Umbrella-ella-ella: Loaves, Fishes & Rihanna
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Today, at First Presbyterian-Memphis, we begin a month-long series called “Songs and Scripture,” where we will take one of the lectionary texts each week and pair it with a popular song that is probably familiar to all of you, and see where they intersect. Music has always been a big part of my life, not because I am musically inclined, but I have a great appreciation for how songs can open us up, make us feel, make us think and how lyrics can speak to the realities of our complex lives.
There’s a lot of music in the Lammers household. In addition to a fair amount of Disney tunes (OK a lot of Disney tunes) there are also a lot of songs by female pop and R&B artists. The Lammers girls will frequently request tunes by Katy Perry, Lizzo, Taylor Swift, and of course, our most recent Superbowl halftime queen, Rihanna. A favorite tune in our house in the last year is Rihanna’s song Umbrella, which is familiar to probably everyone because of it’s unmistakable chorus that includes “You can stand under my umbrella-ella-ella, eh, eh, eh.”
This song was released in 2007, and was a grammy winning single and also won the VMA for video of the year from MTV. Umbrella also appears at number 332 on the most recent Rolling Stone list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.
One of the surprising distinctives of this song for me, that thankfully my kids have not yet figured out, is that I can’t listen to the song “Umbrella” all the way through without getting teary-eyed. Umbrella has the same effect on me as “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and it shouldn’t be that surprising because the two songs deal with the same subject matter – selfless dedication to another. While most folks are stuck on the “ella, ella, ellas” and the “eh eh ehs” they may have skipped over the lyrics that talk about what it means to show up and care for someone in the midst of the storms we encounter in life.
Included in this song are lines such as:
“When the sun shines we’ll shine together, told you I’ll be here forever, said I’ll always be your friend, took an oath, I’ma stick it out to the end.”
or
“When the war has took its part, when the world has dealt its cards, if the hand is hard, together we’ll mend your heart.”
And at the end of the song, if I am not already misty-eyed, Rihanna starts repeating. “It’s raining. Ooh baby it’s raining. You can always come into me. It’s pouring rain. Come into me.”
The lyrics are far from the most poetic I’ve heard. They’re quite simple. But when I hear them, and when I heard literally billions of people around the world singing them in the late 2000s, what I heard was a message straight from the Gospel of Jesus Christ. What I still hear is a message of accountability to one another, and I hear a message of interconnectedness and relationship that remains solid through the hardships that life throws at us. I also hear a message of sharing with those who have less.
You can stand under my umbrella in the middle of pouring rain is a metaphor that speaks to sharing what we have with those who have less physically, materially and spiritually. Have you ever shared an umbrella with someone? It’s a pretty intimate act. You have to stand really close to one another and in my experience, no one stays perfectly dry when an umbrella is shared. There is power in this analogy and it is a power that is not unlike the power of the analogies and the stories we have from Jesus himself.
Other than the various accounts of the resurrection, the story we heard today from the Gospel of Matthew is the only miracle that is present in all 4 gospels. The feeding of the five thousand, also known as the feeding of the multitude or the miracle of loaves and fishes is a biblical story that is near and dear to many of us. It’s the one where Jesus feeds an enormous crowd when starting out with just a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. It’s one of those stories from the Bible that many of us learn as children.
In our Gospel story, Jesus has retreated to a solitary place for some respite and while he is away a huge crowd has amassed to learn from Jesus and to ask him for healing. As the day is getting late, and they are gathered in this remote place, the disciples start to worry that if Jesus doesn’t send the crowd away, they will expect to be fed. Perhaps you can think of a time when you had some folks over to your house and as dinner time approached you wondered, “Am I supposed to offer to have these people over for dinner at this point?”
Jesus tells his disciples, “They need not go away. YOU give them something to eat.” They tell Jesus, “But we only have five loaves and two fish!” Jesus doesn’t hesitate or pause in instructing them to bring the loaves to him and for the people gathered to arrange themselves to prepare for a meal. Jesus looks to the heavens, blesses and breaks the bread, a foreshadowing to the last supper, and we learn that all were fed, and there were leftovers afterward.
How this miracle happened, we don’t quite know. We never will. What’s interesting to me is that text does not suggest a scene like the one from the Great Hall in the Harry Potter movies – one where Jesus would wave his arms and the food is multiplied before everyone’s eyes, creating mountains of bread and fish. Rather, the text makes it seem that the multiplication of food happened in the serving of crowd. It says, “The disciples gave it to them and all ate were filled,” and there is ever leftovers after everyone had eaten their fill.
Some scholars suggest that perhaps this was a different kind of miracle entirely - that rather than a magical multiplication of what little the disciples had, that all 5,000 in the crowd pooled together what they had with them. This interpretation suggests that much like today, the people in the crowd had come to this gathering and had brought some food with them. As the mother of three kids 6 and under, I can assure you that I never leave the house without an adequate supply of snacks. Perhaps this “snack preparedness” has been true for people over time, even back in the time of Jesus. While initially keeping their food to themselves, perhaps the crowd, upon seeing the willingness of Jesus and the 12 to offer up what little they had for themselves for a meal for this crowd, were moved to do the same. Perhaps 5,000 people pooling together what was already brought created a substantial feast for all.
If this is the way it went down (and I stress the “if”), I believe it is no less miraculous than any other way to envision the multiplication happening in the act of feeding others. For people to be in a deserted location, and offer up the food they had brought for themselves to the bigger feast with no assurance that they would actually get to eat anything after making their offer runs so counter to our human instincts to “look out for number one,” and take care of ourselves first. For people in the crowd to ignore the voice in their head saying, “Well, they should have planned ahead and brought their own dinner,” - that is a miracle in and of itself.
To be a faithful Christian, we must live into a faith that is guided by a theology of abundance. This is a theology rooted in the belief that time and time again, there will always be enough for everyone if we are willing to share what we all have with one another. It is a theology that says everything I have comes from God so of course I will share it with my siblings, with fellow children of God, so that we all have enough.
The mountains of bread and fish were not present when the meal began, but everyone was fed and ate until they were filled. Jesus makes it clear that God not only expects this kind of faithful sharing from me, from all of us, but that the abundance COMES through the act of the faithful sharing. And this kind of selfless and faithful giving to on another is contagious. The power of looking out for one another in this way changes us all – reminding us of our interconnectness with the whole of humanity.
So try not to worry too much about what you have with you when you find yourself in the remote places of your life. Take all of your faith, arrange yourself among the crowd, share whatever you have, and trust that we will all be fed. Look to your neighbor and say, “I doesn’t matter how much you brought. You can have some of mine and let’s eat together until we are filled. And it doesn’t matter if you brought an umbrella when the sky opens up and starts pouring rain, You can stand under my umbrella.” These are the kind of relationships that God wants us to have with one another. This is the kind of love we are asked to share in an encounter with your closest friend, or in a crowd full of strangers.
