Friends, let me tell you a true story.
The Reverend Glenn “Tex” Evans was a United Methodist minister, missionary and pioneer in ministry. Between 1953 and 1966, Tex transformed the floundering Henderson Settlement mission post in Frakes, Kentucky into a thriving outreach to Appalachia’s poor. As its superintendent, he organized volunteer work camps, cultivated community partnerships, and traveled across the country telling Appalachia’s story. While ministering at Henderson Settlement, Tex witnessed the great need for better housing in eastern Kentucky. He saw people struggling to survive, hungry, children of God who were living in some awful housing situations. They needed things like love and a new roof, acceptance and an indoor bathroom, respect and a safe floor. In short, they needed a new life experience that would restore dignity to their hurting circumstances.
Tex’s compassionate interpretation of the Gospel moved him to envision a way to meet distressed housing needs while encouraging the church to be a part of the solution. His plan matched church youth from around the country to specific homes in Central Appalachia, harnessing the powerful resource of energetic, concerned people by creating a work project that has changed both the living conditions of thousands and the lives of tens of thousands of volunteers who have unselfishly given their time, talent and labor.
In the summer of 1969, with the blessing of the United Methodist Church’s leadership, Tex recruited 50 teenagers and adult volunteers to repair the homes of struggling Appalachians. Appalachia Service Project’s first work camp center was established that summer at Union College in Barbourville, Kentucky. With $800 and “Pinky” (a pink station wagon), Tex and the 50 volunteers repaired four homes. They worked on site during the day and worshipped together in the evenings. By summer’s end, four families had safe, warm homes for the winter, and 50 lives had been changed forever. “We appeal to the best in our young people — their noblest, bravest selves,” Tex once said. “We say to them, ‘We need your help, we need your hands, we need your minds, we need your love, we need your sweat.’ ”
This was the beginning of Appalachia Service Project. In 2009, ASP’s 40th year, over 15,000 volunteers will work on nearly 500 homes. Last week, twenty youth and adults from our church went to Clinchco, in southwestern Virginia, to do our part, as one seven-hundred and fiftieth of this year’s work force. And we met people there, people named Willie, Lorraine, Teddy and Beulah, who needed our help, our hands, our minds, our love and our sweat. And it wasn’t just we who went. You went. Our whole congregation went. Everyone who pledges went, and everyone who picked up the slack when Jeff Darlin was away went, and everyone who bought a share of stock in our yearly stock sale went. We were joined there by Lutherans from Ohio and an ecumenical group from Maryland, and we were supported by a college staff of two Methodists and two Catholics.
Tex Evans passed away in 1978 from bone cancer. And while he died over thirty years ago, I feel like I’ve met him, and I wanted you to meet him, because he was an impressive and faithful man. And I want you to hold onto his story, because we’re going away from it for a little while. I promise we’ll come back to it, but first we have to check in with Jesus, the disciples and the crowd in the deserted place in which we find them in Mark’s gospel today.
And to be honest, I’d rather not. We all have our favorite parts of the Bible, and our not-so-favorite parts. And today at least, this is one of my not-so-favorites. I have good days and bad days with the miracle stories. On my good days, I recognize the beauty and the wonder and the justice in a story of food for five becoming food for more than five thousand. But from time to time, I struggle with miracles like this. I have questions about them. Maybe you do, too. (Maybe not.) Maybe you join me in being challenged by the way Mark lifts up the miracles as the signs of God’s coming new world. You see, miracles are the exceptions to the order of things, by definition. They are divine, and they are unexpected, and they would otherwise be impossible. And in their moment, they are fabulous and perfect. But then the moment passes, and I wonder about them. Why is the world that God created so in need of God’s supernatural intervention? And what about the rest of us? What about us thoroughly faithful folks living today who can’t multiple bread and fish? As the church, how do we do this? What sort of standard is this to live up to? Our society is already addicted to instant gratification, so it’s tough to interpret this kind of story for a world that needs to slow down and wait more than it does. I think it’s a little unfair of God to leave this story with us when God doesn’t seem to act like this anymore.
