Broken Pieces–Mark 6: 35-44, Part 1

By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch, St. Stephen Presbyterian Church

Fort Worth, TX

The Lord’s Supper

July 15, 2012

Jesus’ disciples want to send the crowds home to get something to eat. Instead, Jesus tells his disciples “You give them something to eat.” He has them organize the thousands present in groups of hundreds and fifties, as were Roman army units, and they pass out the bread.

And somehow, everybody has enough.

We call this the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, but the Bible doesn’t say it’s a miracle. Scholars will argue forever about whether the food somehow multiplied like bunnies or if in fact people there really had brought food with them, and decided that rather than hoard it, they would share it with the members of their group. We aren’t going to solve that mystery today, and that’s not what I want to focus on.

What’s interesting is that Jesus tells the disciples to give the crowd something to eat, but the disciples don’t really do anything special. They organize the people and they hand out the food. That’s it.

And then, they gather the broken pieces.

That seems to define the church’s ministry in a nutshell. We organize God’s people into groups we call churches. We provide them with spiritual nourishment. And something happens. Maybe it’s a miracle that Jesus does. Maybe it’s the result of the gathered resourcefulness of God’s people. Most likely, like the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, it’s some divine combination of both.

And then, afterwards, it’s the church’s job to gather up the broken pieces.

There are always broken pieces when the church is being the church. I’ve experienced that in the last few months, seeing a friend I’ve had for thirty years lead his church out of the denomination because he and they disagree with our decision to ordain gays and lesbians. He and I disagree on this, but I love him profoundly, and it hurts to see him leave.

Last week we sent the youth off on their annual mission trip. They left excited and enthusiastic and they will return changed.  But in the process somebody’s going to get hurt. I tell you this from experience. Every year you send your youth off to camp or to mission trip and at some point, somebody has a falling out with the leadership—or a couple breaks up—or a leader oversteps a boundary—or a kid acts out. And somebody comes back discouraged, angry, disappointed, or hurt. There will be some youth leaders coming to me saying, “I don’t understand why so-and-so hates me or was so bad on this mission trip,” and there will be some youth coming back saying, “That one particular adult hurt my feelings,” or “I’m so angry at so and so for what she did I will never speak to her again.” This is as certain as that the sun will rise in the morning.

But it will still be a great youth mission trip.

And we’ll still have to gather the broken pieces.

Gathering up the broken pieces may be our most important job in the church. It’s our job to be a community of healing for those who are broken—by sin, by suffering, by life.  Even by ministry. Even by being the church. Because when you dare to do ministry, you are certainly going to be disappointed and frustrated, and likely angry and discouraged. You work with the homeless and you discover that often they don’t seem super-motivated to help themselves or that case workers seem just not even to care about their clients or that there are never enough resources, and there never will be enough resources—there will be poor always, after all. It’s discouraging. It may make you want to give up.

And when you dare to join a church you quickly discover that we’re not the ideal community of love and faithfulness and self-sacrificing love and forgiveness you’d hoped we’d be. You discover that there are cliques, and you aren’t in the right one. That people can be petty and back-biting. You discover, to your horror, that there are “politics” in the church. And that people don’t often do things in the name of Jesus, but are more likely to do them in the name of tradition, or whatever their own vested interest is. You think, I’ll just go home and watch church on tv. It’s too disappointing to try to do it in real life.

But that’s the real world. Every ministry and mission outreach and well-intentioned plan is going to fall short because we aren’t living in God’s ideal kingdom yet. We’re still flawed, sinful human beings. Every attempt at faithful, loving community is going to be flawed and imperfect because we aren’t angels, we’re human beings.

Faith doesn’t enable us to attain the miracle of perfection. Faith enables us to gather up the pieces when, inevitably, we fail—when we find out again that we, and the world, are imperfect. Gathering up the pieces of our lives. Gathering up the pieces of our broken community when we’ve hurt one another. Gathering up the pieces of the people we’ve hurt and alienated from the church in our narcissistic debates about who’s a sinner and who isn’t, resulting in the majority of Americans not attending church at all, we’ve hurt them so bad.

Gathering up the pieces and starting over again. That’s faith.

The miracle in the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes is not that all the people were fed, but that there were so many broken pieces to gather up. And that they were gathered up at all, rather than just left lying in the field for the birds to eat or taken home for a late-night snack by the crowd. The pieces were gathered up, and they were brought back to Jesus.

That’s who we are. That’s the church. We’re the broken pieces gathered up and brought back to Jesus. We don’t know what Jesus will do with us, but that’s okay. He’s Jesus! He’ll figure it out. But we broken pieces aren’t meant to be on our own, struggling with our brokenness by ourselves. We’re supposed to be gathered, with all the other broken pieces. And we’re supposed to gather up all the other broken pieces, the people we’ve hurt, the people who’ve hurt us, and together we, in our brokenness, return to Jesus.

We’re both the broken pieces of bread and the disciples who carry them. That’s the miracle of Christian community. We are wounded and we feel helpless and we have reason to feel that way. But jesus calls us to be disciples and says, “you give them something to eat.” Somehow we’re both the patient and the doctor, the homeless client and the social worker, the ministered to and the minister, the passive and the active. Like the Irish Rock Band U2 says, “We get to carry each other.” Despite the fact that we don’t feel capable or even necessarily very willing sometimes, we get to carry each other, broken pieces of bread carrying our own bread basket and offering it up to Jesus.

Because he knows what to do with broken pieces.