Sermons
March 1, 2026 (2nd Sunday in Lent)
Communion at the Lakeshore
John 6:1-15
I was part of an e-mail listserv years ago with a bunch of pastors all over the world. The group on the listserv discussed the weekly lectionary texts, under the direction of a pastor from the United Church of Canada.
There was a parallel group where we talked about other church-related subjects, things that didn’t have anything to do with the weekly Scripture readings. In that group, at one point, someone mentioned that their church leadership had asked them to preach on “theology of scarcity.” They were asking for advice on how to go about this.
The general consensus was that “theology of scarcity” is not biblical. In fact, it’s precisely the opposite of what the Bible says about how the Reign of God operates.
I mentioned this conversation to my worship chair, and it set her to thinking. Before long she had an idea.
We used to do Lent and Holy Week services together with two other congregations. One church would host Ash Wednesday, another would host Maundy Thursday, and the third one would host Good Friday. The next year we would rotate, so the one who had hosted Good Friday the year before handled Ash Wednesday, and so on.
When this conversation happened on e-talk, it was our year to host Maundy Thursday, which we all generally planned around a meal of some kind. So after I said something to Bev about this “theology of scarcity” conversation, and how most of us had agreed that the Bible teaches a theology of abundance, not scarcity, she came to me with the idea of focusing our Maundy Thursday service around theology of abundance, based on today’s Scripture reading from John 6.
We would have a potluck meal, but we would ask people to bring five of something, or two of something. Instead of bringing a crockpot full of baked beans, we were to bring five servings of baked beans. One person would bring five slices of meat loaf. Someone else contributed two pieces of pie. I made five egg salad sandwiches. And then Bev, who spent her entire summers fishing, planned to add five bread rolls and two pieces of fried fish.
People were skeptical. They wondered if there would be enough food for everyone if that’s all we brought.
But do you know what happened? We had plenty of food! Bev’s rolls became our Communion bread. Just like the crowd of people in today’s story, everybody left our table that night satisfied.
I don’t know that we realize how rare it would have been, among the common people living in first-century Palestine, for everyone to leave the supper table satisfied.
Most of the people on the hillside in today’s story were likely quite poor. They didn’t own land; many of the men may have been day laborers, who worked at menial jobs and received their wages at the end of each day. Those wages had to cover all their expenses, including food and shelter. They would buy the food they needed to feed their families, and if it was insufficient, the parents would make sure the kids got as much as possible, even if that meant they went hungry themselves.
They lived in an economy of scarcity, but they dreamed of the age to come—the Messianic Age, many have called it—in which there would always be abundance. Nobody would have to push away from the table before they were full, because if they didn’t there wouldn’t be enough to go around. Nobody would go hungry, no adults, no children, nobody.
That’s why John considers it to be a sign when Jesus feeds this enormous crowd with one kid’s[1] lunch. In the midst of a world of scarcity, there was incredible abundance. Everybody ate until they were full, and there were leftovers! Small wonder that many in the crowd recognized Jesus as “the prophet who is to come into the world.”
The world today is quite a bit different from the world in which this story took place. In Western countries, we still have a relatively comfortable middle class—although we’re being squeezed from all directions by rising energy and food costs and wages that don’t always keep up. I daresay few of us sitting here have been truly hungry in a long time, if ever. I don’t mean hungry as in, “It’s about time for lunch”; I mean, “There’s no food in the house and payday isn’t for another week.” It seems likely to me that most of us haven’t had to skip a meal to make sure there was enough for our kids.
But we still operate out of a scarcity mentality a lot of the time. We worry that even though we’ve got plenty right now, there may come a day when we haven’t. And so we hang on tightly to what we have, just in case.
The seven signs in John’s Gospel are meant to show us that the day of the Lord, the messianic age, the kingdom of God, whatever we want to call it, has arrived. It was a time for which Jesus’ people longed, which they watched and prayed for continually.
It would be a time when, as the prophets proclaimed, the mountains would drip sweet wine; a time when blind people regain their sight, deaf people can hear again, people who weren’t able to walk can leap and dance for joy; a time when there is no such thing as sickness and death; a time when nobody ever had to go to bed hungry; a time when there is peace because there is no need to fight over scarce resources, because scarcity is a thing of the past.
Jesus’ signs in John are meant to show that that time has come. And we are living in it even today. Yet all around us there is still a great sense of scarcity.
Why is that?
The kingdom of God is among us, and we can see it all the time if we are paying attention. We see it when a person who has every reason to be bitter chooses kindness. We see it when someone helps bear the burden of a friend whose way is hard. We see it when somebody sets aside their need to be important, rolls up their sleeves, and does the work of caring for others. We see it when somebody who has brought their lunch shares it with someone else who doesn’t have anything. We see it when the Body of Christ takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and shares it with the world, so that nobody misses out.
[1] While most English translations refer to the child whose lunch Jesus used as “a boy,” the Greek word is actually neuter gender, which means it doesn’t specify whether the child is a boy or a girl.