Empty Buckets, God’s Treasure
Our lives filled up with light as we saw and understood God in the face of Christ,
all bright and beautiful.
If you only look at us, you might well miss the brightness.
We carry this precious Message around in the unadorned clay pots of our ordinary lives.
That’s to prevent anyone from confusing God’s incomparable power with us.
-2 Corinthians 4:6-7, The Message
There were steaming piles of mulch and swarms of sprightly, neon-vested volunteers everywhere we looked. Drew and I had unsuspectingly pulled up to the community center this weekend to go to the gym but were met with a community-wide display of eager and altruistic mulch spreading across the parking lot. Feeling guilty that we were not among the volunteers, we parked out of sight and slunk in to the gym through the back door—justifying this decision by musing about how our property tax dollars very likely contributed to this manifold mulch-buying which means we were basically sponsoring the entire event. To make matters worse, the gym has a wall of windows that faces the parking lot, which only served to emphasize that although we were working out, we were not working outside, which was the obvious right thing to do. (Later I overheard a teenage girl saying, “I’m only doing this for the doughnuts,” which made me feel much better.)
From my privileged position on the treadmill I noticed a little boy in a bright green volunteer vest that reached his knees, following his dad across the parking lot while his dad followed the man with a clipboard and a plan. His wide-eyed gaze scanned the busy scene while he dragged along an empty blue paint bucket that bounced across the asphalt beneath him. The back of his vest read “Just Serve”—words I doubt he could even read. I found myself smiling at the thought of this little boy showing up to help, with his big empty bucket and a vest that swallowed him whole, blindly following his dad as his single point of reference.
And then it hit me. Isn’t this a picture of how we are with God? In spite of what I like to think—that I am the one with the clipboard and the plan—I’m a lot more like the little blue boy with the bewildered gaze who didn’t have much to give but what he could carry with his two child-sized hands. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t pull his weight; it just mattered that he was there, following his father in service and participating in the work of community. And so it is with us. We serve a God who lovingly invites us to participate in the work of the Kingdom, not because of our merit or skill but maybe (just maybe) because of our utter lack of competence.
So often, I think, we try to hide the fact that our buckets are empty. Or we attempt to fill the emptiness with things that satisfy briefly but in the end are just junk—trophies and lusts and material things that are here today, gone tomorrow. Our God loves to fill empty buckets and multiply the little we do have to give, but the first step to experiencing God’s abundance is acknowledging our emptiness.
Consider John’s account of the boy who brought five small loaves of barley bread and two tiny fish to hear Jesus preach. Through expert storytelling, John paints a picture of a God who is fully capable of meeting our needs, yet invites us to participate in a way that exceeds our expectations and displays God’s glory. Before Jesus invites his disciples to feed a hungry crowd of 5,000, John lets the reader in on a secret: Jesus already has a plan to meet that need. This tells us that God’s action is not dependent upon our participation, but it is only through our participation that we get a close-up view of God’s glorious activity on behalf of humankind. Jesus invites his disciple Philip into the miracle he is about to do with a simple question:
“Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?”
(John 6:5)
Philip’s response is all too human: “I don’t know, but it’s gonna cost a lot of money” (John 6:6, paraphrase). Oh, dear Philip. I hear my own anxious sense of inadequacy and desire for money to fix everything in your reply. Do you not recognize the One who stands beside you? Do I?
It was time for a child to do what a grown man could not: offer what little he has in faith that God can do big things. Somehow, Jesus’ disciple Andrew locates the one boy who seems to have planned ahead—or at least, whose mother had sent him out the door with snacks that morning. And what does Jesus do? He blesses this child’s dearth of food before spreading it around. It is striking to me that Jesus actually blesses the lack of food offered in faith before multiplying it. He could have looked at the boy’s meager offering, cringed, and said “Mercy. We must fix this. Fast.” But no, Jesus blesses the boys’ nearly empty lunch bucket before God and 5,000+ people. What a kindness, what mercy! When all had been fed to overflowing, there were twelve baskets left over—more than the boy could have asked or imagined when he woke up that morning and decided to walk towards the hill where Jesus was. (I hope this boy brought some of the leftovers home to his mom. I hope he said “Thank you, Mom, for packing my lunch because you really saved the day.”) The miraculous story of what happens when God’s abundance meets our lack emphasizes this truth:
When we lay our empty buckets at the feet of Jesus, those empty vessels become containers of the Holy. We are transformed into beholders of blessing and witnesses of miracles when we acknowledge our deep need in front of God and community.
Although I still care way too much about appearing full on the outside while inside I am aching and raw, the sweet presence of a small boy with a giant bucket reminded me that my emptiness is not a deterrent, but an invitation for God’s abundance to fill me in ways I could never do on my ow. Whether holy or wholly irrelevant, God lets our small offerings count as treasure in the grand story of redemption that is still unfolding. Perhaps this is what Paul meant when he wrote,
“We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.”
(2 Corinthians 4:7)
Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase says that we carry the treasure of the Gospel “in the unadorned clay pots of our ordinary lives,” making it clear that anything we have to give is from God—not us. So what will we do with our laughably large and hollow blue buckets? Will we present them before our parent God expectant and unashamed, or will we keep dragging them around as if we could possibly pull more weight in the kingdom of God than the least among us?
Perhaps this is true humility: proudly displaying the treasure of our barren vessels as the key that unlocks the lavish storehouses of God.