Spoiler alert.  I know that in what Aliyah just read there are descriptions of two incidents where Jesus is shown to be tossing aside the laws of science as we know them, to miraculously conjure up a feast for 5,000 people, and then to walk calmly across a lake during a fierce windstorm.

And I have no intention of suggesting a clever explanation for either incident.  But nor am I going to avoid talking about them in the hope that you won’t notice.  The fact that this story is told fully six times across all four gospels tells me that it meant a lot to the early church.  And my task is to see what it might mean for us.  Not to get stuck on whether it literally happened that way.  Personally, I’m fine with Jesus doing something that we can’t explain.  I’m okay with a little mystery.  In the words of the author Madeleine L’Engle, “I take the Bible too seriously to take it all literally.”  I’m interested in the meaning.  Why is this story here?

The story begins, “After this…”  The “this” refers to Jesus being targeted by his peers after he healed a man, and forgave him, on the Sabbath.  Jesus’ adversaries took offence, and, after yet another fruitless exchange of views, Jesus heads off to the other side of the lake.  He seems to conclude that he doesn’t owe it to his critics to answer all their loaded questions.  He doesn’t have to justify himself to them or engage on their terms.

Instead, what unfolds across the lake involves something altogether more life-giving – a shared meal.  Jesus’ multiplication of loaves and fish to feed a huge crowd.  According to John’s version of the story, Jesus himself feeds the five thousand.  It’s a lot of food.  But what strikes me about the story is the miracle of gathering.

You see, Jesus’ first thought when he sees the throngs of people approaching is, “How might we create an opportunity where they can stay together?  Where they can have their needs met in community?  How can we help them to be fed as a group, together?”

We know from the other gospel accounts that the disciples don’t share this view.  When his disciples look at the crowd, they see only their own scant resources.  The impossibility of the situation.  Jesus sees genuine need, and he allows that need to hit him squarely in his own gut.  In the face of the crowd’s hunger, someone has to act.  Someone has to feed.  Someone has to gather.

In Mark’s version of the story, his companions object to their teacher’s desire, and say, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is late; send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.”  In other words, the disciples’ instinct is to scatter the people.  To send them off to fend for themselves.  To resist the work, the burden, and the responsibility of meeting needs in community.

There is something important here, I think, for us today.  If we change gears a bit here, from food to content, activities, and programming – you see, for years, the key to vitality and growth for many churches (and other social organizations) has been to create great content to attract people.  In the case of churches, great preaching often was a part of that.  Also, great music.  And children’s and family programmes.

When it comes to the value of something, scarcity is what drives value.  The more scarce something is, the more value it has.  But, in our society, it changes so quickly.  Things that used to be scarce and valuable, even a few years ago, aren’t any more.

Fifteen years ago, you paid registration fees, flights, and hotels to hear a keynote speaker deliver a message because you had never heard her before, and that’s where she shared her ideas.  Then, the internet exploded, and suddenly you’ve probably heard every message from your favorite thought-leader, or writer, or even preacher – let alone musician – via YouTube.  TED Talks you can watch for free, and Podcasts that serve most listeners for little cost.

Go back a generation – by which I mean 1995, by the way! – and the only way to hear a preacher was to attend that church.  Maybe if you had a friend in a church who told you how great a minister was, you might subscribe to the cassette ministry and get tapes sent to you.  Worship, and preaching, were scarce, time limited events.  You had to be there on Sunday at 11:00 a.m.

Fast forward to today, and sermons and talks from effective communicators are anywhere and everywhere, free and available on-demand.  The thing is that many churches are still communicating a message designed for an earlier era:  “Join us for our new sermon series Sunday morning at 11:00 a.m.”  Or you may feel very high-tech and ahead of the game with Facebook posts like “Don’t miss last Sunday’s music.  You can still catch it online, on-demand!”  But you can also catch a thousand other decent worship leaders, preachers, choirs, and their messages are available just like – well, mine.  Some of them sound a lot like – mine.  And some of them (let’s be honest) are more compelling than – mine!

What we’re still treating as a scarce resource, and therefore valuable… isn’t.  Not anymore.  Not like that.

But… While there’s no shortage of information in our culture, there is a shortage of meaning and insight.  It’s one thing to know something, it’s another to know what it means, or why it’s significant.  The more we can help people cut through the noise and clutter, to get to the heart of why things matter, how they matter, and help them integrate the insights into their lives… the more people will value our content.

This is particularly true of the next generation.  They have more access to information than any generation who’s ever lived.  They just don’t know what to do with it.  Meaning and insight are so scarce these days that people almost immediately see the value when they find it – when they encounter meaning.  That’s incredibly important – and encouraging for churches.  However, while providing meaning and insight will help, it’s rarely enough to make a difference in our ability to have impact, and to grab the attention of people today.

Okay.  So, now what?

What is deeply scarce right now is community and connection.  People are more isolated than ever.  That’s playing out in the crisis in mental health in our society, rising addictions, in an epidemic of loneliness, and in new and alarming social and political movements that are forming in our culture. Authentic, loving, and genuine community is scarcer today than ever before in our lifetime.

As a result, the competitive advantage of the local church isn’t content, or programming.  It’s community and connection.  Every church should be running to fill that need in a whole range of different ways.  Bloor Street will be striving to fill that need.  If you think about the future of any live event…the power will not be just in the content, because almost everyone in the room will have heard the content or content like it, before.  It will be in community and connection that people find enduring value—and especially the ability to connect people to each other around a common cause.

Maybe, after the past couple of years, we, as the Bloor Street community  are in an especially good position to appreciate Jesus’s vision.  We, too, are scattered.  We have known the loneliness of the construction site looking empty – the shell of old stones we still can recognize surrounding it.  Faith communities generally in this post-pandemic time have re-discovered afresh how sacred and life-giving it is to gather, and how much we ache when we’re denied the means to do so.  We’ve experienced in urgent ways how much our humanity depends on proximity.  On eating together. Singing together.  Talking about things… together.

When Jesus feeds the five thousand, he does more than fill their stomachs. He encourages hungry, needy, weary people to sit down together, to notice and attend to each other, to take pleasure not only in the possibility of their own fullness, but in the fullness of the whole community.  The point is not to hoard, or conserve.  The point is to enjoy abundance in community.  To learn that in God’s way, there is enough.  Not just enough for one, but for many.

It surely would have made more sense to tell those people they were on their own for their next meal.  After all this crowd of 5,000 would be hungry again before they knew it.  A miraculous meal on a hillside wouldn’t change that.  And yet, all we know is that no one went away hungry that day.

Maybe it’s only when we get in touch with our own deepest needs — for nourishment, yes, but also for companionship, for proximity, for intimacy, for community — that we find ourselves compelled to extend a generous table to include others.

May it be so.