The Dreams of Kings
A sermon preached with the people of St. Francis of Assisi Episcopal Church in Youngsville, Pennsylvania and Holy Trinity Memorial Episcopal Church in Warren, Pennsylvania.
Video of the sermon is available on YouTube (queued to start at the 21:08 mark).
This morning we heard two familiar miraculous feeding stories. The prophet Elisha feeds 100 people, even though it was said there was not enough for everyone. And Jesus feeds 5,000 people, even though it was said there was not enough for everyone.
Sometimes I think about what it must have been like to be there among the 5,000, hoping to get a glimpse of this man who you’d heard about – who had been going from town to town, preaching, teaching and healing. Wondering if Jesus does show up, what he will do.
And then he does show up. And what he does is offer bread, and fish. “As much as you want.”
The phrase is arresting because, how often do we hear that? That you can have “as much as you want.” Without taking on debt, without working an overnight shift, without providing your personal information, without being made to feel guilty, without signing on the dotted line, without committing to something you don’t believe in.
I help out with communications for the Partnership Dioceses, and I wrote a story about the Diapers & Such ministry, which helps people in Warren County who are in need of toilet paper, feminine hygiene items such as tampons, and disposable baby diapers.
When explaining how the distribution process works, Trinity Memorial parishioner Jenn Campbell said: “I start by asking basic questions about what they need, and then I give them a bag and they say ‘You’re giving me all this?’ People are so grateful, even though it’s not a lot.”
The power structures of this world signal that most of us are underserving of “as much as you want” without a very high cost attached. So much so, that the simple provision of even the most basic human rights can feel, well, like a miracle.
So maybe it’s not helpful to call the feeding of the 100 and the feeding of the 5,000 miracles at all. Maybe it would be more helpful to borrow from those home makeover shows and call them big reveals.
Because the wonder of the feeding of the 5,000 is not that it’s a magic trick – it’s not that there wasn’t any food and suddenly there was enough, not really. The wonder was that in that moment, Jesus revealed the truth, the Gospel truth: there has always been enough for everyone.
In that moment, those people sitting on the grass, sharing a meal got a glimpse of God’s dream for us.
It seems the truth that there is enough for everyone has always been hard for us to see, always obscured by earthly power structures that make some perform daily break-breaking work for barely a crumb, while others sit in comfort all day and feast.
This idea that some of us will be kings, taking far, far more than we need while others go without basic needs met and that’s somehow part of the natural created order, is so embedded in how we grow up, learn and conduct our lives, that we don’t even stop to question it.
Because we live inside the dreams of kings.
The dreams of kings started the wars the people in Elisha’s time were suffering through. The dreams of kings expanded a foreign empire to Jerusalem.
The dreams of kings built rocket ships that flew to space for four minutes during the same month we learned that “global hunger shot up by an estimated 118 million people worldwide in 2020.”
As Marina Koren of The Atlantic wrote, “[Jeff Bezos] is the richest person on Earth, who controls the daily life of so many others here—not just his employees, but the hundreds of millions of us who partake, sometimes grudgingly, in the products he owns. … We live in the world Bezos built. In that sense, as he floated over the Earth, taking in the beautiful view, he was surveying his kingdom, and adding one more dimension to his realm.”
We live inside the dreams of kings.
And so I suppose it’s no surprise that after everyone was finished with their bread and their fish on the grass that day by the sea of Galilee, they came up with an idea: let’s make Jesus king.
But Jesus wanted nothing to do with the dreams of kings. When he sensed there was talk of this, he ran for the hills. Literally.
God asks us, over and over, to expand our imagination and step outside the dreams of kings and inside the dream of God. To see that there has always been enough for everyone. God tells us the powerful will be brought down from their thrones and the lowly lifted up. God tells us that those who hoard resources while others in the community live without are defying God’s dream.
Accepting the invitation we receive at the feeding of the 5,000 is to imagine life inside God’s dream. Elisha and Jesus both hear the familiar insistence that there is simply “not enough.” This is an invitation for us as Christians to be suspicious when we hear that. When we hear, “there’s not enough,” “we can’t help everyone,” “we can’t fix this problem.”
It’s an invitation for us as a community and as a church to work to make moments happen when we, too, experience big reveals, large or small. When everyone gathered catches a glimpse of life inside God’s dream. When everyone gathered is fed – not on the terms of kings, but on God’s terms of boundless love.
I would argue that we enact these big reveal moments every time we share the holy meal we’re about to have. As on the grass that day long ago, God does not place barriers or requirements upon the invitation to holy bread and wine. Those who suggest otherwise have, I’m afraid, imposed the dream of kings on God’s table.
When we allow ourselves to imagine life outside the dreams of kings, something deep within us springs to life and remembers that often-obscured truth: there is enough for everyone. And this is a glimpse of God’s dream.