Texts: 2 Kings 4:42-44
Ephesians 3:14-21
John 6:1-21
Our first reading, from the saga of the prophet Elisha, heir of the great prophet Elijah, tells of a miraculous feeding, as a great famine is coming to an end. The story conveys three fundamental features of biblical faith:
1) there is a concern for the poor and the needy;
2) food itself is important—the material things that meet our physical needs are blessings from God; and
3) the abundance of the food is greater than the fear of its scarcity. Fear, in other words, diminishes and subtracts; sharing multiplies.
READ 2 Kings 4:42-44
The epistle reading from Ephesians is, in fact, a prayer that gives thanks for God’s sovereignty over all of creation, every family, every people. It then offers a set of petitions on behalf of the readers:
- that they may be strengthened in the “inner being”, the dimension of self where genuine renewal occurs;
- that the readers comprehend, not in isolation but with all the saints—the multiple dimensions of the love of Christ, that they will know it first hand;
- and that through their experience of the surpassing love of Christ they will be filled with all the fullness of God.
READ Ephesians 3:14-21
The Gospel lesson is taken from the 6th chapter of John, and it is the assigned lectionary text for the next four Sundays as well, although I may not stick with it through all five Sundays.
John often makes use of images and stories from the Jewish tradition in his writings, but they are layered deeply, and require the discerning mind of those familiar with scripture to catch. John presents the Christ of faith, in contrast to the historical Jesus, even though the feeding of the 5000 has parallels in Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Remember, all religious language is metaphorical, and none more so than the Fourth Gospel.
The verses for today are prime examples. It is important to remember that the first two “miracles” the Fourth Gospel describes are those of “wine” and “bread”. The first miracle was the “abundance of wine” provided at the wedding in Cana of Galilee. Here we have an “abundance of Bread” distributed directly from the hand of Jesus—probably a practical impossibility given the size of the crowd— 5000 or more.
Second, note as you hear this passage that it occurs at Passover, bringing to mind the images of the manna that God provided the chosen people in their wilderness wandering, and the unleavened bread of their “passover” from bondage to freedom.
Third, Jesus “tests” Philip by asking him “from whence” will the bread be obtained to feed the crowd. John implies that if you know the source of the gifts of Jesus, you come close to understanding who Jesus is—for he is the Word that was with the God, and comes from God. It is this Word that becomes the “manna” in the wilderness.
Fourth, the text includes the story of Jesus walking on water, again alluding to the passage through the Red Sea of the Hebrew people in their flight from Israel, and Christ’s revelation to the fearful disciples rowing towards Capernaum, reflects language very similar to the holy name of God/Yahweh: I am. I hope you can hear some of these threads as we listen to the Gospel for this day:
Read: John 6:1-21
Do you remember the story of the little girl, when asked to say the grace at a dinner where a number of guests were invited, asked her mother: What shall I say? Her mother replied, “Just say what you have heard me pray.” So the little girl bowed her head, and said with great drama: “Dear Lord, why have I invited all these people to dinner?”
There are times that I wonder if our God ever fretted about why she had invited all the people of the earth across all of eternity to dinner. For indeed God has invited us, time and again, and always to enjoy the creation, to relish the foods from the bounty of the earth, to come to the house of the Lord for a feast to feed our hungry souls. Like the people of the time of Elisha, when there had been a great famine, due to a drought, scarcity seems to overwhelm us.
Whether we think it is a scarcity of food; or a scarcity of money should we have to give more of it to the government; or a scarcity of inner resources to deal with the famine in our souls, fear can block out our awareness of sufficiency, and even more, of abundance.
There are times that we go running after God and Christ because of the signs, the miracles, that seem to happen—to others at any rate—and we want them for ourselves. We will read the Bible. We will pay attention to spiritual gurus. Perhaps these disciplines and actions will bring those miracles to us that we think we need. So we head off after Jesus, as did the crowd long ago, because of indications that this man of Nazareth has a power we would like to tap into, that we would like to use for our own benefit.
Indeed, after the 5000 have been fed from the small offering of the boy who didn’t know any better than to share what he had, his five biscuits of barley bread and his two dried, preserved fish—John says “ when the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, “This is indeed the prophet who is come into the world”, and then John says, that Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king.
Kings, you need to know, for those people were not simply the political equivalent of a president with the rights of hereditary succession. Rather, kings would be thought to have total control of and responsibility for their subjects, and expected to provide them peace, and abundance and fertility of their lands and animals.
