Naming dualities that you see is one way of looking at the world that can help orient you to your surroundings in a way that is helpful. When Walker was a toddler, he vocalized his observations to me all the time. He had designated one of our cars, the SUV, the big car, and the other, the Mini Cooper, the baby car. Do you have recollections of similar frameworks from the little ones in your life? Walker knew his Mom from his Dad, and he’d dole out toys based on it: I get the bigger toy, and Amy gets the smaller toy. Or when Walker and I took our seats, I’d take this big seat, and Walker the little seat. It’s still helpful for him to see patterns of duality in the world.

But I remember well how it breaks down, when I was presented with a white, three-inch-diameter, whiffle ball, and he as a toddler says, “Big!” and points to his own three-inch-diameter, white whiffle ball, and he declares, with certainty, “Baby.”

This way of looking at the world breaks down. Whatever way we have for looking at the world only serves us well for so long.

It was definitely true for the disciples in the Gospel reading. The disciples, with their insider access to Jesus Christ, the itinerant rabbi, the living Word of God, believed that they were special, lucky, and committed to their leader. They had made their whole lives about Jesus.

And when the disciples were faced with the prospect of providing for the crowd of five thousand, their way of looking at the world fell apart all around them. Jesus asked about feeding a crowd, bigger than any size potluck dinner could satisfy. And the disciples turned to each other, assessed the resources they could muster, and questioned, “what are they among so many people?”

And I don’t think I picked up on it before, but there might have been a hint of disdain in that last word, people. Really, the disciples may have wondered, we’re going to feed them, those people?

And you know who those people were. They were people who were only there because Jesus had performed miracles, and they wanted to see them too. They wanted to see the spectacle. They wanted to be able to talk about it (saying “I knew him when I was younger, and I saw him firsthand”) and claim their own kind of insider knowledge of Jesus, their own kind of authority over the subject of Jesus’ life, as if any of us could ever make a claim of that depth. They were people who hoped they would become important, because they had managed to secure for themselves a front row seat to the show. They were selfish and shallow and missed the point of everything Jesus came to illuminate for them. They were the whole world in microcosm – in its base crassness, its flesh, in its darkness, which resisted the light of the world at every turn.

You know those people, too. We all do. We all have people in our lives, or people we deliberately keep out of our lives, whom we designate as unwelcome or unwanted. Pick your latest political story or issue, and mark where the parties disagree over the basic dignity of a human. How ought we treat the people we find unwelcome and unwanted? Do we call them asylum seekers and grant them due process, or do we call them illegal immigrants and deny them the rights we imagine that we should have? 

But please don’t get sidetracked with thinking about national politics, because that’s a question of how to treat people with kindness and respect. It doesn’t hit close enough to home, because it’s something we can turn around in our minds and contemplate, without thinking about getting up to do something, without having to muster a word of kindness, without having to see – in the person standing in front of us – what Jesus sees in him or her, which is the same as what God sees in us: We just need to be fed, all of us. We just need to be cared for, without being interrogated over our intentions, or the extent of our commitment to the way of Jesus Christ, to grace. We just need to be seen for who we are and our basic human needs met, all of us. 

Is that always how we see people? Is that how we feel about every town and village? Is that how we feel about each person we meet in our daily routines? And are we guilty of insulating ourselves from all the people we never encounter, because our paths do not cross, because we divert our attention somewhere else, because we throw up our hands when Jesus asks, not only of his disciples who walked with him in Galilee, but also of his disciples who follow him in this city, how would we provide so that these people can eat? What would we do?

It’s hard to know where to start. It’s hard to imagine how it would work, if we tried to respond as the young boy did, by offering some bread and fish. But maybe the rest of the crowd had some bread and fish, too, to share. Because the boy wasn’t one of the disciples; he was one of the crowd, and he was kinder and more generous than even those who proclaimed Jesus as the light of the world. Maybe their way of looking at the world shifted that day. Dualities and distances break down. Kindness is found not only in us but also in those people. The hope in you is also in “them.”

Recently, a friend shared a post of a writing by my favorite poet, Mary Oliver, titled “In the Storm,” and it spoke to me in a way that felt to me how Jesus must have spoken to the disciples that day in front of the crowd. Mary wrote about a winter scene at the beach she once witnessed:

Some black ducks
were shrugged up
on the shore.
It was snowing

hard, from the east,
and the sea
was in disorder.
Then some sanderlings,

five inches long
with beaks like wire,
flew in,
snowflakes on their backs,

and settled
in a row
behind the ducks—
whose backs were also

covered with snow—
so close
they were all but touching,
they were all but under

the roof of the ducks’ tails,
so the wind, pretty much,
blew over them.
They stayed that way, motionless,

for maybe an hour,
then the sanderlings,
each a handful of feathers,
shifted, and were blown away

out over the water,
which was still raging.
But, somehow,
they came back

and again the ducks,
like a feathered hedge,
let them
stoop there, and live.

If someone you didn’t know
told you this,
as I am telling you this,
would you believe it?

Belief isn’t always easy.
But this much I have learned,
if not enough else—
to live with my eyes open.

I know what everyone wants
is a miracle.
This wasn’t a miracle.
Unless, of course, kindness—

as now and again
some rare person has suggested—
is a miracle.
As surely it is.

Will you be a miracle in the storm? I pray you will. And I invite your response. Amen.