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Abundance in Relationship to God

The Rev. Thomas W. Simmons

One thing I love about the children’s homily is the opportunity to preach two different sermons. I typically like to make just one point in a sermon, so preaching two lets me bring out other points from the lectionary readings.

But today Baptism replaces the children’s homily, so I guess I’ll just have to go ahead and preach my two sermons right now.  Call it two for one day!

In Jesus’ feeding of the multitude we are confronted by an unabashed miracle witnessed by thousands of people. Now I know that it kind of blows the doors off of the modern worldview, which is too small to accommodate such things, but Jesus miraculously multiplied the paltry resources of the disciples to provide this unique dining experience for over 5000 people. 

And the surprising thing about it is that Jesus does this kind of thing with regularity. He is the Lord of small beginnings and unseen potential brought to bloom. We saw it in the parables last week.  He starts with a little mustard seed and grows a great tree.  He starts with a little yeast and raises a whole loaf. 

He starts with little ole’ you and me and builds Christians for service.  He builds us together to create a church, a community of people made in his image, living abundantly together for all eternity. This church we worship in today started as a bible study in someone’s house a hundred years ago. And look what we have become!  I wonder where we will be a hundred years from now.

So here are Jesus, the disciples and this enormous crowd.  The disciples were practical men. They look at their watch and do the math. “It’s too late.  There’re too many people. There’s not enough food. Send them away, Jesus. We can’t give them what we don’t have.” 

But the Lord doesn’t see it that way.  He sees unseen potential in these small beginnings. He takes the little that the disciples have – five loaves and two fish – and multiplies them…and multiplies them…multiplies them. 

Remember that when you think of the relative scarcity of your own personal resources.  Do you feel inadequate? When you do the math do you come up way far short of where you wish you were, of where you need to be, or where God is calling you to be?

Well, Jesus wants to do something about that.  He likes to start small and he has great ambitions for what you will become and accomplish, in both your personal life and ministry and in our corporate life here at St Pete’s.

When you do the math always include Jesus’ miraculous abundance into the equation.  Pick any area of scarcity. The promise of the Gospel is that if we will give to Jesus the little we have he will multiply it. In the end we will have more left over than we started out with.

That means we can invest ahead of our growth, confident that he will cause the ground to rise beneath our stride. We just need to try it to see. Trust him and you’ll see.  This is God’s abundant abundance.  He can do “exceedingly abundantly beyond all that we can ask or imagine through his power working in us.” AMEN

All right, that’s the end of the first sermon. Now we’re on to number two.  In our Epistle reading, which completes our series in Romans chapter eight, Paul assures us of our relationship with God.  He emphatically declares that we can never be separated from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. 

And that is very good news, because separation from God is one of the most fundamental issues of human existence. You see, God made us in his image to be with him, to love and enjoy him, to be one with God and participate with God in the full range of his activity. 

And yet we don’t experience that, do we? Instead of enjoying God people feel deeply ambivalent about God on a deep, often subconscious level. It’s part of our psychology.

On the one hand we long for divine love and are powerfully attracted to God. St Augustine expressed it so aptly from his own struggle. He said, “O God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.”

You see that restlessness in the crowds following Jesus in our Gospel. They don’t want to let him out of their sight.  They’re after something that Jesus has.  They want to be near him for his teaching, for his healing, for the hope and meaning he gives them – and for dinner.  Everyone knows, at many points in their life, that they need God. That’s why there are no atheists if foxholes – or collapsed mines. 

That’s on the one hand.  On the other hand we want to keep God at arm’s length. We feel repelled by God and insist on preserving our independence from him. There are things we find incomprehensible and distasteful about God and we are apt to blame him for our problems.  It’s like he just wants to limit us, like some Cosmic Killjoy. 

We see that same resistance in our Old Testament lesson. Israel is gathered at Mt Sinai, waiting for Moses to come down with the Law. The people are fed up with God.  They want their old gods back and they want to return to the familiar life of Egypt. They don’t want the Law and they don’t want to have to trust and obey this seemingly harsh and mysterious God.  And there’s something in all of us that agrees!

I know I did!  I remember as an atheist shaking my fist in the air saying, “God you’ll never get me.” Call it the atheist’s prayer.  Well he did get me, but it wasn’t without a struggle. On the one hand I desperately longed for true love, for the power to change, for meaning and transcendence to help me “locate myself” in a chaotic world. But on the other hand I resisted submitting my thoughts, feelings and choices to God. 

But God helps us break out of this frustrating dynamic.  He gives us Jesus who brings us to God, converting our hearts, helping us see things in a whole new way, helping us to love him. And what sweet surrender it is!

Jesus says “come to me…”   And we come to him in Baptism, as little Joe Burden will in just a few minutes, renouncing everything that competes with God for our affections. We turn to Jesus and put our whole trust in him.  We surrender to him and love him as Savior and obey him as Lord. 

In Baptism a relationship is established with God. It’s a covenant, in which God pledges himself to us and we to him. This covenant is unbreakable and inviolable. We cannot be separated from God. 

And then to prove it Jesus feeds us as he fed the multitudes.  In our Gospel lesson Jesus takes bread, blesses, breaks and distributes it, like he did in the Upper Room on the night he was handed over to suffering and death.

At this altar he feeds us bread and wine, which are his body and blood.  In a few minutes I will take, bless, break and distribute this meal to each of you. You will come forward to receive it and as you eat the bread and drink the wine, the body and blood of Jesus become part of your body and blood.  We are one with him and one with each other in a bond that cannot be broken.

And “I am convinced 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.” Praise the Lord! AMEN.