August 2, 2020
Hope Lutheran Church
Pastor Mary Erickson
Matthew 14:13-21; Psalm 145:8-21
The Eyes of Faith
Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.
A verse from the appointed Psalm for today, Psalm 145:
The eyes of all wait upon you, O Lord
And you give them their food in due season.
This Psalm always takes me back to my seminary days. The seminary choir once sang a rendition of this psalm. The line mentioned above was to be sung by a soprano solo. And Terri, who sang the solo, was totally blind. “The eyes of all wait upon you, O Lord, and you give them their food in due season.”
To have Terri, who was completely blind, sing the verse regarding the eyes of all! It sent a very powerful message and unpacked the real meaning of the words. The Psalm isn’t referring to outward, sighted eyes. These eyes are inward in nature. These are the eyes of trust. In trust, we look to God as the source of our daily bread. Terri’s eyes, too, though blind outwardly, looked to God for her daily bread.
We live in an inward-outward balance. Inwardly we know that God is the giver of our daily bread. This includes Martin Luther’s list of everything meant by daily bread: food and clothing, home and family, daily work and all we need from day to day. But at the same time, we also know that responsibility for implementation falls on us.
So we work for our daily bread, and this makes us seekers. Our eyes – our outward eyes – look after our needs. We search for deals. We scour the flyers in our Sunday paper for sales. We compare prices online to find the best deal.
A little of both of these visions were at work in our gospel story today. Both the inward eye of faith and the outward eye for our next meal were in play.
The feeding of the 5000 is one of the few miracles of Jesus that is present in all four gospels. When you compare them next to each other, the four accounts may vary a little around the edges. But the basic gist is the same.
Jesus and his disciples travel to a remote place along the Sea of Galilee. But people see him going there and they follow him on foot. Matthew explains that Jesus goes there because he’s just heard about the beheading of John the Baptist. Jesus withdraws to mourn the loss of his friend John.
But the eyes of all wait upon him, and they follow him to this lonely location. Question: Did they follow with the inward eye of faith? Or were they led by the outward eye of “here’s a fellow who can help us?” Maybe a little of both.
Jesus and his disciples pull up on shore only to discover a huge mass of people. Well over 5000 people in total, have followed them there! Jesus had withdrawn to this lonely place to mourn John’s death. But when he sees the crowds, Jesus doesn’t say, “Get back in the boat, fellas, we’re out of here!” No, he responds with compassion. When gospel writer John tells this story, he remarks that Jesus has compassion on them because “they were like sheep without a shepherd.”
Jesus proceeds to spend the rest of the day curing the sick among them. As evening approaches, the disciples are getting edgy about the situation at hand. This is a huge mass of people, and they’re going to need to eat dinner soon.
Masses of people create their own needs. I was talking to a man who attended a Boy Scout Jamboree with his son and their scouting troop in West Virginia. We talked about the infrastructure needs required in order to support this temporary gathering of 40,000 people. He said, “We were the fifth largest city in West Virginia.” He told me about the temporary hospital they had set up just for the jamboree. It was remarkable!
So the disciples were justifiably concerned about the needs of this large crowd. They were viewing the situation with outward eyes. These people needed food.
But Jesus has another plan, a plan involving the inner eye of faith. He says that the people don’t need to go anywhere. “You give them something to eat,” he tells his disciples. The disciples respond with outward vision. “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.”
“You give them something to eat.” There are some commands of Jesus which reach out beyond the context of their story’s situation. It’s like they were spoken directly to us. This is one such statement. “You give them something to eat.”
Our calling as Christians bids us to consider our neighbor’s need for daily bread. It requires outward eyes. We need to keep our eyes and ears open so that we can be aware of how our neighbor needs help. Frequently, our initial response to Christ’s invitation is much like the disciples: we are overwhelmed! Our resources seem as small as the disciples’ handful of loaves and fishes. How can we address the overwhelming need of the world?
One thing that affects our reaction to need is whether we live out of a mindset of scarcity or of abundance. In a mindset of scarcity, there will never be enough of the necessary resources. As a result, we jealously protect what it is we have.
People who grew up in the Depression or in situations of great want will sometimes carry the mental effects of that experience with them for the rest of their lives. It can even be passed along from generation to generation. It’s a learned behavior. You never know when you might run out. So you need to use your resources as tightly as possible!
By contrast, people with a mindset of abundance believe that there are plenty of resources around to meet all our needs. It’s not that abundance-minded people frivolously throw around their resources. They don’t spend money like there’s no tomorrow. But they trust that they will have enough. Their needs will be met.
As a result, there are certain things that they have less of: less anxiety, less hoarding, less envy and jealousy, less miserliness. When we have a mindset of abundance, we open the hand instead of closing the fist.
As people of faith, there’s one necessary thing to help us move from scarcity to abundance: that inner eye of faith. “The eyes of all wait upon you, and you give them their food in due season.”
Through his miracle on that lonely hillside, Jesus demonstrated to his disciples and to everyone present, the abundant life of God. There was enough for all to eat and be filled, and the leftovers filled twelve baskets.
Our opening hymn this morning was “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” I did a little research on the origins of this hymn.
The hymn gained its solid place in American hymnary by its association with the Moody Bible Institute. A president of Moody loved this hymn, and every time he was in charge of a worship service, he selected this hymn to be sung. As a result, it became a much-loved hymn of the college.
The college had a radio station. The president of Moody invited George Beverly Shea, an unknown singer at that time, to sing hymns on the station. As you can imagine, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” was among those songs.
Meanwhile, young Billy Graham was a student at Wheaton College. He heard George Beverly Shea sing the hymn on the radio. He and asked Shea to be a part of his crusade ministries. Billy Graham’s crusades brought international awareness of the hymn. Its popularity grew even more.
The words to this hymn were penned by Thomas Obediah Chisholm. Chisholm was born in 1866 in a log cabin in Franklin, Kentucky. He was ordained as a Methodist minister at the age of 27. But Chisholm had very poor health. After only one year, he had to cease his ministries. Poor health plagued him for the rest of his life and so he always got by on a meager income.
But Chisholm loved to write poems. Over the course of his life he wrote nearly 1200 of them. “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” was inspired by the words from the book of Lamentations 3:22-23:
“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”
For someone who experienced such fragile health and just barely eked by from day to day, the words of this poem are a great testimony to his inner eye of faith in God to provide.
Chisholm sent the words of the hymn to a friend of his, William Runyan, who wrote the well-known melody in three-quarter time.
Although he would live his whole life very humbly, Chisholm was blessed. He spent his days under the umbrella of God’s abundance. His inner eye of faith waited upon God, and God did not disappoint him. Near the end of his life he wrote this:
“My income has not been large at any time due to impaired health in the earlier years which has followed me on until now. Although I must not fail to record here the unfailing faithfulness of a covenant-keeping God and that He has given me many wonderful displays of His providing care, for which I am filled with astonishing gratefulness.”
Chisholm lived to be 94 years old.
“The eyes of all wait upon you, O Lord, and you give them their food in due season.” Open our eyes, Lord, open our eyes.
