Exodus 16:2-21; Acts 2:41-47; St John 6:1-15
In the Name + of JESUS. Amen.
“I don’t know what to do.” Like Israel in the wilderness or Philip on the mountainside, we are often paralyzed by our problems, which seem too big, to insurmountable with no real answer appearing. So we stare at the screen, stare off into spare, throw up our hands and cry, “I don’t know what to do.”
We’re all broken in some way. One person feels out of place, unaccepted. Another struggles with lust. Broken bones, broken hearts, broken marriages, broken promises, broken lives. I’d like to tell you everything will be okay, but that is a lie. Even if this gets sorted out, in the end, you’re going to die. Then the bread won’t matter anymore.
Once again, we have a Gospel reading with Jesus in the wilderness. Three weeks ago He was there alone. Just Him and the devil. No food. No angels. No crowds of people. He was hungry, but He resists the temptation to turn stones into bread. He’s offered a way around the Cross, a way to grasp the thrones of this world without suffering. But He resists.
This time, in John 6, Jesus is again in a wild place, a place without food. The crowds have followed Him there, hungry for a miracle, hungry for solutions to their problems. And the immediate problem is food. Where shall we buy bread, Jesus asks His disciples, that this great crowd may eat?
Its a test. Philip doesn’t need to fish out his laptop and work a spreadsheet to know that the budget won’t allow for a meal for 5000 men plus their families. “There’s not enough money,” comes the despairing reply. That pretty much sums up every trip to the store, every review of the checkbook register, every answer to each kid wanting an iPad of their own. There’s not enough money. Philip doesn’t know what to do. He is gripped by despair, anxiety, fear. An ancient hymn summarizes Philip’s feelings: “But you, on beholding the multitude, are worried, and you do not consider the One who provides abundantly” (Romanus Melodus, Ancient Christian Commentary: John 1-10).
Despair. Anxiety. Fear. “I don’t know what to do.” And that is because we, like Philip mountain or Israel in the wilderness, do not consider the One who provides abundantly.
But then, the miracle. And the crowd quickly falls into the opposite ditch. They see the abundance, each eating as much as he wanted, and they lust after Jesus the Bread Bestower. An endless supply of bread is an endless supply of gold. In Jesus is a miracle cure. With Him there is wine from water, abundant bread for a multitude, fish aplenty, and the sick are healed. Its the promise of free healthcare without all the partisan politics. “Jesus Care! All our problems are solved! Let’s make Him king!”
Nobody understands. Not Philip. Not the crowd. The disciples despair. The crowd lusts. And Jesus goes away by Himself to pray. No doubt He prayed for Philip. And the crowd. And us fools who somehow stumbled into Lutheran church a couple millennia later with the same basic problems and questions. We lust. We doubt. We don’t know what to do.
What’s really going on here? Is there any solution to your own weaknesses? Your lust and greed? Your anger, your pride, your self-righteousness? Is there any solution to your cancer, your anxiety, your dementia? Or just not knowing how exactly you’re going to get through this week with your work done, enough sleep, and your family intact?
On a very simple, basic, human level Jesus is just providing for the people. They need food. He’s the Creator. He gives it to them. Its not that different from the miracle at the wedding at Cana back in John 2; Jesus’ first sign, when He turned water into wine. The multiplication of the barley loves and fish is the same thing. God is doing quickly and grandly what He does all the time all over the place. Jesus is just speeding up the process. He is the Lord of Creation.
Its not the same as the manna in the wilderness. There our Lord provides bread in the wilderness the same way He created: out of nothing. Miraculously. In truth all of creation is a miracle. A miracle that evolution can’t begin to explain: that something came from nothing and in matter is the power of life. We live on a privileged plant in a finely tuned universe with complex code in the very cells of our bodies.
Even more mysterious and miraculous than that, though, is the Incarnation of our Lord. Yesterday was the Feast of the Annunciation. March 25. Nine months from Christmas. The day that the angel Gabriel was dispatched from heaven by God the Father to announce to a Virgin named Mary, who was betrothed to a man named Joseph, who lived in Nazareth, that she would be the Mother of God. The Word which was with God in the beginning. The Word which was God. The Word through whom all things were made, without whom nothing was made. The Word in whom there is life and light. The Word became flesh. He speaks and creation springs forth. Every time wheat comes from the ground it is a miracle. That’s the basic level. But there is more.
