READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Exodus 16:2-21
Galatians 4:21-31
St. John 6:1-15
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Grace to you and peace. (1 Thess 1)
Jesus speaks to you on this day from His Gospel heard, saying:
“And when they had eaten their fill, he told his disciples, ‘Gather up the leftover fragments, that nothing may be lost.’”
When Jesus says, “take and eat” does that make you wanna run
to your closet for more Bible study or does it make you want to find a meal?
When the devil comes to tempt you, it is always in a way that
you will believe him. He wastes no time. So we should not be too proud of
ourselves when we resist a big lie, because there are many more small ones
already at work in us.
One of those small ones is doubt. When I say small, I just
mean harder to detect. Doubt is actually a huge issue for everyone and its
obvious in the way we gravitate towards popular opinions and fads. The doubt we
are going to address today is going to be the doubt of scientific evidence.
The devil wants you to doubt where you live. He wants you to
question the ground you stand on and the environment that sustains you. He
wants you to believe that you are a spinning ball of nothingness and that there
is life-threatening danger where you can not see or test, but experts will be
sent to you to confirm these fears.
When that happens, the main teaching is to doubt what you
can see, hear, taste, smell, and touch. The expert drapes a fleece over his
teachings so that you have to trust him. Don’t worry that your eyes don’t see
what's happening, he can see it, so just believe.
As a result of that, we are adrift in a vacuum of
nothingness, and seemingly have no choice but to give the expert all our money
and read his books about what’s really happening in the world, because what do
we know?
What kind of world does this create for someone? Not only
are you paralyzed with fear, unable to function and think, and ready to throw
everyone under the bus so that you can be safe and secure, but now nothing is
real. Not even God.
In this world, the Israelites will not be receiving bread
from heaven, in the Old Testament reading, and we agree with them. They are in
a desert. There is no irrigation for vegetation. And they are wandering around.
Bread comes from planting and harvesting. That can’t happen if we are always
moving.
Yeah, we know, God is spiritual and supernatural, but the
experts all agree, bread comes from wheat and wheat comes from the ground. Yes,
God “gives us our daily bread”, but He does that through farmers.
In this world, the Israelites will also not be receiving
quail in the evening. Nothing lives out in this dessert. This is not even a
quail’s habitat. The experts all agree that quails live in woodlands,
croplands, and open spaces that are covered with bushes such as grasslands and
farmlands, not deserts. There may have been migrating birds at night, that were
easy to catch, though.
This small doubt about what you can determine for yourself
on where you live, snowballs into the big doubt of God in the world. It does
not stop with “natural science”. It quickly and purposefully moves to
supernatural science, ready with all sorts of opinions and expert papers,
unverifiable by anyone outside of their field of study.
As it attacks God’s Word, it goes like this:
we do not know:
By all this, the Sacrament, Jesus feeding us, is nothing more than table fellowship that Jesus practiced with sinners and disciples on multiple occasions, interrupted by the crucifixion, and resumed in the resurrection. As such, it is unrelated to the events of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.
And this is current, popular Biblical scholarship, widely accepted by just about everyone, even churches, simply because the experts say-so. Imagine God being this way! You can’t. And that’s the point. God can’t exist in the face of so much scholarship and so He doesn’t, they conclude for you.
Repent. This same doubt trickles down into your own study of God’s Word. You also will read or hear about bread and quail from heaven, but you will keep it on paper. You also hear of a feeding of 5000, but you don’t ever think to look for it. You read about faith, but what does that have to do with you?
Dear Christians, it is the Incarnation of God that takes all the venom out of the devil’s temptations. This is because, even in the very beginning of the story, God doesn’t just say nice things, He does what He says. In the beginning He created man, male and female, He created them. At the end, He becomes one.
This is how the Lord combats any and all doubt as to what we live on or whether or not God is out there. He doesn’t just leave the idea on pen and paper, He makes it happen. Jesus doesn’t wait for the crops to produce fruit or the birds to migrate. He feeds His people. Now.
In the Incarnation of God, the Lord is not just giving ideas, He is creating a life to be lived.
