“Cause for Courage”
Matthew 14.22-34
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning, Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado
August 13, 2023
 
Part of being human is encountering things that frighten us or keep us awake at night or make us worry about survival. It’s the stuff of the amygdala, the “reptilian brain” that instructs our hearts to beat and our lungs to breathe, and it also is where we get the fight, flight, or freeze response. Has there been a time for you when you’ve had that deer-in-the-headlights reaction where you feel as though you can’t think straight as a rush of adrenaline courses through your body? Most of us have had that sensation, even if we were not out on stormy seas in an open boat as the disciples were.

One of those times for me was when my stepson, Jane Anne’s son Colin, took his own life five years ago. I was out having a beer with one of our members, Mike Byrne, and I got the call. Jane Anne was so shaken she couldn’t speak, so my son, Chris, had to tell me that tragic news. I remember freezing and then telling Mike, “I have to go home. Now.” I drove home through the February snow, and I have no memory of the rest of the evening. At about 2:00 a.m., our doorbell rang, and there was a policeman at the door. I invited him in, and he said that he needed to inform us of some bad news, and I called to Jane Anne to come downstairs. It’s weird and a bit traumatizing to have the police knock on your door in the middle of the night and to hear them make an official notification that Colin had died. We were in shock, and we thanked the officer for coming by. (I’m sure it was very difficult for him to inform us as next-of-kin.)

Last week, I read this quote from James Finley in Richard Rohr’s daily email: “God is the presence that spares us from nothing, even as God unexplainably sustains us in all things.” God didn’t spare the disciples in the storm, but Jesus sustained them.

Viktor Frankl, a brilliant psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, identified three discreet phases in such circumstances: stimulus, time, and response. Our reptilian brain leaps in after a triggering event (the stimulus) and rushes us to a response. This is great if you are about to walk into the road, see an oncoming vehicle at the last second, and leap back out of the way. In such circumstances, the amygdala keeps us alive. But what makes us human is the ability to expand the time between stimulus and response, so that can use our prefrontal cortex to allow a more considered response. That very brief span of time between stimulus and response is where we can find a sense of liberty in how we respond, using our prefrontal cortex.

What Frankl encourages us to do is practice being conscious of and lengthening the pause between stimulus and response. The disciples were so terrified of the storm and seeing a figure walking toward them across the water (that’s the stimulus) they panicked and thought Jesus was a “ghost.” (To be fair, that is a pretty frightening situation.) And when Jesus reassures them, saying, “Take heart; it is I. Do not be afraid,” it allows them to pause, and Peter responds by asking Jesus to summon him out to walk on the water. Peter is now using his prefrontal cortex! Yay!

When Peter steps out onto the water, the wind comes up and he becomes frightened. His amygdala kicks in, and in immediate response, Peter begins to get very wet ankles and knees. As he is sinking, Jesus grabs his hand and hoists him to the surface of the water, saying “You of little faith (trust), why did you doubt?”

All of this makes me wonder if part of living into a life of faith involves disrupting that stimulus and response pattern slightly and inviting time in between to allow not just our logic but our faith to create a more considered response. I’ve never thought this before, but I wonder if faith (trust) resides in our prefrontal cortex, as well as metaphorically in our hearts. Trust isn’t something that just happens; we have to learn it. We develop trust in God through our own devotional lives and spiritual practice, whether that’s praying or meditating or journaling or reading scripture. It takes time to build faith that will last a lifetime.

Fear may be the opposite of faith. And when you think of what fear creates in our world — hatred, greed, racism, self-centeredness, sexism, Christian nationalism, and war — it is antithetical to faith, which I think of as developing a relationship of deep trust with God.

Part of what helped Jane Anne and me to regain our equilibrium after Colin’s death was to trust that we were being held…held by God and held by this community of faith. All we had to do is look in our backyard, where the prayer flags you all made for us were flying near our back fence, and we knew you were there with us. I am grateful. Thank you for surrounding us with God’s love and yours. James Finley writes, “God depends on us to protect ourselves and each other, to be nurturing, loving, protective people. When suffering is there, God depends on us to reach out and touch the suffering with love, that it might dissolve in love.”

We don’t have to go it alone. There is a force infinitely more loving and powerful that anything we can imagine. And relationship helps tether us to that force and become part of that force.

