Mark 6:32-44
Ephesians 3:20-21
“The Good News Is…Together, the Impossible is Possible”
Preached Sunday, March 8, 2026
Hear the Good News of Great Joy that is the Gospel Message: Together, the impossible is possible.
Hear the Good News of Great Joy that is the Gospel Message: Our God is a God of abundance and there is enough.
Hear the Good News of Great Joy that is the Gospel Message: We are empowered to share the miracle of God’s abundance with others.
We are on our third week of - halfway through - our Good News Lent as we continue our sermon and worship series, “Tell Me Something Good: Grounding Ourselves in the Good News of the Gospel this Lent.” In a world desperately thirsty, parched, for some Good News we have chosen this Lent to focus on the core tenets of the Gospel that are, as the angels proclaimed at the birth of Jesus, “Good News of Great Joy for all people.”
I will admit to you - I have both been loving this sermon series and struggling with it. How can I preach Good News of Great Joy for all People at a time when …well…. (gesture wildly). I have wondered to myself, “Is this too optimistic?” “Am I sticking my head in the sand like an ostrich?” “Is focusing on the Good News of the Gospel a denial of the real hurt and need in this world of ‘bad news’?” Wars still rage. Children die in bombings. Schools are on lockdown. People are hungry. People are hurting.
Preaching Good News at this time is not a denial of the pain in this world. It is not ignoring it. It is recognizing that these stories happened and have been re-told and shared over and over and over again in historical times of oppression, war, and terror. The Good News is that, even in a hurting world, Jesus still comes to us. In times of war, Jesus shows us peace. In times of pain, Jesus shows us healing. In times of scarcity, Jesus shows us abundance. In times of death, Jesus shows us resurrection.
It is more important than ever to focus on the Good News of Great Joy of the Gospel - not so that we can ignore the pain of the world, but so that we can be bearers and sharers of the Good News that the world so desperately needs. And the Good News today is that while that may feel like an impossible task - together, with God and with each other, the impossible is made possible. It is as our Ephesians text says to us today: “Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine…”
And in this week’s Gospel lesson, Jesus invites the disciples and the crowd to participate in a miracle of abundance, of Good News, of Joy - that all are fed.
Jesus and his disciples go away to a quiet place to be by themselves after the death of John of the Baptist - but the crowds follow Jesus. Perhaps they, like us, were desperately thirsty for the Gospel message that Jesus was bringing. They were hungry - both physically and metaphorically. And when Jesus sees the crowd, he is moved to compassion, the Greek word implies that he felt the compassion in his gut, and so he came to them - teaching many things to meet their parched souls' need for Good News.
And it is at this point, as the hours went on, that their physical hunger began to grow louder than their spiritual hunger. The disciples suggest a practical approach: send the people out in the surrounding villages, disperse the crowd, let them figure out their own dinner. It is then that Jesus looks at his disciples and asks them to do the impossible: “You give them something to eat.” The disciples are incredulous. There are over 5,000 people in the crowd. That’s a BIG crowd. Imagine the Pavilion seats at Blossom in Cuyahoga Falls - perhaps you have been to a concert there. The Pavilion seats 5,700 people - a huge crowd, a crowd probably similar - or even smaller in size - than the crowd gathered to hear Jesus that day (because remember - the 5,000 people are men but there were women and children - whole families in the crowd). The disciples reply to Jesus is basically, “Uh…what?? The math ain’t mathing.” They said to him, “Are we to go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread and give it to them to eat?” Some estimates equate that two hundred denarii would be anywhere from 10 to 20,000 dollars in today’s world! That’s a lot of bread to feed over 5,000 hungry mouths! And yet, Jesus is seemingly unbothered by the disciple’s response of scarcity. He says to them, “Well, what do we got?” And so the message goes out into the crowds - no microphone - just passing the message along: what food do you have that you are willing to share? Pass it forward.. The disciples come back and say - we have five loaves of bread and two fish. I highly doubt that would have been enough for every person in the crowd to just have a measly crumb. But again, Jesus is undaunted. He instructs the crowds to sit down, he blesses the bread, gives thanks, breaks it, and distributes it through the crowd. And all are fed. With leftovers - 12 baskets full of leftovers, more than they even started with.
It is Good News of Great Joy for all people that the crowds were fed. That scarcity was turned into abundance. That, together, with God and one another, the impossible was made possible.
The Good News of Scripture is a story of Abundance. Our God is a God of abundance. From the creation narratives in Genesis of a lush garden, to Abraham and Sarah with ancestors outnumbering the stars, to the Israelites escaping the scarcity of Egypt to be fed manna from the sky, to stories of calling the disciples with boats overflowing with fish, to the feeding of the 5,000 - these stories and beyond, our God is constantly trying to tell us through the Holy Scriptures that our God is a God of abundance. In Jesus, there is enough. And enough is abundance.
Unfortunately, it is our human nature, our fallen nature, to operate not out of a mindset of abundance but out of a mindset of scarcity.
Theologian Walter Brueggeman summarizes it like this for American Christians: “We who are now the richest nation are today's main coveters. We never feel that we have enough; we have to have more and more, and this insatiable desire destroys us. Whether we are liberal or conservative Christians, we must confess that the central problem of our lives is that we are torn apart by the conflict between our attraction to the good news of God's abundance and the power of our belief in scarcity -- a belief that makes us greedy, mean and unneighborly. We spend our lives trying to sort out that ambiguity.”
Churches often operate out of scarcity. In our day and age, it’s hard not to. I don’t think I’ve ever been to an anxiety free finance meeting in any of the five churches in which I have attended finance meetings. This is not a criticism of the people who serve on these committees. This is not a criticism of how churches steward the gifts given to them. This is not a criticism of the generous gifts that people give to God through the church. This is simply a remark on human nature and the reality of how churches operate in our world of scarcity and rising costs.
