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

Preaching: Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing

Texts: Ephesians 3:20-21 & Mark 6:32-44

What if the miracle isn’t only in the multiplying, but in the mobilizing? We open with breath and blessing, then step into Ephesians 3 and the feeding of the five thousand to explore how Jesus turns spectators into participants. Instead of amplifying his voice by force, he lets people carry the message and the meal, showing that abundance often travels through ordinary hands.

We share a candid story from our own community: the choice to convert our youth lounge into a temporary shelter for women. The questions were honest—space, volunteers, safety, finances—and the fear beneath them was familiar. By acting anyway, we watched provision meet participation. Volunteers appeared, rooms shifted, and courage rose in step with need. It’s a living picture of Paul’s words about power at work within us, where faith is measured not by applause but by action.

From there, we visit a farm in the Adirondacks where nothing is for sale and everything is a gift. They refuse the phrase free food and call it gifted food to honor the labor, dignity, and relationships behind every potato and loaf. Their sign invites neighbors to trade transaction for relationship and commerce for community, mirroring the gospel pattern in Mark 6: sit together, share together, discover enough together. To make that real, we turn off the microphone and let the room carry a litany of sufficiency—enough food, enough housing, enough healthcare, enough love—because naming abundance can shape what we build next.

If the crowd became a community that day, we can too. Listen for practical steps to move from scarcity stories to shared solutions, and hear why passing the word is as vital as passing the bread. If this conversation stirred you, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs to hear that together, the impossible is possible.

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Transcript

Call To Worship And Prayer

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Neighbors, breathe in God's mercies, and breathe out God's mercies to others. Breathe in God's mercies. Breathe out God's mercies to others. And finally, breathe in God's mercies for yourself. Breathe out God's mercies to your neighbors. Friends, let us worship God.

Readings From Ephesians And Mark

SPEAKER_00 0:27

The prayer for illumination. Holy God, we could press our ear to the page, hoping to hear you more clearly. We could silence all the alarms and notifications, hoping to catch a murmur of your voice. We could steal our beating hearts, and still we might miss your voice. So today we pray, open up space in our hearts, in our spirits, in our minds, to feel your presence among us. With you, anything is possible. We believe. Help our unbelief. Amen. The first lesson today comes from Ephesians chapter 3, verses 20 and 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 the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen. Holy wisdom, holy word.

