Sermon for Ninth Sunday after Pentecost – July 26th, 2015
Text: John 6:1-21 (The Message)
Bread and Fish for All
6 1-4 After this, Jesus went across the Sea of Galilee (some call it Tiberias). A huge crowd followed him, attracted by the miracles they had seen him do among the sick. When he got to the other side, he climbed a hill and sat down, surrounded by his disciples. It was nearly time for the Feast of Passover, kept annually by the Jews.
5-6 When Jesus looked out and saw that a large crowd had arrived, he said to Philip, “Where can we buy bread to feed these people?” He said this to stretch Philip’s faith. He already knew what he was going to do.
7 Philip answered, “Two hundred silver pieces wouldn’t be enough to buy bread for each person to get a piece.”
8-9 One of the disciples—it was Andrew, brother to Simon Peter—said, “There’s a little boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But that’s a drop in the bucket for a crowd like this.”
10-11 Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.” There was a nice carpet of green grass in this place. They sat down, about five thousand of them. Then Jesus took the bread and, having given thanks, gave it to those who were seated. He did the same with the fish. All ate as much as they wanted.
12-13 When the people had eaten their fill, he said to his disciples, “Gather the leftovers so nothing is wasted.” They went to work and filled twelve large baskets with leftovers from the five barley loaves.
14-15 The people realized that God was at work among them in what Jesus had just done. They said, “This is the Prophet for sure, God’s Prophet right here in Galilee!” Jesus saw that in their enthusiasm, they were about to grab him and make him king, so he slipped off and went back up the mountain to be by himself.
16-21 In the evening his disciples went down to the sea, got in the boat, and headed back across the water to Capernaum. It had grown quite dark and Jesus had not yet returned. A huge wind blew up, churning the sea. They were maybe three or four miles out when they saw Jesus walking on the sea, quite near the boat. They were scared senseless, but he reassured them, “It’s me. It’s all right. Don’t be afraid.” So they took him on board. In no time they reached land—the exact spot they were headed to.
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
“These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all…”[1]
So sings Paul Simon in his song “The Boy in the Bubble.” Today’s Gospel lesson tells us of not one, but two, miracles Jesus performed. And the question begs to be asked: Do we believe in miracles?
What is a “miracle,” anyway? Well, here’s a definition I found – “a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.”[2]
Many of us modern people have a hard time with miracles. We like to have a rational explanation for anything and everything that happens. Miracles – things we can’t explain – make us nervous, like the feeling we might get if we’re walking down a dark street and we see something out of the corner of our eye, but when we turn to face it, there’s nothing there. The hairs on the back of our necks stand up, our hearts beat a little faster, the palms of our hands get a little clammy, and we start walking – or running – toward the nearest light. That’s how we react to the unknown; and miracles, by definition, are examples of the unknown.
And yet – polls show that people, young and old, freely say that they believe in miracles.
I believe that miracles happen all the time.
A few years ago now, Katie found the documentary “Touching the Void,” the true story of two young British climbers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, who set out back in 1985 to climb a mountain named Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes.
Now as far as mountains go, Siula Grande isn’t the highest in the world, nor is it particularly beautiful. It’s basically a big pile – a 20,669 foot pile – of shale. But it posed a challenge for Simpson and Yates: They wanted to be the first to scale the as-yet unclimbed west face of the mountain. So these two climbers set out to climb it. They figured that it wouldn’t be that challenging. In fact, at one point in the movie one of them says, “We wondered why no one had ever tried it before.” Well, they found out! The climb was a total disaster. Mountain climbers will tell you that going up is not the major challenge – it’s going down where the bad things usually happen. And bad things definitely happened on this climb. The mountain proved to be incredibly treacherous – because of the shale, gaining a foothold was sometimes almost impossible. At one point, Simpson fell and shattered a leg. When you’re thousands of feet up on the side of Siula Grande, there’s no rescue helicopter to call, no ski patrol on the way. He hung there over a precipice, and his weight began to pull Yates along, too. Yates had mere seconds to decide what to do before his moorings came loose and he plunged with Simpson over the edge. So, in order to save his own life, Yates had to cut the rope on which his hurt friend was dangling. It was the life-or-death choice every climber knows is a possibility, but which no climber ever wants to make. Yates is tortured by that decision to this day.
Simpson fell 80 feet into a crevasse. Yates sadly assumed his friend was dead. In our world, nobody falls 80 feet onto ice and rock and survives.
But Simpson did survive. Not only that, but he managed, despite the terrain, the cold, and his broken leg, to make it back to camp.
As far as I am concerned, Simpson’s survival is a bona fide miracle. It was something that was not supposed to happen, but it did happen. It fit the definition I just shared, “a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.”