In those moments of life’s greatest intensity, we can invite our faith to come to the fore. Jan Richardson, a wonderful artist and minister, who suddenly and unexpectedly lost her husband Gary several years ago writes this, using images from Matthew’s story of Jesus on the waves:
“Eight months have passed since Gary’s death: a moment, an aching eternity. I can tell you that I know what it means to be borne up when the waters overwhelm. I know the grace of hands that reach out to carry and console and give courage. I am learning—again, anew—what faith is, how this word that we sometimes toss around so casually holds depths within depths that will draw us beyond nearly everything we once believed.

This is some of what I know right now about faith:

That faith is not something I can summon by a sheer act of will.

That it lives and breathes in the community that encompasses us.

That I cannot force faith but can ask for it, can pray that it will make its way to me and bear me up over the next wave, and the next. That it comes. That I can lean into it.

That it will propel me not only toward the Christ who calls me, but also back toward the boat that holds my life, incomprehensible in both its pain and its grace.

What are you knowing about faith right now? Where is it bearing you?”
And Jan Richardson offers this “Blessing that Bears the Wind, the Wave”

That we will risk
the drenching
by which we
are drawn
toward the voice
that calls us,
the love
that catches us,
the faith
that carries us
beyond the wind,
the wave.[1]
 
Dear friends, we are here to be the hands of Jesus to one another, to support and uplift one another. “Don’t be afraid; my love is stronger. My love is stronger than your fear. Don’t be afraid my love is stronger, and I have promised, promised to be always near.”
Amen.

© 2023 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact [email protected] for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.

[1] Jan Richardson, at janrichardson.com, used by permission.

“Abundance Enough”
Matthew 14.13-21
by Hal Chorpenning
Plymouth Congregational UCC, 6 August 2023
 
The miraculous story from Matthew’s gospel is one of the best-known in the New Testament, in fact Mark, Luke, and John repeat their own versions of the story. Fishes and loaves. What an image: being able to take a small quantity of very simple food and to nourish 10,000 people. (This story is usually called “Feeding the 5,000,” but they forget to count the women and children, so I’m rounding up.)

Over the years, this story has yielded many different interpretations. One way to look at it is that it happened exactly the way the gospel writer recorded it: that Jesus took two fish and five loaves and magically multiplied them sufficiently so that every one of the people present had enough to eat their fill.

Another way to interpret it is less physical and more spiritual: that what nourished the 10,000 was not having a full belly, but rather having a spirit that was topped off by a meal with Jesus. It wasn’t so much that Jesus increased the volume of food there. Rather, he qualitatively increased the food, enabling it to meet the spiritual needs of the people.

A third interpretation has to do with the sacramental value of the meal. You probably know that in the Protestant tradition, we celebrate two sacraments: communion and baptism. But I would argue that this story of fishes and loaves provides scriptural rationale for opening the door for the third Protestant sacrament: the potluck supper. (I’m only half kidding; I really think that we can come to know each other and God through a common meal shared with those we journey with.) Do you remember what it was like to eat together at church after Covid began to decline? It was joyous! And we’ll do that next Sunday following our outdoor worship.

The fourth way of interpreting this wonderful story is that it shows that God is active here on earth sharing abundance. Just as God provided manna to the Hebrew people wandering in the desert, God also provides sustenance through the ministry of Jesus. Unlike the second interpretation – the spiritual nurture – this fourth way of looking at the miracle is about God helping to meet our most basic needs as animals: we have got to eat. It’s no accident that the two recognized sacraments both involve basic hygiene and nutrition functions: bathing and eating. It’s just a part of who we are as embodied beings. And it can be a wonderful part of who we are and who God created us to be.

The Psalmist writes, that “the Lord is good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made.”[1] And an integral part of God’s compassion is providing enough food to go around. It is we who are responsible for distribution of what God has entrusted to us.

It’s interesting to try and imagine Jesus’ thinking in this story. What is it that is driving Jesus? Is it pity? hospitality? simple generosity? The dominant motive of Jesus is a force that emanates deep in the gut: compassion. The Latin roots of the word mean “to suffer with:” cum + patior. But the Greek word is splagchnizomai (splag-knidz-o-my) which is a feeling so deep it grows out of your belly. It’s the same compassion that God shows to all people.

