sermonboy.com

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

Matthew 14
13 Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. 14 When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. 15 When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” 16 Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” 17 They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.” 18 And he said, “Bring them here to me.” 19 Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. 20 And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. 21 And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.


For the historically-minded, it’s been a busy summer. June saw the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, this past week marked the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Great War, and later this month there is one more important anniversary that may best be set aside.

You see, August 24th marks the 200th anniversary of the burning of Washington, and while it is considered a British victory in the War of 1812, it seems unseemly to celebrate such an event. Now friends, and generally trying to be good neighbours, we are unlikely to produce a commemorative stamp or set of coins for this particular anniversary.

Curiously, the story seems to have been reduced or simplified over time to become ‘the British burned the White House.’ In fact, we were a little more comprehensive than that, burning the Capitol Building, the Treasury, the Navy Yard, and sadly, the Library of Congress. Private homes were spared—these were gentlemen soldiers, after all—but books were not.

The 3,000 or so volumes in the Library were destroyed, and the young nation turned to a former President, Thomas Jefferson, to help. Jefferson initially offered to sell the government 10,000 books from his collection—then the largest in the US—but settled on 6,500 instead. If you visit the Library of Congress today you can see this collection has been reassembled: on a remarkable variety of topics reflecting Jefferson’s varied interests.

One book you will not find there—though you can buy a copy in the gift shop—is the so-called Jefferson Bible. The third President, as an devotional exercise, decided to take a razor and glue and create his own ‘cut and paste’ version of the Bible. And while he did share copies with his friends during his later years, it was only after his death that his edit was published as the Jefferson Bible.

Now, before anyone takes the drastic step of cutting their Bible to bits, they need a plan, and Jefferson’s plan was to remove everything in the New Testament that he perceived as supernatural or miraculous. And this fit perfectly with his deist philosophy, the belief that everything you need to know about God can be observed in nature or arrived at through human reason, and does not require any form of revelation or supernatural activity.

In other words, Jefferson’s religion was an ethic based on the moral teaching of Jesus, with some non-miraculous activity added for good measure, but excluded any sense that Jesus was divine or divinely inspired to say or do anything. And this, of course, has found a new audience in recent years, with the Jefferson Bible viewed as a building block in the development of liberal theology.

I share all of this, in part, because Matthew 14.13-21 would fall outside the part that Jefferson decided to retain and paste in his new Bible. And when the story of the loaves and fishes isn’t being extracted with a razor by candlelight, it is being earnestly explained away by theologians and preachers. As a matter of fact, this story is explained away so frequently, that a consensus of sorts has developed around what actually happened that day—making it somewhat unique in the area of biblical interpretation.

The sermon, which you have no doubt heard before, goes something like this: the disciples despaired over the size of the hungry crowd and implored Jesus to sent then away that they might buy food. Jesus said, ‘no, you feed them’ and they said, ‘but Lord, we only have two loaves and five fishes.’ Then Jesus said, ‘give them to me’ and broke and blessed the bread, giving them to the crowd and feeding the five thousand. Clever preachers will then tell you that Jesus’ blessing prompted the crowd to share the food that they already had, feeding the five thousand in a biblical version of the story of stone soup.

A really clever preacher will make this a stewardship sermon, and remind people that the money we need to pay the bills is already here in the church, it just happens to be stuck somehow in your wallets. Then we call for the offering. It seems that occupying this pulpit is like taking truth serum, forcing me to give away all the best preacherly tricks.

Obviously I’m going to take a different tack from the almost Jeffersonian approach, and defend the supernatural while I do it. And to begin, I want to take us back to last week. You will recall that we were parsing parables, looking at theme and structure and trying to find new meaning. They tend to come in a recognizable shape, and the meaning is supposed to point to the Kingdom of God.

I would argue that the story of the loaves and fishes is as close to resembling a parable as any narrative in the life of Jesus. And it this shape lends itself to a search for meaning, but that would be jumping ahead. So first, the parable of the loaves and fishes:

The Kingdom of God is like an itinerant teacher, who confronted by five thousand hungry people, takes five loaves and two fish and transforms them into a feast: where all are filled and twelve baskets remain.

So if you agree with me that this story resembles a parable, and if you further agree that we can use some of our parable wisdom to interpret this story, then we may be closer to discovering how it was that five thousand we fed that day. Rather than explain it away, I hope we can embrace it, and make it our own.

The Kingdom of God is like an itinerant teacher, who confronted by five thousand hungry people, takes five loaves and two fish and transforms them into a feast: where all are filled and twelve baskets remain.

You will recall that our list of parables from Matthew 13 broke down into two general categories: surprizing abundance and hidden treasure. We had mustard seeds and fine pearls, and these two themes allowed us to reach the conclusion that the Kingdom of God is both surprizing abundance and hidden treasure.

Now, if you took the second theme, hidden treasure, and applied it to the loaves and the fishes, you might quickly reach the conclusion that so many contemporary interpreters reach. You might decide that there is no miracle here, and that the hidden treasure in the story is the bread that has being held in pockets and satchels, liberally shared at the moment that Jesus blessed the bread. In short, a parable about sharing.

And while I have no doubt there will be a lot of sharing in the Kingdom of God, it hardly seems like an aspirational goal for such an important time. If the Kingdom of God is being realized, sharing might be the appetizer before the meal, but the meal itself should be something else, something larger, something more fitting to the title ‘Kingdom of God.’

The Kingdom of God is like an itinerant teacher, who confronted by five thousand hungry people, takes five loaves and two fish and transforms them into a feast: where all are filled and twelve baskets remain.

Imagine that story of the loaves and fishes resembles the first great theme of the parables, the surprizing abundance of the Kingdom, the inexplicable growth of the mustard seed, the leaven, the weeds, the seeds sown in good soil, and the full net that exceeds all expectations. Like the expanding yeast and the great catch of fish, the transformation that happens on the hillside that day is a sure sign of the Kingdom, and not just selfish people learning to be generous.

Imagine then, entering a living parable, a parable-in-time with the author of parables, and receiving his blessing. Imagine experiencing the inexplicable and surprizing abundance of the Kingdom of God in the moment, and knowing that this indeed is the Son of God. The human mind will struggle to comprehend, and maybe find a simple way to explain away what just happened. And this urge will continue down through time.

But we resist. We resist the rational and the convenient explanation and let God be God. We can trust the wisdom of the Kingdom, the wisdom that says ‘my ways are not your ways’ and ‘take stock, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.’ May God allow us live in parable, now and always, Amen.

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 6:29 AM