Seeing with God's Eyes

How good is your vision? If you’re like most middle-class Americans, you visit the optometrist once a year. You get your glaucoma test and your retinal scan. If you’re nearsighted or farsighted you get glasses or contact lenses. When you become a woman – or a man – of a certain age, you get reading glasses or bi- or even trifocals. When you start seeing haloes around stop lights, it’s off to the eye surgeon for cataract surgery. With any kind of luck, your vision is restored or even improved from what it was before the surgery.

And your inward vision? How good is your spiritual vision? How good are you at seeing the world as God might see it? “Not so good,” you say? If so, you’re in good company. In two of our Scripture lessons for today, people had a hard time seeing beyond the ordinary. We might say they couldn’t think out of the box. Take the story of Elisha and his servant. Do you identify with the servant? Elisha had already demonstrated his prophetic powers through a series of miraculous acts. Now in this time of famine a generous man came to Elisha offering his tithe of barley loaves and grain. When Elisha commanded the servant to distribute the token offering to all the starving people, what did the servant say? “This is way too little for a hundred people.” But Elisha had a different vision. He trusted in a compassionate God, a God who cares enough to reap an abundant harvest out of people’s meager offerings. Can’t you hear Elisha thundering, “Give it to the people and let them eat!” And they ate and even had leftovers.

Not surprisingly, the story repeated itself in the Gospel. We’ve now returned to the Gospel according to John, where we will remain from now until the end of August. All our Gospel lessons will come from the sixth chapter. As you may remember, most of the narrative in the first part of John consists of Jesus’ doing something, followed by Jesus’ attempt to explain the significance of his action to this friends, then disputes with the religious leadership over what he has done and said, and finally a resolution at the end of the chapter. See if you can hear that movement as we progress through the chapter. Now in this story of Jesus’ feeding of the crowd, the people around Jesus didn’t seem to have any better spiritual vision than Elisha’s servant. Philip and Andrew had already seen Jesus do many extraordinary things: heal people, turn water into wine at Cana, and face down the religious leaders. Why were they so clueless about what Jesus might do on the hills beside the Sea of Galilee? They might have wondered why Jesus felt so compelled to feed people – did you wonder the same thing – but how come they didn’t have any idea about what Jesus might do? Philip got out his calculator and assured Jesus there was no way they had enough to take care of everyone. Andrew scared up a tiny donation, but he could have been quoting Elisha’s servant when he said, “What are these barley loaves and fish among so many?” However, like Elisha, Jesus looked through a different lens. Although he didn’t thunder, he did create some order out of the chaos – can’t you imagine all those people milling around wondering what was coming next? He made the people sit down. Then, after blessing the little he had, Jesus himself began to give it out. And what did the clueless disciples do? Perhaps they gathered up the leftovers. Or perhaps they joined all those who misunderstood what Jesus had done for them and set about to proclaim Jesus as a political leader.

Is that how we humans are, unable to think out of the box, unable to see the world from God’s perspective, unable to imagine that a God of compassion and abundance might be eager to transform our meager offerings into something much greater? Shouldn’t we as Jesus’ friends be able to do better than Elisha’s servant, Philip, and Andrew? Shouldn’t we be able to recognize God at work – or willing to be at work – in our midst? Shouldn’t we who been baptized into the Body of Christ be able to “comprehend … what are the breadth and length and height and depth, …?”

Maybe it’s understandable that we find it so difficult to see with God, to think out of the box. Despite being Jesus’ friends, we are so rooted in this world. Most of us, in our daily lives, as individuals and as a parish, are really Elisha’s servant or Philip or Andrew. Haven’t we looked at the vast sea of human need, the people all crowding around us with their hands out, to say nothing of the requests that come in by post and e-mail. Haven’t we thought or said, “I can’t. I can’t help you. I can’t afford to help you; there are too many of you. I haven’t got time to help you.” And haven’t we said the same thing as a parish? “We can’t. We’re a small parish. What are our meager resources in the face of such deep world need? We have so little. There’s so much need: what do we have to offer as a cell in the Body of Christ? What do we have to offer as a church?” Why is it so difficult to see past our own vision of scarcity and contemplate the possibility of God’s abundance?

Perhaps the better questions are, “How do we learn to see more clearly? How do we align our vision of the possible with God’s vision? How do we recognize God at work among us and get some glimpse of what God might do if we gave God even some of our admittedly meager resources?” Let’s look again at Jesus our mentor and model. Jesus did something surprising in this story. No, not feeding all those people, not even walking on the sea. Go back to the crowd’s reaction to his feeding of them. They exclaimed “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.” However, they misunderstood just what sort of messiah Jesus was destined to be. His response? “He withdrew again to the mountain by himself.” After a period of extremely intense ministry to others, Jesus took off. He withdrew not only to escape the crowds who wanted to anoint him as king but, more importantly, to seek some rest for his soul, to renew his relationship with the Father, and to align his will with the will of the Father. In other words, he withdrew in order to strengthen his ability to see the world as God sees it.

Isn’t this the lesson for us? We too engage in periods of intense ministry in our personal lives, our work, and in the church. We will do so here today at our Loaves and Fishes dinner. After such intense ministry we too must withdraw for a bit, to seek rest and consolation, to seek nourishment for our souls, to renew our relationship with God, and ultimately, to align our wills with God’s will. We are surely called to minister to others, but without the time away from ministry, without the intentional commitment to deepening our relationship with God, we will have a hard time seeing our ministry through God’s eyes. We will have a harder time letting God take our meager resources and do more with them than we could ever ask or imagine. In the week ahead, take some time with God, even if it’s only five minutes of mid-day prayer. Ask God to nourish and refresh you. Ask God to help you think out of the box and show you how much good God might do with your meager resources and with the resources of this parish.

For this is also our call as a parish. Our participation in the Common Ministry program gives us some time away just to focus on ourselves as a parish and on what God might be calling us to do. Perhaps we also need some quiet time together as a parish. I propose a Quiet Morning here at St. Peter’s focused on our identity and mission as a parish. Will you join me in that?

It’s true that our resources are meager. They always are. In the face of the great human need around us, just in this county, to say nothing of the rest of the state, country, and world, any sane person would say, “What is that among so many?” But our compassionate, loving, inclusive God does not operate out of a politics of scarcity. The God in whom we trust is a God of abundance, if we could but see it. The God we profess is prepared to take whatever we have and use it for the life of the world. Do you need examples? Holy women and men surround us, both on earth and in heaven. Here’s only one. Mother Theresa confronted Calcutta, a city teeming with severely disabled people, with homeless people, and with people dying on the streets in broad daylight. What could one Albanian nun do in the face of such need? Mother Theresa picked up one dying person at a time. Today, the Missionaries of Charity Sisters, Brothers, Lay missionaries, and associates operate 600 missions, schools, and shelters in 120 countries. We too have walked with Jesus. We too have seen the signs. Now may God enable us to deepen our ability to see with God’s eyes. May God work within us and turn our limited and meager selves into the means of blessing for the world.