A Sermon for Proper 12, Year
B
“Gather up the fragments, so that nothing may be
lost...” (John 6:12) [1]
In Dorothy Sayers’ short story, The Necklace of Pearls, amateur sleuth,
Lord Peter Wimsey, has been invited for Christmas to an English country house. Sir Septimus Shale, his wealthy host, is very
fond of party games. And so after an
enormously filling English Christmas dinner, the assembled guests reluctantly make
their way through rounds of Musical
Chairs, Hunt for the Slipper, Animal, Vegetable, & Mineral and an elaborate version of Charades, for
which all sorts of costumes are brought into use. Near the end of the evening,
however, it is discovered to everyone’s shock, that the extremely valuable
necklace of matched pearls which Sir Septimus’ had given his beloved daughter
has gone missing in the midst of all the moving about and changing of
clothes. A frantic hunt ensues. The pile of costume clothing is gone through multiple
times, the house is searched from top to bottom, and, so, after some
embarrassing moments, are all the guests.
An enormous amount of effort is put into finding the missing pearls --
all in vain, of course, until Lord Peter
deduces where the pearls are and who the thief is.
If you want to find out the solution to that
mystery, you’ll have to read the story.
For now I want to turn to a Gospel story which has its own mystery --
that is, why great effort is expended to gather stuff which, unlike pearls, has
no apparent value. St. John’s account of
the feeding of the multitudes contains a
very strange instruction Jesus gives his disciples after the crowds have eaten
their fill of the miraculously multiplied loaves and fishes: “Gather up the fragments, so that nothing may
be lost.”
Why in God’s name does Jesus tell his disciples
to comb the trampled grass on the mountain side where over five thousand people
have spent the day, and to pick up the leftovers lying on the ground? The image that comes to my mind when I hear
this command is the final scene of the 1960’s movie, Woodstock¸ where men with sharp sticks, shovels, garbage bags, and
eventually bulldozers work to clean up all the stuff left behind after 500,000
flower children turned Yasgar’s farm into a litter-strewn sea of mud 40 years
ago. Those guys, at least, were picking
up trash in order to throw it away -- but Jesus wants the disciples to save what
they collect! What could he possibly
have had in mind? Scraps of bread and pieces of fish that have been sitting out
in the Mediterranean sun all afternoon are hardly of the same value as a string
of perfectly matched pearls! Would the
once hungry crowd who’d eaten their fill want to carry away the dry and smelly
remains of their noon meal in a doggy bag for a snack on the way home? I don’t
think so! Clearly, Jesus’ strange
instruction must have another meaning.
Well, in the Gospel of John, you can usually
count on puzzling actions or words having some kind of symbolic meaning, and so
it is here. Jesus tells the disciples to
gather up the fragments, so that nothing
may be lost. There is a suggestion,
and more than a suggestion, that despite appearances to the contrary, something
here is valuable enough to be worth saving -- something that to Jesus is as
valuable as a beautiful necklace of matched pearls. What could that possibly be?
We get a clue to this mystery a bit later on
in the same chapter of John’s Gospel.
Jesus, now talking about himself as the bread of life, says the
following:
“Everything that the Father
gives to me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive
away. For I have come down from heaven
not to do my own will, but the will of the One who sent me. And this is the will of the One who sent me,
that I should lose nothing of all
that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.” [2]
It is God’s desire and, therefore, Jesus’ desire,
that nothing of what God has given
Jesus should be lost, that not one of
the people that God has placed in Jesus’
hands, should fail to be gathered up into God’s Kingdom. Jesus’ strange instruction to the disciples
is a symbolic acting out of this divine desire to save everyone and everything.
The fact that the disciples are told to gather such seemingly worthless things
as scraps of bread and leftover fish makes the point crystal clear: despite appearances to the contrary, there is
no piece of God’s creation, no person in God’s world, that is so small, so damaged,
so used up, so worthless that they can be overlooked or allowed to be trodden
underfoot. God cares about every last
crumb of the creation, and treasures those crumbs as more valuable than pearls,
saving and savoring them as precious gifts.
God is like a parent who collects and saves a child’s every arts and
crafts project, however little or awkward.
Or we might say that God is like Winnie the Pooh when that Bear of Very
Little Brain has gotten his hands on a jar of honey -- he keeps reaching in
with his paw again and again to make sure he’s gotten out every bit of the
honey he loves so much. It is the deep
desire of God’s heart that all should be gathered up, that no one should be
left out, that nothing be lost.
