"The Good News Is...Together, the Impossible Is Possible" (March 8, 2026 Sermon)
/The Good News Is… Together, the Impossible Is Possible
“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.”
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.
enough housing…
enough healthcare…
enough mercy…
In the name of God the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, may all of us, God’s beloved children, say: Amen.