Ah yes—we do still want kings—someone who could keep all those bad people in line, or the bad person inside ourselves in line. We would like a king to do for us what we, in fear, or self-doubt, do not believe we can do for ourselves. It doesn’t matter if kings stretch the truth, so long as they win the battles. It doesn’t matter if kings impoverish the majority of the people, so long as those who already have more than they need are not asked to give up some of their wealth. Moreover, one of the benefits of kings is that they give us someone to blame, other than ourselves, of course, when things go wrong.
So Jesus left those people went off to the hills for some time alone. I also wonder sometimes if, when it feels to us that God is absent, if God hasn’t turned away from our efforts to manipulate God and get a God who will do everything for us and give us what we want. There’s an oft-used question that says: “If God seems far away, who moved?” More than likely it is we who have separated ourselves from God more than God disappearing into the heavens to avoid our manipulations.
Yet, it may be that Christ’s escape to the hills was caused by the people’s attempt to make him fit into their messianic mold rather than the people fitting into Jesus’ call to discipleship. The disciples, you note, when Jesus disappears up into the mountain, head back to Capernaum, which is where some scholars think that Jesus may have had a home. Not knowing what to do when we seem to have lost our way, we too head home. Whether we are thinking of the church—in the days after Jesus’ was gone from their midst, or now—when we wonder if this religious stuff really has meaning for us; or whether we are thinking of our own individual spiritual journeys, heading home to pull the covers over our head may be fairly typical behavior, if not very constructive.
John uses this story of Jesus coming across the water to the disciples on a rough sea (again a metaphor for whatever problems may be assailing us—assail being used intentionally) to give the disciples, the church in every age, a revelation of who Jesus is—more than just a prophet and pal, more than just the “friend” who meets us in the garden to walk and talk with us—the very Word in flesh of the almighty God, the great one whose name is “I am” followed by the classic phrase of comfort “do not be afraid.”
One last thought: the connection between these two stories—the feeding of the 5000 and the coming of Jesus across the rough seas to his followers in a little boat– is charged with spiritual truths. God does provide what we need, and it is God—not our status, not our own good works even–who will deliver us to the port where we belong—and a meal is a sign of God’s justice and mercy. So our meal, each week, is a sign of God’s hospitality and provision for our need, and God’s mercy towards us. Perhaps even the very smallness of the elements we share is a sign of justice that speaks to the largesse of food with which so many of us are sated, and reminds us of those who have so little. Further, our meal with our little pieces of cracker may be a sign of how Jesus cares for the fragments after the feast. He sees abundance even in what is left over. An aside: if you are feeling fragmented, scattered, having little to sustain yourself, perhaps you are one of those fragments with whom God can make yet another feast. The bread is manna from heaven in our wilderness. It is the revelation of strength and unique abilities on the rough seas.
I call to mind for us here in this congregation that just three years ago this summer, you met with Greg Alexander, the regional minister of the Christian Church in Kentucky, to talk about the future of this church, whether it was time to fish or cut bait, or to fold up your nets and call it quits. I had, in fact, unknown to you, received a call to be the minister of another congregation in the area should you have decided call it quits, or even just to go on as you had been. There were about 14 or so in average attendance at that time. But instead of acting out of a mentality of scarcity, you elected to go forward in faith that there were sufficient resources to sustain this church for a while longer. You acted in faith and invested your money, and some of the church’s savings, to renovate our basement and make it an “undercroft” worthy of holding future life. And now our average attendance, 3 years later, is 100% greater.
This change in our congregation’s life is also a metaphor: faith—not in ourselves, but in the God who strengthens us, and in whom we are rooted and grounded in love, as Paul so eloquently prays in those verses in the third chapter of Ephesians— faith in the God who walks across chaos to meet us in times of scarcity or when the seas of life are rough, is the power to accomplish abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine. If we keep our eyes focused not on the waves, not on the fragility of the boat, not on the personality of those people in the boat with us, if we keep looking to Jesus, and if we keep wanting to take him into our boat with us, I believe, I trust, Credo—I give my heart to the conviction that the result for our little church, or for you as an individual, will be the same as it was for the boat that held the disciples on the Sea of Galilee. Our boat will reach the land toward which we, and they, are meant to go. So may it be. Amen.
