Twelve Baskets Left Over

I want to write something different this week.

If you have been reading this blog for the past two months, you have walked through a lot with me: the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the earthquakes in Venezuela, the deaths of immigrants in encounters with ICE, a march of masked white nationalists through Washington on this country's two hundred fiftieth birthday, and my own exhaustion after twenty-three years of trying to build something loving in a world that often seems to prefer hate. I have not hidden any of that from you, and I am not going to pretend today that any of it has resolved itself. It has not.

But this Sunday closes our series, The Kingdom Worth Everything, and the final word is ENOUGH. I have been sitting with that word for the past few days, and I want to offer you something more hopeful than I have managed to offer in recent weeks. Not because the world has become less heavy. Because hope, real hope, is not the absence of heaviness. It is what you choose to hold onto in the middle of it.

This Sunday's Gospel is the feeding of the five thousand. A crowd has followed Jesus into a deserted place. Evening comes. The disciples want to send everyone away to fend for themselves, because all they have on hand is five loaves and two fish, which is nowhere near enough for that many people.

Jesus takes the five loaves and two fish anyway. He blesses them. He breaks them. And somehow, in a way Matthew does not try to explain, everyone eats until they are full, and when it is over, the disciples gather up twelve full baskets of what is left.

Twelve baskets left over. Not just enough. More than enough, after everyone was already fed.

I want you to sit with that detail, because I think it is the whole sermon in a single image. Scarcity is real. The disciples were right that five loaves and two fish were not enough for five thousand people, by any ordinary math. And yet the story does not end with ordinary math. It ends with abundance so complete that there was more left over than they started with.

I do not want to offer you hope in the abstract, so let me be specific about where I have actually found it this week.

In Burundi, a hospital's maternal health unit that used to lose power unpredictably, putting mothers and newborns at risk during deliveries, now runs on solar energy. Lights that used to go out at the worst possible moment now stay on. It is a small story in the scope of the whole world, and it is exactly the kind of thing that rarely makes headlines. But somewhere tonight, a baby will be born safely under a light that would not have been there a year ago.

I have found hope in the diplomats and humanitarian workers who keep showing up to the table year after year, refusing to let the scale of the world's need talk them out of trying. The United Nations' humanitarian leadership has been explicit this year that they believe real, sustained peacemaking is possible in more than one of the conflicts currently causing so much grief, not because the work is easy, but because enough people have refused to stop working at it.

And I have found hope closer to home, in this parish. In the sixteen people who signed up for our newsletter at Augusta Pride because they found out a church existed that would not turn them away. In every Blessing Bag handed to a neighbor sleeping outside. In the fact that after twenty-three years, this community still gathers every Sunday, still feeds whoever shows up, and still has something left over to give away.

Twelve baskets left over. That has been true here more often than my tired days let me remember.

I am not going to tell you what Sunday's sermon says about the word ENOUGH. But I will tell you this much: the crowd in Matthew's Gospel did not have enough by any calculation available to them in that moment. And they ended up with more than enough anyway, because the one distributing the bread was not limited by the same math the disciples were using.

If you are tired, if the news this year has worn you down the way it has worn me down, if you have been waiting for your own five loaves and two fish to turn into something that actually feeds the people in front of you: I want you to know that the story does not end with the disciples' fear. It ends with twelve baskets left over.

Come Sunday. We will close this series together, and we will talk about what enough really means, for a world that keeps insisting there is not enough to go around.

Thank you for staying with me through a hard stretch of weeks. It has meant more than I have been able to say.

Pax et Bonum,

Bishop Greer