Tuesday, August 9, 2011
July 31, 2011 - Pentecost + 7
Do you know the term “compassion fatigue”? It's what happens when people are faced with the on-going suffering of others over time. It can strike health care professionals or home health aides. It's also used to talk about what happens to the public at large, as we see images and hear stories of tragedy and are asked to give to help in those situations. It's another way of saying that we can become desensitized to the hurts of others or burned out in our efforts to do something about it.
I sometimes wonder if Jesus didn't feel the effects of compassion fatigue. Everywhere he went, after all, he was followed by people in great need, people seeking healing, people seeking hope. It happens again in this gospel story. Here Jesus is trying to get away for a little bit – the “after he had heard this” is about him finding out that his cousin John, the baptizer, had been beheaded by Herod, & so he goes off by himself to a deserted place to be alone. But when he gets there, he sees “a great crowd,” desperate, looking for the healing that only Jesus can give. And just in that moment, can't you almost hear him sigh? Yet, Matthew says, Jesus has compassion for them, and cures their sick.
And this goes on and on, until finally it's late – past dinnertime, and the disciples come to him, concerned. They want Jesus to send the crowds away, to go off into the villages and find themselves something to eat. I imagine the disciples wanting to give Jesus (and themselves) a little break, a little downtime. It's exhausting managing all this need, keeping the crowd in check.
But “No,” Jesus says. “No. They don't need to go away. You give them something to eat.”
“But,” they say, “we have nothing here. Just a few loaves and fishes.”
And Jesus says, “Bring them to me.”
Bring them to me. He has the crowds sit down, and he takes those 5 loaves and 2 fish, looks up to heaven, and breaks the bread and blesses it, and hands it back to the disciples to distribute.
Did you catch that? They say to Jesus, “We have nothing,” and Jesus says, “Bring your nothing to me.” And he takes their so-called nothing, their certainly-not-enough, and he blesses and breaks it and gives it to the disciples to give away to the people. And there is enough! Everyone gets to fill their bellies. Everyone is completely satisfied and when the meal is all said and done and they get to cleaning up – they find that not only did everyone get enough to eat, there are leftovers! 12 baskets full of bread and fish. Their “nothing”, in the hands of Jesus, becomes more than enough. Becomes abundance. Becomes a blessing once Jesus has blessed it – a blessing to a hungry people – 5000 men, and that's not counting the women and children. So how many is that? Ten thousand? Fifteen thousand? More? Who knows? But the point is, when the disciples give what little they have to Jesus, so little that it seems like nothing, Jesus multiplies it. Jesus makes it a miracle. Out of nothing, there is enough and more to spare.
Now I don't know where you find yourself in this story – You may imagine yourself as part of the crowd, aching for Christ's healing touch and deep compassion, hungry for peace or forgiveness or hope. Or perhaps, like me, you identify with the disciples this time around. Because there are times when we feel that emptiness, that sense of nothingness, when we look at the great crowds around us and are overwhelmed with compassion fatigue as we see, not faces of fellow human beings, but just their great need and feel powerless to do anything. We hear about famine and drought and starvation in eastern Africa, of ongoing devastation in Haiti and Japan and the mid-West and South of our own country from earthquakes and tsunamis and flooding and tornadoes, of growing poverty and hunger in our own land, we worry what will happen if this debt-ceiling debate is not resolved in the next 2 days, and that's not to mention the pain and struggles we witness in the lives of our families, our friends, our neighbors, trying to get by or to overcome addiction or to heal and move on from broken relationships, let alone our own personal challenges – the ones we wrestle with alone, that we keep hidden from others. We see these great crowds, filled with deep need, and it's enough to make us want to ask Jesus to send them away. Not just because of things like compassion fatigue, not because we don't want to do something for the people who are hungry and hurting and hopeless in our world, but because the problems are just so immense, and when we hear Jesus say, “They don't need to go away – You give them something to eat,” all we can see are 5 loaves of bread and 2 measly fish. Our resources – financial, emotional, spiritual, political, practical – seem so small, so “nothing” in the face of those needs, that that's what we say to Jesus. “We have nothing here, Jesus.”
But Jesus says to us, “Bring your nothing to me. Give what little you have to me. Trust me enough to place it in my hands.”
That's the trick of it, of course, to look at what we have, as little as it seems, and to give it away to Jesus anyway. To place our “nothing” in his hands, even though it doesn't make any sense, even though it seems like there's no way in the world that it could ever be enough to make a dent, even though we may want to hold onto it for ourselves, just in case. But when we do that, when we put our nothing in Jesus' hands, not knowing what the outcome will be, Jesus takes our nothing, lifts it up to heaven, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it back to us to give away – and in the process, we find that there is more than enough to go around, enough to make a difference in the life of someone else. That's why we keep putting these inserts in the bulletin when disaster strikes – not to guilt anybody into anything, but to give us all a chance to see what Jesus can do with what seems so little to us – how in Jesus' hands, our gifts multiply, how they expand, how he can make more-than-enough out of our nothing.
Jesus says, “Bring your nothing to me. Let me bless it so that it can become an abundant blessing, and find yourself blessed along the way.”
Amen.
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