Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity: July 18, 2021 jj
Rev’d Mark B. Stirdivant, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Yucaipa, California
✝ sdg ✝
The Son spoke the Father’s Word, and behold, there was an abundance of food. What a gift it was for Adam and Eve, and their children who would have come from their paradise-surrounded marriage, to eat fruit from any tree in the garden except the one God commanded not to eat. All that easily available fruit bore testimony to His desire for His human and animal creatures to possess and enjoy life in its fulness. There was, to be sure, not a need that the gracious Lord did not fulfill. They shall not want, for the Lord was their Shepherd from day one. There was water a plenty on this elevated site, enough water even to divide into four great rivers that flowed downstream to spread Eden’s lush wealth with the rest of the created land. It was so perfect that the only way we can understand it is to say what Eden didn’t have: no lack, no limitation, no sin, no lawlessness, no violence; in short, no death.
Then Satan spoke his snake-like voice, and his lies introduced doubt into Eve and also into Adam. God does not want you to be fully satisfied! He’s not interested in providing for you! You need to provide for yourself. You need to become like God, knowing good and evil, or else you will not be happy! You may be eating all this fruit and feeling full in your belly, but the Lord is starving you of what will truly give you a fulfilling life. Satan’s big lie brought forth the wages of sin, which is death. Ever since, death has cast its dark pall over God’s perfect world, and death has its unmistakable markers: lack, limitation, unfairness, violence, suffering. Every time we eat our daily bread, we are reminded that that bread came to us at the cost of our toil, our feverish, thorn-cursed working against death the inevitable.
A crowd had gathered to hear Jesus preach in the desert wilderness. It was about the farthest thing from Eden that the mind can imagine. Water was scarce, food would be inaccessible. If there were any trees there would hardly be enough fruit to pick for a multitude of four thousand to share even a nibble. They had been with the Lord for three days, hearing the Son speak the Word of the Father, and life had enveloped them in a way they had never experienced before. Many of them scarcely noticed it at first, but soon all present would come aware of the presence of death. There is a lack of food. This is a desolate place, as Jesus Himself observed, and many people of the crowd are far from their homes, or even the closest McDonalds.
The Good Shepherd feels compassion for His sheep. The Biblical word actually describes our Lord’s insides twisting in pain-filled concern for their health and well-being. How much more so was He caring also for their souls! God felt literal pain in His stomach for people who might not make it back home in time to eat and fill their stomachs. They might faint along the way. That would not be the Creator’s fault. God had created the world so that people would not faint from lack of food. He created food in abundance, but sin on the part of deceived mankind took that abundance away. Yet instead of throwing up His hands in disgust over what we did to ruin His perfect world, Jesus felt compassion deep down in His guts, and it is that compassion that led Him, even compelled Him to take the next step.
Jesus called His disciples to Him, and spoke to them about His compassion for the crowd. He told His traveling companions and students that He did not intend to send them away empty. What makes this even more complicated is that this very situation had already happened before. With a larger crowd of 5000, Jesus spoke the Word of blessing, and there was miraculously an abundance of food that multiplied from five bread loaves and two fish. Now there are seven loaves, some more fish, and just a gathering of 4000, and the disciples still reacted to Him as though they had not been walking around all this time with the True Son of God living and breathing in human flesh! All the disciples could see were the great number of people, the little amount of food, and the worthless wilderness that surrounded them with death.
“Have the people sit down,” so says the Good Shepherd. He was speaking as though the crowd were a flock of sheep settling down in peace for their feeding. Just as He did before, He took the bread, gave thanks to the Father the Creator of heaven and earth and all good things, and He broke apart and gave the food to the disciples to give to the people. You’d think by this point a disciple or two would have remembered the feeding of the 5000, and then would have predicted what would have happened next. The Son spoke the Father’s Word, and behold there was an abundance of food. It didn’t look like Eden’s trees sprouting forth from the ground and bearing fruit for the people to eat, but it was still God’s abundance that satisfied the stomachs and kindled the fires of faith in those who looked to Jesus as their one hope and trust. These new believers would soon find out that Jesus came not just to give them one memorable meal, but to continue feeding their souls unto everlasting life. He came to set them free from the bondage of death, lack, and limitation. They had no reason to fear, even if they themselves had grossly disobeyed God.
