"The Good News Is...Together, the Impossible Is Possible" (March 8, 2026 Sermon)

Guilford Park Presbyterian Church

The Good News Is… Together, the Impossible Is Possible

Rev. Stephen M. Fearing

March 8, 2026 · Third Sunday in Lent (Year A)

Ephesians 3:20–21
“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, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”

Mark 6:32–44
The feeding of the five thousand

The Worship Committee is currently considering using memorial funds to replace our aging audio equipment here. Our soundboard and speakers, for example, have dutifully served this space for decades, but it’s time to dismiss them with thanks. So I’ve been thinking a lot about amplification, you could say.

As I reflected on these scriptures with several of you this past week, a simple truth came to mind—one that is, honestly, quite obvious but no less profound: Jesus didn’t have a microphone. At least not like the one that carries my voice now. He didn’t have electricity, soundboards, or amplifiers. Instead, his amplifiers were his followers, in a very real sense.

“Before there was amplification, there was community.”

In The Word This Week, we gathered in the library and watched part of an episode of The Chosen that depicts today’s story from Mark’s gospel. There’s a small detail I really appreciated: as you hear Jesus teaching the crowd, you can hear others in the background repeating his words, carrying his message to those in the back.

A space can be designed to help one voice carry a long way, but a crowd of more than 5,000—especially outdoors—would still make hearing Jesus a shared act, not just an individual one. We aren’t told exactly how Jesus’ teaching reached the edges of such a large crowd. But I can’t help imagining it this way: a word spoken here, repeated there; a phrase caught by one set of ears and carried to another; a murmur of mercy rippling outward through human voices.

Participants, Not Spectators

Now, it stands to reason that if Jesus could miraculously feed thousands with just two fish and five loaves, he also could have easily amplified his voice through divine means. But he chose not to. The good news is that in Christ, God’s abundance becomes real not only through divine power from above but also through shared human participation below: voices carrying the word, hands passing the bread, communities discovering together that the impossible is possible.

Jesus could have snapped his fingers and had a four-course meal literally fall from the heavens into the people’s laps, but he chose not to. Jesus is fully capable of acting alone, but he doesn’t, because the kingdom he proclaims always makes people participants, not spectators.

“The kingdom Jesus proclaims always makes people participants, not spectators.”

In Mark’s gospel, Jesus does not treat the crowd as passive consumers of a religious experience. He draws disciples and, in a sense, the entire gathered community into the work. The word is shared collectively. The food is enjoyed together. The abundance is found together. The good news is that with Christ, and with one another, the impossible becomes possible.

From Scarcity to Abundance

The disciples’ instinctual posture is one of scarcity. There are too many people; it’s too late in the day; we have too little money; we have too little food. Jesus doesn’t deny the size of the need; he simply rejects their conclusion. The disciples see the need and believe it’s impossible. Jesus looks at the same need and sees a community that hasn’t yet realized what is possible when they come together.

Exactly one year ago, this congregation faced the question of whether to convert the youth lounge into a temporary homeless shelter for about a dozen women over the summer. What started as a simple January coffee meeting between the CEO of Greenboro Urban Ministry and me grew into a Mission Committee discussion in February, a Session meeting in March, and then numerous conversations across this church and beyond.

At every stage, the same concerns kept resurfacing: Do we have enough space? Enough volunteers? Enough money? Enough security? Enough emotional energy? Enough flexibility in our building and our life together to host roughly a dozen women for three months? These weren’t foolish questions, and they weren’t necessarily unfaithful ones. But they also reflected scarcity.

Beneath each practical concern was a deeper fear: if we open what we have to others, will there still be enough left for us?

“Bring what you have, offer it together, and trust that in God’s hands, shared gifts will become more than enough.”

And that is exactly the kind of question that lingers during the feeding of the five thousand. The disciples look at the crowd and see the math of insufficiency: not enough food, not enough money, not enough capacity—just not enough. But Jesus invites them to see things differently.

He does not dismiss the reality of the challenge, but he also refuses to let scarcity have the final say. “You give them something to eat,” he says. In other words: bring what you have, offer it together, and trust that in God’s hands, shared gifts will become more than enough.

