This was the last of three sermons I preached last summer, all offered at the same congregation while their pastor was away.  The texts were based on Proper 23, Year B, and can be found here. The texts include 2 Kings 4:42-44, which tells of Elisha feeding 100 people with little food; Psalm 145:10-19, which tells of God’s constancy; Ephesians 3:14-21, which tells of the fullness of Christ’s love and abundant power; and John 6:1-21, which offers the story of Jesus walking on the water after feeding the multitudes.

It contains the final summary of faith terms and claims which ground our calling and our capacity to preach and teach about justice, systemic change, and yes, even politics.

Perhaps the notions in this sermon as well may be helpful to those called to preach tomorrow’s texts, considering last week’s election, tonight’s anniversary of Kristallnacht, and the theme of scarcity both in the passages slated for tomorrow, and in the fears within our country now.

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Grace to you and peace from our risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Siblings in Christ, it has been such a pleasure to be here with you for lo these three weeks.

I am so honored to have had the opportunity to worship with you, and to offer you the Word while your mighty and righteous Pastor has been away. Sincere thank you.

Because in my vocation I am not yoked to a specific church, but rather to a specific call to serve the wider church, through fairly regular supply preaching I have the super cool chance to see little congregational quirks that I otherwise wouldn’t.

So, for example, when I preach and preside at Emmanuel Lutheran in Two Harbors, they have this sweet ritual after Holy Communion—never seen it done before—in which after the Eucharist has been offered, those who served it return the elements to the table, and then they gather in a circle before the altar, and they hold hands, and they offer this gentle prayer of thanksgiving for the opportunity to have shared the bread and the wine with God’s people. It is one of the most tender sincere organic traditions I have ever beheld in a worship service.

So I love this rare experience of noticing what different gatherings of God hold dear as a way to honor God and deepen their faith In their context

You, too, have one that I caught on the very first Sunday here.

Typically, at the close of a service, the pastor or assisting minister will say something like, “Go in peace, serve the Lord,” and the congregation will respond “Thanks be to God.” And it’s right and good, and reminiscent of the benediction I have sometimes seen in a sanctuary hanging over the exit door: Worship has ended. Let the service begin. Also, right and good.

But here, you are accustomed to a different blessing.  Here, the pastor says “Go in peace. You are the body of Christ.”

You are the body of Christ.

It’s so lovely.

You are sent out to be Jesus.

Fed with Jesus, you become Jesus to feed other people.

These last two Sundays, I have given you some faith vocab I cherish: words and concepts that especially inform my theology and therefore my preaching and way of life. All of them, in one way or another, flow together to culminate in the single focus word of this Sunday.  So a quick review:

There are a zillion different ways to think about God and one’s Christian faith. Some, frankly, are more faithfully rooted than others, though none has it all right and you should be wary of those who say they do. Among the frameworks most consonant with orthodox Christianity, and the one with which I resonate most deeply, is the system of faith that begins its thinking about God with Easter, with the news that Jesus is risen. The Greek word that we translate as ‘gospel’ is most literally translated as ‘Good News.” News is an event, something that happens that makes a difference or has an impact on our lives. Jesus resurrection is an event which we, 2000 years later, assert still affects our lives. In contrast to bad news, it offers Good News, and at its essence it’s this: death no longer wins. Death, in any form, does not have the last word. Death manifests in, of course, the expiration of breath, but it also shows forth in our lives by way of regret, loneliness, loss, addiction, brokenness, hate, and fear, and also broader deaths that occur in our acquiescence or acceptance of unjust systems.

Sometimes these forms of death do deserve a word: grief and lament and even anger can be holy, for example. Sometimes fear, for example, is legit—look at our Gospel text for this morning! Sheesh!  A storm and someone who looks for all the world like an apparition over the waters in the night? But what did Jesus say? I’ll tell you what he didn’t say: “There’s nothing to be afraid of.” There are so many things in life to fear, legit things in life to fear. The gospel message isn’t that they don’t matter, or are illusions—apparitions, if you will.  Instead, it’s don’t be afraid! That which is grasping you, claiming you, immobilizing you is real but it is not real-est!  The thing you fear or grieve is not enduring, and is not more powerful than God’s promise of life. The resurrection reframes daily deaths, and our physical death, and allows us to live according to the promise of life rather than the threat of death.

It is thanks to the resurrection that the early believers began to bestow the title of Christ to Jesus.  Christ, of course, means ‘the messiah,’ as it’s a translation of the Hebrew word ‘mesach.’ Identified as the divine Christ, the life and ministry of Jesus is put into proper perspective.  He was not just some good man doing good things—then, as arguably now, there are any number of miracle doers and healers. But because the early Christian community—and now we—believe that Jesus did not stay dead, we see the resurrection as confirming Jesus’ agenda as God’s agenda, Jesus’ ways as God’s ways, and insofar as we identify ourselves with Jesus by way of calling ourselves Christ-ians, they are now our ways too.

His way is that of offering salvation—a word that in biblical Greek does not primarily mean that which one receives upon dying, but rather that which one receives while living! It means health, healing, and wholeness: that’s what Jesus came to offer the world: health, healing, and wholeness, and it is also what faithful Christians offer the world in his name.