Psalm 78:19-20 “Then they spoke against God; They said, ‘Can God prepare a table in the wilderness? Behold, He struck the rock so that waters gushed out, And streams were overflowing;
Can He give bread also? Will He provide meat for His people?’”
Hear that doubt! Things on paper or in your head will always create doubt as to whether or not they even exist. God is not a God on paper only, but in Body and Blood. Psalm 23 answers 78, saying, “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever” (v.5-6). So look for that house.
God prepares the table in that house. Not through a servant, not through natural science which He created, and not by chance. He prepares the table Himself, in person, immediately, and purposefully. For though He only fed the lost children of Israel in the desert, and He only fed the 5000 on the mountainside, today He feeds billions.
You’d think that after Christ’s ascension to the right hand of God that He would disappear into the abstract again, but you would be wrong. He ascended to Bodily be everywhere at once. To be at all promised meals, to be in every word of His Gospel, and to be there in every doubt.
Jesus purchases the forgiveness of sins on the cross in order that the Holy Spirit use His means to get them to you. Man does not live on bread alone, but on every Word that comes from the mouth of God, because now every word that comes from the mouth of God is attached to His Holy Supper and the Bread which is His flesh.
Here now, we see the devil routed. His temptations to doubt cannot stand in the face of a fulfilled promise. God said there would be bread and quail from heaven and there was. God said, “If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that” (James 2:15-16) and so provides a neighbor to love as yourself.
Jesus says, “Take and eat; take and drink” and lo and behold a meal is set before you, begging you to doubt. But there is no room for doubt anymore, because God’s world is full to the brim of Himself and His Church and the sacraments are proof of that.
Does the natural earth produce grain and nature produce meat in time? Yes. But the holy meal set before you today has no such cycle. Its root is the Root of Jesse. Its lifeblood, is the Spirit of Life. Its body is the true Vine and its fruit is the fruit of the Tree of Life. God has planted Himself on earth, in Christ, and now grows Faith from there.
The life of doubt and chaos and uncertainty is of sin. Sin that cannot see past a written word or a nice idea, will be stuck in the secret closet, believing that God has forsaken this life. We heard His promise made to us on Ash Wednesday from Joel 2:19:
“The Lord will answer and say to His people, ’Behold, I am going to send you grain, new wine and oil, and you will be satisfied in full with them; And I will never again make you a reproach among the nations.’” Speaking of the Sacrament of the Altar.
The life of Faith is a sacramental life. When the crowd in John 6 heard about the bread of heaven, they naturally thought that actual bread was going to show up, and He did. When Jesus talked about living water, He said, “but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:14) and the woman at the well expected water to show up, and He did.
When God declares us to hear His Word and believe it, He causes Scripture to be written and also sends His only begotten Word to suffer and die and rise again from the dead, for you. God’s created world has meaning and you have meaning.
The meaning is found in the union of God and man in one Christ and His union of spiritual and physical in His sacraments. So when you are diligently studying God’s Word, do as it says. All of what it says, for the forgiveness of sins, to everlasting life, found only in the bread and wine of God’s Word, given for you.
Jesus speaks to you on this day from His Gospel heard, saying:
“And when they had eaten their fill, he told his disciples, ‘Gather up the leftover fragments, that nothing may be lost.’”
we do not know:
- Whether Christ’s institution of the Sacrament was actually “on the night He was betrayed.”
- Whether the Last Supper was a Passover meal so that Jesus could be seen as the Passover lamb that takes away the sin of the world.
- Whether the Last Supper was one event or a composite of multiple events. Three events are given as probable. In some treatments, even post-resurrection events are folded into the composite.
- What Jesus actually did during the institution of His Supper.
- Whether it was an actual event, or something created retrospectively by a subsequent theology of the cross.
- Whether Jesus said, “Do this.” Instead, this is seen as being added to the text for liturgical necessity.
- Whether all of the disciples drank of the cup, because it is too hard to believe, and it must be an embellishment by the evangelists.
- Whether Jesus took the cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, since that might have been added to the text for the sake of liturgical parallelism.
By all this, the Sacrament, Jesus feeding us, is nothing more than table fellowship that Jesus practiced with sinners and disciples on multiple occasions, interrupted by the crucifixion, and resumed in the resurrection. As such, it is unrelated to the events of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.