But here’s where we come back to our new friend, Tex. Like Jesus, Tex saw crowds in a deserted place – spread out over the Appalachian Mountains instead of gathered on the beach. Like Jesus he saw their great needs. And like Jesus, he had compassion on them. To be clear, Tex Evans was not the second coming of Jesus Christ. Tex was a Methodist, after all. Jesus is divine, and we are solely human, and we should never confuse the two. Any miracle is always God’s and God’s alone to create. But God does seem to like picking out people to get things ready. For Jesus orders the disciples to get people organized into groups of hundreds and of fifties, sitting down on the green grass. And God uses people like Tex – and like our Methodist and Catholic ASP staffers – to get us organized into work crews with driving directions, tools and supplies.
So maybe there is more good stuff in this passage than I gave God credit for. Maybe we don’t have to be Jesus, turning crumbs into loaves. Maybe we can leave the miracles up to God. And maybe we don’t even have to be the disciples this time around, organizing and preparing and taking orders. Maybe we can leave that up to Tex and his modern-day agents. Maybe today, we are the fish and the bread. Maybe we are not the miracle-workers or the organizers. Maybe we are simply the gifts that are multiplied and lovingly given by God to God’s children.
For the bread and the fish are gifts from God, given to the crowds in need of something to eat. And as Christians, we might recognize that bread is always more than bread in the New Testament. It is also the Body of Christ, broken for us, broken for all, blessed and given there on the beach just as it was in the upper room. And fish is always more than fish in the New Testament as well. For the Greek word for fish is “ichthus”. The first letter of which is the first letter of Jesus’ name in Greek. And the second letter is the first letter of Christ. The fish was an early Christian symbol for Christ, because the “ich” in “ichthus” was Jesus’ initials. So maybe the fish is like the bread, that is the Body of Christ. Maybe the gifts Jesus multiplies and distributes are really his own body, given to those in dire need of it, with more than enough to go around. And if we are to call ourselves the Body of Christ, as our congregational mission statement does, then maybe we are God’s gift to the world. And I don’t mean than in self-important or obnoxious way. I simply mean that the world around us lacks many things and God might just be sending us to fill those holes.
For I daresay that Teddy and Beulah Wallace had some needs. They have been married fifty-three years, living the last forty of them in the house Teddy literally built himself with only a chainsaw and a hammer. They were the family my work crew was assigned to for the week. They needed some board and batten on the outside of that old house to make it warmer, prettier and more sound. And I think Teddy also needed someone to listen to him, someone to share his wisdom with and someone to work with him, not just for him. Teddy and Beulah treated our work crew as gift from God. He was quietly overjoyed to have Robyn Morse catch wood as he passed it through the table saw. He loved to talk next steps with Dave Carson and watch Gib Hartley and Charlotte Cushing hammer. He smiled when he helped Ian Anderson get drill bits out of hard wood and when we he saw Hart Clements manage all of the work, making sure the right lumber was the right size in the right place. “Hart of my heart,” he called her.
He was graciously thankful and joined us in the work, when his health was up to it. He was proud of what we did and noted that it would cut his heating bill in half this winter – from 500 to 250 gallons of oil. He talked about how previous crews had been good or not-so-good, how they had listened to him or not. (And we were always sure to listen to him.) I may be biased by pride or hubris or my imperfect humanity, but I honestly believe we were a gift from God to Teddy and Beulah.
And I know they were a gift to us. Their grace and thankfulness, their pride and assistance, their hospitality and sharing of themselves through story and song and theological discussion – they all multiplied to feed us so we had extra baskets full to take home everyday. They even gave Robyn a card and a gift on her 17th birthday, which happened during the week. They were Christ’s body to us, filling us to overflowing. Maybe that should be our goal in these days – to be Christ’s body to others and receive Christ’s body from others. Bread and fish. I imagine that’s exactly what Tex had in mind. Amen.