God – and Jesus – didn’t just provide enough: they provided abundantly. That is the reason there 12 baskets of leftovers after feeding all those hungry people. And God continues to provide for humanity abundantly.

What kind of miracle would it be if we could use God’s abundant gifts to eradicate world hunger? That might sound even more miraculous than feeding the 10,000 with two fish and five loaves.

• One billion people exists on less than one dollar a day. 2
• In developing countries, 6 million children die each year, mostly from hunger-related causes.
• More than 800 million people in the world are malnourished – 777 million of them are from the developing world.
• 10.2 percent of households in this country are food insecure.
• 38 million people in our nation live in poverty.
• Child poverty rates tell an interesting story: in 2020, the child poverty rate was 9.7 percent. But by 2021, it had declined to 5.2 percent, a 46 percent improvement. What worked? Child tax credits, expanded Medicaid, and other programs related to Covid-19 antipoverty measures.
• What kind of miracle would it be if we could use God’s abundant gifts to eradicate hunger not just in our nation but around the world?
• According to Oxfam, it would take $37 billion each year through 2030 to end hunger on our planet. Just to put it in perspective, that’s less than we Americans spend on pet food each year.

Peter Singer is a highly controversial ethicist, originally from Australia, who now teaches at Princeton. He really takes our government to task for its low percentage of overseas aid. The U.S. gives just 0.18 percent of our GDP for international relief – we would have to increase our national giving by 5.4 times to reach the target set by the U.N. It isn’t that we Americans are not generous folk – we are! It is that we are unwilling to look all the rest of our sisters and brother with whom we are sharing God’s world.

As Christians, in a very tangible sense, we acknowledge that whatever we have is not even ours to begin with: it’s God’s. All we have is given to us as a gift, entrusted to us as stewards. Whatever wealth we have on hand now is only ours in the short term. Do you remember that old song, “We give you but your own, whate’r the gift may be, all that we have is yours alone, we give it gratefully?” That’s not idle chatter; it’s real. What kind of miracle would it be if we could use God’s abundant gifts to eradicate world hunger?

Peter Singer writes, “In the world as it is now, I can see no escape from the conclusion that each one of us with wealth surplus to his or her essential needs should be giving most of it to help people suffering from poverty so dire as to be life-threatening. That’s right: I’m saying that you shouldn’t buy that new car, take that cruise, redecorate the house or get that pricey new suit. After all, a $1,000 suit could save five children’s lives. ... Again, the formula is simple: whatever money you’re spending on luxuries, not necessities, should be given away.”[2]

Okay, that’s a pretty radical suggestion. But I have a concern with this, and it’s a problem of enormous proportion in every church I know: we want to do charity, not justice.

Charity is giving something you have to someone who needs it. Charity makes me feel good, and it might meet the other’s need in the short term. But, ultimately, the answer is not about me and my feelings. It’s about God’s world and God’s children.

What happens when compassion – not pity – comes into the equation? When that gut-wrenching, suffering-with, feeling grows inside us? When we respond not as somebody who is one step above another, but shoulder to shoulder with those who are suffering? We’re more apt to respond with justice, rather than with charity.

We’ve moved beyond the need for band-aids: we need major surgery: systemic solutions to answer world hunger. And we have the ability and the resources to do it.

I would like every person here to write down this web address: bread.org That’s the website for Bread for the World, which is a Christian-based citizen’s group lobbying Congress to help make systemic changes to end world hunger. It’s also a great resource for information on hunger here in the U.S. and around the world.

So, what can we do? How can we be good stewards of all we’ve been given?

We can start with prayer. Not just prayer for more food for those who need it, but by confessing our own overconsumption. We can pray to help discern our true needs from our wants. The next time you say the Lord’s Prayer, take the “give us this day our daily bread” part seriously.

We can share what we have through the UCC’s One Great Hour of Sharing offering, which comes around every spring.

We can put pressure on our elected representatives not only to do our fair share, but to help put into place sustainable structures and systems that provide food for all.

As we come to the communion table together, let each of us, as we taste the bread, think of those who don’t have that privilege today. And let us rededicate ourselves, as stewards of God’s world, to help create a miracle in our midst.
What kind of miracle would it be if we could use God’s abundant gifts to eradicate world hunger?

Amen.
 
[1] Psalm 145.9
[2] NYT, 5 September 1999.