When Your All Is Not Enough Jamie Maciejewski
Series: One at a Time 10/1/2023
Matthew 14:13-23, 34-36; 15:21-31
For the past few weeks, Pastor Don has been walking us through stories of Jesus as he shows his disciples what it means to care for people, one at a time. I’ve been encouraged as he shares these gospel stories, along with stories about his own experiences and the experiences of others. I sense that God has been using this series of sermons to breathe life and encouragement into us as a family of faith that wants to be used by God to care for our neighbors.
Pastor Don selected texts for us today that give us a chance to think about what the obstacles are that get in our way and discourage us from boldly loving our neighbors in Christ’s name.
As we begin, I will be honest with you. I’m pretty closely acquainted with these obstacles and discouragements. I find that my experience of following Christ is kind of like what happens with New Year’s resolutions: I begin with the best of intentions. And then life gets in the way. Each of the past few Sundays, I have been so excited by the sermon and our worship together. But unfortunately, I have a short memory and it hasn’t taken very long for my new resolve to fade. As I was studying and preparing to speak this morning, I found myself having to work to remember some of the things that had been so important to me just days earlier, when I was sitting listening to our pastor speak Spirit-inspired words.
I’m going to make a wild guess that I am not completely alone in my experience. What is it about us Jesus-followers that makes it hard for us to stick with it and put into practice what we learn about on Sunday morning? That makes it easy to get excited and catch a vision of loving people into the kingdom, and then to find our gas tank is running on empty?
The stories we read this morning give us some important glimpses of what is going on, and they might help those of us who feel like our gas tank is too often on empty. In these stories, we see three dynamics at play. One, the disciples are too tired and exhausted to reach out. Two, when faced with overwhelming needs, their resources aren’t nearly enough to make a difference. Three, they are busy people with important work to do and are much too busy to deal with interruptions. Too tired, too little, too busy. Let’s look at these, shall we?
As the story opens this morning, we read, “As soon as Jesus heard the news, he left in a boat to a remote area to be alone.” (Matthew 14:13a) Wait. News? What news? The worst kind. Shocking, terrible, heart-rending news. Jesus’s cousin John, the prophet who “prepared the way” for Jesus’ ministry, had just been beheaded. Hearing this must have shaken Jesus and his disciples to the core. No doubt the disciples are emotionally and physically exhausted by the grief and horror of it. Jesus takes his friends and says, Come away with me for a rest. What a relief it must have been to leave the crowds behind and go away, just Jesus and their little group, for some private time where they could talk, cry, pray, be quiet, maybe go for long walks. Unfortunately, it was not to be. “But the crowds heard where [Jesus] was headed and followed on foot from many towns. Jesus saw the huge crowd as he stepped from the boat, and he had compassion on them and healed their sick.” (Matthew 14:13b-14)
Every time I come to this story; I ache for the disciples. I’ve gone through many times in my life where I’ve been bone-tired and badly needed a break from the demands of my life. I think of nursing a baby who wakes up multiple times a night while you are still recovering from childbirth. Jobs helping abused children and homeless teenagers, every one of whom has a story that breaks your heart. Holding a job that demands every bit of creativity and effort you have in you. Or holding a job that drains the life out of you because it’s so dull. You have your own stories of exhaustion. A diagnosis that throws a major gut punch. The death of a spouse. The death of a relationship. Caregiving for a person with dementia or other serious health issues.
Exhaustion makes it hard to respond to people. Sometimes it leads to burnout. Spiritual and emotional burnout make people brittle and angry, reduce their resilience, make them more susceptible to illness, and suck the joy out of life. Disciples who are burned out and exhausted start to see people as projects rather than people. My experience is that exhaustion causes me to turn inward. When the crowds show up, I imagine the disciples must have lost their heart. Yet, here is Jesus. Instead of losing heart, Jesus’ heart swells. He has compassion for these thousands of people and begins to care for them. His friends must have taken a deep breath.
A second barrier in our responding to people is that we may look at what we have to give and measure it against the need in front of us and find a gap the size of Mount Everest. If I’d been there with the disciples and heard Jesus telling me to rustle up food for that whole crowd, I would have been genuinely bewildered. What, Jesus? How can we feed a crowd of more than 10,000 people? And what does Jesus do? He asks them what they have. Five loaves. Two fish. That’s it. What good is that?
Do you ever feel that way? Most of us have had someone in our life at some time or another whose needs just feel bottomless. I know someone who has been living for years, just a thin sliver away from homelessness. Their spouse has enormous health challenges. What do I have to give that could even begin to scratch the surface of that need?