The abundance yielded more than enough food, more than the crowd could eat, plus the seven basketfuls of food left over. One basket for each day of creation, plus the one day of rest and worship, the day that crowns each week and reminds us that God is our provider for everything. It drives home the point to us even to this very day that our Lord wants us to hear this great miracle for our benefit. It would be one thing for us to rejoice that God did great things for some other people, some other time, in some far away other place. Instead, we have the opportunity today to give thanks to the Father, standing alongside with Jesus, and to receive this same abundance today—this time not a simple meal of bread and fish, but the true, full abundance of our Creator, granted us by faith in Christ His Son.
That same compassion Jesus felt for the hungry people, He felt in His own stomach also for you, His precious lamb. He did not want you to go home faint or with anything to lack, but instead He desires to fill you here today with His most precious gifts of forgiveness, of life everlasting, of salvation from everything that death has brought into this world. Jesus was moved by this very same gut-wrenching compassion to die the death that would destroy death, that would achieve a full reconciliation between you and your Father. On the third day, Jesus rose from the dead to crush Satan and his evil lie. He guaranteed this return of abundance of life, and it envelops you with a forgiveness and a fulfillment to your life that you had never experienced before. At your baptism, Jesus clothed you with the white robe of sinless perfection and the Father blessed you and called you His beloved child. That’s partly why I wear a white robe in church, to picture for you how God now sees you with your wages of sin paid in full in your place.
For the time being, you still need to eat your daily bread with the curse of death still attached to it. You will get hungry again. You will suffer disease and lack and limitations, and violence, and unfairness. You may faint from exhaustion as you make your way closer and closer to your heavenly home. There are days when all you can sense around you are the fearful signs of death, just like the disciples could only see that which made their situation seem impossible. But do not fear, for your Good Shepherd has you today sit down, you may even kneel at His holy table if you like. Soon you will hear again His blessed words of thanksgiving, and another miracle will take place. Bread, which ordinarily reminds us of our hunger, toil and eventual death, this bread is linked up with Jesus’ own Word and it becomes for you instead a life-giving bread! His servant the pastor serves you straight from the Lord, just like the disciples served the 4000. The true Body and Blood of Christ is given you to eat and drink for your forgiveness and everlasting life. We need not merely rejoice that Jesus did great things for a far-removed crowd so long ago. Our Creator’s great abundance is restored to you this day, and for the rest of your life as you hold fast to His Word of promise, and not sway your attention to the alluring, yet passing away things of this world.
What a great and abundant blessing is here for you, for your children, for your friends and loved ones, indeed for all whom Our Lord chooses to gather here in His presence! Nothing that helps you is withheld. Only that which will harm you is to be avoided. This may be the farthest thing from the hilltop garden of Eden, with rivers flowing down in a wealth of trees and fruit. But here you have all you need to testify to your Creator’s sincere desire not to starve you, but fill you with good things, and satisfy your soul to eternal life. Our church season’s color of green bears witness to that Eden-like growth that is taking place in your heart as you join your faithful parents Adam and Eve in worship of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. There is not a need you have that your Lord has not answered and fulfilled by what Jesus has done for you. He has been your Shepherd from day one. The death you feel and sense about you will not be around much longer. Soon, well-fed and nourished by the Word of God, you will arrive home.
In the Name of the Father and of the ✝ Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Readings:
Gen. 2:7–17 and the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground
Psalm 33:1–11 The counsel of the LORD stands forever
Rom. 6:19–23 but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Mark 8:1–9 He took seven loaves and gave thanks … seven large baskets