What would happen if we took seriously the
implications of Jesus’ words to the disciples: “Gather up the fragments, so
that nothing may be lost.” ? Well, we
might begin by realizing that we ourselves, each and every scrap of our own lives is precious to God. We might learn that there is no part of who
we are or what we do that is without value in God’s sight. We might discover that what we see as nothing
more than a dried crust of bread or a smelly scrap of fish, God sees as a
precious pearl.
That’s a lesson we all would do well to take
to heart. Some people look on their
whole being as worth not much more than day-old bread. These are people who say, “Well, I’m really
not good at much of anything,” or “I’m not surprised that no one likes me very
much.” They think they have nothing of value to contribute to life, and that
they deserve to be ignored, overlooked, and even mistreated. To such people, Jesus says, “You are as
valuable as a pearl. I want to be sure
that you are gathered up and not lost.”
Others of us may not devalue our selves quite
so thoroughly -- but even so, most of us
have at least some parts of our selves, some aspect of our lives which we think
God could not possibly care about -- assuming that God even bothers to notice. But as I have been reminded at times by
friends and family, God cares about every last hair on our heads, even if some
of us don’t have very many of them.
There is no part of our being, however small or unremarkable or flawed
it may seem to us, that God is willing to treat as trash, to be picked up only
to be thrown away. On the contrary, in
love God searches out every part of us, things that we might see as only a dried scrap of bread or an old fish tail,
and gathers them up and treasures them, so that nothing, absolutely nothing,
may be lost.
And if that is how God sees and loves us,
gathering up the scraps of our lives like pearls -- how then are we to see and
love other people? In the same way, of
course. That is part of Jesus’ point in
telling the disciples to gather up the fragments of bread and fish. He is instructing them to act as he does, to
assist in fulfilling God’s desire that no person, no part of God’s wonderful creation should be
lost. The disciples’ afternoon of picking up scraps on the hillside is on the
job training for them, physical as well as symbolic practice in what they are
to do as Jesus’ followers.
What a contrast this is to the ways of our society! America is the land of the disposable – we
are extraordinarily wasteful of physical
things. But the deeper sin of our society is that we treat human beings as
disposable, not worth being gathered up, treasured, and savored . We consider people disposable because they
live in the wrong neighborhood or have the wrong color skin, because they are
of the wrong class, or received the wrong education; because they are the wrong
age or gender or sexual orientation. To
see how easily our culture treats people as disposable, all you need to do is
drive down one or two streets in parts of Plainfield or Newark or Elizabeth, or
visit the Roosevelt Care Center in Edison..
But that not is not how God treats people nor
is it how we, who seek to be Jesus’ followers, are to treat people,
either. Like those disciples on the
hillside 2,000 years ago, we are to gather up those whom the rest of the world
treats as worth no more than a crust of bread or dried fish. We are to gather up the fragments so that
nothing may be lost. That is why, even
in the midst of financially hard times, the Episcopal Church Budget adopted by
General Convention gives over $800,000 to Episcopal Relief and Development’s Nets for Life program as part of our commitment
to the UN Millennium Development Goals. That is why the Budget also commits significant
funds to a domestic poverty initiative targeted to places of great need in our
own country: indigenous communities, especially
Native American reservations. It is also why Convention enacted
resolutions that made fuller provision for the participation for gay and lesbian
people in our common life. In doing these things, and many more, General Convention sought, however
imperfectly, to live out God’s desire that no person, no part of God’s wonderful
creation should be lost. Whether gathered in General Convention in Anaheim or
in a smallish congregation in New Jersey, Christians are invited always to see
with God’s vision, to look on the outcast, poor, undervalued of the world as
pearls of great price, as Pooh Bear’s honey, as a child’s works of art -- to be
sought out, collected, loved, and treasured.
The mystery of Jesus’ strange instruction to his disciples
is that God seeks out, loves, and treasures every part of the creation; each
one of us, however worthless we may think we are; every part of us, however unsightly we may think it is. So,
too, God seeks out, loves and treasures every other person God has made,
however different, off-putting, difficult or troubling we may find them. Living
out that welcoming love is what Christian mission is all about. As Jesus said
to those disciples 2,000 years ago, so he says to us today, “Gather up the fragments, so that nothing may
be lost.”
The Rev. Jack Zamboni
July 26, 2009