Feast

Scripture: Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 18) A.D. 2014 A

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

America is the Saudi Arabia of food. We have calories coming out of our ears.

Think about it. You can buy effectively unlimited amounts of bacon cheeseburgers for 99 cents a pop, no waiting. The Minnesota State Fair takes deep pride in our ability to deep-fry anything edible, from bacon to butter, and mount it on a stick. Iowa, as far as I can tell, is a 57,000 square mile cornfield. And we export rice to China. We have more food, and more food choices, than any human society that has ever existed anywhere on the globe. Keep in mind that for many of our ancestors, the American dream wasn’t freedom and opportunity but simply a full dinner plate. We are, after all, the breadbasket of the world. And that’s after throwing out nearly half of all our food. America is nothing if not the land of abundance.

We have so much food, in fact, that we suffer from a bizarre inversion of a historical norm. Throughout most of history, fat was a sign of health, wealth, and success. The Renaissance ideal of beauty was pudgy. Noblemen would hire blacksmiths to hammer out false beer guts in their armor. Snorri Sturluson, the infamous “uncrowned king” of Iceland, insisted that refined and successful people must always be (ahem) stout. Big bellies meant high status. Not so today. Now it’s the wealthy and successful who can afford nutritionists, personal trainers, and fresh organic food, while the lower classes subsist on carbohydrates and heavily processed grease. Slim is the new fat. Oh, brave new world.

Things were different in Jesus’ day. The ancient world was a two-tiered society: the rich and the rest. There was no middle class. The rich lived lives of leisured abundance, with food and wealth to spare. Their biggest concern was boredom. The rest were not necessarily dirt poor—they had houses and clothing and the occasional luxury—but their diet was subsistence at best. That doesn’t mean that they went hungry, but it does mean that their food supply was highly vulnerable to weather or blight or the vicissitudes of fortune. You could never be sure that this year’s crop wouldn’t fail. Famine always threatened.

That’s why food is always so important in religion, because food for most people has quite palpably reminded us of life and death, of health and suffering, of our need to feed the hungry and our own reliance upon the mercy of our neighbors. Two clear themes repeated over and again in the Bible are that God is a God of abundance whose Kingdom brings feasting and joy, and that God wants each of us, all of us, to feed the hungry.

Keep in mind that the most severe famines, even today, are caused by governments. The British Empire held a massive grain surplus while a million Irish starved. The warlords of Somalia grew rich on food aid while their people wasted away. We live in a world that provides superabundantly; there is no lack of food. In the Kingdom of God there is more than enough for all to join in the feast! We don’t need external miracles for this to become our reality. We simply need Jesus to rule in our hearts.

Our Gospel reading this morning tells the story of Jesus miraculously feeding a crowd of thousands with only five small loaves and two fish. Right before this, John the Baptist, I’m afraid, had just been killed. You will recall John as Jesus’ forerunner, cousin, and friend. John’s crime was to have spoken out against Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great, whom we will remember from the Christmas story. Herod the younger had the unfortunate habit of openly flaunting the torrid love affair that he enjoyed with his own brother’s wife. John told him that this was naughty, and so Herod locked John away.

Later on, Herod hosted a lavish feast, at which his niece-slash-daughter danced so provocatively that Herod brashly boasted before his guests that she could claim any reward she desired, even if it be half his kingdom! And what did the girl desire? Why, nothing other than the head of John the Baptist, severed from his shoulders and presented to her upon a silver platter like one of the courses of the meal. I do so love a good dinner party, don’t you?

Upon hearing of His cousin’s death, Jesus withdrew to the countryside, to mourn, perhaps, and to pray. But crowds gathered, denying Him solitude, and in His compassion He healed their sick. As evening came, however, the disciples urged Jesus to send the crowds home, for it was dinnertime and they had nothing to eat. “They need not go,” Jesus replied. “You feed them.” At this the disciples were astonished. “Feed them with what?” they asked. “All we have are five small loaves and two little fish!” And Jesus said simply, “Give them to Me.”

Directing the crowds to sit, our Lord then looked up to Heaven, blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples to distribute amongst the crowd. And somehow, miraculously, this little fare—barely enough for a dozen Apostles—multiplied and grew in the sharing until 5,000 families gathered ate their fill, with a dozen basketfuls left over. All four Gospels record this wonder, and a church would be erected over the site of this story. Of all Jesus’ astonishing miracles, this mass feeding would prove amongst the most beloved and well-remembered of all His works. To this day, people speak reverently, and sometimes perplexedly, about the Feeding of the 5,000.

Those familiar with Scripture will realize that there’s an awful lot going on in the subtext of this story. It reaches into the past, recalling how Moses called down bread from Heaven to feed God’s people in the wilderness, and how the great prophets Elijah and Elisha multiplied bread to provide for hungry men, women, and children. Here Jesus proves Himself greater than Moses and the prophets. It also reaches forward, into the future, pointing towards the blessing and breaking of the bread at Jesus’ Last Supper before His Crucifixion, and towards the Holy Eucharist which we bless and break and distribute to one another as Jesus’ Body.

This miracle further contrasts Jesus, the true King of Kings, against the false and gilded royalty of Herod and his ilk. Both Jesus and Herod show their claims to kingship by providing a feast for their followers. Great men host feasts, yes? Yet whereas Jesus humbly feeds the needy with a foretaste of life in God’s Kingdom, Herod garishly serves up the severed head of a holy man to an audience of titillated aristocrats in a twisted feast not of life but of death.

Keep in mind that for Jesus the point of a miracle is never the miracle in itself. Plenty of hucksters toured about the Middle East claiming to perform wonders. Even the priests of Pharaoh could turn sticks into snakes and water into blood. Jesus’ miracles are more accurately understood as signs pointing to the truth of His identity. And in this sign, this feast, we see Jesus shine through as prophet, as king, and as the God who comes to us in the Eucharist.

Funny how that works, isn’t it? Jesus chooses to reveal the deepest truths about Himself not in flashy displays of power, but in the simplest of things: in bread and fish, in a gathering in the wilderness, in the sharing of a poor man’s meal. This, brothers and sisters, gets to the very heart of Christianity. We call it “Theology of the Cross,” but it deals with much more than the Crucifixion. Theology of the Cross is about God revealing Himself to us where we would last expect to find Him: as a babe in a manger; as a convicted criminal on a Cross; in an empty tomb, in a community of sinners, in a tiny morsel of bread and wine.

This is the abundance that God offers—not unlimited cheeseburgers or fat bank accounts or houses full of stuff that we don’t need. Forget the prosperity preachers who promise winning lotto tickets and magical parking spaces for all the faithful. God’s abundance is not material excess but spiritual overflowing. God’s abundance is the ability to see wonders in the everyday world, to experience simple things as holy, to treat everyone we meet as children of the Most High God formed in His image. God’s abundance is the gift to be thankful for all that we have been given, and the humility to share it as best we can with those in need.

No matter how little we may have—a mustard seed, a measure of yeast, five little loaves and two fish—let us offer it up to Jesus. He will reveal to us the infinite abundance contained in what we already have. And He will free us to use our gifts to feed the world in His Name. Such is the abundance of the Kingdom of God.

In Jesus’ Name. AMEN.