Feed my Sheep

Today 1 in 4 children in this city are living below the poverty line, many of them will go to bed hungry tonight:          Feed my Lambs.

Today nearly 1/3 of adults in Oxford are experiencing food insecurity and describe themselves as either ‘hungry, worried or struggling’ to access enough nutritious food:                                         

Tend my Sheep.

Today 2.4 billion people globally are experiencing malnutrition:

Feed my Sheep.

How has Easter changed your world I wonder?
How has it changed theirs? 
How has it changed you?

If you’re anything like the Disciples, you’ve probably returned to something resembling ‘normal’. Perhaps, like me, some days you’ve been spending rather more time attending to an overflowing inbox than to the overflowing grace of God. Perhaps you’ve returned to work or study, or whatever your usual pattern of daily life involves.

And if you have then you’re in good company - The disciples returned to what many of them knew (fishing), even after receiving world-changing news too.

Even after meeting the resurrected Christ twice before this encounter (according to John) they didn’t exactly launch themselves immediately into world-changing action. At least some of them went back to the daily grind and attended to the daily need by fishing in Galilee.

And they weren’t having much success with it, until a mysterious stranger asks whether they have any fish and calls out from the shore to cast their nets on the other side of the boat.
Lo and behold they haul a catch so great they can barely land it. And John declares ‘it is the Lord’ as Peter hastily flings himself into the lake to reach him.

As with much of John’s Gospel, this passage is laden with symbolic meaning, and it would be incredibly temping to read the encounter Jesus and Peter then go on to have, on a purely symbolic level too. But, as we have already identified, Jesus knows that people in this world are hungry… and they are hungry on many different levels. They are hungry for God and they are hungry for justice, they are hungry for salvation and they are hungry their daily bread.

Jesus did not ignore people’s physical need in preference to their spiritual need, but he attended to both because (to paraphrase James) ‘what use is it to say to a brother or sister without food, go in peace and keep warm and well-fed’ if you do nothing to alleviate their need of bread?

The only people who really had to be worried by Jesus’ message were not those who were hungry, but those who did not recognise their own or their neighbours’ hunger. Those who were overly content, who did not share their bread or recognise their spiritual poverty because they had never confronted or attended to material poverty before.

Jesus didn’t give us a set of wise sayings to remember him by so that we might partake in God’s salvation – he gave us a meal and he bid us to feast with him and all creation in anticipation of a heavenly banquette.

Once again (whether it is breaking bread on the road or cooking fish by the lake) the disciples recognise Jesus by the abundance of his provision and the way he shares his food with them. He is ‘made known in the breaking of the bread’, in his hospitality, in his miraculous works and his provision for their needs. Whether it is 7 friends or 5000 strangers, he sees to it that they are fed, and he uses this physical feeding as both a symbol and a means for their nourishment and building-up physically, mentally and spiritually too.

As we read further through the Acts of the Apostles, we hear how feeding people became such a core part of the Mission of God’s Church, that they needed to appoint Deacons to ensure that this work was undertaken diligently and resources were distributed fairly. And as Jesus’ final aside to Peter also points, the disciples have quite a task ahead on this mission feeding others on the many levels which they need it. They must themselves also be nourished for the task by feeding on the One whose body is offered to them as true food.

So Jesus cooks breakfast for his friends, inviting them to add their own catch to the BBQ – caught, symbolically, with the cooperation of Jesus’ assistance and their labour. And Jesus feeds Peter before he takes him to one side and instructs him to feed others.

Jesus is calling Peter away from ‘going back to normal’ – away from being a fisherman to becoming a Shepherd instead.

All of a sudden it clicks, Peter one of Jesus’ sheep, becomes a shepherd too. Peter is to follow Jesus but he is also to follow his example and tend his flock. Peter is to feed them, nourish them and build them up in strength, so that they might then go on to do the same for others.

Ministry belongs first to Christ, but also to all of us. We are not just sheep – we are called to be shepherds also. Some of us, like Peter, will Shepherd in particularly public and authorised ways, but deacons, priests and bishops stand as representative of the whole, not as a replacement for it.

We are all called to be both sheep and Shepherds, and we are given the Holy Spirit in order that we might share in Christ’s mission to feed the world. To nourish it with his words, heal it with his body and build it up so that every belly is filled and every heart knows hope.

I hope, that you each know you are beloved members of this flock, but I also recognise that you each have a flock to tend too… You each have those who God has charged you with caring for, and there are many more out there on our doorstep and around the world who need feeding and caring for too. 

It is the task of us who have been fed, who have breakfasted with Jesus, to go out and share that bread with others in the rest of the week.

Bread is made to be broken. Food is made to be shared. This world has an utter abundance and the mission of those who have been fed already, is to ensure that that abundance is distributed fairly so that when crops are threatened in one country, all are still fed – and when food security is threatened in the terraced housing of this City, those with bread on their table get to know their neighbours and share it with them.

Peter is hurt that Jesus asks him three times whether he loves him, but Peter’s earlier three-fold denial of Jesus, necessitates thrice the re-commitment.
None of us are up to the task. Like Peter we will all fail or flounder or forget… but whatever we do, we must not return to ‘normal’.

Easter has changed us and it has changed the world around us. God has broken all the rules and now we need to live in this new Way which upends the old order of sin, selfishness and insufficiency, and instead practices a radical abundance and scandalous hospitality.

We need to throw open the doors of this house of God as wide as this ancient building has ever known. This place which birthed Oxfam and has been nourishing bodies, minds and souls since its earliest days; which collects for the Community Emergency Foodbank and supports projects overseas and at home through the work of the Faith in Action group, can do even more in this coming season to fulfil our call to offer hospitality within these walls and to take nourishment out from it to feed a world that is hungry.

We gather here to be nourished, to receive bread for the journey.
In this Eucharist we breakfast with Jesus, but get ready, because after we eat we too will be sent out to feed others.

Christians of Oxford, do you love God?

Then feed his Sheep.                                                                                       

Amen.