Sermon preached Sunday, July 25, 2021, the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, at Grace Lutheran Church in Westminster, Maryland.
When I was a freshman in high school, I had a pretty incredible English teacher. His name was Mr. Fey and we frequently referred to him as the “Hawaiian Santa Clause” because he always paired his snow white beard with Hawaiian shirts, khaki shorts, and sandals. In his class, I was introduced to Shakespeare, explored poetry, practiced debate, and read some of my all-time favorite novels.
Mr. Fey had a unique approach to choosing what books his students would read. Instead of assigning one book to the whole class, over the course of the year he chose three books for each student. He personalized these selections based on what he knew about us: our interests, our reading level, what we were passionate about. He picked books that would not only help us develop our reading and comprehension skills, but ones which would also help us learn something about ourselves.
One of the books he assigned me was The Robe, by Lloyd C. Douglas. Have any of you ever read this book? It was a bestseller in the 40’s, a novel that followed a Roman soldier named Marcellus in the first century. Marcellus was one of the soldiers who was at Jesus’ crucifixion. He was one of the men gambling and casting lots for Christ’s clothes. He was the one who finally won Jesus’ robe.
What unfolds is an imaginative and exciting journey as Marcellus begins to retrace Jesus’ footsteps to learn more about him. Eventually, Marcellus comes to believe in Jesus himself.
What I remember most about this book is what happens when Marcellus gets to the seaside and begins to ask the locals what took place there. They tell him about the feeding of the multitude. They say that everyone was hungry and Jesus called the disciples together to find them food. When the disciples began distributing food to the crowds, individuals began pulling bits of bread and other food out of their own belongings, bits that they had hidden away, inspired by Jesus’ generosity. Their food, which they were no longer selfishly hoarding, was also shared and led to there being so many baskets left over.
I have to say, Mr. Fey always picked great novels for me, and this was no exception. At this point in my life, I was fascinated with finding explanations for miracles and miraculous events found in the Bible. I remember finding a series on tv as I was flipping channels that explained how the Israelites could have crossed the Red Sea when the conditions were just right, or how the walls of Jericho could have come tumbling down because of poor craftsmanship and the acoustics of the trumpets. It’s something that many of us go through—wanting to know the scientific reasonings behind the things that can be hard to take on faith.
During this time, I was excited about this new information. I remember talking to my mom and telling her I had seen a program that explained that under just the right conditions, when the water was low, it was totally, scientifically possible for the Israelites to have walked across the sea! She simply looked at me and said, “That just misses the point. It doesn’t matter if science says it could have happened. It doesn’t matter if science says it’s impossible. These stories aren’t there for us to prove them. They are there to tell us something about God.”
That’s when I realized, it’s not about the “how.” It’s about the “why.” Think about all the miraculous and unbelievable things that happen in scripture. Can we ever know how they happened? I mean, down to the nitty gritty details of it all? Of course not. Only God knows.
But that’s not the point. It’s like Communion or Baptism. We don’t need to how it all works. We don’t need to know how God is present in bread and wine—just that God is. We don’t need to know how baptism joins us into the body of Christ—just that it does.
This is especially true in the Gospel of John. I don’t know how much time you’ve spent in any individual Gospel. If you ever get the chance, I encourage you to read each one, beginning to end, as a whole, and discover the unique perspective the Gospel writer has. For John, one of his signatures is that he never refers to the changing of water into wine at the wedding in Cana, or any of Jesus’ healings, or the feeding of the multitude, or Jesus walking on water, or anything else that we might consider “miraculous” as miracles. Instead, they are signs.
They are signs and not miracles, because it’s not about the how, it’s about the why. Miracles are displays of an individual’s power. Signs point to something much larger. It’s not about what Jesus can do—it’s about what Jesus’ actions tell us about God and who God is and what God does.
Let’s look at the first sign we have in our Gospel reading this morning: the feeding of the multitude. Yes, it is incredible that Jesus is able to feed so many people out of so little—and have so much left over! But what does this event tell us about God?
It tells us our God is a God of abundance, who gives and gives, freely, so much so that we do not ever want for more and we overflow with God’s good gifts. It tells us that God often works in community, working through our friends and neighbors to provide for what we need. And it shows us that God believes that our physical needs are not secondary to our spiritual ones.
When Jesus sees this large crowd continuing to follow him, he knows that they must be hungry. Instead of saying that they should go find food and come back, or that it was okay for them to be hungry because he had IMPORTANT THINGS TO TEACH THEM™, he feeds them. He knows that many times the physical needs must be cared for before the spiritual ones can even be approached.
How many of you have had to use the bathroom really badly, but someone stops you to talk? It doesn’t matter how important that conversation is, you won’t actually be fully engaged until your bladder is empty. You stand there, dancing in place, praying they’ll finish soon and not listening to a word that’s being said. This is something teachers see, too, and lots of teachers who work with kids who are food insecure make sure they have food in their classrooms because a kid can’t be expected to learn when their stomach is growling.
We are not called to ignore our body’s needs in favor of spirituality and instead are called to care for the immediate needs of our neighbor so that they are actually able to hear and enjoy and embrace what God is up to.
And what about the second sign in the Gospel today? How does that sign point to God? It might not be quite as obvious.
In the midst of strong winds and a rough sea, Jesus walks on the water to join his disciples and calm their fear. This sign reminds us where God always is—with us, walking towards us, even when we are scared, even when we can’t even tell it’s God in the first place. We’re never alone even in the stormiest of waters.
Here’s the thing that always comes up when ever we talk about these incredible, miraculous, mystical and magical accounts in the Bible: we always look to our own lives, our own neighborhoods, our present-day world and wonder why we don’t get the same kind of events happening with the regularity they seemed to happen in the ancient world. But that’s where we’re wrong.
If we truly understand these things as signs, and not just miracles, we can begin to see them happening all around us. What are the signs in your life that point to God?
Maybe it’s the neighborhood that comes together to search for missing person. Friends and total strangers dropping everything to try and make a family complete again, pointing to a God who selflessly gives for us.
Maybe it’s the town that recognizes its homeless population is getting larger and conditions on the streets are inhumane and so it works to provide sanitary and welcoming shelters and more abundant affordable housing, pointing to a God who can make a lot happen with few resources.
Maybe it’s the simple act of forgiveness being offered, pointing to a God who holds no account of our offenses.
What is happening in your life that points to God? What is happening in the life of this congregation? Is there a relationship, a ministry, a worship opportunity, that others can look to and see God at work? These are the signs that fill our lives and our world.
Tiny miracles. Ones most of us wouldn’t even see, or think that much of—but these are BIG SIGNS that direct our gaze and focus our minds on our loving God who does more for us that we can understand.
Amen.
Drinking from a Deep Well 