Woven throughout Scripture are revelations of God’s essence and God’s vision for the world, consistently identified as being in solidarity with those on the margins: the exile, the stranger, the excluded, the hurting, the poor, and the hungry.  God speaks again and again to rulers and the ruled alike, insisting that the systems of order and power in the world be both just (mishpat) and righteous (tzadek), namely oriented to the principles of God’s commandments, and to God’s grace. With the crescendoed ministry of Jesus, we see what he is about, and via the resurrection we look back and, in an haha moment, we see that that’s therefore what God is about, and it clicks that that is what Christians are therefore about too.

With that, we can now turn to the single word with which I leave you in today’s sermon, and the one which ties together all of these notions, and our readings for today, and this congregation’s blessing at the end of its worship: Hospitality.

So it turns out that the word ‘hospitality’ and ‘host,’ and the word ‘guest,’ come from the same Indo-European root word -ghosti.

How cool is that, I ask you.

So when you are a host, you hospitably welcome guests and their stories, and spread the table of food, shelter, and safety. But you also become yourself a guest, sitting at the feet of your now-hosts to hear their life and story. It’s a reciprocal relationship, one of mutual vulnerability, trust, and tenderness, and right up there with economic equity is one of the key themes coursing through Scripture, baked into God’s expectation of God’s people: “Welcome the stranger,” we hear again and again, as in Hebrews “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it,” or Romans, “Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. contribute to the needs of the saints, extend hospitality to strangers,” or Leviticus 19:34, “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” or Luke 10, “‘Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ He said to him, ‘What is written in the Law? How do you read it?’ And he answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength and all your mind and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” 

Like, I’m not making it up. 

Hospitality—going both directions, a dynamic relationship of serving and being served—is a core value of God and therefore of God’s people.

Of course, we see it in action in both our text from 2 Kings and from John.  In each text, you see hungry people being fed bread, and being fed abundantly, even though there were abundant hungry people hanging around.  In 2 Kings, we hear “They shall eat and have some left,” and in John we hear that “Jesus took 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.” Twelve baskets were left over. Twelve.

Where there was reason to assume scarcity, instead, we have abundance, and not just for a few, but for all. Not a bad summary of the gospel’s primary take-away, and that of what the Christian life looks like in motion.

Two things, then, to which I want to draw attention before this sermon and my time with you wraps up.

First, notice the language John uses for this sharing of the bread. “Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them…”

Wait a minute wait just one little minute: we’ve heard those words before: oddly, perhaps, though, not in John.

In John, the Last Supper—at least the words of institution—isn’t recorded—only the washing of the feet is, a supreme act of service. 

In a moment, we’ll get to what we do hear John say, but for now, it is enough to say this:

Not only Jesus’ ministry but the entire Jewish tradition in which he is embedded is about hospitality: welcome to the hungry, to the forlorn, to the sinners, to the rejected, to the refugee, to the wayfarers, to those in need of health, healing, and wholeness.

And again, if we align ourselves—remember, the word for ‘righteousness’ in Hebrew is tzadek, which also means to be properly aligned—if we align ourselves with God (think First Commandment) we are fundamentally about hospitality too.

The words we hear Jesus say as he feeds the 5,000 obvious hearken to other words we’ve heard Jesus say:

In the night in which he was betrayed, our Lord Jesus took bread, and gave thanks; broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying:

Take and eat; this is my body given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.

Again, after supper, he took the cup, gave thanks, and gave it for all to drink, saying:

This cup is the new covenant in my blood, shed for you and for all people for the forgiveness of sin. Do this in remembrance of me.

It’s exactly this connection, see, that has gotten me choked up at the end of every service here.

Jesus has fed us with his body by way of consecrated bread.

And what then?

We disperse from here, made again part of the body of Christ, to be the body of Christ in the world, feeding others as they have need of immediate salvation. We are hosts at the table spread for the world. No one is unwelcome, and all are fed.

We are veritable ministers of abundance, fed by bread to feed the hungry, serving up Jesus to those who have need of the health, healing, and wholeness which he brings.

We might not hear the words of institution in John, but later in John 13, we do hear this: “Whoever receives one whom I send receives me; and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.”

“Whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.”

If you incline your ear, that right there is Jesus saying “I am God.” John, of course, sprinkles these hints all throughout his gospel, especially in the “I Am” sayings: I am the bread of life, I am the light of the world, I am the door, I am the good shepherd, I am the resurrection and the life, I am the way and the truth and the life, I am the true vine.

That’s what’s called a Big Deal, and a heck of an allusion to boot, because in Exodus, God self-identifies to Moses as I am who I am, or I am who I will be, which sounds a bit like Popeye, but it actually comes from the Hebrew root verb “To Be,” which is, wait for it, YHWH. I am.

If they tell you who they are, as the saying goes, believe them!

So if we receive Jesus, we receive God, and if we receive one who acts in the name of Jesus, we therefore receive God too.

When we receive communion, we receive God, and when we go out and serve others bread in any form—actual food, or housing, or welcome, or forgiveness, or our voices of comfort, encouragement, or advocacy—we serve them God.

You are, to hearken to the parting words of this congregation’s worship, the body of Christ, incarnating the Good News that death does not win.

Here filled with bread, we become bread.

Here guests at the table, we now become hosts to the world.

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