And this is current, popular Biblical scholarship, widely accepted by just about everyone, even churches, simply because the experts say-so. Imagine God being this way! You can’t. And that’s the point. God can’t exist in the face of so much scholarship and so He doesn’t, they conclude for you.
Repent. This same doubt trickles down into your own study of God’s Word. You also will read or hear about bread and quail from heaven, but you will keep it on paper. You also hear of a feeding of 5000, but you don’t ever think to look for it. You read about faith, but what does that have to do with you?
Dear Christians, it is the Incarnation of God that takes all the venom out of the devil’s temptations. This is because, even in the very beginning of the story, God doesn’t just say nice things, He does what He says. In the beginning He created man, male and female, He created them. At the end, He becomes one.
This is how the Lord combats any and all doubt as to what we live on or whether or not God is out there. He doesn’t just leave the idea on pen and paper, He makes it happen. Jesus doesn’t wait for the crops to produce fruit or the birds to migrate. He feeds His people. Now.
In the Incarnation of God, the Lord is not just giving ideas, He is creating a life to be lived.
Psalm 78:19-20 “Then they spoke against God; They said, ‘Can God prepare a table in the wilderness? Behold, He struck the rock so that waters gushed out, And streams were overflowing;
Can He give bread also? Will He provide meat for His people?’”
Hear that doubt! Things on paper or in your head will always create doubt as to whether or not they even exist. God is not a God on paper only, but in Body and Blood. Psalm 23 answers 78, saying, “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever” (v.5-6). So look for that house.
God prepares the table in that house. Not through a servant, not through natural science which He created, and not by chance. He prepares the table Himself, in person, immediately, and purposefully. For though He only fed the lost children of Israel in the desert, and He only fed the 5000 on the mountainside, today He feeds billions.
You’d think that after Christ’s ascension to the right hand of God that He would disappear into the abstract again, but you would be wrong. He ascended to Bodily be everywhere at once. To be at all promised meals, to be in every word of His Gospel, and to be there in every doubt.
Jesus purchases the forgiveness of sins on the cross in order that the Holy Spirit use His means to get them to you. Man does not live on bread alone, but on every Word that comes from the mouth of God, because now every word that comes from the mouth of God is attached to His Holy Supper and the Bread which is His flesh.
Here now, we see the devil routed. His temptations to doubt cannot stand in the face of a fulfilled promise. God said there would be bread and quail from heaven and there was. God said, “If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that” (James 2:15-16) and so provides a neighbor to love as yourself.
Jesus says, “Take and eat; take and drink” and lo and behold a meal is set before you, begging you to doubt. But there is no room for doubt anymore, because God’s world is full to the brim of Himself and His Church and the sacraments are proof of that.
Does the natural earth produce grain and nature produce meat in time? Yes. But the holy meal set before you today has no such cycle. Its root is the Root of Jesse. Its lifeblood, is the Spirit of Life. Its body is the true Vine and its fruit is the fruit of the Tree of Life. God has planted Himself on earth, in Christ, and now grows Faith from there.
The life of doubt and chaos and uncertainty is of sin. Sin that cannot see past a written word or a nice idea, will be stuck in the secret closet, believing that God has forsaken this life. We heard His promise made to us on Ash Wednesday from Joel 2:19:
“The Lord will answer and say to His people, ’Behold, I am going to send you grain, new wine and oil, and you will be satisfied in full with them; And I will never again make you a reproach among the nations.’” Speaking of the Sacrament of the Altar.
The life of Faith is a sacramental life. When the crowd in John 6 heard about the bread of heaven, they naturally thought that actual bread was going to show up, and He did. When Jesus talked about living water, He said, “but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:14) and the woman at the well expected water to show up, and He did.
When God declares us to hear His Word and believe it, He causes Scripture to be written and also sends His only begotten Word to suffer and die and rise again from the dead, for you. God’s created world has meaning and you have meaning.
The meaning is found in the union of God and man in one Christ and His union of spiritual and physical in His sacraments. So when you are diligently studying God’s Word, do as it says. All of what it says, for the forgiveness of sins, to everlasting life, found only in the bread and wine of God’s Word, given for you.
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