“HE FEEDS YOU AND YOU ARE FULL”
Saint Mark 8: 1-9
7th Sunday After Trinity: 18 July Anno Domini 2021
Fr Jay Watson, SSP
I’m not preaching/teaching to your New Man/Woman when I accuse you, correctly so, of weak faith. Your baptized, regenerated, risen-with-Christ-New Creation believes the Words of Gods…even words about the multiplication of seven loaves and a few small fishes into a meal for at least four thousand people.
Your brain knows that that is impossible, doesn’t it? Your common sense, historical mastery, and scientific fetishes, knows that that kind of story is simply made-up myths for the weak-headed and superstitious lowbrows, right?
So, let me address your “old Adam” smart-guy and your upper crust, pretentious, rational, higher critic. Stop disbelieving the Word of The Lord.
Jesus is your God or He is not your God. Jesus is either Omniscient and perfectly truthful, or He is a liar, fraud, and dangerous enemy.
If He says the world was created in 6 days (and He had Saint John record that “The Word” was He Himself—The Son, The pre-incarnate 2nd Person—that did the creating), then it is true. Believe it. When He says that Noah had all those animals, two-by-two, on a wooden boat during a cataclysmic flood, then it is true. Believe it.
So where is your weak faith, your doubts, and your rejection of Christ? It appears when you, me, all of us, look to Saint Mark’s account of the 4,000 and fail to see a Sacramental, Eucharistic reality that will be again demonstrated on THIS altar is a few minutes. The weakness of sinful man’s faith is found in not reverentially and worshipfully approaching the High Table of God Incarnate as if one actually believed that Jesus is here. Lutherans have been lulled, pacified, dulled, drugged, and brainwashed by not just empirical and rational modernism, but by Calvinism (intellectual “religion”), receptionism, and out and out Zwinglian denial of the supernatural, into traipsing up to The Holy Communion Rail lackadaisical, casual, and frankly, unbelieving. This is clearly observable to pastors, to visitors, and to God. Thank The Lord that such is NOT the case at this Parish. The Word works here. The Word has caused strong faith amongst you and is believed, taught, and confessed by you in heart and body—thought and acts.
He, The Son of God, Who created the earth, the seeds, the fertile ground, the wheat, and the bread, is He Who can make it multiply when and where He chooses; can make it be What He desires it to be—bread for 4,000 people two-thousand years ago, or His actual, Holy, precious, real, true, bodily, BODY this morning—here and on other altars scattered over the face of the same fertile world.
These miracles, so commonly disbelieved and denigrated, and, among Lutherans, not even thought about or marveled at, or meditated upon, are the works of diseased, fallen and sinful, brains and minds. The mind of man apart from the miracle of Holy Ghost created faith in The Word and by The Word, is the territory of Satan.
I know you don’t watch television, that you instead read Scripture. But were you to turn on the black-mirror you would see advertisement after advertisement and infomercials that are legion, promoting both health and food. The devil uses these good and godly necessities in an almost pornographic way. Physical health and the fight against obesity, without an overarching and concomitant advance and deepening in The Word of God, simply produces thinner and leaner cordwood for the devil’s furnaces. And food! The average person’s obsession with snacks, treats, deserts, convenient and quick mealets, not to mention sugars, corn-syrups, empty carbs, and all other manner of gob-stuffing, is blasphemous to He Who is The Bread of Life. And when a pastor suggests the Biblical and Christ commanded discipline of fasting, he is labeled an anti-Gospel Romanist.
Fasting when you don’t want to be fasting, when it’s forced upon you either by nature (fallen, i.e., famine), governments (fallen/evil), or by your own delusions (brainwashing from Agra-Conglomerates) is in reality starvation. Not having food that The Lord wants you to have, indeed has provided you with (“Give us this day, our daily Bread”) leads to death. The widow of Zarephath would have died, and her son, had God not sent Elias to be Jesus “for her.” The Prophet would do a “feeding of the 4,000” for her and her family: “and the barrel of meal wasted not, neither did the cruse of oil fail, according to the word of the Lord, which he spake by Elijah” [1 Ki. 17.16]. Again, The Lord multiplied mercy when He had Elisha visit the woman who was about to lose her two sons and servants to debtor’s prison for lack of money. The Word, The Jesus, spoken by Elisha caused the one “pot of oil” (olive oil) to be an over-flowing generative, source of enough oil to fill dozens and dozens of empty vessels [2 Ki. 4. 1-7].
Science denies this. Human reason rejects this. And now Christ, three days with the multitude. And now Christ on The Third Day, Sunday, with the “multitude” of Augsburgers.
You know it’s not just history, just power, just God being able to “multiply” stuff into more stuff. You believe that The Word works, that The Word is transformative.
- Jesus called His disciples unto Him
- He saith I have compassion on the multitude
- From whence can a “man” satisfy these?
- He commanded; He took; He gave thanks; He gave to His disciples to set before them
- They did eat and were filled
- More was left than what was there at the start.
If this does not, at least, make you think of, and yearn for The Sacrament of The Altar—then Repent. Repent and believe. Listen! Hear the Verba, the Words of Christ’s Institution, this morning with fresh, new, and hungry ears!
Eating the Body of The God/Man, and drinking His Blood, for the forgiveness of your sins is only done in faith and by faith. Pray for those who yet have this Spirit worked trust in the Word of God.
But it isn’t just manna type power bread in your desert life where the promised land is 40 years away. This Eucharist is the same, identical Body and Blood of Jesus which hung on Calvary’s crucifix paying for your sins and defeating all your enemies.
The great 20th century theologian, Jaroslav Pelikan said: “if Christ rose from the dead…nothing else matters; and, if Christ did not rise from the dead…nothing else matters.” Yes, oh yes. But if that objective reality does not come to you in an actual and subjective “delivery” real, not just spiritual, then nothing else matters either. If Jesus is not bodily present in His Supper, then you truly have nothing to eat.
But He is. He is, because “IS MEANS IS!”
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of The Holy Ghost
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