It's all too much

Text: John 6:1-21

 Recently I saw a picture of a duck with 76 ducklings - a common merganser, which is the kind with a little ponytail on the back of her head. Not all those 76 baby ducks were all hers biologically but all in her care in reality, bobbing along behind her on the lake, needing to be managed and led to the places where the food and shelter are and the predators are not. 

In the living room the TV was tuned in to a baseball game - or more exactly, to one game shown live on the left side of the screen while little pictures of a bunch of other games with basic stats updated with every pitch and hit and out on the right side of the screen, all while a ticker scrolled across the bottom listing all the scores and news from all kinds of other sports events.

Later, I sat down with the Times and the Post and got caught up in many details about presidential candidates, the over the top opening ceremony for the Paris Olympics, wars in several countries,the IT outage, and the proliferation of problems directed to advice columnists. There are SO MANY advice columnists!

And I thought to myself, I feel overwhelmed by the too-muchness of life.

I’ve been in this place before, feeling that I need to pare things down so that I have some semblance of control, reducing the sheer number of topics galloping through my brain so that I can thoroughly understand just a few of them. I imagine that this is what “having it all together” looks like, a person who is able to manage the too-muchness of life.

But, Lord help me, I am so wrong about this.  A beautiful life is not about limitations.  After all, Jesus said, I came that you might have life and have it abundantly.  God said to Abraham, look up at the stars, that is how many descendants you will have. Jesus’ first miracle was to turn jars of water into the equivalent of about a thousand bottles worth of excellent wine at a wedding in Cana. And his second miracle was to take a few pieces of bread and fish from a little boy’s lunch box and multiply them so to provide for the thousands of people who were desperate for healing and wholeness and life and yes, so hungry for bread. 

In other words, God is not about inventing limits but about too-muchness and overflowing-ness. Abundance. Overabundance - of beauty, of blessings, of love.

God is all about the way your heart feels ready to burst when you hold a newborn baby in your arms. About the way your eyes overflow with tears of grief and gratitude when a loved one lies dying and the whole community comes out with food and flowers and visits and stories and hugs. About the way your soul soars when you see the vast ocean and sky above it and you know there’s another beautiful world under the water and another above the clouds, or a bee rising from a flower carrying so much pollen saddlebagged on its legs that you wonder how it ever lifted off on such delicate wings. 

Ancient people believed that if you looked at God, you would die. This is not because God was mean or vengeful but because a mere human could not withstand the abundance of glory that surrounded God. God was too powerful, too beautiful, too radiant, too holy, to come too near. One might just get blown away in the presence of God.

So there is a too-muchness of God and of life in God and we humans are both capable and incapable of dealing with it. Creation may be shot through with divinity and humans may carry a holy spark, but there is a point when we can become stupefied by the abundance. We may wander through our lives oblivious to the too-muchness because that’s the best way we can cope.

But how else am I going to be able to recognize the work of God in the world? How else am I going to be able to hold on to hope, to carry the flame of the overwhelming love of God into the world, to live the abundant life Jesus says he wants for me? How else am I going to love God with all my heart and with all my soul and with all my mind unless I let the too-muchness of God’s abundance wash over me, trusting that I will not drown in its extravagant holiness?

Once I came across this line from American poet Chen Chen. “I am simultaneously trying to be LESS overwhelmed by the world and more.” 

And I thought, yes. That’s it exactly. I try to be less overwhelmed because I am a limited human being who imagines that serenity is to be found among limitations, who is afraid of being blown away by the too-muchness of life. I cling to what I can get my arms around or my head around, to what I think I can control and understand, even if it means I go through life wearing blinders. 

And yet, as someone who wants to be close to God, God who is exquisite poetry to my workaday prose, I want to lay myself open to be overwhelmed by the sunset and the Milky Way and the taste of chocolate covered strawberries and the perfume of a damask rose and the 76 ducklings and the kindness of friends and fierce love for family. 

I want to be filled to the brim and overflowing with life with more to spare just like the wine at Cana and the bread on the mountain. I want to never run out of anything good and holy. I want to know in my bones that whatever difficult too-muchness the world dishes out is answered by the holy too-muchness of God’s lavish, creative, love in which I can both lose and find myself.

Jesus led the huge crowd of suffering people to a holy place and told his disciples, “Make the people sit down on the soft green grass in this rocky, brown wilderness, let them stop and sit and eat as much as they want.” And so the too-muchness of their need was met by the too-muchness of the bread, and the people realized that they want this kind of life for ever.