That is what this church wrestled with a year ago. Not just whether we had enough resources, but whether we were willing to believe that God can do abundant things when a community stops clutching what it has and begins putting it in Christ’s hands. And by God’s grace, we took that leap of faith. We opened our doors, welcomed our neighbors, and discovered that when we placed what we had into Christ’s hands, God provided every space, volunteer, resource, and every bit of courage we needed to share good news with women seeking both shelter and a path toward work and stability.

And this was possible because we trusted in the God who, by the power at work within us, is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.

Food as Gift

Did you know that there’s a farm in upstate New York where nothing is for sale? In a small town in the Adirondacks called Keeseville, there’s a place called the Sand River Community Farm. On the surface it looks like any other farm: people digging potatoes, peeling garlic, chopping wood, making stew, tending animals. But there is one remarkable difference: the food is grown and shared as a gift.

No wages. No prices. Nothing bought or bartered. Just neighbors showing up, working together, and feeding one another.

It’s run by a farmer named Adam Wilson. One of his neighbors unexpectedly came into some money and wrote him a $500,000 check to take a local abandoned farmhouse off the market. He started growing food and giving it away. Then some of the people he gave food to began showing up to assist him in tending the farm so they could grow more food. A community began to form—neighbor feeding neighbor. A place where everyone was welcome, and the only requirement was to come hungry.

Not only did those who helped form this community find their stomachs filled, but their spirits filled as well.

“This food is our gift… a responsibility to consider: What are my gifts? And how might I join hands with others to sustain the whole?”

Adam Wilson noticed a shift when giving food as a gift. The Sand River Community doesn’t call it “free” food; they call it “food as a gift.” Because, in his words, the word “free” implies that something doesn’t have value. Instead, they use the phrase “gifted” food to emphasize the value of food grown and harvested by a community of volunteers who do that sacred work simply because everyone deserves food, with no exceptions.

If you enter Sand River Community Farm, you’ll find a sign that invites people to trade transaction for relationship, commerce for community, and to consider how their own gifts might help sustain the whole.

What if we stopped believing the lie of scarcity? What if we saw food less as a commodity purchased by consumers and more as a gift shared among neighbors?

Passing the Good News Along

But Jesus said to them, “You give them something to eat.” Not just you watch. Not just you admire. You give. You carry. You pass it along.

Friends, the good news of this story isn’t just that Jesus once fed a hungry crowd long ago. It’s that Christ still confronts our fear of not-enough by teaching communities to speak and share a different word. A word of gift. A word of mercy. A word of enough.

And that word doesn’t travel by magic. It travels through people. Through voices. Through bodies. Through neighbors.

So I want to invite us, for just a moment, to become what this story says the church is: a people through whom good news is passed along.

There is enough for all:

enough food…
enough housing…
enough healthcare…
enough mercy…

Together, the impossible is possible.

In the name of God the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, may all of us, God’s beloved children, say: Amen.

Rev. Stephen M. Fearing

www.stephenmfearing.com  |  www.guilfordpark.org

"Disciples Affirm Resurrection Hope" (November 2, 2025 Sermon)

Text: Ephesians 1:11-23

Content Warning: Suicide

“Pastor Stephen, where can I find hope?” If there's a common theme in my pastoral conversations with many of you over the past year, that’s it. "Where can I find hope?" As we gather on this All Saints Sunday, we mourn those we've lost over the past year. In a few minutes, we will ring bells to honor ten members of this church who have died in the last 12 months. We will ring bells for Peg Lukens, Bobbe Jackson, Ed Hendricks, Nat Bingaman, Carolyn Sherrick, Doris Mengel, Edith Phillips, Burl Hull, Rick Cromer, and Vernon Mull. Each of these beloveds was a saint who has joined the heavenly chorus, and is now the cloud of witnesses cheering us on as we run this race of faith. So today, we sing a requiem for them. But requiems are complex things. They are no simple matter when many of us feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the world’s grief.