For Jesus is the Word which proceeds forth from the mouth of the Father, by whom and in whom you live. That He did not make bread for Himself in the wilderness when tempted by the devil, but now makes it for His people means something. Food is more than simple practicality or base necessity. Food is fellowship and pleasure. The Lord doesn’t only provide on the mountain for the hungry and unworthy and those who misunderstand. He also provides for Himself. He joins them. He who did not eat when the devil tempted Him with bread in the desert now eats bread in the desert with sinners. Again: He who did not eat when the devil tempted Him with bread in the desert now eats bread in the desert made lush and full of green grass, with sinners made saints.
It all points forward to the greater miracle when Jesus attaches Himself to the bread of John 6 and the wine of John 2. You lust for wine, you are worried about bread, but you do not consider that your lust and your worry point to the underlying contagion. Your lust and worry and anxiety and fear are signs of the death that creeps in you, the death that now pervades this creation, so beautiful but marred and infected with the curse spoken over our ancestors.
Consider anew the familiar words describing the sign. Jesus takes bread and gives thanks. Two questions on the basic level: Do you say a table prayer? And if so, is it perfunctory? Every sip of coffee, every morsel of chocolate, every drop of wine, every speck at the bottom of the cereal box should, if we rightly considered it, provoke jubilant hymns of thanksgiving sung at full volume in our kitchens, yes, even when the sun’s not yet up and the kids’ are scrambling to get ready for school. The haste of our mumbled prayers damns us as thankless brutes.
Jesus takes bread, gives thanks, and gives it to His disciples. He gives. That’s the Gospel in two words. Jesus gives. For you. That’s the nature of God, He is the giver and the forgiver. You confess it concerning God the Holy Spirit in the Nicene Creed: The Lord and Giver of Life. He gives. That’s what God does. That’s who He is. And the more that we share in His life and love, the more we give away what we have received, recognizing that nothing is ours, nothing do we possess, but it passes through our hands from God to our neighbor, as you heard in Acts.
We don’t get the bread of heaven, the Body of Jesus, directly from Him, just as the people in today’s Gospel didn’t receive bread directly from Jesus. They got it through means, through the instrumentality of the disciples. That’s vocation. God gives gifts through means, through people. You become daily bread unto one another. He feeds children through parents. He heals people through physicians and pharmacists. He loves people through you, even as you receive the Bread that is His Body from my unworthy hand.
And that’s the point; the place where the whole of Gospel of John, the whole season of Lent is driving us toward: Holy Thursday, when the same words will be spoken again, Jesus taking bread, giving thanks, giving it to the disciples with the culminating words, This is My Body, given for you. And then on Good Friday, the body abandoned on the Cross and the words of the Baptizer finally hit home: Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
And that’s why this seemingly out-of-place reading from Acts this morning. The climactic conclusion of the Pentecost narrative. The 3000 who received the word and were baptized. And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ doctrine and the koinonia and the Eucharist and the prayers. Baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus they embarked upon the rhythm of the Christian life, the Lenten journey with our Lord Christ, always to and from His gifts in Word and water, bread and wine.
Kaitlynn is joining this journey today through catechesis and confirmation; joining in the life of our Lord Jesus together with His baptized children, embarking down that road. Through your Baptism and catechesis, with the sign-post of confirmation, you are also on that road. The road through the wildness, haunted by demons, tormented by lusts, filled with doubt and despair, stupid pride and insidious cancer. And all we really see in this life is the Cross. The dead body on the tree, confused disciples and greedy people always looking for more, looking for the next guy to make king hoping they’ll get free stuff.
But it doesn’t end there. Not for Jesus. Not for you. It ends with the words given to Kaitlynn this morning: the almighty God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has given you the new birth of water and of the Spirit and has forgiven you all your sins, strengthen you with His grace to life everlasting.
Stop clinging to your doubts. Stop clinging to your pride. Cling instead to the death and resurrection of Jesus. Cling to the gift of your Baptism into that death and life that never ends. When you don’t know what to do, cling to His Word which gives peace to your troubled conscience and everything is done already. When you don’t know what to do, come, take and eat, feast upon His Word joined to bread and wine, His Body and Blood, given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins, for your life and salvation.