On Christmas Eve of 2009, Tracy Hermanstorfer’s heart stopped beating while she was in labor with her third child, a boy she and her husband, Mike, had named Coltyn. Just after receiving an epidural for the pain, she lost consciousness and went into full cardiac arrest. Doctors attempted to revive her but couldn’t, and began an emergency C-section to save the baby. But Coltyn was born limp and seemingly lifeless. “Half of my family was lying there right in front of me, dead,” Mike said at the time. “I lost all feeling.” Then, to his astonishment, Tracy’s pulse returned, and moments later, Coltyn began to breathe. “I’m not big-time religious,” says Tracy, “but I know this was in God’s hands.” Within a few days, mother and son were sent home with a clean bill of health.
Was that a miracle? Sure seems like one to me.
There’s even a TV show on the Discovery Channel that our daughter, Madelaine, loves to watch. The title of the show is “I Shouldn’t Be Alive.” It chronicles experiences of people who have faced situations that would be expected to kill them – but they’re still walking around! And the common refrain of all (or most) of these people is: “It is a miracle that I’m still alive.” And who are we to contradict them?
I believe in miracles. Miracles do happen around us all the time. The trick is to recognize them. Albert Einstein once said, “There are two ways to live your life. You can live as if nothing is a miracle or you can live as if everything is a miracle.”
The attitude of the world we live in that nothing is a miracle. How depressing! I take the view that everything is a miracle.
Here are just a few everyday miracles to show you what I mean.
Waking up every morning – that’s a miracle.
Everyone who has witnessed the birth of a child has to believe in miracles. Every child is a living miracle; or, as Walt Whitman wrote: “Babies are God’s opinion that the world should continue.” Now that we’re grandparents, Katie and I believe that more than ever!
Then there’s the miracle of family. Our families can sometimes drive us crazy, but where would we be – what would we be – without them?
Friendship is a miracle. It’s been said that “friends are the family we choose for ourselves.” Just ask someone who has no friends about how important friendship is.
Love is a miracle. Not just romantic love, or the love between parents and children, but the kind of human love that does things like dropping a dollar or two into the hand of a hungry homeless person, or letting someone pull into traffic from a parking lot.
Most importantly, there’s the love God has for each one of us, the love that made God send Jesus to redeem and heal our world.
This church is a miracle. You, the members of St. John’s, are a miracle. For over a century and a half, this little church in the middle of a cornfield has been working wonders in Jesus’ name.
“These are the days of miracle and wonder…”
We will never know exactly what happened on that day so long ago. But we know that something dramatic and earth-shattering happened, because this is only one of two miracles recorded in all four of the Gospels. The other one is the Resurrection itself. So the people who were there that day wanted to make sure that the world knew what had happened. They told and retold this story for generations, until it was finally written down by Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John and preserved for us today.
There are at least three ways to look at this miracle. The first, and the most difficult for us, as we’ve seen, is to take it literally – Jesus took five loaves and two fishes and fed 5,000 hungry men (not to mention the wives and children who were likely also there, which increases the crowd to well over 15,000 people). Thinking of this miracle in those terms is perfectly legitimate, and you would not be wrong in doing so.
One other way to look at it is as a sacramental meal. The language John uses here is exactly the same language he uses at the Last Supper. So maybe these people were filled and nourished spiritually, instead of physically. The morsel of bread and fish that each person received, blessed by the hand of this Jesus-who-is-God, satisfied and strengthened these weary people to their very souls.
A third way is to view this as a miracle of transformation. If you stop to think about this incident, it becomes certainly plausible that people who are about to go off on a nine-mile hike through the countryside would not just take off without making any kinds of preparations. They possibly would have brought their version of a “brown bag lunch” with them to share with their families and friends, but no one else. Yet, when they saw Jesus take the five tiny loaves and two small fish from the little boy, saw him bless them, and then saw him distribute them as far as they would go – something stirred within them; and, one by one, everyone began giving what he had to those around him, and it became a movement. In the end, there was enough, and more than enough, for everyone.
Yes, that certainly qualifies as a miracle! But, at the end of the day, it’s really not ultimately about the miracles themselves, but about what you might call “the miracles that happened after the miracles.” The miracle here is not what happened to a couples loaves and fishes, but about what happened to the men and women who were there that day. Their view of the world was changed. Their hearts were changed. Their lives were changed – completely transformed beyond anything they ever would have expected.
That’s the promise Jesus offers us, today and every day: The promise of transformed lives, lives that are richer, and fuller, and more deeply meaningful than we could ever imagine. We bring here the broken pieces of our lives to be blessed and made whole again. We come, hungering and thirsting, and leave satisfied.
For these are the days of miracle and wonder – brought to us by God!
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
[1] Paul Simon, “The Boy in the Bubble,” © Universal Music Publishing Group
[2] https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=definition+of+%22miracle%22&ei=UTF-8&hspart=mozilla&hsimp=yhs-004