It Becomes Enough

This is the last of our summer and fall series on the prophets - based on 2nd Kings 4: 42-44

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Transcript

Sermons from 

Mission Hills UCC

San Diego, California

Rev. Dr. David Bahr

david.bahr@missionhillsucc.org

November 16, 2025

“It Becomes Enough”

2nd Kings 4: 42-44 – Common English Bible

A man came from Baal-shalishah, bringing the man of God some bread from the early produce—twenty loaves of barley bread and fresh grain from his bag.[a] Elisha said, “Give it to the people so they can eat.”

43 His servant said, “How can I feed one hundred men with this?”

Elisha said, “Give it to the people so they can eat! This is what the Lord says: ‘Eat and there will be leftovers.’” 44 So the servant gave the food to them. They ate and had leftovers, in agreement with the Lord’s word.

“A man brought Elisha twenty loaves of barley bread made from the first harvest.”

This means he is not giving Elisha some leftovers, as if to say, “here, I made too much.”  Religious devotion meant giving the first part of the crop, the best part, to God. But note, he used barley, which doesn’t mean he was gluten-free. It means he was poor, because wheat was for the wealthy. Barley does not rise well, so they’re pretty dense, about the size of a pita – not big bakery-sized loaves. Barley was for those who lived close to the edge – the everyday bread of ordinary people. Twenty of those could feed a large family for a day, not a crowd.

But though he brought it to Elisha to feed his group of prophets, Elisha directs his servant to feed not just the prophets but the people. His servant objects and says, “This isn’t enough to feed a hundred men.”

Traditionally we read this as doubt, as if he lacked imagination and doubted it could feed that many, but in the very next story this same servant deceives Naaman in order to take silver and riches and hide it all for himself. So his protest may not have been skepticism at all, but “Why are you giving away what was meant for us, meant for me.”

It was in the middle of a famine. Families were scraping by on whatever could be found.  It may have been the man’s obligation, but this man’s offering was truly holy because bread becomes sacred when it is shared – almost sacramental.

And then, what does the story say?  Everyone ate, and there were even leftovers. The echoes of Jesus feeding thousands couldn’t be more obvious. In fact, in the Gospel of John, the boy offers five barley loaves and two fish, which means, his family likely needed that food for themselves.

But once again, everyone ate, plus leftovers. Elisha shared it with the community. And because God is God, it became enough. 

It reminds me of a story I learned while travelling in Sri Lanka. In the ancient city of Anuradhapura, there is a great stupa that once stood among the largest structures in the world. A guide told me the story that during a terrible famine almost two thousand years ago, the people continued their sacred practice of feeding the monks before feeding themselves. 

Even today, Buddhist monks walk through the neighborhoods with their alms bowls, receiving whatever is given, and that becomes their only food for the day.

But during that famine, as the people kept feeding the monks, the monks saw families left starving. So they quietly disappeared into the forest and the caves so the people would stop giving food to them and feed their children instead. Hundreds of those monks in hiding starved to death. They are buried around that massive stupa as a witness that they chose the wellbeing of hungry families over their own survival.

And while nowhere near that dramatic, I have witnessed smaller versions of that kind of generosity throughout my ministry. Many of you don’t know that I was once a minor celebrity in Cleveland. 

To be clear, “minor” is to compare a crumb of hamburger to a filet mignon, but I was on TV, every year for fourteen years, when I was “held hostage” in our church steeple to collect for our annual food drive. We used the publicity to draw attention. I would only come down after the ten long steps of our church were full of food.

We asked people to drop off donations to fill our pantry as school was getting out for the summer, a time when many children lose access to school meals.

Every year, every news station in town covered the story of my twenty-four hours in an open-air steeple eighty-five feet in the air – sometimes live, including questions on live TV about how I went to the bathroom. It’s also how I first saw my husband. He was one of those reporters and asked me if I was cold up there.

Our first year, after the ten o’clock news segment, a man drove up in a van that looked as if it were held together with duct tape. He pulled out case after case of food and told our volunteers that he had been helped by a food pantry and wanted to give back. He gave what he likely still could not spare. 

