Jesus shows up on a beach after the worst week of his friends' lives and asks a disarmingly simple question: have you eaten anything? This week we push back against the lie of scarcity and practice the defiant, countercultural act of believing there is enough. LINKS: Current Conversation | Connect | YouTube | Coming Up TRANSCRIPT: Eat Something: Waking Up to Being Fed The Question That Shouldn't Be Radical A beat of honesty to begin… This week's message is built around a phrase that should not be controversial. It shouldn't raise anyone's blood pressure. It shouldn't feel political. It shouldn't require courage to say. The phrase is: There actually is enough. And yet… depending on your life experience, where you grew up, what your bank account looks like, what neighborhood you're in… that phrase might land anywhere from obviously true to laughably false to offensive, because you don't know my life. So before we go anywhere else, let's hold all of that. Let's hold the complexity of that sentence in the room together. The Story… Breakfast on the Beach (John 21:1–14) Tell the story… Let’s paint the scene: It's after the resurrection. The disciples are rattled, confused, grief-stained. They've seen what they've seen, but nothing has quite settled yet. So they do the thing people do when they don't know what else to do: they go back to work. Peter says, I'm going fishing. And the others say, We'll come too. They fish all night. They catch nothing. Then, as dawn is breaking, a figure appears on the shore. He calls out: "Hey, you don't have any fish, do you?" They say no. He tells them to throw the net on the other side of the boat. They do — and suddenly there are so many fish they can't haul the net in. And then — and this is one of my favorite mental pictures of Jesus ever — they get to shore, and he’s already has a charcoal fire going. Fish already on it. Bread already there. He doesn't wait for them to bring what they caught and make it into something. There is already something prepared. And he says: "Come and have breakfast." There’s no moment of like… “let's debrief the last week.” or “I need you to understand what just happened.” Come and have breakfast. Pull up some sand and have a seat. The first thing the newly-alive Jesus does with his bewildered, grieving, exhausted friends is to feed them. The Lie of Scarcity Now — here's where we need to be honest with each other, and honest about the world we actually live in. Because it is not true that everyone in this room or in this city, or this country has always had enough to eat. Or enough to feel safe. Or enough to rest. In 2024, nearly 1 in 7 U.S. households — that's 47.9 million people — experienced food insecurity at some point during the year. Nearly 1 in 5 households with children were food insecure, the highest rate since 2014. And those numbers are not distributed evenly. Almost 1 in 4 Black households, 1 in 5 Hispanic households, and nearly 1 in 3 American Indian and Alaska Native households were food insecure in 2024 — at least double the rate for non-Hispanic white households. These inequities reflect the impact of structural barriers rooted in systemic racism and other forms of discrimination that result in higher rates of poverty. So when we talk about scarcity — we have to say this plainly: for a lot of people in our lives and community, scarcity has not been a philosophical problem or a spiritual metaphor. It has been Tuesday. An embodied, lived reality. And we have to also say: that is not because the earth doesn't produce enough. It's not because there isn't enough food, or enough housing, or enough care to go around. The pie is plenty big. But the slices are cut unevenly.. Research from the Federal Reserve Board shows that Black families' median wealth was approximately 15% that of white families — $44,900 compared to $285,000 — in 2022. Studies indicate these racial disparities persist even when factors like income and education are accounted for, suggesting that pervasive racism embedded in historical, political, and economic systems continues to drive the gap. Scarcity, as most of us experience it, is manufactured. It is the product of systems — empire systems, to use a biblical word — that concentrate abundance at the top and make the rest fight over the remainder. The problem is not that there isn't enough fish in the sea. The problem is who controls the nets. What Jesus Keeps Doing And this is where the Easter story opens up into something larger than one morning on a beach. Because if you read the Gospels as a whole — if you trace the arc of what Jesus actually did — you start to notice a pattern. Feeding keeps happening. Abundance keeps showing up in the middle of scarcity. Five loaves and two fish for thousands of people, and there are baskets left over. Water turned to wine at a wedding — not a trickle, but somewhere between 120 and 180 gallons. A woman who loses a coin and sweeps her whole house until she finds it, then throws a party that probably costs more than the coin. A father who sees his prodigal kid coming from a long way off and kills the fatted calf — we're celebrating tonight. Over and over, Jesus enacts this: there is enough. More than enough. Abundance is the character of the divine, not scarcity. And then he dies. And the people who crucified him — Rome, the religious gatekeepers, the systems that depended on keeping people in their place — they thought that was the end of it. But here's what resurrection means, in part: his teachings didn't die with him. The practices didn't die. The communities he formed kept forming. Throughout history, untold numbers of people, inspired by this life and death, have put their bodies and their resources on the line to insist — there is enough, and we're going to share it. The church at its best — not its worst, not its empire-adjacent self, but its best — has always been a community that takes the fish off the fire and says come and have breakfast. That is what resurrection looks like in a neighborhood. In a coalition. In a food pantry. In a protest. In a community that shows up, over and over, to say: the story of scarcity is a lie, and we're not going to live by it. What We’re Doing Here, Fabric… And here's where I want to get concrete, because I think this community is doing exactly that kind of work — and I don't want us to miss it or undervalue it. Our new partnership with ISAIAH — a statewide coalition of congregations and allies working for racial and economic equity in Minnesota GuideStar — is one expression of this. ISAIAH was founded in 2000 and has won real, tangible things: healthcare access for all children regardless of immigration status, billions in public transit funding, paid leave, homeowners' rights. These are not small things. These are exactly the kind of retooling… taking systems built on scarcity and bending them toward abundance… that the beach breakfast points toward. When Fabric shows up in public — at Fabric on the Town events like this past Friday at Midtown Global Market, for Fabric in Action events, or simply at tables in the neighborhood— we are not doing outreach in the old-school sense of trying to recruit people to our club. We are practicing what it looks like to be a community that shows up and says: we're here. We see you. There's room at the table. When you show up on Sunday, or in your Fabric group, or check in on someone during the week — you are participating in this same movement. You are part of a network that is slowly, stubbornly, defiantly insisting that there is enough connection, enough care, enough belonging to go around. This is not soft or peripheral… this is the work. The Hard Part: Receiving But here's where I want to gently push, because there's a move in this story that's easy to skip over. The disciples don't just witness the breakfast. Jesus tells them to bring what they caught — and they do. And then he says: come and eat. Receiving is part of this. And for a lot of us — especially those of us who've been trained by scarcity, by systems that told us our needs were a burden, by communities or families that taught us to make do and not ask — receiving is actually the harder practice. Self-compassion researchers Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer have spent years documenting something that resonates here: one of the key barriers to human flourishing is not a lack of generosity toward others, but an inability to extend that same generosity to ourselves. Their work in Mindful Self-Compassion identifies a move they call mindful awareness — which is simply this: noticing what is actually happening in your experience right now, without immediately narrating it, judging it, or trying to fix it. Not: I shouldn't feel this way. Not: Other people have it worse. Not: If I just work harder, I'll feel okay. Just: This is what is happening in me right now. That kind of honest, gentle noticing — of your own hunger, your own exhaustion, your own longing — is actually a prerequisite for being able to receive. You can't take food you don't know you need. Closing Practice So let's close with something simple. An invitation to practice mindful awareness — and what this story might call coming to the fire. Take a breath. Let your feet feel the floor. And ask yourself — without judgment, without fixing — one of these questions. Just one. Let whichever lands, land. Where am I running on empty right now? What kind of nourishment have I been telling myself I don't need, or don't deserve, or can wait?
