Lunch Box

 Friends, today’s Good News is about what we can do in the name of Jesus with what we have in our hands right now…not with what we wish we had, or with what we think we need before we can even get started.

One of the biggest issues holding churches just like this one back from being able to engage in good ministry work is something we call “scarcity mindset.” I’m gonna take a shot in the dark and guess that a lot of y’all have heard that phrase before, and maybe even used it yourselves in another context. Scarcity mindset happens when anxiety starts to take over the control room. Any of y’all see the Disney movie Inside Out? It’s about a girl named Riley, and her feelings. Disney relatably and humorously had the movie take place inside her head, and showed us her anthropomorphic feelings, voiced by comedians. Anger, fear, disgust, sadness, and joy. In the sequel, Riley gets some new feelings up in “headquarters”—ennui, nostalgia, embarrassment, and anxiety. If you’ve seen either the first Inside Out movie, or the sequel, think for a second about what you learned about all the feelings appropriately taking turns and making space for one another: Riley can’t be joyous all the time, sadness, anger, fear, and even disgust all play very important roles. Bringing this back to church life, scarcity mindset starts to happen in churches when all the other healthy feelings of the church experience get shoved out of the way in favor of a little gremlin who’s ALL too happy to hog the control panel and take over for good: anxiety. If you’ve seen Inside Out 2, anxiety has a one-track mind, and she says the same thing over and over and over in Riley’s head: “not good enough”. When anxiety takes over the control panel in churches, it says to us, over and over and over, “not enough.” We stop paying attention to other feelings, like the joy of being together, or even our sadness over what we’ve lost in recent years and decades. We become a one track, broken record: not enough, not enough, not enough. And all of ministry gets reduced to loss prevention, and then asset protection, and then, to quote a beloved, retired minister friend of mine named Peter, “bean counting”. Peter retired a little over a decade ago, but when we gathered as area clergy, and we talked about the challenges of serving congregations where folks had become hyper-focused on money, Peter used to say, “oooooh, here come the bean counters!”

Churches spend a whole lotta time counting our beans. And I get it, it’s only natural, especially when we’re running very low on beans. But that mindset, that scarcity mindset, that “not enough not enough not enough” mindset, runs directly in the face of what Jesus teaches us in this morning’s Gospel lesson, from Matthew, where no one has beans, but one kid has five loaves of bread and two fish, and despite what basic arithmetic would teach us, Jesus manages to make it…enough.

Now, if anyone on earth would ever have understood “not enough”, it was Jesus. He ran on the bare minimum. The most astonishing part of all of that is that he CHOSE the bare minimum. Surely the omnipotent Son of God could have found a way to have a sick mansion to live in, with cupboards that automatically replenished the caviar and filet minion every time they ran low, with a closet full of dope threads and a Hummer limo in the driveway. But Jesus, instead, lived on what would come his way as a voluntarily homeless guy with 12 voluntarily homeless friends. He never knew where he was going to sleep, and he was always hungry and exhausted—ever notice how often the disciples are crying out for Jesus and he’s asleep in some random place?—but, nevertheless, he trusted, it would be enough.

Jesus had to trust not only that the material goods would be enough, but the less tangible things, too, like his time and energy. This story begins like several of Jesus’ miracle stories do—Jesus doesn’t have much left in his tank, he’s “people”d out, and he’s looking for a quiet, private place to pray. And, as with other such stories, just as Jesus is about to get himself that break, on a deserted island with WiFi, more people show up who need him. And Jesus goes back to the people, because he will have enough.

He has to convince the disciples of that, though. “Jesus, we gotta get these guys out of here,” says one of Jesus’ disciples, “it’s late, we want dinner, and I don’t want to Door Dash for all these folks.” 

“No need for Door Dash,” replies Jesus. “What do we have on us right now?”

”Dude, you can’t be serious…”

”OMJC, he is…”

And while the disciples start to fumble the ball, a kid with a lunch box stops overthinking, and just trusts that it will be enough. “Want my lunchable? I have 5 loaves and 2 fish.”

Jesus takes that small gesture of trust, and makes it way, way more than enough. He starts breaking up pieces of bread and fish to pass around, and the disciples struggle so much to count the number of meals served that they leave out women and children and only count adult men: 5,000. The last remnant of scarcity mindset, “not enough” time and energy to count everyone. Jesus gets us past that, and makes everyone count. Not only is everyone fed a square meal, everyone is stuffed, and satisfied. Just think about how rare that is, and how hard it would have been to pull that kind of thing off. Think about the last time you had to order pizza for a big group, and immediately the quibbling started—I want pepperoni! Too spicy, I like vegetables. Ew, I don’t want anything green on my pizza. I need a gluten free crust! You ended up ordering four different pizzas just to try to satisfy every need, and your seven year old still ate a bag of Goldfish instead. Not that I’m speaking from personal experience.

This isn’t just a miracle of Jesus making the smallest amount enough. It’s also a miracle of thousands of people who all stopped complaining for an hour. Can you imagine? How different would life be, how different would driving home in rush hour be, how different would the comments be on social media posts, if we all stopped complaining for an hour? We’d be half way to world peace.

I took this thought train back to ministry this week, and I asked clergy colleagues of mine: what mission work would you do right now, either on your own or with other people, if money were no object, and no one could tell you “no”? In other words, if you had the trust of the crowds, and you knew it would be “enough”, what would you roll up your sleeves and do?

My colleagues had all kinds of big ideas.

”I’d institute a year of Jubilee, and relieve all debt.”

”Equine therapy!”

”Support groups and generous baby showers for new moms.”

”I’d open a retreat center for artists.”

”I’d fund schools.”

”Relief for those in poverty.”

”I’d convert old commercial buildings into low cost housing.”

”I’d do ministry for migrants and refugees.”

”Foster care ministry.”

”Jail ministry.”

”I’d feed EVERYONE.”

Those are big dreams, and no one I talked to needed more than 2 seconds of thought to come up with a response. These were gut reactions, which tells me—these are callings.

Can you imagine? I think we all can. We just won’t get out of our own way, stop worrying about scarcity, and instead open the lunch box and start serving from what we have.

Do we have bills to pay? Yes. Do all of these dreams cost money in the real world? Of course. But, try to take my word for it after 14 years in the ministry—the biggest obstacle to good ministry is not lack of money. It’s us. It’s our mindset.

I’m gonna stop counting beans, and start passing out loaves and fish, and I hope you will, too.

Amen.