In my first two years as a priest, I served both in a parish and as a choir director in an Episcopal school, which was situated in an under-resourced neighborhood of Philadelphia. For students who were well acquainted with trauma and poverty, the school was a haven of security. It was a place that would always be heated in the winter and cooled in the summer, where students could enjoy well-prepared and nutritious meals. The teachers would love the students and do their best to give them a quality education. The students would be taught about Jesus, even while their own religious traditions were respected.
At each chapel service in the school, the prayers of the people ended with please and thank you prayers. Students and staff would raise their hands and ask or thank God for something. When I first encountered these prayers, I was surprised and moved by how abundant they were. The average person walking into that chapel off the surrounding streets might have imagined there would be a plethora of please prayers and only a smattering, if any, of thank you prayers.
On the streets, it was obvious what wasn’t there. What wasn’t there were adequate public schools. What wasn’t there were enough garbage cans to hold the trash that littered the streets because the city traditionally ignored this part of the city and didn’t provide enough trash cans. What wasn’t there was the certainty of walking to a neighbor’s house without being caught in the crossfire of gun violence. What wasn’t there was sufficient heating in homes and money to pay the rent.
And yet, while the please prayers were in abundance, sometimes it was the thank you prayers that were even more prolific. The school chaplain didn’t have enough time to call on all the students who wanted to voice their gratitude. I learned very quickly that some of the most grateful people are those who don’t seem to have enough by the standards of the more privileged. They’re adept at discerning the blessings of their lives and giving thanks for those things that evade the awareness of those who are more sated in life. They’re skilled at seeing abundance where others only see scarcity.
The school itself was a shining example of finding abundance where most people would only see scarcity. It was housed in an abandoned Episcopal church, with buildings that were unused and deteriorating. To most people’s eyes, the property was one more example of the disastrous effects of church factionalism. But to the eyes of one Episcopal priest and a pediatric oncologist, the school’s founders, it was a gold mine of an opportunity.
The beautiful historic church would become a chapel. The church’s parish house would become the school itself. The former rectory would be turned into a community house for teachers. The neighborhood, long overlooked by many, would help provide the vision for this new school and its students. And now, little more than a decade later, the school is thriving.
But in those initial days of visioning for the school, the narrative could have been otherwise if only skeptical questions were asked. Perhaps those questions wouldn’t even have seemed skeptical but merely practical. How could that one piece of property, which was in shambles, nurture so many people? How could those aging and neglected buildings, cramped as they were, be sufficient for a school? What are they among so many problems? The need and the numbers to address the need didn’t add up. But thankfully for that school, the neighborhood, and the Church, the vision of a few, hearty, imaginative people prevailed. They shifted the narrative from scarcity to abundance, from rationalized impossibility to miraculous possibility. Through prayer, the school’s leaders began to see that everything they needed was right before their eyes.
Such a shift in vision is what Jesus reveals in the feeding of the 5,000 in John’s Gospel. When Jesus confronts a hungry crowd that has followed him to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, his disciples ask all the usual questions engineered by a scarcity mentality. They’re the same questions that were undoubtedly voiced by those who were skeptical that a flourishing inner-city school could emerge from decaying, abandoned church property. They’re the same questions that most of us have surely asked at some point in our lives. But Jesus’s initial question to Philip is meant to test him. It’s also intended to teach him and the other disciples that everything they need is right before their eyes.
Philip’s first reaction is to put dollar signs on the need. Two hundred denarii would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little. Andrew is no more hopeful. There is a lad here who has five barley loaves and two fish; but what are they among so many? Philip and Andrew simply ask the typical questions of our own age. What can we do with so little money? How can we afford to maintain all these aging buildings for such a small congregation? How can we give sacrificially and also plan for our retirement? How can we be practical and hope for a miracle, too?
It’s impossible to exist in our society without constantly being told that there’s not enough. Either you’re told that you don’t have enough or that you aren’t enough. There’s not enough time. There’s not enough money. There aren’t enough homes or jobs. There’s not enough peace. There’s not enough security. And it’s all because we live in a zero-sum game of competition with finite resources that must be distributed among a crowd of billions. And this inevitably means that many will lose out.
How could five barley loaves and two fish feed all those people? And Jesus shows them how by performing a miracle, but his miracle is much more than mere magic. It’s miraculous, because in it, he reveals to the crowd that everything they need is right before their eyes. It’s miraculous because Jesus teaches the crowd and the disciples that five loaves and two fish is enough because God makes it enough.
It’s not simply that people within the crowd were inspired to bring out their own hidden stores of food to share with others, as some overly rational interpreters have claimed. Such a view only reinforces the sense that we live in a zero-sum universe where there really is only a finite amount of food. But Jesus undoes this kind of thinking by manifesting a miracle wrought by the hand of God, in which infinite abundance emerges from seeming scarcity. And it all happens from the ordinary stuff that has been right before the people’s eyes the entire time.
This is what happened in north Philadelphia. A handful of decrepit, abandoned buildings turned out to be more than enough for an under-resourced neighborhood in north Philadelphia. It was enough because God showed it to be enough. It was enough because a few visionaries who believed and trusted in God’s abundance knew that with God’s help something good could come out of a rotten past on that property. They had a strong sense that everything they needed was right before their eyes, even if unseen. The money needed to resurrect that abandoned property came pouring in, as if five dollars and two cents had been multiplied infinitely. The volunteers emerged as hundreds aligned themselves with the mission of the school. The teachers and the students and the visionary neighbors all came because more than human altruism was at work. God was at work, creating a miracle with all the stuff that had been beneath their eyes the entire time. And nothing was lost or wasted.
Right now, as we are continually fed with emergency messages of scarcity, the Mass teaches us—as Jesus taught that crowd of people on the mountain—that there is enough, that a little bit of Bread and a tiny sip of Wine will give us eternal life. The world will always try to teach us that there’s never enough. The world, indeed, feeds us with fear because the sustenance of its competitive spirit is based on fear. But it’s God who teaches us to shift our vision from scarcity to abundance, from seeing impossibilities to seeing possibilities. And while some try to force-feed us fear, God feeds us with the gift of Christ his Son, the true bread from heaven. And in that gift, God shows us that everything we need is right before our eyes.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
July 28, 2024