When thousands were gathered around Christ in the desert, the Disciples expected the Lord to send them away so they could feed themselves. Instead, Christ said, “They do not need to go away. You give them something,” and thousands were fed with just a few loaves of bread and two fish. Christ fed the crowds through the Disciples. He can bless others through us when we allow Him to use us as He used the Disciples. We become agents of God’s grace to help others.
My brothers and sisters, I was wondering, as I was thinking about this morning’s gospel, we just heard Christ tell the apostles to feed the people, and the first thing the apostles thought about was to send them away. “We don’t have enough.” And it occurred to me how many times God tells us what he wants us to do, and we always second-guess him. We always think we know better than God. And we say to ourselves, and we say to God, “Don’t worry, I got it handled.” I will do what is right even if it is not what God asks us to do. How many times, if we’re honest with ourselves? I will answer for myself, every day it happens. Every day I wake up and I read the scriptures and I say my prayers, and every day I end up doing what I think is right and what I want to do, and I find myself ignoring what God wants for me and from me. It happens to me every day, so I can only imagine it has happened to you before.
Yet when we listen to God, great blessings can happen. This morning’s gospel is one of the feeding of the thousands. We say 5,000, but the gospel even says that does not include women and children. We’re talking about thousands and thousands and thousands of people with just a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. And the apostles thought they were doing a good thing. They thought they were being compassionate when they said to Christ, “Lord, this is a deserted place. It’s already late. The hour is already late. Send the multitudes that they may go into the village and buy themselves some food.” And Christ says, “They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.” And immediately the apostles began to forget who Christ is. They had seen, by then, so many amazing things.
The gospel story begins this morning with him healing the sick. They already knew the power of God, and yet somehow they forgot. Somehow they thought they knew better. Has that ever happened to anybody here? Anyone? Of course it happens, because we human beings are always focused on ourselves. And yet Christ, in this morning’s gospel, in addition to healing the sick, in addition to feeding the thousands of people with a few loaves of bread, the great lesson in this morning’s gospel is the patience that God has with us. He doesn’t lose his cool at the apostles. He says, “Fine. They don’t have to go away, sit them down, get them ready and bring me the bread and the fish.” And then he blesses them.
Now, here is the other great lesson for us as Christians. Christ doesn’t give the food himself to the people, but he gives it to the apostles, to the disciples, for them to give to the people. And there was enough that everyone ate. It says here, “was filled.” They got their fill of bread and fish, and there were baskets and baskets and baskets left over. Because when we listen to God, my brothers and sisters, his blessings are always enough and more than enough. But we have to let go of our ego first. We have to be willing to let God’s will be done for us and through us. He fed the thousands of the people through the disciples.
Now, we know that when we’re talking about God’s power, we’re not only ever talking about his physical power. Not every miracle is just about the physical miracle. It isn’t just that God fed thousands of people. The other part of this story, my brothers and sisters, is that what God really wants for us is to not go away from him. You see, if the disciples had sent the crowds away, they would have left Christ. Instead, God wants us close to him. He wants us with him. In the church we call that Holy Communion. He wants us to be united to him in the chalice, and he does that through the church. God is not going to reach his hand down from heaven today holding a cup. God, through the Holy Spirit, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be here with us, but he’s going to do it through the church as he did through the disciples.
And so it’s our job, yours and mine, not to send people away from God, but to bring them to God and be the vehicle for God’s grace and for God’s blessings. In Orthodoxy 101 class, when we talk about the sacraments, I always remind everybody that as Orthodox Christians, we do not limit the sacraments only to the seven sacraments. Anything we do to bless each other and others is a sacrament of God. Because when we feed the poor, we are the ones expressing God’s grace and food to the poor. When we visit the hospitals, when we visit the lonely, when we become agents of God’s grace, we become the sacrament to those other people.
So my brothers and sisters, if we really want to be what God wants us to be and to do what God wants us to do, now is our chance to let him work through us, so that his grace, his blessings can come through us to our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends, our family members who may themselves have strayed from the church. Let’s bring them home to Christ, so that they too can be fed and receive God’s blessings. But only if we do it God’s way instead of our own way. Glory to God for all things.