Texts: 2 Kings 4:42-44; Ephesians 3:14-21; John 6:1-21
Our first reading, from the saga of the prophet Elisha, heir of the great prophet Elijah, tells of a miraculous feeding, as a great famine is coming to an end. The story conveys three fundamental features of biblical faith:
1) there is a concern for the poor and the needy;
2) food itself is important—the material things that meet our physical needs are blessings from God; and
3) the abundance of the food is greater than the fear of its scarcity. Fear, in other words, diminishes and subtracts; sharing multiplies.
READ: 2 Kings 4:42-44
The epistle reading from Ephesians is, in fact, a prayer that gives thanks for God’s sovereignty over all of creation, every family, every people. It then offers a set of petitions on behalf of the readers:
- that they may be strengthened in the “inner being”, the dimension of self where genuine renewal occurs;
- that the readers comprehend, not in isolation but with all the saints—the multiple dimensions of the love of Christ, that they will know it first hand;
- and that through their experience of the surpassing love of Christ they will be filled with all the fullness of God.
READ: Ephesians 3:14-21
The Gospel lesson is taken from the 6th chapter of John, and it is the assigned lectionary text for the next four Sundays as well, although I may not stick with it through all five Sundays.
John often makes use of images and stories from the Jewish tradition in his writings, but they are layered deeply, and require the discerning mind of those familiar with scripture to catch. John presents the Christ of faith, in contrast to the historical Jesus, even though the feeding of the 5000 has parallels in Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Remember, all religious language is metaphorical, and none more so than the Fourth Gospel.
The verses for today are prime examples. It is important to remember that the first two “miracles” the Fourth Gospel describes are those of “wine” and “bread”. The first miracle was the “abundance of wine” provided at the wedding in Cana of Galilee. Here we have an “abundance of Bread” distributed directly from the hand of Jesus—probably a practical impossibility given the size of the crowd— 5000 or more.
Second, note as you hear this passage that it occurs at Passover, bringing to mind the images of the manna that God provided the chosen people in their wilderness wandering, and the unleavened bread of their “passover” from bondage to freedom.
Third, Jesus “tests” Philip by asking him “from whence” will the bread be obtained to feed the crowd. John implies that if you know the source of the gifts of Jesus, you come close to understanding who Jesus is—for he is the Word that was with the God, and comes from God. It is this Word that becomes the “manna” in the wilderness.
Fourth, the text includes the story of Jesus walking on water, again alluding to the passage through the Red Sea of the Hebrew people in their flight from Israel, and Christ’s revelation to the fearful disciples rowing towards Capernaum, reflects language very similar to the holy name of God/Yahweh: I am. I hope you can hear some of these threads as we listen to the Gospel for this day:
Read: John 6:1-21
Do you remember the story of the little girl, when asked to say the grace at a dinner where a number of guests were invited, asked her mother: What shall I say? Her mother replied, “Just say what you have heard me pray.” So the little girl bowed her head, and said with great drama: “Dear Lord, why have I invited all these people to dinner?”
There are times that I wonder if our God ever fretted about why she had invited all the people of the earth across all of eternity to dinner. For indeed God has invited us, time and again, and always to enjoy the creation, to relish the foods from the bounty of the earth, to come to the house of the Lord for a feast to feed our hungry souls. Like the people of the time of Elisha, when there had been a great famine, due to a drought, scarcity seems to overwhelm us.
Whether we think it is a scarcity of food; or a scarcity of money should we have to give more of it to the government; or a scarcity of inner resources to deal with the famine in our souls, fear can block out our awareness of sufficiency, and even more, of abundance.
There are times that we go running after God and Christ because of the signs, the miracles, that seem to happen—to others at any rate—and we want them for ourselves. We will read the Bible. We will pay attention to spiritual gurus. Perhaps these disciplines and actions will bring those miracles to us that we think we need. So we head off after Jesus, as did the crowd long ago, because of indications that this man of Nazareth has a power we would like to tap into, that we would like to use for our own benefit.
Indeed, after the 5000 have been fed from the small offering of the boy who didn’t know any better than to share what he had, his five biscuits of barley bread and his two dried, preserved fish—John says “ when the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, “This is indeed the prophet who is come into the world”, and then John says, that Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king.
Kings, you need to know, for those people were not simply the political equivalent of a president with the rights of hereditary succession. Rather, kings would be thought to have total control of and responsibility for their subjects, and expected to provide them peace, and abundance and fertility of their lands and animals.