It makes me think of one of my favorite musicals, Dear Evan Hansen. The story revolves around a socially isolated young man in high school who becomes entangled in a lie that inadvertently helps him connect with others in a way he has longed for. One of my favorite songs from the musical is called “Requiem,” mainly sung by Evan Hansen’s love interest, Zoe, as she processes her grief after her brother Connor’s tragic suicide. In the song, she and her two parents sing a requiem for Connor. Notably, they sing this separately, in different parts of the stage, which beautifully highlights the isolating nature of grief. Ironically, each family member sings “Requiem” by expressing that they cannot sing a requiem due to their complex feelings following Connor’s death. Zoe talks about struggling with mourning Connor while also feeling anger over the harm he caused her. Her parents, Cynthia and Larry, express their anger at Connor for throwing away everything they gave him through their love. So together, yet apart, these three family members sing their requiem with the refrain, “I will sing no requiem tonight.”

I believe most of us understand that feeling. The sensation of being overwhelmed by grief and yet simultaneously numb. I’ve seen this recurring theme in many pastoral conversations I’ve had with many of you over the past year or so. “Pastor Stephen, where can I find hope? I feel so numb. I feel so helplessly overwhelmed by my own personal losses, and at the same time, I feel numb because of the larger societal grieving happening because of [gestures vaguely] all the things.” So, we gather on this day to mourn those who have been lost, but we also gather on every All Saints Sunday to hold that grief in one hand and the hope of the resurrection in the other. Holding those two things together is messy business, y’all, make no mistake about it. But it’s part of what it means to live as a Christian.

In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul speaks of this hope that we have “on” Christ. That preposition is a curious thing. Notice, he doesn’t speak of the hope we have ‘in” Christ, but the hope we have on Christ. It’s as if Christ is the “sure” foundation upon which everything depends. “On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand,” Edward Mote once wrote in his 1834 hymn, “My Hope Is Built on Nothing Less.” Yes, friends, as Christians, we don’t place our hope “on” the grieving circumstances of the world. Not on any power or principality. Not on a political ideology or any person who comes along promising that he alone can fix things. Not on money, or privilege, or success, or followers on social media. Those things are fleeting, friends, and each one, in time, will disappoint.

No, we gather to declare Christ as the sure foundation of our faith. And the key to that foundation is something remarkable called the Resurrection. Paul describes it this way: “God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule, authority, power, and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.”

You hear that, y’all? “Far above all rule, authority, power, and dominion, above every name that is named.”  That’s the totality of Christ’s resurrection.  And that’s where we find our hope.  Not in you.  Not in me.  Not in any earthly person who promises salvation in return for unquestioned loyalty (and there have been many of them throughout history!).  No, friends, our loyalty is to Christ, the sure foundation.  And that loyalty gives us the courage to preach resurrection in a world that preaches violence.  It provides us with the audacity to sing about that “sure foundation” when so much of the world around us feels so…unstable.

And so, with every bell we ring today, with the reading of each of the ten names we’ll surrender to God, along with the many others no doubt on our minds, we sing a requiem. A messy, complicated requiem. For no simple requiem can be sung in a world as broken as ours. But requiems aren’t just about expressing grief. Requiems are also about surrendering our loved ones into the story of Christ’s resurrection, a story promised to each and every one of us.

Most classic sung requiems end with a section called “In Paridisum,” which is the Latin phrase for “in paradise.” It sings as such in the Latin,

In Paradisum deducant Angeli in tuo adventu suscipiant te Martyres et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem. Chorus Angelorum te suscipit et cum Lazaro quondam paupere aeternam habeas requiem.

In English, it reads: May the angels receive them in Paradise, at thy coming may the martyrs receive thee and bring thee into the holy city Jerusalem. There may the chorus of angels receive thee, and with Lazarus, once a beggar, may thou have eternal rest.

And so, friends, remember this day—whether you can sing a requiem unfettered or whether the words get stuck in your throat—that eternal rest is promised to each of us and is, indeed, fulfilled today for all whose loss we mourn. Through the power of Christ’s resurrection, may God grant them eternal rest, and may we hold onto hope on the Risen One, who “has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.”

In the name of God the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, may all of us, God’s children, say: Amen.