Jesus Without A Microphone

Community As God’s Amplifier

Participants Not Spectators

Facing The Scarcity Mindset

The Shelter Decision Story

Trusting What We Place In God’s Hands

Food As A Gift Not A Product

Trading Transaction For Relationship

SPEAKER_01 1:35

Friends, let us go again to Scripture to hear what God is saying to God's church using the words of Mark 6, verses 32 through 44. And the disciples went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves. Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. As Jesus went ashore, he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and he began to teach them many things. When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late. Send them away, so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat. But Jesus answered them, You give them something to eat. After they picked their jaws up off the floor, they said to him, Are we to go and buy two hundred denari worth of bread and give it to them to eat? And Jesus said to them, How many loaves have you? Go and see. When they had found out, they said, Five and two fish. Then he ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass. So they sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties, taking the five loaves and the two fish. He looked up to heaven and he blessed, and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people, and he divided the two fish among them all, and all ate, and were filled. And they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish. Those who had eaten the loaves numbered five thousand men. Friends, holy wisdom, holy cow, thanks be to God. Let us pray. Gracious God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. So the worship committee is currently considering using some of our memorial funds to replace our aging audio equipment in here. Our soundboard and our speakers have dutifully served this space for decades, but it is 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 my mind, one that is, honestly, quite obvious, but no less profound. And I want to anchor us in this truth for this sermon, and it's this Jesus did not 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 literal sense. 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 in that episode as you hear Jesus standing before the thousands and thousands, as he's teaching the crowd, you can hear others in the background, other people turning around and carrying his message to the people behind him. You see, a space can be designed to help one voice carry a long way, but in a crowd of more than 5,000 people, remember that's 5,000 men, not counting the women and the children who were surely there, especially outdoors, would make hearing Jesus a shared act, not just an individual one. The scripture doesn't tell us exactly how Jesus' teaching reached the edges of such an expansive crowd, but I can't help imagining it this way. A word spoken here, repeated here, a phrase caught by one set of ears and carried to another, a murmur of mercy rippling outward through human voices. Before there were microphones and amplification, there was community. Now it stands to reason that if Jesus could miraculously feed thousands with just two fish and five loaves, he 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 participation, 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. 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 together. 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. You see, the disciples' instinctual posture, and one that we probably have as well, is one of scarcity. There are too many people. It's too late in the day. We have too little money, too little food. Jesus doesn't deny the size of the need. He simply rejects the disciples' conclusion. The disciples see a need and find it impossible. Jesus looks at that same need and sees something different. He 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 beneath our feet today into a temporary homeless shelter for about a dozen women last summer. What started as a simple January coffee meeting between myself and Brian Hahn, the CEO of Greensboro Urban Ministry, grew into a mission committee discussion in February, and then a session meeting in March, and then numerous conversations across this church and beyond. And 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? We're not a huge congregation. Y'all, these weren't foolish questions, and they weren't necessarily unfaithful ones. They were questions that needed to be asked. But they also reflected a shared scarcity mindset, questions that I shared as well, if I'm completely honest. Beneath each practical concern, I think, was a deeper fear. If we open what we have to others, will there still be enough left for us? And you and I took that leap together, and God provided. And those questions, though, those are exactly the kinds of questions that lingered during this what led up to this feeding of the 5,000 plus. The disciples look at the crowd and they 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 before them, but he also refuses, 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 it will be enough. And 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 as I said, by God's grace, we took that leap of faith. We opened our doors, we welcomed our neighbors, and discovered that when we placed what we had in Christ's hands, that God provides every God provided every space, volunteer resource, and every bit of courage that we needed to share the good news with women seeking both shelter and a path towards work and stability. And this was possible because we trusted together in the God who, by the power at work within us, those two words in the Ephesians passage is important, within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than you and I could ever ask or imagine. Do you know that there's a farm in upstate New York, up in the Adirondacks, where nothing is for sale? It's a story that I learned this past week, and I want to share it with you all. It's a small town called Keesville in the Adirondacks up by Lake Champlain, and there's a place up there called the Sandy River Community Farm. If you go there, it looks like any other farm, people digging potatoes, peeling garlic, chopping wood, making stew, tending animals. But there's one remarkable difference at this farm. The food is grown and shared simply as a gift to anyone. 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 check for$500,000 to purchase and to take a local abandoned farmhouse off the market. And so he did that and he started growing food and he started giving it away. Then some of the people that he gave food to began showing up at the farm to assist him in tending it so that they could grow more food and give it to more people. And then those people started showing up and learning how to garden and how to farm. And then 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. You see, Adam Wilson noticed a shift when giving food as a gift. The Sand River Community Farm doesn't call it free food. They don't use that term. 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 the Sand River Community Farm, you'll find a sign, excuse me, you'll find a sign that reads the following says this. It is offered without charge to anyone who is hungry for any reason. This is not free food. It is not valueless. It emerges from immense and careful labors. This food extends an invitation to trade, transaction for relationship, commerce for community. There is no barrier to entry, rather, a responsibility to consider. What are my gifts? And how might I join hands with others to sustain the whole? Isn't that beautiful? 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? But Jesus said to them, You give them something to eat. Not just you watch, not just you admire, but you give, you carry, you pass it along. Friends, the good news of this story isn't just that Jesus fed a hungry crowd long ago. It's that Christ still confronts our fears 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, not through microphones. 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 passing along. So we're gonna do a little experiment together. You want to do something different? Yes? Okay, well, too bad we're doing it anyways. So you and I are going to finish this sermon together. I'm gonna turn off my microphone and I'm gonna say some good news to some people on the front pews. And then your job is gonna be to pass that along to the people behind you. And if you're joining us via our live stream, don't worry, I haven't forgotten about you. Uh you'll you'll hear some silence, but then I will turn my microphone back on and share to you what was said. Y'all ready? Have no idea if this is gonna work or not. But we'll see you. All right, do the people in the back get it? All right, so what did we say together? First, we said there is enough for who? For all. Then we said that there was that there is enough food. Then what do we do next? There is enough health care, and then there's enough housing, and then the last thing we said together from our live streamers that are uh joining us online is let's say it together. Together, the impossible is possible. Y'all, what might there be enough of? Everything. Oh, come on, y'all. Let's get specific here. What else might there be enough of? Enough money, enough shelter, enough food. Yeah, we already said food, but there's always room for more food. Water, go very good. There is enough water. How about there's enough love? There's enough forgiveness, enough mercy, enough listening, enough kindness, enough neighborliness, enough forgiveness. So, friends, what Jesus did in this story was he turned a crowd into a community. And that's what happens at this church. And can we all say thanks be to God? Thanks be to God. Amen.