By the power at work within us [God] is
able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.
(Ephesians 3.20)
Peanut Butter
Years back, I was asked to speak to a group of advertising
and marketing students about mapping career paths. Although the invitation
flattered me, I was flummoxed by it. I was the last person to tell kids how to
succeed in the crazy world of agency politics and client demands, as I’d
stumbled into this business with no idea how it worked or how to make it work
for me. I was a film and psychology major who spent his first 10 years out of
school putting little of his training to use. Before settling on a career as a
marketing creative director (which I discovered as a temp typist), I’d tried my
hand at dozens of things. “Are you sure I’m your guy?” I asked the professor
who tendered the invitation. “I didn’t really choose this path. It sort of
chose me. I only got this far because I learned a lot by not having a career path.” He chortled, “That’s why you are the guy.” He’d observed a trend that
concerned him. Major agencies were recruiting his students straight out of
school and running them through their cookie cutters before they acquired any
real-world experience. “That can’t be good for them or our field,” he said with
a sigh. I couldn’t have agreed more.
I titled my talk “Learning to Love Peanut Butter,” referring
to many times when all I had was a jar of Skippy and some bread. After clocking
through my résumé, I told the students that, as far as I could see, there are
two types of people: hikers and explorers. Hikers find—or are given—a path and
stick to it. They know where they want to go and get there sooner than
explorers. Explorers, on the other hand, tend to get lost along the way. Their
destination isn’t as sharply defined and the route often takes them to places
where they find little clarity or comfort. “That’s how you learn to love peanut
butter,” I explained. “If it’s all you’ve got, it’s as good as steak—even better than steak—because it’s all that
stands between you and going hungry.” But along with loving peanut butter,
explorers learn that success and abundance can’t be measured quantitatively.
They’re discovered in what lack of
worry about them affords: freedom, endurance, simplicity, and resilience. Reaching
deep inside to see what you’ve got is how you discover all you’ve been given. Once
explorers master the art of bringing everything they’ve got to the table,
success—and its abundance—comes to them,
often surpassing that of hikers who’ve stuck to prescribed, “tried-and-true”
paths.
Sacrificial Living
Aside from followers of the oxymoronic “prosperity gospel,”
most believers get queasy whenever they hear success and abundance linked with
Christian faith. Jesus’s teachings are anything but a formula for worldly
success. By definition, discipleship is a discipline
that aspires to selflessness; its “success” can only be measured by the extent
of one’s sacrifice, not one’s gains. Yet Sunday’s Gospel (John 6.1-21) and New
Testament (Ephesians 3.14-21) describe how sacrificial living—made possible by
departing from proven paths—reaps great success and abundance. Both texts
endorse an explorer’s mentality that takes stock of all we’ve been given so
that we can bring everything we’ve got to the table.
John tells the familiar story of how Jesus miraculously
feeds 5000 by multiplying a boy’s lunch of five loaves and two fish. This
massive congregation assembles at a most inconvenient time. Jesus and the
disciples are exhausted. He needs some time alone with them to replenish their
energy and discuss next steps in His ministry. He whisks them off to a
mountainside and no sooner do they get settled than a huge crowd shows up. An
ordinary leader would politely greet the uninvited horde and tell them, “I’d
love to talk with you, but I’m in a very important meeting. If you go back to
the seashore, I’ll get to you as soon as I possibly can.” Not Jesus. He
scuttles His agenda—urgent though it is—sensing that most of the crowd has
climbed the mountain with little or nothing to eat. Before anything else can
happen, they’ll have to be fed. He already knows what He’s going to do. But He
tosses the predicament in the disciples’ laps to see how they’ll handle it.
They tell Him it’s impossible. There’s nowhere to buy bread and if there were,
it would cost a fortune to feed so many people. A quick survey turns up a boy’s
lunch and nothing more. Jesus tells the disciples to make the people sit down.
After He gives thanks for the loaves and fish, they’re distributed to the
people. Not only is His strategy successful. To the amazement of all, it yields
an abundance—12 baskets overflowing with leftovers, one for every disciple.
It’s impossible to know if Paul (or the author writing in
his name) recalls this story while outlining the principle of spiritual abundance in the Ephesian
letter. Scholars date the epistle circa 62 CE, around the time that Mark,
Matthew, and Luke pen their gospels and 30 years before John composes his. So
Paul may not have even heard of this episode. Yet he is by far the greatest
explorer among all the Apostles, the one who discovers success and abundance
come to those who quit the beaten path and, for lack of a better phrase, learn
to love peanut butter. He prays the Ephesians “may be strengthened in your
inner being with power through God’s Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your
hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love.” (Ephesians
3.16-17) He trusts they will discover “the power to comprehend… what is the
breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that
surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (v18)
With this power at work within us, he
writes, God “is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or
imagine.” These statements sound lofty until we reach down inside ourselves and
discover what we’ve got is more than enough. If all we have are peanut butter
and bread—if the most we can scrounge up would barely feed a growing boy—it’s
still an abundance, because we’ve been given power to comprehend God is at work
within us.
What’s in Your Pocket?
Of the gospels’ miracle stories, the feeding of
thousands—5000 here, 4000 in another instance—strikes me as the most
problematic. Living in an age when meteorological and medical phenomena are
standard news, calming storms, walking on water, curing disease, and even raising
the dead seem, well, not so amazing. (In a way, what we’ve learned from science
since these stories were first recorded magnifies their miraculous nature by
shifting the focus from their inexplicable outcomes to Jesus’s role as the
catalyst that brings them about.) But there really is no explanation for how
Jesus transforms one lunch into dinner for 5000. Or so I thought, until I read
Barbara Brown Taylor’s exquisite sermon on this episode.
In “The Problem with Miracles,” she invites us to imagine most everyone on the
mountainside showed up with a little something to eat in his/her pocket. The
problem was none of them thought they had enough to share.
They might have been able to keep their
own food for themselves if that bread basket had not come around, full of
scraps, everyone so careful not to break off too much, everyone wanting Jesus’s
crazy idea to work so much that very carefully, very secretly, they all began
to put their own bread in the basket, reaching in as if they were taking some
out and leaving some behind instead.
Of course, we can’t say with certainty that’s how it
happened. Nonetheless, the notion is fully in keeping with how God works. God
leads us to places where we discover God’s power to transform the little we
have into overflowing abundance. Yielding our meager talents and resources is
how we enable God to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or
imagine. As we ponder Sunday’s passages, I pray we’ll discover that by learning
to love peanut butter, not only will we eat well. Hungry hearts that find us
will also be fed.
What’s in your pocket?
God’s power at work in
us transforms what little we have into more than enough.
