Give Them Something to Eat
A Sermon preached on Sunday, August 5, 2007
by Pastor Terry Davis
First Presbyterian Church, Hartford, CT
Acts 6:1-7 Now during those days, when the disciples were increasing in number, the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of food. (2) And the twelve called together the whole community of the disciples and said, "It is not right that we should neglect the word of God in order to wait on tables. (3) Therefore, friends, select from among yourselves seven men of good standing, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint to this task, (4) while we, for our part, will devote ourselves to prayer and to serving the word." (5) What they said pleased the whole community, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit, together with Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolaus, a proselyte of Antioch. (6) They had these men stand before the apostles, who prayed and laid their hands on them. (7) The word of God continued to spread; the number of the disciples increased greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith.
Mark 6:35-44 When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, "This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; (36) send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat." (37) But he answered them, "You give them something to eat." They said to him, "Are we to go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread, and give it to them to eat?" (38) And he said to them, "How many loaves have you? Go and see." When they had found out, they said, "Five, and two fish." (39) Then he ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass. (40) So they sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties. (41) Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all. (42) And all ate and were filled; (43) and they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish. (44) Those who had eaten the loaves numbered five thousand men.
As I began looking more deeply into the Acts of the Apostles for this summer’s preaching I was struck by the fact that the sermons in Acts are totally focused on Jesus’ death and resurrection; they say virtually nothing about the life and the teachings of Jesus, and the same thing is true for the letters of Paul and the others which make up much of the rest of the New Testament. It is only in the gospels that we learn who Jesus was as a person, what he taught and the miracles and healings that he performed.
But the leadership and membership of the Jerusalem church were obviously familiar with the life and teachings of Jesus; we can see the evidence of this is the programmatic life of this Church. There was a radical love and concern that members had for one another. They went to each other’s homes, they shared their meals together, and there was a sacramental quality to the meals. Because they were breaking bread with fellow believers they remembered Jesus, and they found that we has present in their midst as he had promised that when even two or three were gathered in my name there I will be in the midst of them. We have read that the new followers devoted themselves to the Apostles’ teaching, to the breaking of bread, to fellowship and to prayers. I am convinced that it was in the Apostles’ teaching that the story of the life and the teaching of Jesus was taught. The evangelistic preaching focused on the death and resurrection of Jesus; the teaching must have included the deeds and teachings of the master, because his commandments and values were being followed among the new believers as well as among those who had been with him from the first.
They obviously knew how Jesus himself had commanded the Apostles to feed the multitudes with the loaves and the fishes in those sacramental meals that closed his all day preaching sessions on one or more occasions; they must have known the parable of the sheep and the goats and how the king said in so far as you have fed and clothed and helped and visited the least of my brothers and sisters you have done it unto me.
We have to believe that they knew these things because we find that the members of the Jerusalem Church had all things in common, that there was no one in need among them because they took care of one another. People were even selling off assets, houses and land to provide for the Church and for the needs of those members who would be otherwise without life’s necessities.
We also found out this morning one of the ways that they took care of one another was that they sponsored a community meals program. This was not just providing a meal one Tuesday evening a month, not just holiday meals, not just five days a week but there were meals for the impoverished every day. They talk about the widows, but in those times when the majority of destitute persons were widows or orphans you could refer to the impoverished underclass as the widows, just as we often talk about the community meals as serving homeless men, there are regularly some women, and often several families who are served at each meal.
The one difference between the community meals of the early church and those today is that the clients of the community meals in Jerusalem were members of the new and rapidly growing fellowship of believers. This wasn’t a middle class church reaching out to meet the needs of the downtrodden and impoverished; the early church members were themselves predominantly from the lower rungs of society. The men who were able to work could support their families in a meager way, but employment opportunities for widows particularly elderly widows and those with children to support were limited or non existent. Without these meals these women might have no way to support themselves except prostitution or begging; instead the Church took care of them, and created a fellowship and bond of solidarity among them. It was a place where they were respected for who they were, not because they were someone’s wife or someone’s widow. It was a place where they developed leadership gifts so that we see in the later letters in the New Testament that they were a powerful organization in the life of the Church and its ministry. They became like a powerful Women’s association, or an usher board or a mother’s board in various churches today.
But we learn another lesson that is important for the multicultural church from this scripture passage and that is the necessity of constant vigilance to be certain that everyone is included. The minority, the Hellenists, that is Greek speaking Jews, complained that their widows were not being treated the same as the new Christians of Jewish ancestry. We see that the apostles immediately took care of the problem like they were Presbyterians, they formed a committee. The first board or committee beyond the less formal recognition of the 12 and the other original followers was the board of deacons. Peter said in essence, this is a vital program, and having it run fairly and efficiently is vitally important, but we are not the only people who have the gifts and responsibilities of leadership. You think your people are not being treated equally; then elect some folks from your community and we will lay hands on them and commission them to be deacons and to wait on tables and supervise this program.
Among the seven who were elected was one man named Stephen, and when I get back from vacation we will read about Stephen’s story.