Ah yes—we do still want kings—someone who could keep all those bad people in line, or the bad person inside ourselves in line. We would like a king to do for us what we, in fear, or self-doubt, do not believe we can do for ourselves. It doesn’t matter if kings stretch the truth, so long as they win the battles. It doesn’t matter if kings impoverish the majority of the people, so long as those who already have more than they need are not asked to give up some of their wealth. Moreover, one of the benefits of kings is that they give us someone to blame, other than ourselves, of course, when things go wrong.
So Jesus left those people went off to the hills for some time alone. I also wonder sometimes if, when it feels to us that God is absent, if God hasn’t turned away from our efforts to manipulate God and get a God who will do everything for us and give us what we want. There’s an oft-used question that says: “If God seems far away, who moved?” More than likely it is we who have separated ourselves from God more than God disappearing into the heavens to avoid our manipulations.
Yet, it may be that Christ’s escape to the hills was caused by the people’s attempt to make him fit into their messianic mold rather than the people fitting into Jesus’ call to discipleship. The disciples, you note, when Jesus disappears up into the mountain, head back to Capernaum, which is where some scholars think that Jesus may have had a home. Not knowing what to do when we seem to have lost our way, we too head home. Whether we are thinking of the church—in the days after Jesus’ was gone from their midst, or now—when we wonder if this religious stuff really has meaning for us; or whether we are thinking of our own individual spiritual journeys, heading home to pull the covers over our head may be fairly typical behavior, if not very constructive.
John uses this story of Jesus coming across the water to the disciples on a rough sea (again a metaphor for whatever problems may be assailing us—assail being used intentionally) to give the disciples, the church in every age, a revelation of who Jesus is—more than just a prophet and pal, more than just the “friend” who meets us in the garden to walk and talk with us—the very Word in flesh of the almighty God, the great one whose name is “I am” followed by the classic phrase of comfort “do not be afraid.”
One last thought: the connection between these two stories—the feeding of the 5000 and the coming of Jesus across the rough seas to his followers in a little boat– is charged with spiritual truths. God does provide what we need, and it is God—not our status, not our own good works even–who will deliver us to the port where we belong—and a meal is a sign of God’s justice and mercy. So our meal, each week, is a sign of God’s hospitality and provision for our need, and God’s mercy towards us. Perhaps even the very smallness of the elements we share is a sign of justice that speaks to the largesse of food with which so many of us are sated, and reminds us of those who have so little. Further, our meal with our little pieces of cracker may be a sign of how Jesus cares for the fragments after the feast. He sees abundance even in what is left over. An aside: if you are feeling fragmented, scattered, having little to sustain yourself, perhaps you are one of those fragments with whom God can make yet another feast. The bread is manna from heaven in our wilderness. It is the revelation of strength and unique abilities on the rough seas.
I call to mind for us here in this congregation that just three years ago this summer, you met with Greg Alexander, the regional minister of the Christian Church in Kentucky, to talk about the future of this church, whether it was time to fish or cut bait, or to fold up your nets and call it quits. I had, in fact, unknown to you, received a call to be the minister of another congregation in the area should you have decided call it quits, or even just to go on as you had been. There were about 14 or so in average attendance at that time. But instead of acting out of a mentality of scarcity, you elected to go forward in faith that there were sufficient resources to sustain this church for a while longer. You acted in faith and invested your money, and some of the church’s savings, to renovate our basement and make it an “undercroft” worthy of holding future life. And now our average attendance, 3 years later, is 100% greater.
This change in our congregation’s life is also a metaphor: faith—not in ourselves, but in the God who strengthens us, and in whom we are rooted and grounded in love, as Paul so eloquently prays in those verses in the third chapter of Ephesians— faith in the God who walks across chaos to meet us in times of scarcity or when the seas of life are rough, is the power to accomplish abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine. If we keep our eyes focused not on the waves, not on the fragility of the boat, not on the personality of those people in the boat with us, if we keep looking to Jesus, and if we keep wanting to take him into our boat with us, I believe, I trust, Credo—I give my heart to the conviction that the result for our little church, or for you as an individual, will be the same as it was for the boat that held the disciples on the Sea of Galilee. Our boat will reach the land toward which we, and they, are meant to go. So may it be. Amen.
