In one of the earliest descriptions of mass, called the Didache, this prayer was prayed over the bread, “We thank you, our Father, for the life and knowledge which You made known to us through Jesus your Servant; to you be the glory for ever. Even as this broken bread was scattered over the hills, and was gathered together and became one, so let your Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into your kingdom; for yours is the glory and the power through Jesus Christ for ever.” I was thinking about that the other day when something strange happened. I looked around the student center and asked myself, “Where are all the students?” Now, you may ask yourself if I’m totally oblivious to what is happening around me or if I had a temporary memory loss, but let me assure that, you that life at St. Thomas is not like a Soap Opera. Instead, what happened was that I became acutely aware that I’m really looking forward to having the rest of our parish back. It’s not that I don’t appreciate those of you who have stayed here the whole time; our resident parishioners and student parishioners who were here for the summer, but, to use an image borrowed from Pope John Paul II, our parish has two lungs and one of them has been gone for a while. It will be nice when we have them both back.
The ironic thing is that you would have received an entirely different response from me two or three months ago. I was ready for some peace and quiet after several 2:00am moments of being awoken as the bar crowd walked by my window. I actually looked out as Buchanan hall one Saturday morning when all kinds of moving vans and trucks were pulling up to take students home and I said to myself, “good, get those kids out of here” now I want them back so that our parish can get back to normal.
Our gospel today is both a culmination and a transition: it is the culmination of what has taken place the last two Sundays. These past few Sunday’s we’ve been hearing a consecutive set of readings from the gospel of Mark. You might remember two Sundays ago, Fr. Ev preached about how the apostles were sent on mission and Fr. Ev also challenged us to go on mission. Last week, I preached about the return of the apostles and how they were not given time to reflect on their evangelical mission because they were overrun by people. I challenged us to persevere through the tough times in order to carry out the mission that we began. The next story in Mark is the very story that we heard today but, as you may have caught, we transitioned to the Gospel of John. Same story, just expanded a little bit…enough to fill five Sundays talking about the bread of life. The transition to this is this miracle story of the feeding of the 5000 and all that surrounds it. Just like last week, we recognize that the success of the apostles evangelical endeavors has led to a large crowd that seemed like sheep without a shepherd, to use terminology from the gospel of Mark. In John, however, there is no demand for food. Jesus just knows their hunger and desires to feed them. I imagine most of us can sympathize with the hunger of the crowd. But, imagine being Phillip who heard that it’s his responsibility to feed them. It seems impossible. It would take 200 days wages to feed 5000 people! It takes Andrew’s cool head to see that Jesus wasn’t going to leave them without hope. He was probably at the wedding at Cana when Jesus turned Water into wine, he knew he could feed the hungry masses. Because of a boy’s five loaves and two fish and the faith of Andrew, the whole crowd is fed such that there is even more left over than when they started.
I think it deserves to be said that there are a few messages that aren’t quite central for this reading. The fact that there was enough left over that they had to gather it up is not just an ecological message about not wasting food, even though that’s a good message that we Americans need to hear. Nor is this gospel merely a message about sharing, as though the crowd, upon seeing the young man turn over his meager fish and loaves, opened their bags and started giving over what they had. It’s obvious from their reaction, wanting to make him king, that a real miracle happened here similar to the miracle that Elisha did in the first reading. Despite how important an ecological message or a message about sharing is, neither of them really has to do with this particular passage of scripture.
Instead, taking the next step from the previous two passages in Mark, Jesus is trying to tell us that his message needs to go out to all people, not just either to those who want to hear it or those who act like they want to hear it. Our goal, according to the second reading today, is “to preserve the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace”. God wants us all to be united under Jesus Christ “with all humility and gentleness, with patience.” Just as Jesus gathered the fragments together, so we are called to gather the lost sheep together, especially the ones that are hardest to convince.
In the next few weeks, we will go through a difficult transition with the arrival of several new parishioners. Many of them will walk into St. Thomas and experience a liturgy like they have never experienced before. Let’s face facts; we do things here that don’t happen in most other catholic churches. This is intimidating and, again to be honest, it turns some people off. One thing that can help people make the transition to St. Thomas a little easier is quite simple: helping them know that even as strange as our liturgy might seem, they belong here. This is part of our common mission as baptized Christians – to welcome the stranger and help them feel united to us. It’s not just the role of the staff or even just the role hospitality ministers. All of us are called to do what we can to gather the people of God together so that, “(e)ven as this broken bread was scattered over the hills, and was gathered together and became one, so let your Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into your kingdom; for yours is the glory and the power through Jesus Christ for ever.”
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