January 12, 2003
By Jack Price

Series: Asset Management and the Search for Self

(read Genesis 1)

God was creative! How great would it be to have God’s creative power? Just speak the words and really great stuff happens -- to have any thought be transformed into reality. Wow! The creation story from Genesis -- God says it and it happens. “Let there be,” and it is! I do get frustrated sometimes by my inability to bring my dreams into being -- that I can’t make my will happen merely by thinking it or speaking it. Maybe I should be grateful. Still, it seems I am powerless to change anything significant about my life or my circumstances. I feel powerless because I am powerless. It is said that the fundamental problems of life are insoluble. We must grow to a place that we are able to see them from a different perspective. We do not change them. We grow ourselves.

Theology is a “sometimes-roundabout” process of figuring out what we believe about God by paying attention to ourselves and to the Creation around us. Our theology tells us more about ourselves than it does about God: about our needs, our hopes, our fears, and our values. When we, realize that, accept that, and embrace that truth, then we look more deeply within. By seeing the image God has placed within us, we see a little more clearly the nature of the One who made us.

So, when I feel powerless to change my circumstances, I think about God’s ability to create by speech. I think about the ability to create God places within my life, my own creativity, and how powerful words, ideas and dreams are to helping me create my life. And this leads to the Gospel lesson for today.

(read Mark 6: 30-44)

The disciples have just come back from a mission trip. Each of them is eager to tell Jesus what had happened. He said, “Let’s get away to a quiet place where you can rest and we can talk.” Jesus knew how important it was to connect the outward journey of ministry with the inward journey of spiritual growth. So they got in a boat and head for a deserted place on another part of the lakeshore, a quiet grassy meadow far from civilization. But Jesus was a celebrity and the crowds of people followed him and found him in that deserted place. Rather than be angry, Jesus had compassion for the people. He taught them a lot about God and what God was bringing into existence among them. He taught them all day until it was too late for some of them to make it to their homes to get food (no fast food in Galilee). The disciples come to Jesus,

“Stop teaching and get rid of these people. They’re starving and we don’t want to be responsible. They need to go find themselves food.”

Maybe fatigue from all the things that had been happening to them had finally hit the disciples. Maybe they were getting cranky. I get cranky when I am tired and hungry. They want Jesus to send these people away, but Jesus says,

“You feed them.”

“What?” You must be kidding. We don’t have enough money to go buy food for this many people even there was some place to buy it. Are you crazy, Jesus?”

But Jesus wasn’t kidding. “How much food have you got?” he asks.

“We don’t even had enough for ourselves. Well, there is are five small loaves of bread and a couple of sardines.”

“That’ll do, guys. Now listen, I want you to get everyone to sit down. Seat them in groups of 50 and 100 and bring the food to me.”

So Jesus blessed the food, broke the bread, and had the disciples distribute it. Everyone ate as much as he or she wanted. 5,000 were fed and when the leftovers were collected, they filled twelve baskets. Five loaves fed 5,000 with a basket left for each disciple – a powerful picture of God’s economy.

We tend to understand Jesus’ miracles as ways to demonstrate his power and divinity, but his experience with temptation in the wilderness at the outset of his ministry clearly show that demonstrations of power are not the way to accomplish his mission. Jesus’ miracles are inevitably tied to the whole task of his life: to proclaim the in-breaking of God’s new creation. The miracle stories of Jesus are themselves part of the proclamation that God was in Jesus bringing into our very time and space the new creation of God. The Gospels proclaim, “God is here in Jesus.” Jesus teaches, “God is among you”. The new creation includes people, the entire nature order, and the entire supernatural order. All things are made new!

The miracle stories are teaching moments. Mark’s Gospel teaches his readers, and we contemporary disciples who are now reading, what God is like and what God is doing. The feeding of 5,000 foreshadows Jesus breaking bread in the upper room. He breaks the bread, blesses it, and feeds those who have come to him. The broken bread of Jesus’ life and ministry feed countless millions the bread of life. And there is a limitless bounty left for us to share so that all may eat the bread of life and be satisfied. In God’s economy, there is always abundance.

The miracle story about Jesus multiplying the loaves and fishes to feed 5,000 people certainly has a lot to teach us about placing our faith in God’s providence and about God’s challenge to us. To those who stand today as Jesus’ disciples he still says, “You feed the hungry.” Feed them to satisfy their bodies and feed them with the bread of your love and the hope of God’s presence.

Gordon Cosby, pastor of the Washington, DC-based Church of the Savior, affirms our ministry to feed the hungry a touch people at the point of their pain. Through their ministries among the poor of our nation’s capital, through his leadership, and through the writings of Elizabeth O’Connor the remarkable Church of the Savior has had a profound effect on Christianity today. Cosby suggests this story primarily teaches us about the importance of creativity in the life of discipleship. The title of this sermon Called to be Creative and its focus is borrowed from him.

Genesis 1 proclaims, “God creates persons in God’s own image.” This “Image of God” in which we are made may well reflect the very creativity of our maker, that we, in our very human ways, are also creative. We are not all creative in the way of Mozart or DaVinci. Our creativity is the ability to shape our lives by the priorities we choose and the decisions we make.

Cosby states,

Creativity is so fundamental that if you are not creative in the peculiar way that you are destined to be creative, you will be angry – deeply frustrated and angry. Quite a number of such angry people are very much in evidence. …Of the many reasons for anger, one of the least understood and yet most important is this: the denial or blocking of creativity. If you need to sing a song, sing. If you need to dance, dance. Give yourself to whatever is the special area of your own creativity. God is a creator.

Creativity is the currency of God’s stewardship. Again, Gordon Cosby says:

…The flow of energy in life continues – is limitless. Coming from the limitless depths of God’s being, the flow is infinite, inexhaustible. So you don’t have to husband your resources and dribble them out. You can be lavish and you will be embarrassed by the new riches being poured into your life. Jesus was so aware of the immeasurable richness of God’s grace that he could only ask, “Why are you so anxious, wondering ‘What we shall eat, what we shall drink?’” Don’t you know there is a limitless flow of life—a superabundance of love and caring? You simply cannot exhaust it. It may be tough learning how to touch that current, how to get into that stream, to feel the flow and the power of it, to be carried by it, but one thing is certain: the stream is there. And it is limitless.

Each of us is gifted with creativity for the living of our lives. To deny that creativity is to deny the image of God in which we are made. To live creatively is to hold ourselves in the flow of the movement of God’s Spirit. To shape life creativity is to meet Christ within each day, to see and respond to life’s opportunities and the challenges that come to us, and to connect the two. Let there be life, creative and meaningful life. And there was, and there is, and it is very good.