jesus presents an entirely
different kind of economy, one infused with the mystery of abundance
and a cruciform kind of generosity. Jesus transforms the economy
by blessing it and breaking it beyond self-interest." (p. 346)
This is not conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat.
There is no program, no plan. Either it's an entirely new brand
of politics, or no politics at all. It is a new direction for
a new community, calling us to re-organize, re-orient, re-create,
re-form, to think more like the crowds who followed Jesus and
gave with their hearts and less like the disciples who became
so limited by their very human desire to contain.
There is more than enough grace, grace which we treat as a
commodity to be earned and traded, rather than the gift freely
given, like manna from heaven, that we can't predict or plan
for, only receive.
And all will be filled. And God only knows what we might do
with all those leftovers. Amen.
