PROPER 11-B, July 20, 2003

There is a true story told by Paul Conn in his book Making It Happen. As the story goes, one evening while he was living in Atlanta , Paul and his wife decided to go out for dinner. Being new to the town, they did what a lot of us do when visiting new cities: we look in the yellow pages under “restaurants”. Well, Paul saw an ad for an establishment called The Church of God Grill. His curiosity got the better of him, so he called the restaurant. 

When someone at the grill answered the phone, Paul asked how the restaurant came to have such an unusual name. The person on the other end of the line replied: "We had a little mission down here, and we started selling chicken dinners after church on Sunday just to help pay the bills. People liked the chicken so much, and we did such a good business, we eventually cut back on the church services. After a while we just closed down the church altogether and kept on serving chicken dinners. We kept the name we started with; so we're The Church of God Grill."

Only there was no more church -- only a grill. I guess the point of the story is that a church died because its food was better than its faith. When that Church of God opened its doors, people came because they were hungry. They were looking to be fed food, fed spiritual food. What eventually happened was that the physical food that was cooked to help pay the bills began to taste better and was more filling the spiritual food that brought them to the church in the first place. The people soon went to church on Sunday looking to be fed with chicken rather than to be fed with the Word of God. Perhaps the morale of the story is that we need to always remember not what is being served, but rather who is being served.

Take today's Gospel as a case in point. The Apostles' had just come back from their first preaching mission that we read about in last Sunday's Gospel lesson. Jesus has sent them out two-by-two to call the people to repentance. When they returned, they were both excited and exhausted. They were excited enough that they immediately wanted to tell Jesus everything that had happened, how successful they were, each one of them. But they were also almost too tired to talk. Jesus understood this. He wanted to hear their stories and he wanted them to get some rest at the same time. So before they could get started, he told them to get into the boat so that they could go across the lake to a deserted place. There they could rest, relax, and debrief.

Of course we know what happened. Just as they arrived at this place of refreshment, a whole crowd of people arrived with them -- over 5000 of them. My suspicion is that the apostles were somewhat angry about this development. After all, this was to be their time alone with Jesus, their time to rest, their time to be praised, their time to be refreshed. Now all these people were take their time away from them.

And so when evening finally came, they were probably beside themselves with anger. All they wanted was for this crowd to just go away and leave them alone. And they told Jesus so in so many words. Yes, they were kind about it in their self-centeredness when they reminded Jesus that it was getting late and these people did need to get away from this deserted place in order to get something to eat. But Jesus recognized what was going on. He called their bluff.

He said to them that if they were really so concerned with this crowd of people, if they were truly concerned that the people had been traveling since sunrise and had spent all day either walking or listening and were thus obviously famished -- if these apostles were so concerned about feeding these people, well, why not just go ahead and feed them? By now, of course, all sense of caring and serving and understanding had vanished from the minds and hearts of the apostles. Sarcastically they said to Jesus that not even 200 days wages would buy enough for these people to eat -- and they had nowhere near that kind of money in their common treasury nor were they in any place where food could be bought -- as they had already reminded Jesus.

I suspect that by now Jesus was smiling inwardly, shaking his head, realizing that, once again, his followers had really missed the message. In fact, they seem to have missed the whole point of why he had sent them out in the first place and what they had learned -- if they had learned anything.  Like the people of the Church of God Grill , they were more concerned about their stomachs than their souls. On the other hand, the people who chased Jesus around the lake were more concerned about their souls than they were about their stomachs. They probably didn't even realize they were physically hungry. They simply felt blessed -- and fed – because they were in Jesus's presence. They didn't need anything else.

The apostles, of course, forgot that fact. They always had Jesus. They were always blessed with his presence, so much so that they began to take it for granted. And then when others simply asked for a tiny portion of that blessing, they complained. They wanted what they had, believed that they deserved it and begrudged others for wanting only a little part of it.

Senator Ernest Hollings once told the story about a veteran returning from Korea who went to college on the GI bill. He then bought a home with a AHA loan, saw his kids born in a VA hospital; started a business with an SBA loan; got electricity from the TVA, and later water from an EPA project. His parents retired to a farm on social security, got electricity from REA and soil testing from the USDA. When his father became ill, Medicare saved the family from financial ruin and his own life was saved with a drug developed through NIH.

His kids participated in the school lunch program, learned physics from teachers trained in an NSF program, and went through college with guaranteed student loans. He drove to work on the Interstate and moored his boat on a channel dredged by the Army Corps of Engineers. When floods hit, he took Amtrak to Washington to apply for disaster relief and spent some time in the Smithsonian museums. Then one day he wrote Senator Hollings an angry letter asking the government to get off his back and complaining about paying taxes for all those programs created for ungrateful people.

Like Senator Hollings constituent it is so very easy to forget not only how blessed we are but also how important it is for us to share some of our blessings with those who are less blessed. The church is in the business of feeding and being fed, of serving and being served, of taking care of the needs of others and of our own needs: not either-or but rather both-and.  

At the end of John's Gospel Jesus says to Peter -- and he says to us -- "Feed my sheep." Notice, there were no conditions on this commandment to feed, least of all: "Feed my sheep if they deserve it. Feed my sheep if you feel like it. Feed my sheep if you have any leftovers. Feed my sheep if the mood strikes you, if the economy is OK, if you're not too busy." No, there were no conditions, just "Feed my sheep." We who have agreed to keep our baptismal covenant are called to feed sheep even when it might mean that grazing may sometimes be done on our own front lawns.

Could it be that the Kingdom of God will come and God's work will finally be done -- and yours and mine as well -- only when each lamb, each sheep, is fed, fed spiritually and fed physically? The Church of God people could have had the best of both worlds. Their selfishness or stupidity, or whatever it was that caused them to close the church and keep open the grill, resulted in people being only half-fed, half-full.

Like the Apostles we are called to feed others both physically and spiritually. As today’s Gospel reminds us, how good the food we serve – and how much -- will depend both on the depth of our faith and the degree of our willingness to put other people first. May that faith in God and our willingness to live it out in love and service to others grow each day.