For the last eight weeks we have heard from the Gospel of Mark because along with many other denominations like the Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, 

we follow a common lectionary where we read through major portions of the Bible every three years.

Since Mark is the shortest of the four Gospels, John is used to supplement Mark, so until the last Sunday in August, we will hear from John.

All four Gospels have the miracle of the feeding the Five Thousand.

If we were to take out our Bibles and look at the four accounts of this story, we would find some differences and those differences would again remind us that we are dealing here not with world history but with what theologians, using the German word, call “Heilsgeschickte” or salvation history.

The Story of God’s Love for Us… This book is a collection of love letters from God. Like all lovers there are quarrels, reconciliations, letters of disappointment and letters of passion, hope, frustration and even poetry, songs and of course letters …

Our story picks up with these words “After this, Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee.” So once again Jesus is back on home turf, among his own people. 

As in the Gospel of Mark, we are told, “large crowds kept following him…”

John tells us that the reasons they followed him and that the crowds continued to get bigger by the day was that “they saw the signs he was doing for the sick.

They needed a rest, so Jesus took his disciples up the mountain on a sort of campout --what we would call a spiritual retreat. We are also told that the time was close to one of the greatest of all Jewish festivals– the Passover. But it was not to be.

Jesus asks Philip, Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?

He asks for the same reason I ask locals where the good eating-places are. This story takes pace in Philip's backyard so to speak.

But we learn that Jesus had another reason. He wanted to test Philip to see what he was going to do. I’m reminded of another time in this Gospel where we are told that Jesus and his disciples were together at a public event …it was at a wedding. It was his mother who asks Jesus to do something about the wine that is running out.

She wasn’t testing Jesus, she was just being his mother. Like any mother who knows that a son or daughter has a gift and that the gift can alleviate a need…she tells him to do something, and like most progeny he says “oh, mom…”

But then he does it. He does it so well that some complained that those throwing the party had held back the good stuff till last.

So today we have Jesus testing Philip and Andrew. Philip reminds Jesus that it would take six months of good fishing to earn enough money to throw a fish fry for all these people. Andrew, overhearing the conversation between Jesus and Philip, suggests that all he has been able to find is a kid with five loaves and two fish… but there is that proverbial “but”…

I’d like to help but. I’d like to be on your committee to visit but…” I’d like to join the choir but… but we don’t have one. So it goes.

At that point Jesus had enough. He takes command. “Make the people sit down.”

They do as they are told… “Jesus takes the loaves and “when he had given thanks… he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted.”

The Gk. word for giving thanks is Euxaristesas …from which we get Eucharist, i.e. Thanksgiving.

John has taken this event in the life of Jesus and has rewritten it as a sacramental moment where everyone present is included in a meal for which Jesus gives thanks and after everyone has eaten and had their fill, the leftovers fill up twelve baskets.

I’m reminded of a hymn that we sing as an offertory “Gather the hopes and dreams of all; unite them with the prayers we offer. Grace our table with your presence and give us a foretaste of the feast to come.” When God does things, he is extravagant almost to the point of recklessness. Not guilt like my dad, who used to make us eat everything on our plate… reminding us that the little children in Africa were starving. He did not want anything to go to waste.

God is extravagant. As is said in other places in scripture He makes the rain fall on the just and unjust alike. Or, as one of our old hymns puts it greater good because of evil, larger mercy through the fall.

It was raining last Tues. when I shared this scripture with the folks at the rest home a/k/a Ocean View Manor, and I told them that rain is  what this miracle is about.

When it rains, God reminds us that it rains on all of us. The good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful--everybody gets wet unless they carry an umbrella… and they laughed. 

But it is true…rain is a wonderful metaphor of Grace.

I think John who wrote this Gospel wanted us to know that God’s signs, as he puts it, are all over the place… two fish and five loaves, a grassy hillside, 5000 people, and Jesus. John tells us it was close to the time of the Passover.

Passover is THE festival of Jewish identity. While we might rock to a Christmas tune by the Mannheim Steam Rollers or us older folk to Irving Berlin’s “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas. Passover People would be dancing the Seder Songs… Havana Have … some are silly like the ones we sing at Christmas, others are deeply spiritual.

So when they see what Jesus did, not just mass healings but this picnic on a Galilean hillside… they began to say, this is it… He’s the one!  “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world. When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.  And once again Jesus has to high-tail it out of there while the disciples left by boat. Then they have an encounter in the dark of night as Jesus catches up to them. While they row across, he walks across. 

That is the Good News as John tells it in his retelling of the feeding of the Five Thousand. As I see it, the blessing is Jesus taking what is given freely by a lad who thought he was going have just enough for himself until Andrew, the little brother of Peter, spots him and the rest is history.

Whatever we bring to Jesus, however insignificant, becomes a sign of God’s power and compassion.

Preacher Fred Craddock tells about being stranded in Winnipeg, Canada, when a freak early fall snowstorm dumped three feet of snow on the unprepared city, shutting everything down for a day.  That morning, Craddock with only a windbreaker and a baseball cap to keep him warm, struggled to a diner where all they had to offer the patrons who found their way in was some pretty unappetizing soup. Craddock was toying with his bowl of soup when a woman came in and sat at the counter.  When the owner took her order, all she asked for was a glass of water.  He refused to give it to her and insisted that she order something.  She whispered that she had no money, but really needed a glass of water.  He insisted that space in his diner was for paying customers. Their argument was loud enough that everyone knew what was going on.

Finally the owner ordered her to leave. And when she got up to go, the other customers, one by one, also got up and headed for the door. The owner relented, and even dished up a bowl of soup for the woman.  When everybody was seated again, Craddock says, he returned to his own bowl of soup. 

Now, suddenly the soup that hadn’t seemed very interesting at first was warm and inviting and nourishing.  It even, said Craddock in his preacherly way, tasted a little like bread and wine.

Did Jesus really feed five thousand people on a hillside two thousand years ago in a far away place? And that walking on water bit…“c'mon preacher, you don’t expect me to believe that?”

No I don’t, it really doesn’t matter if you believe it or not, any more than whether you believe that the earth moves around the sun or that this universe is made of atoms that are made up of even smaller particles.  Or if you believe that you matter in this infinite universe – you matter a lot. Amen.