Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Text: St. Mark 6:30-44, but especially these words –

And taking the five loaves and the two fish he looked up to heaven and said a blessing and broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples to set before the people. And he divided the two fish among them all. And they all ate and were satisfied. And they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish. And those who ate the loaves were five thousand men.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Dear Friends in Christ Jesus:

Many people today don’t have a place for the word “miracle” in their vocabularies. Words like “competence”, “confidence”, “achievement”, and “certainty” are much more attractive as they describe some of the things people can count on. Miracles suggest the unreal, the uncertain, the irregular, the change, the unnatural – but certainly not that which we can rely on. It’s in this context that we must look at the miracles of Jesus. They seem unbelievable both in what they tell us about God and about ourselves. To the eyes and ears of faith, however, the miracles of Jesus open up new dimensions to the presence and the power of God in Jesus Christ in our lives.

These new dimensions aren’t so much a “doing for” someone – as they are a “participating in” the all-sufficient power of our God. In the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand the disciples participate in the action of our Lord. It was Christ who performed the miracle; it was the crowd that was fed; and it was the disciples who were the instruments of the action and who themselves experienced the sufficiency of their Lord.

Now, miracles occur when the negative intrudes. The beginning of a miracle is always a negative or a bad situation. The people were tired and hungry. In other miracles of Jesus we can also see the negative – the person was blind or lame or deaf or possessed by a demon. On one occasion at Cana in Galilee, a wedding, the people ran out of wine. Participation in miracles always has a negative context. It’s the person healed from a disease – a negative – who calls it a miracle. Given the context of the negative, each and every one of us has plenty of occasions for participating in a miracle. Guilt, failure, a sense of inadequacy, a feeling of uselessness, death, and inevitable disappointments are just a few of the negative intrusions in our lives. But we don’t always see these disruptions as occasions for our participation in God’s action.

Often we feel that our God has abandoned us. On other occasions, negative intrusions bring about only an attitude of despair and hopelessness and for others they’re answered only by being told to “think positively”. The conversation that the disciples had with Jesus suggests that they didn’t see much possibility, they didn’t see a resolution to the negative situation of satisfying thousands of hungry people with very little food available. Our Lord asked His disciples – “How many loaves do you have.” And they responded – “Five, and two fish.” It’s not too difficult to identify with their feelings. The hopelessness of negative intrusions is a common experience. And while not all disruptions are sinful, sin itself is the main negative intrusion as it destroys life, and produces endless despair and inevitable death. However, the message of the cross is, of course, that sin was the occasion for the miracle of Christ’s victory over it.

You see, the reason we’re so easily overwhelmed by the disruptions in our lives is that we have difficulty seeing how our God could be for us and yet permit these things to happen. This problem is as old as human history. It stems from our forgetting God’s goodness in the Genesis account of creation and remembering only man’s rebellion and the despair that resulted from it. The perspective of God’s presence in a negative situation is the message of Holy Scripture. That presence is a creative, redeeming, life-giving presence. 

This is the presence that St. Paul speaks of in his letter to the Christians at Rome – “If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died – more than that, who was raised – who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, ‘For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Our God is the giver of life and there is no escape from Him. The psalmist declares – “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me. If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,’ even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.”

The negative intrusion is not an occasion for wondering – “Where are you, Lord?” but rather, given His presence, asking – “God, what are you saying to me?” When we look at the lives of the Old and New Testament faithful – Abraham, Moses, Amos, Simon Peter, and the apostle Paul, the negative intrusions into their lives opened the way for them to participate in God’s goodness. God is for us! The question is – “Are we able to hear what He is saying?”

It wasn’t necessary to go to the store to buy bread to feed these hungry people. Because the answer was there all the time. That answer was – and is –  Jesus Christ! Jesus is the Word of promise and possibility to the negative intrusions. The fact that bread and fish were used only affirms the way in which God always responds with what’s needed! Our Lord said on another occasion –“Which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”

God’s Word of promise and hope to life’s situation is always Jesus Christ. He brings to us what is really needed. That’s why He came. Jesus said – “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor…Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

The Word of God always speaks to what’s happening to free us from despair, emptiness, and hopelessness – and makes it possible for us to live, to love, and to rejoice in every situation. When the intrusion is guilt, the Word is forgiveness. When the intrusion is hunger, the Word is food. When the intrusion is loneliness, the Word is caring. When the intrusion is death, the Word is life! To the alienated and the oppressed, He is the new beginning.

Jesus Christ is an affirming, renewing, redeeming, restoring Word. He is always present! He is life accepted, the future opened, the present celebrated! And the point of the miracles of Christ is that those who experience the miracle, strengthened in faith, might give witness to the power of God in Jesus Christ. It must have meant a lot to the young boy in St. John’s account of the feeding of the five thousand. It must have meant a lot to Andrew who brought the boy to Jesus. It must have meant a lot to the other disciples as they reflected of our Lord’s response to the negative intrusions of life they shared with Him – the most dramatic of which was the week that ended with Christ’s death on the cross and the tremendous reassurance of God’s power in the resurrection.

That is the recurring miracle of life. This is the message the Christian Church has to proclaim to all the world. The church does its best when it participates, as the disciples did, in the miracle. Sensitive to the human situation, the church must, through Word and Sacraments, affirm again and again God’s presence and power at life’s negative intrusions with a Word that indeed makes all things new. To live in this confidence is to live in hope here and now. But even more than that! For we have been blessed to be a blessing. Each of us is a miracle of our God, His own sons and daughters – eternally. Amen.

The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Amen.