I’ve been thinking a lot about my hands this week. I have thin hands, with long, slender fingers. “Piano player hands,” my grandmother would say wistfully, holding up her short stubby fingers against my own. Nine futile years of piano lessons proved my grandmother wrong, these are not piano player hands. Long though they may be, my fingers lack the dexterity needed for music making. My grandmother’s hands were quilting hands. Her short fingers were amazingly nimble with a needle and thread. In her ninety-four years she made well over two hundred quilts, all more works of art then functional objects, though we used them for function. I was in college before I knew that you could buy a bedspread, no one in my family ever had. Such was the work of my grandmother’s hands.
Our hands are incredibly complex systems. Two major muscle groups and countless nerves move the twenty-seven bones along four different arches to allow us such diverse mobility. I invite you to take a moment and just move your hands. Notice all of the different ways you can move them, the various motions and contortions they are capable of. No other part of us has the dexterity of our fingers.
Now think of all the things you can do with your hands. Think of all the things you do without thinking. Do you stop to contemplate which finger goes where when you swing a golf club, open a book, hug a friend, or pick up your grandchild? These actions come automatically. So complex, so perfect, is the coordination of our fingers that we give little or no thought to the movements required for these tasks. But our hands know how to do them. Our hands are the holders of memories.
It was officiating Dorcas’s funeral this week that got me thinking about my hands. My right hand still remembers the first casket I ever touched as a pastor. The silky smoothness of the well polished oak; so soft as to feel almost warm. That first casket held the body of a young man killed in a car accident. After a week of feeling totally helpless in the face of unspeakable tragedy, standing alongside a family whose grief was immeasurable, my right hand remembers the feeling of the casket under my palm as my voice proclaimed the powerful words of promise from the commendation prayer, that God will receive this lamb of God’s own flock into arms of mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, into the glorious company of the saints of light. This prayer proclaims that even at the grave our song is Alleluia, because even in death Christ’s victory is assured. I hold that memory in my hands for the power of it is too deep for my mind to understand.
I began my sermon this morning with a reflection on hands because for the next five weeks, we will be immersing ourselves in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John. There are rich and powerful teachings in this chapter. In the next five weeks we will hear Jesus declare himself to be the Bread of Life, proclaiming, “whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” Jesus will offer us his own body, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.” The disciples will marvel at his words, saying, “Lord to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” But they will also question, asking, “this teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” We will probably, in the next four weeks find ourselves in the same boat as the disciples, caught between the confusing tension of “Lord to whom shall we go?” and “this teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” But the teachings we will be immersed in for the next five weeks did not come from nowhere. Before all of this teaching, Jesus began with the sign of God’s power that we heard in our Gospel reading for today, that Jesus fed five thousand from his own hands.
After crossing the Sea of Galilee, Jesus went with his disciples up a mountain to sit. A large crowd followed them, for they had seen the signs that Jesus had done for the sick. When Jesus saw the crowd, he said to Philip, “where are we to buy bread for them?” Philip was dumbfounded, “Six months’ wages couldn’t buy bread to feed all these people.” But Jesus took five loaves and two fish in his hands, gave thanks, and from his own hands, distributed them to all the people, so that when he was finished there was enough leftover to collect twelve baskets.
Before Jesus taught them, he fed them. Before they heard about how he would give his body for them, he first used his hands to feed them. From his hands to their hands, Jesus fed five thousand people bread, so that they could hear the words of the promise of salvation that would soon pass from his body to their bodies. The teaching that would follow was rich and powerful but also “difficult; who can accept it?” And so Jesus began that teaching with something they could hold on to, something they could know with their hands when the teaching itself was too much for their minds. Jesus began with bread; that passed from his hands to their hands. Bread so that, in the long days to come, the days of journeying to the cross, the days of watching Christ’s death and thinking it was the end, the days of wondering in the glory of the resurrection, their hands would remember what their minds might not. Their hands would remember that day on a mountain when Jesus gave bread to them. Their hands would remember that moment, so that every time bread was broken and shared in their midst, their hands would again feel bread broken on a hillside, and their hearts the promise that Jesus himself was the Bread of Life, that “whoever comes to him will never be hungry, and whoever believe in him will never be thirsty.”
We receive before we know. We receive, even though we may never know, and that receiving leads us to understanding that is deeper than all knowledge. That is the pattern of the life of faith, the pattern of our worship life together. The walk of Christian faith starts at baptism. We baptize infants in our tradition because baptism is not about our being ready for God, but about God who is always ready for us. It is about God ushering us in, broken and confused, wet and cold and probably now with our hair all tousled, into God’s family as children, as heirs, of God’s promise.
And we live this promise out every week when we come to the table and receive God’s own body in the bread and the wine of communion. We celebrate the Eucharist every week, because every week we need the opportunity to know that God meets us here, no matter what the week behind us has brought us. It is not a matter of us being ready for the Eucharist, but of the Eucharist making us ready for what is to come. Martin Luther said that the days that we feel the least ready for the Eucharist are the days in which we need the Eucharist the most.
So come to the table with your hands outstretched. Come open the beautiful, carefully crafted gift of your hands. Bring hands that will hold God using muscles and tendons, bones and nerves woven together in perfect precision to hold grace of expansive, immeasurable, abundance. The miracle of the feeding of the five thousand is that God’s infinite goodness, too powerful, too wonderful for human comprehension, shrunk itself down into such simple gifts of bread and fish, so that all could be fed from God’s abundance. And that abundance would cascade over into leftovers enough to feed the world. This is God’s abundant feast set for you. This is food to feed a hungry world. This is a foretaste of the feast to come. Come taste and receive God’s goodness. Amen.
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