Meditation 

Message        Lectionary 18          A Worship      August 2nd, 2026

Good morning!

In our Gospel reading, God invites all who are hungry or thirsty to receive food and drink without cost.  Jesus feeds the hungry multitude, and reveals the abundance of God.  Then at the eucharistic table, we remember all who are hungry or poor in our world today.  As we share the bread of life, we are sent forth to give ourselves away as bread for the hungry.

In our Gospel, the people who passed along their memories of Jesus were better at storytelling than at counting.  “Those who ate were about 5,000 men, besides women & children” (Matthew 14:21).  So, let’s rename this story to “The Feeding of Many More Than 5000.”  I mean, if every man there had a wife & a child, it could have been 15,000!

Like the disciples on the hillside seeing all those hungry people, we humans too often believe we have nothing to offer, nothing of value to give to others.  That is what those disciples felt.  And that problem is crucial for today’s chat.  It’s tempting to try to explain how the small gift becomes enough for many to feast upon, but that doesn’t direct us to the beauty and truth of Jesus’ gentle warning to the doubting disciples, who can’t fathom finding food for five thousand men (plus women and children!).

The truth is that the feeding challenges us to notice that we live with huge overabundance, even when it looks like only a little.  The zero-sum model of scarcity says “I get less if you get more”, and that’s simply inaccurate when it comes to faith.  To see little, is to see a fixed pie.  The story of Jesus multiplying a small meal defies that pie, and helps us recognize it as an image that deceives, and that we even use as an excuse for not helping those in need. “If I give, I will have less for me” is a fallacy that is betrayed whenever we experience that to give love, only increases love’s capacity.  Faith alone will tell us that.

We operate on scarcity mentalities because it is difficult to believe that a small thing can become a great thing.  Such thinking generates hopelessness and withdrawal from finding solutions to problems.  Isaiah cuts through our despondency by asking a blunt question: Why do you buy what is useless?  (We must admit we do this.)  We honor the covenant God made with us, when we attend to what is life-giving.  Isaiah celebrates the value God has given to the people: “Nations that you do not know . . . shall run to you” (55:5).

We cannot see what abundance will come, when the value of who we are, and what we currently hold, is not apparent.  Yet, all along, God is showering God’s people with riches that truly satisfy the desires of the heart.

In both Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, and the Genesis story of Jacob’s wrestling, we find assurance of God’s abundant divine generosity.  As Jacob went to meet his brother Esau, whom he cheated, Jacob’s situation was a threat to his survival.  When “Jacob was left alone” (Gen. 32:24), the wrestling began.  He fought with God by fighting with himself over his course of action, his fear of the outcome, and the danger he faced.  To wrestle with God is also to do battle with oneself, even to injure oneself, but to leave the divine encounter changed and blessed.

Shorn of all that does not satisfy, we are set free to find real bread.  The story’s outcome assures us that even when we think we have nothing—when we are alone, unprotected by our accumulated holdings—we are at the place of crucial opportunity.  We are given a blessing.  A moment, when we might have considered ourselves too small to matter, turns into receipt of a new name.

And that is an opportunity like no other!  Growing up in Williamsport, I saw extreme contrasts- with as many Fundamentalist churches as others around us, we heard a lot of how things went on there.  Then, watching TV preachers with their loud voices, Bible thumping, and theatrical tears make claims they said were supported by the Bible, but made more sense as a way of supporting the pastor’s lifestyle.  It always confused me how folks that truly believed in God could be so led to believe things God never intended.

So it has bugged me my whole life, that many fundamental and other preachers select a text to preach on, not because it represents what Jesus said and lived, but because it helps them keep their members chained to their seats, and afraid to go against what they’ve been told.  It’s a great way for those preachers to effectively get people to join, attend and give.

I’m sure I’ve told you how my work had me traveling around the US, & how I used that as an excuse to see the displays local churches put up in front of their buildings.  Often I saw the 10 Commandments, but never ONCE did I see the Beatitudes, even though they were the words that captured Jesus’ way of expanding faith from Hebrew rules, into love and service.

Richard Rohr talks about how Jesus purposefully altered the focus of his community thru “the lens of love”:   …from “How Jesus Uses the Scripture”, Monday, July 27, 2026, abridged

“”Jesus never once quotes from 19 of his own Hebrew scriptures.  In fact, he only uses a very few favorites: Exodus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Hosea, Psalms.  Jesus didn’t quote most of his own Bible, yet it clearly formed his whole consciousness. That’s the paradox.  But if we look at what he ignores, it includes any passages that appear to legitimate violence, imperialism, exclusion, purity, and dietary laws—of which there are many.  Jesus is a biblically formed Bible quoter, who still gets the deeper stream of God’s unconditional love, the spirit and trajectory of his Jewish history, but never settles for mere surface readings.

When he does once quote Leviticus, he quotes the one positive mandate among long lists of negative ones: “You must love your neighbor as yourself” (see Leviticus 19:18). He openly disagrees with Scriptures that emphasize non-essentials and “mere human commandments” that made their way into what are presented as divine commandments (see Mark 7:1–23 and almost all of Matthew 23).  Jesus reduces 613 clear biblical commandments down to two: love of God and love of neighbor (see Matthew 22:34–40).  

He omits troublesome verses with which he does not agree, as when he drops the final half-verse from the Isaiah scroll when he first reads in the Nazareth synagogue (see Luke 4:18–19). As if to make the point, he “rolls up the scroll, hands it back to the attendant and sits down.”  We can imagine them glaring at him for adjusting the Scriptures.  They know the final line of Isaiah 61:2b is “to proclaim a day of vengeance from our God.”  Jesus ends with verse 2a, which “proclaims the Lord’s day of favor,” and better portrays the God he knows.

Jesus makes use of his own Scriptures to teach a message of radical inclusivity, mercy, and justice, and to negate the predominant religious messages of exclusion, religious righteousness, and oppression of the underdog, the impure, and the sinner.

Jesus clearly considers “justice, mercy, and good faith” to be “the weightier matters of the Law” (see Matthew 23:23), and many statements such as this seem to indicate he did have a definite hierarchy of values….  Not all Scriptures were created equal in Jesus’s mind, which is a great blind spot for most fundamentalists. Jesus seems to teach that you can only tell goodness “by its fruits” (see Luke 6:43–45) and not just by the action itself. Paul then lists these fruits as “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (see Galatians 5:22–23).”   unquote

This takes me back to my travels, and only seeing tablets of the Ten Commandments, and not the Beatitudes.  I had accused those “fundamentalist” preachers of “selective quotation”.  But now that I hear this new approach, it’s clear that Jesus ALSO used selective quotation in his preaching, teaching, healing, feeding and serving others.  But ya know what the difference is?  Those preachers were more mortals, subject to human frailties like selfishness, arrogance and blindness to the Spirit.  Jesus, on the other hand, was human, but divine as well- he was sent to advance us into a better way of seeing things, a better way of interpreting things, and a better way of being ourselves, and being church.  And it’s all about love and grace.

So I’m gonna go with Jesus, and use his “guide to selective quotation” as a way to build my faith and my life.

So may it be for all of us.  God loves you, and so do I!  AMEN!    And all the people say,  amen!