All Saints’, Dorval
July 28, 2024
The worship space at the National Worship Conference.
As you probably know, I just came back from three weeks of vacation, and a fourth week in which I attended the National Worship Conference in Regina. The conference was an incredibly rich time; it ran from Thursday to Sunday, and on Sunday morning at the closing worship service my overwhelming feeling was, “wait, this is over? I was just getting started!”
The theme of the conference was “Stones Cry Out: Praying with the Land” and the focus was on decolonization and on worship that embraced and celebrated voices from the margins. Among many other moving moments, we were able to participate in a smudging ceremony, handshake ceremony, and round dance led by Cree elder Lorna Standingready, and we witnessed the Gospel read in a language into which it has not yet been translated – Ngumba, spoken in Cameroon – by a Lutheran bishop-elect who is currently engaged in creating that first translation.
During one of the sessions, we were invited to engage in scriptural reflection and the passage chosen was today’s Gospel, from the sixth chapter of John. (Whether this was deliberate on the part of the leader, to get us all starting to think about our sermons for the following weekend, I don’t know, but I have my suspicions.)
It was typical of the conference that we had barely scratched the surface of the richness of this passage before we had to return to the keynote speaker, so I’m grateful to have the chance to delve deeper into it and pick up some of the threads that I had started to tease out during that session!
(And if your brain got stuck on the soap opera of David and Bathsheba, fear not, we’ll get back to that next week.)
This story of the feeding of the 5,000 is one of a very few episodes in the life of Jesus that appear in all four gospels. And it initiates a period of five weeks in this late summer season in which we will be hearing a great deal from Jesus about bread. So we’ll have plenty of time to delve into the details of the sixth chapter of John, beyond this morning. Today, I just want to go through this story in order and look at some of the things that jumped out at me as I read it at the conference and re-read it this week.
First of all, the crowds don’t follow Jesus because they want to be fed; they follow him “because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick.” And frankly, Jesus doesn’t seem to be particularly enthusiastic about engaging with the crowd. He goes up a mountain and sits down there “with his disciples” – this certainly sounds like he’s trying to get some time away from the crowds to teach the people he’s actually chosen as his closest followers. But no luck – he looks up and sees “a large crowd coming toward him”.
When Matthew, Mark and Luke tell this story, they describe Jesus teaching the crowds for a whole day and only then the disciples coming to him and wondering how they’re going to feed everyone so that they don’t keel over from hunger on the walk home. But in John, Jesus brings it up himself, before the crowds have even fully arrived; he asks Philip, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” And even that he does only to “test” Philip, because “he himself knew what he was going to do.” This is the Jesus of John – omniscient, fully in control, always a step ahead of everyone else, knowing not only exactly what he’s going to do but how he’s going to interpret and present it. There is no day-long teaching in John’s account: the entire point of this crowd coming together on the top of the mountain at the Passover is precisely so they can be fed, and the feeding is generally understood by scholars to be the fourth of seven “signs” of Jesus’ divinity that he gives in the first half of this gospel.
Accordingly, Andrew immediately produces the boy with the lunch basket, and the disciples follow Jesus’ direction to have the people sit down (which I have to imagine was a lot more chaotic, and took a lot longer, than the text acknowledges!).
At the conference, my brain got stuck on the seemingly unimportant detail that “there was a great deal of grass in the place, so they sat down, about five thousand in all.” Would they not have been able to sit down if there hadn’t been grass? As the conference leaders pointed out during the discussion of this passage, the territory around the Sea of Galilee is arid and rocky; there isn’t a lot of grass. One of the questions we were given for engaging with the text was “what is the miracle here?” and some people wondered whether it was the presence of such an expanse of actual living plants! In this story of being fed in abundance, the abundance of enough grass for five thousand people to sit on is a detail that reinforces the overall theme.
The title of the conference, remember, was “Stones Cry Out” and many of the presentations and conversations over the three days returned to that motif, and to Jesus’ statements elsewhere in the Gospels that if his disciples were silent, the very stones would cry out in praise to God. It makes me wonder what would have been different about this story if the people had had to sit on stones. It’s hard to imagine that the miracle somehow wouldn’t have worked if there hadn’t been grass. And yet there’s more than an echo here of Jesus’ refusal to turn stones into bread when he was tempted in the desert, because he wanted to keep the focus on God and not on the showiness of the miracle.
In fact, after their stomachs are full, the crowds react exactly the way that Jesus doesn’t want them to: they acclaim him as “the prophet who is to come into the world” and then they try “to come and take him by force to make him king.” (The logical leap from “prophet” – usually a countercultural figure who criticizes authority – to “king”, is impressive.)
Somehow, Jesus manages to avoid the crowd and “withdr[a]w again to the mountain by himself,” while the disciples set off in a boat across the Sea of Galilee. And we get an abbreviated version of the story of Jesus walking on the water (which is the fifth of those seven signs of Jesus’ divinity I mentioned a minute ago). The passage then concludes on an even more peculiar note with the implication that Jesus somehow morphed the boat directly from the exact middle of the eight-mile-wide lake to land it on the opposite shore.
Having spent my vacation sailing with Dave Robinson aboard his 30-foot sailboat, Dragonfly, the navigational details of this passage hit me with a great deal more force than usual. The three weeks of our trip from Gaspé to Charlottetown were plagued with winds that were either contrary, nonexistent, or bordering on gale force. We got very, very sick of the noise of the engine, but without that engine we would have had no way of getting where we needed to go. I have a deep sense of solidarity with the disciples, rowing four miles (and with every expectation of having to row another four more) in a sea that was “rough because a strong wind was blowing,” probably with the waves slopping water into the open boat, in the middle of the night. The Sea of Galilee is notorious for the storms that can blow up out of nowhere, and they were probably on edge the whole time about whether nasty, exhausting weather would become life-threatening weather at a moment’s notice. I can only imagine their terror when Jesus materialized next to them, and then their relief when “immediately the boat reached the land” and they were able to collapse.
A lot is going on in this passage. Each of the things I’ve noted could probably be a sermon in itself. And I will be returning to this story in the coming weeks, as we hear four more passages from this very long sixth chapter of John and as Jesus unpacks at length this sign of the feeding of the multitude.
But what I want you to remember is how as soon as you scratch the surface of this passage – and most biblical stories, to be honest, but this one in particular – you get to connections with two things: the land – God’s creation, the winds and waves and grass and stones – and your own experience. In this sermon, I’ve talked about my experience, but I’m sure you have your own that would be echoed in it if we were having a Bible study discussion. And those were two essential elements in our conversations about worship at the conference: what it means to “pray with the land”, and how we can bring in the experiences of everyone, not just white, cisheterosexual, able-bodied, middle-class people, into the worship services that we plan and lead.
Jesus heals us, feeds us, and shows up in our most terrifying moments. And if we were silent, the very stones would cry out.
Stay tuned for more.
Amen.
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