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In the Name + of JESUS. Amen.
“I don’t know what to do.” Like Israel in the wilderness or Philip on the mountainside, we are often paralyzed by our problems, which seem too big, to insurmountable with no real answer appearing. So we stare at the screen, stare off into spare, throw up our hands and cry, “I don’t know what to do.”
We’re all broken in some way. One person feels out of place, unaccepted. Another struggles with lust. Broken bones, broken hearts, broken marriages, broken promises, broken lives. I’d like to tell you everything will be okay, but that is a lie. Even if this gets sorted out, in the end, you’re going to die. Then the bread won’t matter anymore.
Once again, we have a Gospel reading with Jesus in the wilderness. Three weeks ago He was there alone. Just Him and the devil. No food. No angels. No crowds of people. He was hungry, but He resists the temptation to turn stones into bread. He’s offered a way around the Cross, a way to grasp the thrones of this world without suffering. But He resists.
This time, in John 6, Jesus is again in a wild place, a place without food. The crowds have followed Him there, hungry for a miracle, hungry for solutions to their problems. And the immediate problem is food. Where shall we buy bread, Jesus asks His disciples, that this great crowd may eat?
Its a test. Philip doesn’t need to fish out his laptop and work a spreadsheet to know that the budget won’t allow for a meal for 5000 men plus their families. “There’s not enough money,” comes the despairing reply. That pretty much sums up every trip to the store, every review of the checkbook register, every answer to each kid wanting an iPad of their own. There’s not enough money. Philip doesn’t know what to do. He is gripped by despair, anxiety, fear. An ancient hymn summarizes Philip’s feelings: “But you, on beholding the multitude, are worried, and you do not consider the One who provides abundantly” (Romanus Melodus, Ancient Christian Commentary: John 1-10).
Despair. Anxiety. Fear. “I don’t know what to do.” And that is because we, like Philip mountain or Israel in the wilderness, do not consider the One who provides abundantly.
But then, the miracle. And the crowd quickly falls into the opposite ditch. They see the abundance, each eating as much as he wanted, and they lust after Jesus the Bread Bestower. An endless supply of bread is an endless supply of gold. In Jesus is a miracle cure. With Him there is wine from water, abundant bread for a multitude, fish aplenty, and the sick are healed. Its the promise of free healthcare without all the partisan politics. “Jesus Care! All our problems are solved! Let’s make Him king!”
Nobody understands. Not Philip. Not the crowd. The disciples despair. The crowd lusts. And Jesus goes away by Himself to pray. No doubt He prayed for Philip. And the crowd. And us fools who somehow stumbled into Lutheran church a couple millennia later with the same basic problems and questions. We lust. We doubt. We don’t know what to do.
What’s really going on here? Is there any solution to your own weaknesses? Your lust and greed? Your anger, your pride, your self-righteousness? Is there any solution to your cancer, your anxiety, your dementia? Or just not knowing how exactly you’re going to get through this week with your work done, enough sleep, and your family intact?
On a very simple, basic, human level Jesus is just providing for the people. They need food. He’s the Creator. He gives it to them. Its not that different from the miracle at the wedding at Cana back in John 2; Jesus’ first sign, when He turned water into wine. The multiplication of the barley loves and fish is the same thing. God is doing quickly and grandly what He does all the time all over the place. Jesus is just speeding up the process. He is the Lord of Creation.
Its not the same as the manna in the wilderness. There our Lord provides bread in the wilderness the same way He created: out of nothing. Miraculously. In truth all of creation is a miracle. A miracle that evolution can’t begin to explain: that something came from nothing and in matter is the power of life. We live on a privileged plant in a finely tuned universe with complex code in the very cells of our bodies.
Even more mysterious and miraculous than that, though, is the Incarnation of our Lord. Yesterday was the Feast of the Annunciation. March 25. Nine months from Christmas. The day that the angel Gabriel was dispatched from heaven by God the Father to announce to a Virgin named Mary, who was betrothed to a man named Joseph, who lived in Nazareth, that she would be the Mother of God. The Word which was with God in the beginning. The Word which was God. The Word through whom all things were made, without whom nothing was made. The Word in whom there is life and light. The Word became flesh. He speaks and creation springs forth. Every time wheat comes from the ground it is a miracle. That’s the basic level. But there is more.
