The image that has been on the screen and on the service
sheet this morning is a photo of a wonderful floor mosaic in the church of the
multiplication of bread and fish at Tabgha on the nor-western shore of the Sea
of Galilee in modern day Israel. The existing church is built on the ruins of
two previous churches, a small fourth century chapel and a bigger fifth century
church. The mosaic was part of a fifth century church, that church was
destroyed and the mosaic lost for about a thousand years till archaeologists
excavated it in 1933 and the new modern church was built around it. You may
remember the church briefly making the news last year because it was badly
damaged in an arson attack by a Jewish extremist group.
The mosaic depicts a basket with five loaves of bread and
two fish, the little that the disciples had that Jesus was able to take give
thanks for and use to feed the five thousand in the reading we had this morning
from Luke’s gospel.
AS I looked at the mosaic and its history I thought it was a
helpful framework as we come to the passage today.
Firstly, because the reading we had this morning probably
felt a bit like a mosaic. We are used to hearing the episodes in Jesus life,
the sending of the twelve and the feeding of the five thousand, which appears
in all four gospels, separately and as distinct units, like tiles, and even
here they may seem like that because they are separated by the paragraph in the
middle about Herod’s reaction to and curiosity about Jesus. But in Luke they
flow together, they are all part of the same sequence of Jesus sending the
twelve on a mission tour, the section about Herod is a reflection of the impact
of that mission trip, and then the feeding of the five thousand happens in the
process of Jesus debriefing his disciples on their return. Flowing through the
whole section is the disciples beginning to be involved in the mission of Jesus
and learning to trust him to be able to take what they offer and use it to meet
the needs of the people around them.
Secondly, as this passage is about the origins of the
mission of the church it gives us good insights into what Jesus call on the
church today looks like. But it’s not like the clear twenty first century
images we are used to it’s like the tiles of a mosaic. And it’s like the mosaic
in the church of the multiplication, it’s at the centre of what we as a church
are about, but when we come to view it in the confines of the structure we’ve
built around it.
When I talked about this passage with Kris she said that it
had the feel of like what teacher training was like. You learned about teaching by being with
education lecturers, then you were sent out to put that into practise in
placements in real schools, after that you’d come back debrief and reflect and
then there would be a test...
Up until this point the disciples have had a rather passive
part in the gospel narrative, there role had been to simply be with Jesus. They
had got to know what Jesus was like, they had seen his interactions with
people, they had experienced his grace and mercy, they had seen God move
through Jesus, had front row seats as Jesus had taught about what it meant to
be a citizen of the kingdom of God, in the sermon on the plain, they had Jesus
explain the parable of the sower and
knew that the faith Jesus was looking for was people hearing Jesus word and
then obeying it, putting it to action. At the centre of the call for the church
today and for our mission is to be with Christ... To know Jesus and be known by
him, we love because we have experienced his love, we serve because of the way
Jesus was a servant, we forgive because
we have been forgiven.
Now the twelve are sent out on section, on a short term
mission trip. They have seen what Jesus did and they are told to go do
likewise, to participate in Jesus ministry of word and deed: to proclaim the
Kingdom of God and to heal all those who are sick. When we look at this we
often see those two things like two separate tiles. There are parts of the
church, that focus on proclamation, and they are often open to, in the words of
Paul in 1 Corinthians if being a noisy gong, they lack the display of God’s
compassion and love that gives substance to their message. The other tile is
people who are committed to showing the love and compassion of God, but it is
void of the important narrative of Jesus kingdom. The fact is the two are to be
viewed together; The kingdom is proclaimed and demonstrated.
We could also get caught up or put off by thinking that the
focus for Jesus deeds is the miraculous. But all through the gospel we have
seen that Jesus miracles come out of his love and compassion for people, as we
saw last week when Jesus is prepared to get his hands dirty with the problems
of the world, that we see the presence and power of God displayed. It’s the
same for us as we get our hand’s dirty with the problems of the world God and
bring the narrative of God’s kingdom we see the possibility of God’s presence
and gracious activity. I’m constantly surprised when God actually turns up when
I am praying with people or in the midst of the nitty-gritty-ness of life with
them.
Another important tile in the picture of the mission of the
church from this passage is that before Jesus sends his disciples out to
proclaim the kingdom in word and deed, he delegates his power and authority to
them. This week I’ve been shopping for a laptop with Bethany, which means
basically that I’m there to drive and to provide moral support and to learn
about computers. Bethany knows what she wants her laptop to do and she knows
what specs she needs for her laptop to achieve that. To have a computer that
will do what she needs it to do it has to be powered by a certain CPU (central
Processing Unit), it needs to have an i7 CPU...The church is powered by Jesus to do what he calls us to do.
