This past pandemic year, when the church closed to worship and the service of Eucharist, the year had one very small benefit and that was we were able to revisit the service of morning prayer. Now that, in and of itself, is not so great, because it is not really the service for Sunday worship; but it was good to rediscover it; and one of the choices for the last line in the service of morning prayer comes from this Ephesian reading we just had, to paraphrase, “God working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.” It reminds me of something someone told me once, “I love reading the Bible, it quotes the prayer book so often.” Our Book of Common Prayer so commonly lifts phrases from the Bible that many of us have lines of scripture engrained in our very being, and don’t know from where they come. After all, as Episcopalians, we can’t, or we don’t quote scripture: chapter and verse.
“Glory to God whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine: Glory to him from generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus for ever and ever, Amen.”
Besides this reading from Ephesians which I think maybe is a tow rope for all the other readings, there are other echoes at work in the readings we have for today. Just reading the Old Testament, you probably went, “Hmm, this sounds a lot like Jesus feeding people.” You know the stories of feeding the thousands, either two or five thousand, sometimes both numbers in one Gospel. The story of Elisha has a much smaller number of people, about 100, with 20 loaves, instead of five. The point of the story is not what Elisha can do, what Elisha’s abilities are; the point is that Elisha a prophet allows God to work through him. It is God who does these things. Elisha is merely a conduit. “So he repeated, “Give it to the people and let them eat, for thus says the Lord, ‘They shall eat and have some left.’”
The children’s education program Godly Play describes a prophet as one who walks closely with God. To walk closely with God is to trust in the Lord beyond where I would guess most of us place our trust. Now because we know Jesus as one with God, it is tempting to say that Jesus’ feeding was something different entirely, and I’m willing to grant that may also be so. Maybe Jesus allowing God to work through him then becomes proof positive to his followers that Jesus was a prophet.
“Glory to God whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine: Glory to him from generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus for ever and ever, Amen.”
At least since the Enlightenment, various people have reinterpreted Jesus’ miraculous feeding as natural occurrences, something that amounts to mere peer pressure. The explanation goes something like this: people in the crowds see what little food the boy brought, and they look in their own sacs and come up with other food, which is why two fish and five loaves of bread can feed a few thousand. One could argue that anytime people decide to share food, in whatever way they do so, that this actually is a miraculous occurrence.
Maybe it doesn’t really matter how we interpret it. I think perhaps more to point is that both Elisha and Jesus are models for us. We too are called not so much to be a prophet, but to be conduits for God’s goodness in the world, knowing that God’s goodness is abundant, beyond what we can even see. The point is not a magic trick, the point is that amazing things can happen when we trust in God. And this is not science; there is not going to be an experiment to determine how this happened. The point is that it happens at all.
However, I wish I were, but I am not one to preach the usual flip-side of this message. “You just have to have faith.” Um, that’s hard to take on board. Maybe one can will one’s self to have more faith, and maybe one can’t. Seems like an impossible thing to try to accomplish. Putting your mind to it, doesn’t really work, at least not for me. Maybe the answer is something in between. Maybe the approach is something like this:
For things that respond to data, you know like masks and covid and delta variants, observe and use numbers, figure out what is happening, respond the best you can, knowing God will provide. On things that are of God, feeding people when they are hungry, whenever they are hungry, don’t worry about whether they qualify for food assistance, don’t be compelled to dot I’s and cross t’s, in those scenarios, feed until you run out. Maybe you run out of food at 50, may not until 4950 or 5000, or 5050. The message isn’t about the number, the message is about caring for people because we serve a God who will provide and who sometimes uses us to do so! And of course, there will be cross over, but if more things are less about us doing things for us, and more things are about God doing things in us, then we come closer to being able to say:
“Glory to God whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine: Glory to him from generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus for ever and ever, Amen.”
What about Jesus walking on the water? How does it make things different? I’m not sure it does. Do we need to know that Jesus walks on water to follow Jesus? I’m following whoever feeds as many people as possible, because that is a work of God flowing through that person. Maybe the purpose of Jesus walking on water is for us to know that many, many more things are possible through him. And for that we say, with great gladness:
“Glory to God whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine: Glory to him from generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus for ever and ever, Amen.”
2 Kings 4:42-44 Psalm 145:10-19 Ephesians 3:14-21 John 6:1-21