When the bishop candidates came to
Nevada
for
a week-long bus tour,
our third stop was in
Las Vegas.
One of the Church ladies said to us,
“You
do understand this is a desert. Right?”
She probably meant it
literally.
Not everybody gets the
beauty of a desert.
But she might have meant
the resources are sparse here
– not many people, not much money.
The cultural climate is
as harsh to religion
as the
physical climate is harsh to animal life.
In many ways, it really
is a desert out there.
On the Galilean
mountainside, people were hungry.
It would be natural to
send them off somewhere
to find food.
But Jesus didn’t want to
do that.
He worried what would
become of them
along the way.
So Jesus said to the
disciples, “Let’s feed them here.”
They replied,
“You do understand that this is a desert. Right?
Where would we get enough
bread in the desert
to feed this multitude?”
It was the primal message:
“We don’t have enough.”
To which Jesus said,
“What have we got?”
“We don’t have enough” is
the universal game stopper.
To which Jesus responds
every time, “What have we got?”
Often we come back at him
with, “We don’t have the right stuff.”
What kind of fish do you
suppose they blessed and shared
on the
mountainside that day?
Chances are it was
Tilapia, the main fish in the Sea of Galilee.
But when they made the
movie The Greatest Story Ever Told,
the Sea of Galilee was portrayed by our own Pyramid Lake.
We don’t have Tilapia in
Pyramid Lake;
so the Tilapia were portrayed by Kooyooe.
Different lakes have
different fish.
Suppose the disciples had
said to Jesus,
“Well we have two fish, but we have no salmon,
no cod, no trout, no kooyooe.
We don’t’ have the right kind of fish.”
Jesus said, “What have we
got?”
“We got tilapia.”
“Ok then on tonight’s
menu we are serving tilapia.”
They had five loaves – of
what?
They had Galilean bread –
a filling but course bread
made
from barley, not wheat.
Suppose the disciples had
said to Jesus,
“We have five loaves alright,
but we
have no garlic bread, no Nan, no pumpernickel,
no German black bread, no whole wheat or Wonder
bread.”
Jesus said, “What have we
got?”
“We got barley bread.”
“Alright then”
So they blessed and
shared barley bread and Tilapia,
the
bread of Galilee the fish of Galilee
to feed the people of Galilee.
They called it “the gifts
of God for the people of God.”
There is always
resistance to blessing
the
simple gifts of the desert,
always the idea that we don’t have
enough
or what we have somehow isn’t right.
1,300 years before Jesus,
when the
children of Israel traversed the Sinai Desert,
they complained
because they wanted Egyptian cuisine.
All Moses had to give
them was the bread of heaven,
the food
of angels.
But they wanted something
from somewhere else.
They wanted Egyptian,
Thai or Italian maybe.
Somewhere that has good
food.
Moses said, “Sorry. We
got no Pad Thai noodles,
We got no tacos.
All we got is the bread
of heaven, the food of angels.”
There are several three
points here.
First, we all get hungry
sometime for something
-- truth, love, meaning, hope,
serenity -- something.
My favorite line from the
late poet Ann Sexton
is as simple and as it is poignant.
I suspect it was special
to Ann Sexton too,
because she used it in two poems,
one religious, one not.
It goes: “O my hunger! My
hunger!’//
We all hunger for
something.
It goes with the turf of
being human.
There is an emptiness
inside us.
17th Century
philosopher Blaise Pascal called it
“the God
shaped hole in the human heart.”
Second point: when we get
hungry,
we think
we need to go somewhere for what we need.
We look around our own
personal wilderness
and say, “This is a desert. I don’t have enough.”
We want a jazzier
philosophy, a more exotic diet,
a new
lover, a religion that is more cerebral
or more emotional or more something we are not.
Because “This life of mine is a desert. I don’t have
enough.”
Moses said,
What you need “is not up in heaven so that you have to ask,
‘Who will ascend into heaven and get it for us?’
Nor is it beyond the sea so that you have to ask,
‘Who will cross the sea and get it . . . . ‘
No, the word (of life) is very near you.
It is in your mouth and in your heart.”
We have what we need
right here
to do the work God has given us to do right here.
We have the bread of
heaven, the food of angels.
To be satisfied, all we
have to do
is bless
and share what we’ve got.
The people of Nevada are
hungry – spiritually hungry,
existentially hungry, emotionally hungry.
We have what we need and
we are the people
to feed the Nevada’s hunger.
The point of the English
Reformation
was that the Church in England
does not have to be identical to the
Church in Rome
in order to be the Church.
After the American
Revolution,
we
discovered that the Church in America
does not
have to be identical to the Church in England
in order to be Anglican.
to the
Church in Chicago
in order
to be Episcopal.
So let’s start with the
basic point. We are different.
But different does not
mean deficient.
It means different. God
made us different
to play a different part in God’s mission.
A Carmelite monk once
prayed,
“O Lord make me another St. John of the Cross.”
God replied, “No thank
you. I’ve already got one.
I need you to be you.”
Part of our difference is
special assets, strengths, capabilities.
Why do you think the
National Church
makes movies of our Latino Ministries
and the
work of St. Martin’s to show all over the country?
It isn’t because we’re
deficient.
It’s because we do some
things well.
Nevada is special.
We have turquoise,
underground rivers,
Area 51, entertainment extravaganzas,
wild burros, and the rare but not endangered
Armargosa toad.
We also have the most
interesting, colorful human beings
anywhere in the world.
Do we have deficits?
Yes, we lead the nation
in high school dropouts, suicides,
divorces, and women killed in domestic violence.
That’s our mission field.
That’s the hunger part.
That’s why evangelism
isn’t about propping up
our institution and meeting a budget.
It’s about saving people
on the brink.
We’ve got a lot of
neighbors on the brink.
Nevada is beautiful,
wonderful, and endlessly entertaining.
Nevada is also broken,
hurting, and hungry.
Jesus looked out at the
crowd on the mountain
and said
“I feel compassion for these people.”
That same Jesus sees this
hunger of our Nevada neighbors
and
says, “If you love me, feed my sheep.”
And someone says,
“It’s a desert here. You know that right?
We don’t have
enough.”
But Jesus says, “What
have we got?”
And someone says,
“Well we have the Episcopal Diocese.”