For Jesus is the Word which proceeds forth from the mouth of the Father, by whom and in whom you live. That He did not make bread for Himself in the wilderness when tempted by the devil, but now makes it for His people means something. Food is more than simple practicality or base necessity. Food is fellowship and pleasure. The Lord doesn’t only provide on the mountain for the hungry and unworthy and those who misunderstand. He also provides for Himself. He joins them. He who did not eat when the devil tempted Him with bread in the desert now eats bread in the desert with sinners. Again: He who did not eat when the devil tempted Him with bread in the desert now eats bread in the desert made lush and full of green grass, with sinners made saints.
It all points forward to the greater miracle when Jesus attaches Himself to the bread of John 6 and the wine of John 2. You lust for wine, you are worried about bread, but you do not consider that your lust and your worry point to the underlying contagion. Your lust and worry and anxiety and fear are signs of the death that creeps in you, the death that now pervades this creation, so beautiful but marred and infected with the curse spoken over our ancestors.
Consider anew the familiar words describing the sign. Jesus takes bread and gives thanks. Two questions on the basic level: Do you say a table prayer? And if so, is it perfunctory? Every sip of coffee, every morsel of chocolate, every drop of wine, every speck at the bottom of the cereal box should, if we rightly considered it, provoke jubilant hymns of thanksgiving sung at full volume in our kitchens, yes, even when the sun’s not yet up and the kids’ are scrambling to get ready for school. The haste of our mumbled prayers damns us as thankless brutes.
Jesus takes bread, gives thanks, and gives it to His disciples. He gives. That’s the Gospel in two words. Jesus gives. For you. That’s the nature of God, He is the giver and the forgiver. You confess it concerning God the Holy Spirit in the Nicene Creed: The Lord and Giver of Life. He gives. That’s what God does. That’s who He is. And the more that we share in His life and love, the more we give away what we have received, recognizing that nothing is ours, nothing do we possess, but it passes through our hands from God to our neighbor, as you heard in Acts.
We don’t get the bread of heaven, the Body of Jesus, directly from Him, just as the people in today’s Gospel didn’t receive bread directly from Jesus. They got it through means, through the instrumentality of the disciples. That’s vocation. God gives gifts through means, through people. You become daily bread unto one another. He feeds children through parents. He heals people through physicians and pharmacists. He loves people through you, even as you receive the Bread that is His Body from my unworthy hand.
And that’s the point; the place where the whole of Gospel of John, the whole season of Lent is driving us toward: Holy Thursday, when the same words will be spoken again, Jesus taking bread, giving thanks, giving it to the disciples with the culminating words, This is My Body, given for you. And then on Good Friday, the body abandoned on the Cross and the words of the Baptizer finally hit home: Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
And that’s why this seemingly out-of-place reading from Acts this morning. The climactic conclusion of the Pentecost narrative. The 3000 who received the word and were baptized. And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ doctrine and the koinonia and the Eucharist and the prayers. Baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus they embarked upon the rhythm of the Christian life, the Lenten journey with our Lord Christ, always to and from His gifts in Word and water, bread and wine.
Kaitlynn is joining this journey today through catechesis and confirmation; joining in the life of our Lord Jesus together with His baptized children, embarking down that road. Through your Baptism and catechesis, with the sign-post of confirmation, you are also on that road. The road through the wildness, haunted by demons, tormented by lusts, filled with doubt and despair, stupid pride and insidious cancer. And all we really see in this life is the Cross. The dead body on the tree, confused disciples and greedy people always looking for more, looking for the next guy to make king hoping they’ll get free stuff.
But it doesn’t end there. Not for Jesus. Not for you. It ends with the words given to Kaitlynn this morning: the almighty God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has given you the new birth of water and of the Spirit and has forgiven you all your sins, strengthen you with His grace to life everlasting.
Stop clinging to your doubts. Stop clinging to your pride. Cling instead to the death and resurrection of Jesus. Cling to the gift of your Baptism into that death and life that never ends. When you don’t know what to do, cling to His Word which gives peace to your troubled conscience and everything is done already. When you don’t know what to do, come, take and eat, feast upon His Word joined to bread and wine, His Body and Blood, given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins, for your life and salvation.
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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