by CCW | 30 July 2017 15:00
It is a good question and one which haunts our age of extreme affluence, on the one hand, and extreme poverty, on the other hand, an age of extremes despite the claims to the reduction of universal poverty overall which may indeed be true but tell that to those in radical need! But the Gospel speaks to another kind of poverty which underlies each and every other form of poverty. It is spiritual poverty, the poverty that belongs to our neglect of God and as a consequence to what God constantly provides for us.
In a way, the Gospel presents to us a fairly common biblical theme, the idea of God feeding his people in the wilderness journey. What is that journey? It is about our life to God and with God in the learning about the will and purpose of our life with God. This Gospel story explicitly recalls the provisions which God makes for his people in the wilderness of Sinai. Tough lessons actually. There is a certain reluctance among the children of the Hebrews to accept the discipline, the learning. The lessons are more intellectual and spiritual, we might say, than simply material.
And therein lies the difficulty. It is the constant temptation to measure the reality of God by way of our immediate material concerns. It is not that they don’t matter; they do. It is just that they are subordinate and depend upon something far more radical. The physical and material world is not nothing but neither is it everything, a point which the teaching of the Law of Moses makes clear as does the Gospel of the Resurrection. It is in the light of those ideas that we best make sense of this Gospel pericope. It recalls Deuteronomy’s claim that “man cannot live by bread alone but by every word which proceeds out of the mouth of God.” That does not deny the need for bread – for food – but it conditions that need by placing it squarely within the providence of God revealed in the Word of God as Law. There can be no bread without the Word of God in creation.
Bread, of course, is an almost universal symbol of what our lives physically depend upon even though bread is something which requires human labour working with the created order. You can’t just go and pick a loaf of bread off a tree. It requires our intense labour in the fields of creation. That already speaks to an aspect of our humanity as being in the image of God. Only so can there be a cooperation, a working with, the order of the created world, a working with the divine purpose for creation and our place within it. There is something profound, I think, in that realization.
The Epistle reading taken from Romans recalls us to “that pattern of teaching” which defines our freedom. What is that freedom? It is our liberation to God at once through the Law but now more fully through redemption in Christ by which as we heard last week we are “dead indeed unto sin but alive unto God through Jesus Christ.” How? Because “the free gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” As Paul indicates this requires something of us, namely as becoming “the servants of God” whose labours seek to produce “fruit unto holiness”, thus bringing out an ethical dimension to our lives and our labour. This too contributes to our understanding of the Gospel story of the miraculous feeding of the four thousand in Mark’s account.
It begins with Jesus’ acknowledgment that “the multitude being very great” have “nothing to eat”. He begins, however, with the strong and powerful word of compassion. “I have compassion on the multitude,” he says, indicating an intention to do something about our lack, our need, our poverty. That provides the lead-in to his working with what little there is – seven loaves. He takes them; he gives thanks; he breaks them; and he gives them to the disciples to set before the people; likewise with a few small fishes. As with other accounts of the Christ’s miraculous feedings of multitudes in the wilderness, there is a further point: there are lots of left-overs!
The sacramental features of the Gospel story are clear but they are equally informed by the theological background of God’s provision of bread via word and deed in the Old Testament accounts of the Exodus. There is a going forth into the wilderness of the world but that is equally about our learning to live from the word and will of God. That is our true freedom and true dignity. In the Christian Gospel, the emphasis is upon God being with us in Jesus Christ. His compassion is the mercy and goodness for us and towards us. God can make something great out of very little; even more, God and God alone makes all things out of nothing, namely, out of the love which wills to create and restore, in short, to recreate. And we are reminded, too, that with God there is always more than what we can desire or deserve – to echo last week’s beautiful collect. These are all lessons which challenge our empirical ways of looking at things. They open us out to a profounder view of our humanity.
In a way, our readings this morning are summed up in the Collect. God is the “Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things.” On the strength of that truth and acknowledgement, there is the prayer not simply and primarily for physical things but for the “graft[ing] in our hearts of the love of thy Name” and for the “increase in us [of] true religion” – these are explicitly spiritual realities, qualities of divine grace in our souls and lives. They speak about our life in and with God, about the bond between our humanity and the Lord God of all creation revealed to us as Trinity. Added to these intentionally spiritual benefits are the further requests to be “nourish[ed] with all goodness” and “by thy great mercy [to be] kept in the same.”
The images are agricultural; they belong to that spiritual understanding of human labour as working with and within the good order of creation. They are the images of grafting, of growth and nurture, of preservation and maintenance. They show us the connection between our everyday lives and our life with God. That is what is primary and the basis upon which all else necessarily proceeds.
They show us the forms of God’s righteousness and mercy as infused into us by way of these agricultural images of growth and development. They remind us of the dynamic of our lives in faith. As such they challenge our static complacencies which belong to the spiritual poverty of our forgetting and ignoring the provisions of God for us without which we not only have nothing but are nothing. The compassion of Christ is set before us to awaken us to his love for us and for one another. Here in this sacrament is the mercy and love of God for us and in us. It is the only satisfaction.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 7, 2017
Christ Church, Windsor & St. George’s, Falmouth
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2017/07/30/sermon-for-the-seventh-sunday-after-trinity-5/
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