Sermon for July 25, 2021 - The Ninth Sunday After Pentecost, Year B, The Ven. Pat Zifcak

I was talking with my friend and colleague, Bob, this week and when I told him I was preaching today, he told me that the Gospel this morning has special meaning for him:  “…gather up the fragments left over,  so that nothing may be lost.” Bob had once felt like the fragment, the bit not to be lost.  “The church that hated me was also the church that saved me,” he said.   Readings like ours this morning are reminders of God’s abundance and compassion.  Nothing and no one is to be lost to God. 

Both the Old Testament and the Gospel tell feeding stories.  In the first, 100 people are fed; in the second, 5,000 people are fed.  I want to celebrate, for a moment,the hero of the Gospel story.  It is a boy who has five barley loaves and two fish.  Andrew, one of the disciples, tells Jesus of the boy’s offering, but says, “but what are they among so many?”  Andrew was grounded in the reality of the moment.  5000 people, five loaves, two fish.  Impossible!  The boy, as children so often are, was not the least hindered by the reality of the situation.  His child-like ability to live in the realm of magical thinking brought him to Andrew with the solution to a problem Andrew thought impossible to solve.  Jesus responded to the faith of the boy, to his conviction, with a miracle. 

As one who has worked with children all my life, I know the dangers of magical thinking.  Children do not anticipate the “what if’s” of their decisions.  That is the job of the adults in their lives who love and care for them. We must encourage their magical thinking but protect them from the “what if’s.”  I’m sure you have many examples in your own life of magical thinking.  Just this week in a conversation, I was reminded of a moment of magical thinking that could have had disastrous consequences.  A child who grew up with Superman on television, put on his Superman pajamas, put a towel around his shoulders as a cape, and “flew” out his bedroom window on the second floor of his home.  It never occurred to this child that he might fall.  How many stories have we heard already this summer about drownings that could have so easily been prevented?  Magical thinking.  Accidents happen to other kids, not to me.  

Imagination, unbounded by reality, though, leads to creativity that ushers in a new reality.  Magical thinking allows the freedom to explore, to dream, to dare.  Isn’t that the story of any new technology or the latest space endeavors or any invention?  My partner, Bruce, is one of the most creative and talented people I know.  He is an upholsterer and restorer of antique furniture.  He can imagine what a beautiful couch or wing chair once looked like and he can restore it.  That is magical enough.  When a client brings him a beloved and broken table with one of it’s ornately carved legs missing, Bruce imagines a way to recreate the missing leg and when the piece is returned to its owner there is no way to tell that it was ever damaged!  Magical thinking with many “what if’s” but very little danger. 

Imagination, unbounded by reality- isn’t our faith a lot like that?  In the psalm we hear,  the Lord is faithful in all his words and merciful in all his deeds.  The Lord upholds, satisfies, is righteous and loving, and is near to those who call upon him faithfully.  And in Ephesians, “Now  to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine….”  Trust in God invites magical thinking.  Thinking that is not bound  by the reality of our daily lives but by the power God gives us to accomplish more than we can ask or imagine.  Thinking cannot explain the resurrection; faith can.  

Living in faith and love creates its own reality.  God sends the invitation, we can imagine a new reality, but our feet are planted firmly in this world and our rational minds say, “No point in offering five loaves and two fish, they are not enough.  We close our hearts to God’s infinite resources and on God's desire to supply our need.   

Faith in God is not rational.  We live with the temptation to question it, to challenge it, to sometimes ask for proof of it as we would a mathematical equation or a sign even of God’s existence.  God’s faith in us, though, is boundless.  What greater proof of magical thinking could there possibly be?

There is no region of the universe, nothing that can be imagined, no spark smoldering within us that is not embraced by God’s purpose and governed by God’s love.  But the highest understanding of God is not an individual attainment, not the privilege of any chosen few.   Understanding the breadth and depth of God’s love is the work of community.  What we cannot imagine for ourselves we see in the faces of those who journey with us in faith.  We must speak what we imagine, offer our faith and uphold with love the dreams we dare to dream for a new reality.   We must be for each other the boy with five loaves and two fish who believes that what he offers is enough.