A speaker at a church property redevelopment meeting this last week said that tithing as the sole means to support a church budget is dead, it’s a thing of the past. The cost of insuring a church alone makes this the reality.
The question is - will this reality push us to despair? Will it push us further towards a scarcity mindset? Will it cause us to fold into ourselves? To protect what we have until the last of us is dead and our doors are closed?
Or.
Will we realize that we serve a God of abundance and together, with the God of abundance and with each other, the impossible is possible. Can we look at what we do have - our building, our community, our gifts, our preschool, our relationships - and realize that we have more than enough and enough is abundance. That we are capable of so much Good - some that we are already doing and some that we have yet to do? That we can do the impossible. And not the impossible of filling the plates to fund the building - but the impossible to leverage our assets of abundance to be bearers of Good News to a world that is thirsty for Good News and parched for the Gospel of Abundance.
Can we trust the Good News of the Gospel that there is enough? That abundance is possible?
The Rev. Lauren Wright Pittman interprets the feeding of the 5000 through the lens of our reading from Ephesians today and this is what she has to say:
“Through the lens of Ephesians, if Jesus were to ask us today what we have to give, our answer would be: We have the power you have given us to do the impossible. The same power that turned five loaves and two fish into a feast for thousands— with leftovers—empowers us ‘to accomplish far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine.’ Do we allow this truth to settle into our bones and animate our actions?
I’ll admit, I tried to avoid this passage because it felt overly optimistic in light of today’s world. People still go hungry. Wars rage. The earth groans under our misuse. Yet if we reimagine the systems we created, studies show it is possible for every human being to have what they need. That would require massive restructuring, international cooperation, and the reallocation of resources—but not more than we already possess. We don’t need a miracle of multiplication. We simply need to use what we’ve been given.”
And to a world so entrapped in the scarcity mindset - this is Good News of Great Joy for all people.
We may not need a miracle of multiplication - but we still need miracles. Miracles of infrastructure and mindset changes. Miracles of changed hearts. Miracles of open hands.
As individuals, we don’t have the ability to satisfy all the hunger in the world. And yet we have the power to do all the good we can, here and now, with all the abundance that God has already given us. It starts by asking: “What can I bring to the table - to do the impossible with the power of God in community?”
I’d like to end our sermon this morning with a testimony from The Rev. Lisle Gwynn Garrity. Bear with me as it’s a little long but well worth sharing:
In 2022, I joined the strategic planning committee for my church, Black Mountain Presbyterian [in] (Black Mountain, NC). Like many churches, we were discerning a new mission statement—one that could be embedded within the life of our community and not just a bunch of words that no one paid attention to. Through a long committee process, we struggled to identify a new 'vision' statement that felt relevant and authentic. One day, a committee member pointed to the question carved into our Communion Table: ‘Has everyone been fed?’ He asked, ‘What if that was our mission statement?’ We collectively pondered this idea. A question as a mission statement? We unpacked it more and listed all the ways our church feeds people in body, mind, and spirit. We decided the question was also a charge: our work is always ongoing. We can’t get complacent. Like good Presbyterians, we submitted the new mission statement to the church session for approval (which means the entire process moved very slowly).
By September 2024, we were finally ready to present the new mission statement to the church. On September 22, 2024, our head pastor Rev. Mary Katherine Robinson preached on the new mission statement with a sermon titled, “The Time is Now!” A few days later on September 27th, hurricane Helene wreaked havoc on our mountain town and the surrounding areas of North Carolina. Catastrophic flooding wiped out homes and businesses, causing hundreds of deaths and decimating the entire infrastructure. Once the storm relented (and nearly everyone was without water, power, or cell service), my husband, daughter, and I made our way to our church by foot (nearly every road was impassable). We hoped to connect with other neighbors to make sure people were okay. Selfishly, we also set out looking for information and possibly some ice for our quickly-spoiling food. To our great surprise, we found several church members emptying the church pantry, cooking up anything they found in the freezer using gas-powered cooking stoves. A line of hungry people was quickly forming in the parking lot. ….
The post-storm situation was dire. We soon learned about harrowing rescues and neighbors who didn’t survive, and that the destruction was far greater than just our small town. But the church didn’t hesitate; without any plan or pre-thought, they opened the doors wide and began feeding anyone who showed up. Within a few days, the church was feeding nearly a thousand people a day. Neighbors and strangers gathered around tables in the parking lot. Volunteers showed up, both to serve and also receive hot meals. As word spread and supplies were finally able to come in (which took nearly a week due to impassable roads), the church soon filled to the brim with donated supplies and food. …
Over weeks and months, financial donations poured into the church, designated into a hurricane relief fund. Thanks to the careful discernment of a task force, over 2 million dollars of donations were distributed to local organizations and non-profits to support rebuilding efforts as well as long-term recovery needs such as affordable housing. Our mission statement is known far and wide by the community; people remember the church that acted quickly to feed people after the storm. Yet, the work continues. To this day, each time we celebrate Communion, after the elements have been served, one of the pastors asks the congregation: “Has everyone been fed?” And the congregation shouts back: ‘Not yet!’”
Thus ends The Rev. Garrity’s testimony.
May we live into this not yet. May we open ourselves up to God working through us to make miracles happen with all we have - alongside God and one another.
Hear the Good News of Great Joy that is the Gospel Message: Together, the impossible is possible.
Hear the Good News of Great Joy that is the Gospel Message: Our God is a God of abundance and there is enough.
Hear the Good News of Great Joy that is the Gospel Message: We are empowered to share the miracle of God’s abundance with others.
Amen.
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