We were a small inner-city church surrounded by poverty. Like him, many of the people who brought food or dropped coins in the bucket could have used the very things we collected. But little by little, year after year, it became more than any of us could have imagined – and always lasted through the summer. Because God is God, it became enough.

One last detail, over the years we collected more than six tons of food and fifty thousand dollars in cash. 

In the story of Elisha, there is one last detail that matters. The man who brings this offering of barley bread comes from Baal-shalishah (ba-ALL sha-LEE-shah). Baal was the name of the god of Queen Jezebel. And way back at the beginning of this series, you may remember that Elijah called her prophets to a contest. Whose god could call down fire? After trying all day, the prophets of Baal could only limp with exhaustion, but Elijah’s God burned not only the sacrifice drowned in water, it consumed even the stones and dust around it.

Elijah’s successor, Elisha, could not have been more different. He didn’t call fire from heaven through spectacle. He practiced small things that directly met the people’s needs.  In his miracles, he healed poisoned water so a town could drink. He provided for a widow so her children wouldn’t be taken as slaves for a debt. He restored a child’s life. He fed hungry people with whatever someone could place in his hands. He was a prophet of ordinary mercy rather than spectacle.

From there, we moved through the prophets, all the way from Amos to Zechariah. Every one of them confronted a people who confused religious performance with justice. Their warnings came true as the nation was dragged into exile.  This leads to the final books of the Hebrew Scriptures that hold the tension of a people who returned and rebuilt yet still longed for the world God promised.

We now step into the Christian Testament, but before we do, we need to be clear. Christians have often spoken as if Jesus replaced the prophets or as if Christianity replaces Judaism. That is called supersessionism. It dangerously minimizes the Jewish faith and has been used to justify terrible violence. But when we speak of Jesus, we are not saying God started something new because something old failed. We are saying Jesus stands inside that story. He does not cancel or replace it. He carried its hope forward. 

After spending the summer and fall studying the prophets, our series now concludes. I hope the prophets better help us understand Jesus. It’s important to know who and what shaped his life. And as his followers, that matters. Just as the prophets before him, Jesus confronts the misuse of religion in ways that mirror our world today: 

 • The prophets call out the sacrilege of leaders who twist scripture to justify cruelty.
 • They reveal the profanity of religious performance that protects the privilege of the already powerful and enriches those who are already obscenely rich.
 • They expose the blasphemy of Christian nationalism that wraps flags and religious language around fear, blesses violence and terror, and of the suffering of the poor who lack health care and food, claims a divine mandate.

But if this series has taught us anything, it’s that prophets don’t only name the truth:

• They inspire a hope that speaks deep into despair and doesn’t pretend everything is OK.
 • And even while standing in piles of rubble, they shout that God is still here.
 • They insist that new life will rise from the ashes.
• They persevere through their own genuine despair.
• And for all that, they are our moral imagination.

Because imagine this: God heals what is broken through the multiplying of small, brave acts by ordinary people. That’s it. 

God heals what is broken through the multiplying of small, brave acts by ordinary people. Not through spectacle, but as the feeding stories of both Elisha and Jesus show, through the simplest truth: generosity becomes abundance.  That is the fuel for our prophetic imagination. 

And what a gift it is that we get to practice this together because Mission Hills UCC is not just a place we go.  We’re called to:

• Inspire hope when so many are struggling to hold on to it. Ourselves included.
 • We get to shout that God loves each person as they are.
 • And insist that mercy and truth are always the right response.
 • To persevere together in the long, faithful work of justice

·         Claim joy as an act of courage in a weary world.

• And keep feeding, knitting, praying, singing, and practicing the kind of imagination that does heal the world, one small, multiplying act at a time.

Which raises the question: as we conclude our stewardship season next week, what are the barley loaves in your hands, meaning, what everyday gift that you think is not enough to matter will become enough – the moment you share it?

This is how God works. Ordinary people. Open hands.
 
 

And because God is God, it becomes enough.