Rector's Sermon - Sunday, July 27, 2003

First Reading	Psalm	Epistle	Gospel
2 Kings 4:42-44	14	Ephesians 3:14-21	John 6:1-21

    When I lived in Saranac Lake, one of my friends was a baker at the Lake Placid Club in the next town over. While by this time the place was an aging and virtually bankrupt dowager, it still catered to an exclusive and rather snobbish clientele. Its last moment of glory was serving as the home for the International Olympic Committee during the 1980 Winter Olympics. Every so often a guest would phone down to the kitchen for a custom-made cake. My friend would take out of the freezer a frozen Friehoeffer's cake, made in a large regional commercial bakery located in Troy, and let it thaw out for the afternoon. The moisture would bubble up through the old icing, so he would scrape all of it off, whip up new icing, redecorate it, and send it up. The cake may have been two or three months old, but the fancy icing worked wonders, and there were never any complaints. The patrons thought the kitchen had baked a cake especially for them, and held that there was never any other cake quite so moist and delicious as one served at the club. It was a perfect ending for a birthday or anniversary meal.

    That the well-healed patrons couldn't tell the difference between a fresh cake made from scratch and an old store cake was a source of amusement for the kitchen workers, but the analogy I would suggest is not. Many TV and Internet evangelists do the same thing. They show what they claim are evidence of great miracles: a college campus with new buildings where hundreds of well-scrubbed youth are studying the Bible; gatherings of people singing and in prayer; all sorts of testimonies of people being healed and leading successful, stress-free lives. Look at the signs, they urge. Don't you want to be part of this? Don't you want to join us in this worthy enterprise and contribute, and feel that your contribution is really doing some good? In effect, they serve up a cake with pretty icing, for it is often not what it purports to be. It does not invite a serious wresting with the Gospel in our world. Nonetheless, nothing succeeds like the appearance of success in our society and that is what is being sold, an old ordinary cake iced with all the glow of sweet success.

    A lot is packed into the reading from the Gospel of John this morning. John prefaces the feeding of the five thousand by connecting it to the Passover. Later Christians would see Jesus as the new Passover Lamb who continually feeds and refreshes them. The actual feeding of the people on the hillside would be connected to God providing the manna in the wilderness to the tribes of Israel. Jesus withdrew and went up a mountain to teach his disciples, just as Moses withdrew and went up the Mountain at Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments. In both Moses' and Jesus’ case, many of the people misunderstood what was going on and wished to worship false gods instead. Lastly, Jesus controls the waters of Galilee and leads the disciples to safety just as Moses had controlled the waters of the Red Sea and led Israel to safety.

    This passage reveals one of the few close connections John has with the three other Gospels. The feeding of the multitude, Jesus walking on the water, and shortly afterwards, Peter’s confession of whom Jesus really was, are all linked together in John, Mark, and Matthew. Luke omits Jesus walking on water, but connects Jesus’ feeding with Peter’s confession. The direct relationship among these three stories seems to have been established independently before any of the Gospels were written.

    What this connection of the three stories suggests is that great signs of God’s presence often occur in the context of struggle and tension. Neither God’s deliverance from Egypt, nor the revelation on Mt. Sinai, nor any of our journeys as people of faith are cake walks. Be wary of those who use great signs and miracles as reasons to buy a ticket promising a path of bliss and guaranteed happiness without stress or adversity. People of faith expect to encounter storms, and it is in the midst of storms rather than rosy calms, that the presence of God is perceived. Jesus taught the disciples to be connoisseurs, to tell the difference between real food and empty calories.

    I don’t think the cake at the Lake Placid Club would have fooled Jesus. Rather he would have withdrawn and gone over to Betty’s Diner, which had no linen tablecloths, just red vinyl stools and Formica counters. It was a block down from the church. Every weekday Betty made fresh iced cinnamon buns from scratch and served real coffee. It wasn't a classy place, but a place to share sorrows, joys and frustration as well as learn what was going on in the town. Yes, that’s where I remember Jesus visited, on many a morning.

    And I offer this to you in the name of the Living God, Amen.