2 Samuel 11:1-15
Psalm 14
Ephesians 3:14-21
John 6:1-21

Introduction

The loaves and fishes story in this morning's Gospel is one of the most familiar. Who hasn't heard about the boy whose lunch saved the day for a crowd of thousands? It was tempting to focus instead on the sex and violence of this morning's Old Testament lesson. But the loaves and fishes kept drawing me back. Who were the people that this story was first important to? Why did they tell it over and over? And what does it have for those of us who listen today?

1. Who were the people who first told this story?

Answering the first question plunged me back into the world of the first century. I found myself in the year 100 AD, a time when the New Testament was still being created, 70 years after the crucifixion of Christ, 35 years after the martyrdom of Paul. I found myself in a town called Ephesus, whose ruins can be visited in Turkey today. It was at that time and in that place where the Gospel of St. John first appeared.

Imagine that you are a typical Christian at Ephesus in the year 100. You speak Greek. You are a Gentile. You are about 25 or 30 years old. Life expectancy is low, so older people are rare. Time has passed and memories are precious.. You have heard stories about Jerusalem, a long journey to the south, but Jerusalem has been just a pile of rubble for 30 years, since the Romans destroyed it in the year 70. You hear in church about the great leaders of the early church--but they have been dead for a generation. James, brother of Jesus was martyred in 62 AD; Peter and Paul also were martyred in the 60's.

And so when you join the congregation for worship in the year 100, you expect two things--a time to listen to the gospel stories and hear preaching about them, and then a time to act out the work of Christ through the actions of the Communion service.

Today, is a special day, for many of the Gospel stories that have been told again and again here in Ephesus have been collected together in a new scroll about the life of Christ, which has been named in honor of St. John.

Perhaps on this special day the story of the loaves and fishes is read from the new Gospel. People are familiar with it already from Mark's work which was first written down in Rome almost 30 years ago, just after Jerusalem was destroyed, but now some new twists appear that delight the congregation.

The new story explains things to Gentiles--telling us that the Passover is a festival of the Jews. That's important information to a congregation like that in Ephesus, where many Christians have had no familiarity with Judaism.

The new story is more personal. Mark's mentions no-one by name, but the new account mentions the disciple Philip.

The new story is clearly a communion story. Not only does Jesus take bread, bless it, break it, and then share it with all, but it goes farther. It compares the bread Christ brings to the the manna, or "bread from heaven,: of Moses' days in the wilderness, and then, by the end of the chapter, Jesus himself says, "I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh."

2. Why were the stories told?

As I prepared for today, I wondered, "Why did these stories get told over and over again?

And as I wondered, I was reading something that seemed completely unrelated to stories about loaves and fishes. In September I'll be leading a workshop session on "Biblical Perspectives on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder." To prepare, I was reading a book on the psychological cost of learning to kill. The author gives some good news--and bad. The good news is that human beings have a strong innate resistance to killing their own kind. In World War II, only 15-20% of combat infantry were willing to fire their rifles. The bad news is that training can overcome this resistance. As we got better at it, 50% were willing to fire weapons in Korea, and by the time of Vietnam, the figure had reached 90%. Our basic training has gotten more and more effective. More soldiers will kill. They are carefully taught.

Basic training. Carefully taught. I remembered the famous lyrics from the musical, South Pacific and went to the basement and found them:

You've got to be taught to hate and fear,
You've got to be taught from year to year
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear.
You have to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
of people whose eyes are oddly made
and people whose skin is a different shade:
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late
before you are six, or seven, or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught.

And then it hit me what the church at Ephesus was doing and all the other early Christian churches were doing, in the midst of the brutality of the Roman Empire, in the midst of ignorance and hatred and hopelessness, telling the stories and celebrating the Lord's Supper over and over again. In effect they were saying, "you can do your basic training for death, but we will do basic training for life."

3. What have they for us today?

And that answers what they have for us today. The loaves and fishes story is more than a cute little story about a boy who remembered his lunch. It is part of a training curriculum for life. Acted out in communion, the story is a training event in which we repeat the actions of the multitudes who were with Jesus that day in Galilee -- coming close and being fed, bringing a little, receving a lot, and in the process being trained in three critical aspects of the Christian life: seeking, sharing, and seeing.

a. Seeking

The loaves and fishes story first of all is basic training in where to seek life. It brings Jesus' message that power for living is found in the presence of other people.

