I can do the standard liberal version of this passage, in my
sleep, and I am sure that you have heard the gospel interpeted this way, in
class or in yr reading, or on the pulpit. It is the one that talks about how
through the inspiration of Christ,
people who thought they had only enough for themselves, learned that
they had enough to share with their neighbours—that the magnaminous nature of
this miracle comes from a willingness to engender community.
I can also talk about more traditional views of this passage—ones
that are slightly more alien—ones that talk about how the feeding of the five
thousand, becomes a larger metaphor for God’s realtionship to humanity. In this
metaphor, that Christ took so little and created so much, means that through
our belief in Him, will result in blessings—not only the small blessings of a
return to the original, of barely being satited, but of excess.
Both of these messages
fit seamlessly into the idea of the passage as one of Eucharistic power. That
to have Eucharist requires the gathering of a community—that the Lord’s supper
is one of like minded people, working for a common good—and a common good
related to being feed, and feeding each other. It is also about the constantly
renewing commitment to the Lord—the excess nature of love, that She has for us,
the knowledge that we will be provided and protected because we eat together.
I have been thinking about the passage, about the gospel—and
these two readings came to me in the first few hours, but settling on them
seemed unsatisfying. They need to be said, and the two working together and not
in opposition was the beginning of a wider understanding, but there was one
passage that I stumbled on, and that I kept returning to.
It is a passage in the middle of the Gospel. So they
gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by
those who had eaten, they filled twelve basket (John 6:13). This whole gospel
passage is filled with places of ambiguity, of portent and sign, but these
passages—this seems to have something to tell us. I was talking to Maggie about
this passage, and going through what I was thinking, and she said that it was
Trinity, so they were a bit more patient about the intellectual, and allowed
the preacher to be a bit more abstract.
So this sermon will be a bit about taking a dog out for a walk—but I am
going to try to make it as practical as I can towards the end, though I am not
sure there will be moral exhortations.
The gathering of the fragments is one of the problems of our
age—we live in an age that is good at sorting out what the edges mean, where
the fabrics tear, where the gaps are, what is absent, and what has never been
filled. This is called deconstruction—it is good and useful work, it is moral
work, and if we can add a small social justice edge, it is work that allows us
to know how to feed each other—to analyze who has not been feed, and how best
to do the feeding.
In this sense, we are kind of doing the work of Derrida, and
that name, you know—you kind of don’t need to read him, to know that we are
working through the project that he elucidated, even as Christians, and
Derrida, got closest to defining the term: “But is what we call deconsturction,
not above all a taking into account of f orces of dissaaction, dislocation,
unbinding forces, in a world of difference and heterogenity…” And that has been
the project—if we can be narracissitic, if we can think that, these people in
this room, are the usual set of people, which is obviously not true—but this
has been a project—a way of noting the forces, and the power of the forces,
this taking into account, and perhaps not working past that, perhaps only thinking
about the fragment.
If we keep deconstructing,
if we keep thinking of readings of scripture that foreground the
fragmented, allow for the fragmented to remain, think about holes, tears,
collapses, do we refuse to actually think about what the implications are when
we gather up the fragments,
The fragment here, is the fracturing of bread, the
fracturing of the bread, becomes the fracturing of the body of Christ—and so
this fracture to fragment, this fragment of bodily desire, that leads with hope
to the restoring, to the unbroken bones and complete spirit of the crucified
Lord, but there are details in this passage—fragments that we could gather like
the 12 disciples.
We should notice that Christ does not gather the fragments.
Christ worked with the twelve, and with others around him. There are many
miracles and more prosiac spaces where he eats with his neighbours, and there
are rarely details about who gathers and who cleans—there is the assumption
that the tussle of give and take, the dishes get done and the fragments get
picked up, the detail does not need to be spoken, but here, in this space he
sends the disciples to do his work, to find the food, and to collect the food
after he has taught. He sets Himself apart. In this sense, he is telling the
disciples that the gathering up the fragments is gathering up the body.
I mentioned that
before—this is foreshadowing, and the foreshadowing rests on one of the
centeral tensions of the church. The fragments are not restored to wholeness.
You know, there is more then the disciples could hope for—five little barley
loaves—the loaves of the poor, rough loaves, cheap loaves, made of the chaff of
substandard grain, and a few small fishes—and what results from that is
overflowing baskets, but it is not overflowing baskets filled with better
bread, or more luxiorious fishes, it is not even baskets filled with whole
loaves and whole fishes—there is enough to feed here, but they are still
fragments.
In this sense—when we are called to gather the fragments as
a community of God, we are not called to restore the fragments here. In a few
minutes here, Maggie will fracture a piece of whole bread, in order to feed us,
and in this fragmentation and feedng, she gathers us together. The broken, the
falling apart, the difference, dislocation, and hetergenity, bind themselves
into a miracle of communal action.
For the Anglican communion—a communion that rests on as much about what they are not, as much as what they are—who were founded on not being communal, and not being Roman, and not being Calvinist, of the fragments of refusal and working of a solution which honours otherness and fragmentation, but a fragmentation that has been gathered, has a form and an order. We are a church that is whole in our fragmentation, because of our fragmentation—our baskets are overflowing because we gather the fragmentation together as a whole, so that the act of gathering, is marked by this delightful, cosmic irony. There is a magnaminty of the humble, an excess that can only be found via the gathering, but an excess that becomes the symbol of a Christian figure, the texture of that irony, the gestural nature of those desires for wholeness returned as a kind of fragmentation, returns itself to the message of the divine—it is the same irony of the beaatuides, where the first will be last, and the last will be first, to name a smaller example.
The question then, becomes—how do we gather with respect,
how do we respect fragmentation without the fear of schism, how do we note
which gaps or tensions need to be repaired, and which can be left as an
intergral part of who we are—and how do we convince ourselves of the magnamity
of a restored Gospel.
I think these questions can be answered with much caution,
with a humility, and with a belief in the centrality of the idea of gathering,
as both a noun and a verb. We have to recognize the fragmentation, and the
collection—and we have to be wary of the desire to restore into wholeness, for
that restoration is the work of God, we cannot create one body, but we gather,
in this room, a dozen bodies, and attempt to work, through our own
fragmentaiton, to a muddled middle ground, that muddling—the small, localized,
and intimate work of daily gathering, will be enough for t he magnamity of the
divine to bless us.