A third barrier we see in our reading today is that the disciples are often way too busy to stop to meet individual needs. They are enrolled in classes with an important rabbi; they have places to go and things to do. When the non-Jewish woman in the second reading keeps insisting to them that they let her see Jesus, they are completely frustrated. Doesn’t she get that it’s not going to happen? Make her stop bothering us, Jesus!
Interruptions are something we see over and over in the gospels. Jesus is always on his way somewhere when someone stops him and wants his attention. Sometimes it’s a polite request from someone who doesn’t want to bother him, like the woman who had been bleeding many years; she quietly reaches out and touches him, not wanting to make a fuss or interrupt him on his way to help someone else. Sometimes someone is demanding and even obnoxious, like the blind beggar outside of Jericho who won’t behave with decorum but just keeps shouting. In these situations, and many more, Jesus is on his way somewhere. His disciples are doing their best to keep him on schedule. For busy, important people like Jesus’ disciples, interruptions are a bother!
Too tired. Too little. Too busy. No wonder it’s hard to be engaged with people, meeting one need at a time. This is the story of the disciples in this morning’s readings. But what is the story of Jesus? He’s human, too. He’s grieving the death of his cousin. He doesn’t have any more food than the disciples have to offer to the crowds. So how does Jesus deal with too tired, too little, too busy?
What brackets Jesus’ very public life of ministry is very private alone time, time that he spends with his Father. “As soon as Jesus heard the news [about John’s death], he left in a boat to a remote area to be alone.” I think it’s a given that even in the boat, he was “alone” with his Father. And later, after that amazing miracle of turning a kid’s lunch into a feast for thousands, “he went up into the hills by himself to pray. Night fell while he was there alone.” (Matthew 14:23)
Have you ever wondered what Jesus prayed when he went to be alone with the Father? We have a pretty good idea, because we have access to the prayer book that Jesus learned from. The Psalms were his prayer book. He had probably learned all 150 of them by heart in Torah school as a kid. They had shaped his prayer life. How do we know? Because phrases from the psalms come out of Jesus’ mouth many times in the gospels. The prayers in the book of Psalms lay out our very human, very raw selves before God in the most honest way possible and then give God room to respond.
The emotion in some of the psalms is so raw that I can barely stand it. I want to correct it and make the words prettier. But pretty words aren’t the same thing as prayer. Prayer isn’t meant to be spiritually uplifting and make us feel better. The psalms teach us that prayer re-orients our lives in relationship to God. Prayer helps us to know God as God, despite our circumstances. God wants our honest prayers. And he wants us to pray those honest prayers, trusting that he is God through even the darkest, most exhausting, even empty times. I’ve been learning to pray the psalms the last few years, allowing myself not to shrink back from their rawness, and finding in each one of them an acknowledgement that, despite wherever I am, despite my feeling lost or overwhelmed or empty or so angry I could hit someone, the psalms always acknowledge that God is God and I am his creature.
Jesus wants us to spend time alone with him and with the Father. Going into this quiet place with God doesn’t guarantee that we will leave with our tiredness gone, our emptiness filled up, or the demands on our life lessened. That isn’t the purpose of prayer, necessarily. The purpose of prayer is to re-orient us away from our own self-importance. It is for us to be reminded that God is God and we are not.
In prayer, we offer to God our minimal resources, our five loaves and two fish. We offer it to him in love. And we wait to see what he will do with it.
In prayer, we are freed from the tyranny of what is urgent, from what demands our attention. Not because we now feel that we have more time. But because we have been re-oriented to know that God is God, and that the people we encounter are people who matter to him. Prayer doesn’t somehow make me a stronger Christian. Prayer lets me see that I am weak and Jesus is strong. That I am his servant and he is my God.
Being alone with God doesn’t make us superhuman; it gives us perspective. Our tank might still feel empty compared to the journey ahead; but in prayer Jesus reminds us that we belong to him, that the ministry is his, and that he can take my small offering, held out to him in love, and turn it into enough to feed his people. He wants us to look at him, not try to figure out if we can do whatever we are facing. We can’t. We don’t have the capacity, in ourselves, to meet the scale of human need that exists in this world. And so, we offer what we have, with love and trust, to Jesus. He takes what we offer and blesses it and puts it to use. And the end is that the Father is glorified. Here’s the final verse of today’s reading: “And they praised the God of Israel.” (Matthew 15:31b)
As we seek to follow in Jesus’ footsteps, loving people because he loves them first, we will need lots of help. That’s because we’ll never feel that we have enough – not enough energy, not enough time, not enough bandwidth, not enough anything. And that, my friends, is the way it’s meant to be. Only God is enough. Which is why we need our time with him. Time to remember that even our all is not enough, but he is. Time to offer him the little we have and let him take it, bless it, and turn it back to us to give away.
My friends, the good news is that it's okay that our all is not enough. So long as we remember that we need to keep going back to him. Shall we do that now?