If You Love Me Feed My Sheep
Sermon by Rev. Steven McClelland on John 21: 17. Focus on how Jesus incarnates in people today like Willie Davis of Paterson, NJ. Be sure to check out Simona Frenkel and the duet of Jody and Alex following the sermon.
We all know the story from Sunday school. The five loaves of bread and two fish turned into enough food to feed five thousand people and send them home with doggy bags. And the question to be put to a miracle is not, “Is it true?” or even “How could this happen with so little food?” but rather, “What does this say?”
At its essence a miracle is a message – an illustration or a demonstration of a message that God chooses to communicate to us. A miracle is God’s extraordinary message in the midst of the ordinary. To understand a miracle is to understand something of God. To see a miracle is see something of God.
The people of the Bible may not know how to explain a miracle, at least in a rational sense, but they know one when they see one, like the farmer from Missouri who was asked if he believed in infant baptism. “Believe in it?” he said. “Why, I’ve even seen it.”
The shepherds didn’t ask themselves if they “believed” they say an angel; they went in fear and haste to find the manager. The blind man who was given his sight didn’t ask to understand what happened to him; he simply acknowledged in amazement that he could see. The five thousand didn’t ask questions about supply and demand. When they saw the sign which he had done, they said, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.’” A miracle is a message from God to us.
But what is the message? To heal the sick, the lame, or the blind, demonstrates power to do the right thing. The first miracle Jesus preformed in John’s Gospel was at the marriage feast in Cana, demonstrating a power to bring order out of chaos, but the essence of a miracle isn’t in its power, or in its ability to attract attention, it’s in its ability to meet and satisfy a need. A miracle is a response to what is most needed; it’s not so much a demonstration of power as it is an answer to prayer.
In the feeding of the five thousand the crowd’s immediate need was met and satisfied by the wondrous way in which they were fed, but that wasn’t the miracle. The miracle was that the people saw “the prophet who is to come into the world.” Their eyes were opened and they saw Jesus as he was: God’s incarnate message to the world.
I came across this wonderful modern day miracle story in this past Monday’s Record Newspaper. The Headline read: Feed the People. A reference to our passage in today’s Gospel lesson and I realized this was no accident. Our story and this story. Christopher Maag wrote:
“One night as Willie Davis slept, God gave him a tour of Hell. Hell was noisy and it’s fires had consumed the homes of his sister and brothers. Now the buildings were gone, and the broken bricks and burned up dreams lay in barren hillocks across the land, covered by knee-high grass and empty cans of Arizona Iced Tea.
And God said: “This is the place. This is where you will build a garden. You will feed my people.
Willie Davis was afraid. This acre of land sat at the corner of 12th Avenue and Rosa Parks Boulveard in the city of Paterson, one of the most dangerous intersections in New Jersey. Drug dealers and addicts used this burned-out acre as a shortcut, a garbage dump, a spot to hide drugs.
“I said, ‘god, how am I goona do this? I aint got no money,’” said Davis, 68, remembering his dream. “God said, Just walk inot it. I’ll guide you all the way.”
Nine years later, Willie Davis welcomed the first of a number that has been growing ever since he began the garden four years ago.
Now one man cannot fix a city like Paterson, just like Jesus didn’t fix the towns that the folks came from who were hungry in his day and age, but like Jesus, Willie Davis didn’t have to fix an entire city. He just had to fix one acre of it.
And it didn’t even take that long Davis said. Davis’ dream of a garden occurred in 2009. He won permission from Habitat for Humanity, which owns the land, to covert that dream into vegetable, like scallions, collard greens, tomatos, peppers, and flowers like tulips and trees like cherry blossoms, peach, plum, and apple trees in 2014.
In the past four years Willie Davis and a samll group of volunteers, transformed this barren ground into a minature farm overflowing with 35 different crops from corn and kale to beets, oregano and figs. And before 2014 you would have bought heroin or crack in this place. Today, there are no more drug dealers on this block.
A block over and it’s a different story, but God didn’t call Willie Davis to transform an entire city. He simply called Willie to feed his sheep, and Willie did and does to this day. That’s the miracle. That this story that is told in John’s Gospel continues to be told to this day by the like of Willie Davis.
The food is given away for free, but there is a box that accepts donations up to a million dollars. Willie says, “We don’t take nothing bigger than a million.” And with that he stuffs the bag of another elderly woman who depends on Willie for fresh food and her daily bread. If you love me you will feed my sheep Jesus said. This is what Jesus looks like today. Amen
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