Jesus' faith was one that emphasized other people. In Luke, Jesus sends his followers out, two by two, and commands them to carry neither purse, nor bag, nor sandals. Professor John Dominic Crossan of DePaul University points out that another group, called the Cynics, also sent out misionaries in the time of Christ. They were specifically told to carry a knapsack with them because they emphasized self-sufficiency. Jesus, by contrast, emphasized communal dependency. If you didn't carry a purse, or bag, or sandals, then you had to depend on others to provide for you. You can be a Cynic alone, but you cannot be a Christian by yourself.

The Christian basic training flies in the face of all that's been written about finding God best in a beautiful sunset or the stillness of a mountain peak--not that God is missing from here, but these are not the places you will find the bread of heaven or the cup of salvation. We look out at other human beings and we sometimes see petty, backbiting people, we see hypocrites, we see people with all their warts and infirmities, and turn away in disgust, only to hear Jesus tell us, as he told the unfaithful ones in Matthew 25, "even as you failed to give water or food or clothing to the least of these my brethren, you failed to do it to me."

The communion service teaches us that if we would seek life, we must come together with other people.

b. Sharing

Acting out the story of the loaves and fishes again and again is not only basic training in seeking, but in sharing.

Some sharing is easy--little things that don't matter much, occasional things that won't recur. If you ask me for $20 I'd be likely to give it to you--but less so when you ask me for another $20 next Sunday. After all, I need to keep some for my own obligations. But in this morning's Gospel, none of the loaves or fishes are held back.

The church at Ephesus didn't want to hear that, and we don't really like it either. If you read the story in Mark, it permits the idea that the 5000 got fed because the disciples started a chain reaction of sharing among others. This morning's story that the Ephesus congregation honored John with is more palatable. It asks us less to count on other people and more to count on Jesus, although it is still one boy's lunch that is shared so we can be fed.

Sharing asks a lot of us, but if you do it in a big way, it also threatens the power structure. In Jesus' time, hunger was a form of political oppression. Professor Crosson writes of how the two oppressed classes in Palestine were the peasants, who at least had land, and the artisans, including carpenters like Jesus, who didn't even have that. A Roman strategy for keeping control was to keep people hungry and suspicious of each other, keep them individual and isolated. When Jesus gathers a crowd of 5000 men, plus women and children, that's enough to make the Romans nervous; when he teaches them to share and organizes them to pass the baskets so that all are fed, it's practically an act of insurrection. This is the kind of thing that upsets the Romans--and leads to crucifixion.

But it is also the sort of thing that leads to life. People end up being fed. They end up sharing the resources that they have. They end up not needing handouts from the Romans. They end up confident of their own power in a new way. And so in our Christian basic training, our Communion service starts with the offering. If we don't share, the rest won't happen, just as if the five loaves and two fishes hadn't been there for a start, the rest of the story wouldn't have happened. As we come to Church Sunday after Sunday, we practice sharing again and again, until it becomes second nature.

c. Seeing

Thirdly, whenever we celebrate Communion, we are getting basic training in seeing.

We live in an age of secularism which insists that what you see is what you get, and there's nothing more. We live in an age of militarism that trains us to see less than we're looking at--so that we can kill it.

In the face of this, the Biblical message is as important now as it ever was: there is more out there than you can see, and if you settle for only what you can look at, you're selling yourself short.

You're selling yourself short if you look at a baby and don't see a miracle. You're selling yourself short if you look at flowers and bees and aren't in some kind of awe at what it could possibly be that had all this come together. You're selling yourself short if you look out at the wonderful diversity and inclusiveness of our congregation here at Christ Church and see only something that kind of happened rather than a Spiritual entity pulling us together to make of us His body. You can look at the newspaper if you want to and see the news simply as "one damned thing after another," but you're selling yourself short if you don't struggle to see where and how the Kingdom of Heaven is struggling to break into our lives and our world.

Basic training teaches soldiers to kill by training them to see less than they're looking at -- to look at a human being and see only an enemy. It is precisely here that our faith is a force for life by training the opposite -- we are to see more than we're looking at -- to look at a human being and see Jesus Christ.

Communion gives us specific training in seeing more than we look at. Every Sunday we rehearse seeing bread and wine on the altar and praying that it may become the body of and blood of Christ--as we become for the world the body of Christ, redeemed by his blood. Our secular world tells us that that sort of talk is a problem, but our faith and experience tells us that it is a solution. Whenever we train ourselves to see more than we look at, we are opening ourselves to the world of feeling, the world of commitment, the world of spirit, the world of God.

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