Here we see him giving them his authority and power, after the resurrection,
Jesus commission’s these same disciples sort of like going out as qualified
teachers, but he says that he goes with them and will be with them, in Luke
Jesus promises to send power from on high, we see this happen at Pentecost with
the coming of the Holy Spirit. It’s easy for us to think that being the church
and doing what God has for us is dependent on us. But we are God’s spirited
people; God has empowered us to do the things he has called us to. But we can
also forget who the Lord is and who is the servant and think it all has to do
with us. I think we are all aware of Christian leaders who have got caught up
with power and prestige and the negative impact that has for the gospel.
Jesus not only asked and empowered the disciples to do what
he had done, but also to have the same kind of faith and trust he has as well.
He asks them to go out with nothing, rather to Trust God to provide. The
mention of a bag in the list of things not to bring refers to the begging bag
that itinerant religious preachers in Jesus day would carry, the disciples were
not to make people pay for the ministry that they were offering in his name.
Can I say, we often see people who talk of having a faith ministry actually
being people who have bought the bag along with them. They were not to go house
to house in the villages they were in, trying to get a better place to stay,
rather to see a welcome as God’s provision. This travelling light was to teach
them to trust in God’s provision. Now later in the gospel Jesus will change
this strategy and encourage his followers to take resources with them. In Acts
the Church in Jerusalem showed equal faith in holding what they had in common,
and being prepared to sell what they had to meet a need. How we resource our mission and ministry has
always been an issue, here Jesus shows that resources will follow mission. AS
we set about the ministry of word and deed that Jesus did, we will see God’s
provision. It’s interesting I’ve moved quit a few times in my life and each
time there just seems to be more and more stuff that comes along. When I went
to Bible College everything I owned fitted in my car. When I left Bible College
that wasn’t the case... for one thing I got married to Kris and so couldn’t
pile as much stuff on the front seat. And as we’ve moved around it’s gone from
a hired van to half a truck to a full truck and a bigger truck as our family grew. And I feel as the church has done the same thing. It’s like the
big church that has been built round the mosaic that we are using as our
central image today. We've picked up more and more baggage that we want to take with us...We expend energy and seek resources to keep all of that
going, and just maybe we need to hear Jesus words here about travelling
lightly.
The other thing that Jesus tells his disciples is that need
to be prepared for rejection as well, there will be places that do not receive
the good news that will not welcome them. We don’t know what percentage of
villages refused them. We do know that this mission trip, these six pairs of
disciples had an effect because word of Jesus got to Herod and he was both
curious and concerned about Jesus. In this passage Herod asks the central
question that Luke wants us to ask as we’ve encountered Jesus... who is I hear
such things about?... But we know that in the stunning way we are introduced to
the fact that Herod has beheaded John the Baptist, that there will be very
negative reactions to Jesus as well.
I want to finish as Luke does with the miracle of the
feeding of the five thousand, because it’s like the disciples test after there
going on section and it is central for us to build a picture and understanding
of the mission of the church.
The crowds come looking for Jesus and this maybe an
indication of how well the disciples had done in their mission, here are people
wanting to meet and hear Jesus. They follow Jesus and the disciples out into
the wilderness, there is no town, no fast food outlets nearby, and Jesus
ministers to them. The disciples actually show some concern and compassion for
the crowd because they are aware that the crowd is hungry the time is late and
well there is nowhere near by for them. They make a reasonable decision of what
needs to be done. Dismiss these people Jesus and they can go get what they need.
But Jesus says to them, “You give them
something to eat”. The disciples scratch their heads, they do some calculations
of what this could cost them, and are aware they only have five loafs of bread
and two fish. But Jesus takes that looks to heaven for God’s help and is able
to feed the crowd. By the way five thousand men does not mean that women and
children were not there or any less important, a friend of mine travelling in
the middle east talked of talking to a large outdoor crowd and the men sat separately
from the women and while the men sat in orderly rows that you could count the
area where the women sat with the children was a uncountable moving mass. Here
Jesus takes the little the disciples had to offer feds the crowd and there is
plenty left over.
Here is the centre of Mission, the picture at the heart of
this mosaic of mission we have been piecing together, its trusting in Jesus to
be able to meet the needs of the people around us. Trusting him enough that
when we hear him ask us to feed the hungry, the spiritually hungry and the
physically hungry that when we offer the meagre resources, and I know that the
most valuable and meagre resource we have these days is time, we have
he is able to take that and use it, multiply it to meet that need and
there is plenty leftover It’s a call to trust Jesus, to put our faith into
action and RISK to reach out.
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