Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

24:55 My friends, you made it to worship this morning. Congratulations. If you are in this space, would you just turn to your neighbor and say, congrats, you made it. Friends, when I was a child, I would often take trips to go see my extended family in Colorado, where my father's family is from. And I can remember always staying with my aunt and my uncle. And now for a 13 year old like myself, I would often rise super early the first day of our travels. I think the only force in this world strong enough to get a 13 year old out of bed is jet lag. But as I laid there in bed, unable to sleep anymore, I can remember the soft sort of noises that would begin to fill my aunt and uncle's house as people began to wake up in the morning. And often just a few minutes after those initial noises began to rustle, I would begin to hear the sounds of my aunt and uncle beginning to prepare breakfast.

26:18 and now breakfast in in the Palmer household was something of a big deal my family are Wyoming raised hearty stock kind of people breakfast was the most important meal of the day but it was also the meal that had maybe the most rituals where everybody had to be present where everything had to be perfect. And I can remember something about the smell, maybe you know this feeling, when you're laying in bed and you can, you begin to smell those sweet aromas coming from the kitchen. And there's a way in which the actual smell itself makes you hungry, even if you weren't hungry in the first place. And now my uncle is a very tall, lumbering kind of man. And I can remember as I walked into the kitchen and just saw him tilted over that stove making bacon and grits and sausage and eggs. And yet for a 13 year old there is a terrible moment at breakfast where you realize that it is not quite ready yet. And so instead of receiving a steaming hot plate, you are given empty dishes to go and set the table. And then as the hunger begins to bubble inside you, you realize that maybe there are a few more things that aren't quite ready yet.

27:50 The cousins still haven't arrived. And that hunger continues to bubble up inside you, patiently waiting to be satisfied. The thing that Eunju did not read this morning in our text is the crescendo in Jesus's ministry that leads up to this moment, this fateful moment that many of us have probably already experienced. A text, a story known as the feeding of the 5,000. but before this dramatic scene Jesus is out doing what Jesus does best. He's healing people, teaching people, he's reconciling people and his name in this part of the world becomes more and more familiar in the ears of those who are local and eventually Jesus becomes a busy man as so many people hear about the wonders that he is working.

28:52 And he becomes so busy, in fact, that he has to deputize all of his disciples to go out and to work their own wonders, to heal, to teach, to reconcile. But eventually, he and his followers, well, they just need a break. And so they seek refuge in a small little fishing village on the corner of the Sea of Galilee called Bethsaida, which in Hebrew means the house of fishermen. But much to their dismay, word spreads quickly in those days and more and more people still find their way to Jesus and his tired disciples. Some 5,000 men, not even to count the women and the children. but there's one thing you should know about Jesus and that's that Jesus is never very good at setting boundaries and so he and his disciples well they get right back to work they continue the best course of action to heal the sick to reconcile the ostracized but there are so many people that have gathered that eventually the masses begin to get hungry It is evening and the hour is late and you can almost hear those bellies rumbling.

30:20 And you know that in that group of 12 disciples, at least a few of them were type A personalities. And so there are already some people in their midst who are proactively thinking about what the best course of action might be. and maybe you've been in this situation where an unexpected snag befalls you, where you are left at the last moment having to change your plans. Let's send them back into town, one of the disciples offers. They have a better chance of being fed where they came from. But what I want to offer you this morning, Fifth Avenue Presbyterian, is that I find Jesus's response to these disciples to be a fascinating thing. What does Jesus tell them? He says, you give them something to eat. And immediately after that, that disciple responds and says, we don't have enough food. We only have five fish, two loaves of bread. And what does Jesus say next? He tells them to sit down, if only for a moment. And now I think in my Sunday school timeline for how this story unfolds, I think of this as a pretty rapid process, that the bread and the fish, well, they just kind of instantaneously multiply, and everybody is just filled with as much as they could want.

31:53 But I don't know if that's the case. I think Luke means to cue us up here to say that this is going to take a moment. That in the midst of this crowd's hunger, Jesus is telling them to wait. To sit in the midst of that hunger. and now these people this crowd this crowd of 5,000 that has gathered truth be told they are hungering after all sorts of things both the disciples and those that have gathered they are out here in the wilderness following this Jesus this rabbi from Judea why not just send them back into town wouldn't that have been the better the more efficient option why make them wait in their hunger. And friends, I want to offer one guess, one speculation this morning.

32:57 But I wonder if it's because that Jesus knows that all of us hunger after one thing or another, whether it be food or otherwise. Do we hunger for food? Sure. But do we hunger for status? for power, for romance, for friendship, for all sorts of things. And in the midst of our deepest hunger pangs, the things that we hunger for most can sometimes have a way of satisfying us the least.

33:40 Many of you might know Dale Hansen. Dale is one of my favorite storytellers here at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. He is our church's archivist and Dale has convinced me that being the pastor of a congregation in its present means something, means knowing a little something about the congregation as it has existed for many, many decades. And so every now and again I have been taking time to read up on the lives lived on the sermons preached by folks who sat in these pews for decades. In this past week, I found one of my favorite sermons, I think, that has been preached from this pulpit, or at least to this congregation in another pulpit. It was preached by John Romaine, the first pastor of this congregation in the year 1810. 1810. And he preached a sermon on what he entitled, The Perils and Promise of Young Adulthood. And so I thought to myself, well, seeing as that's my job description, I should probably dive in. And now there are some points that Romain makes that I'm a bit suspicious of. Two of the biggest temptations, he says, for young people is that they get caught up in thoughtless conversations about vain topics like novels. Or even worse, Romaine says, that they get caught up in frivolous conversations about the theater. My friends, I wish he could have known you. He would have had his work cut out for him. But all joking aside, I was moved by some of Romaine's words, in part because something he says towards the end of that sermon, that he says that one of the dangers that is present to young adults is that we are taught to desire things from

35:50 a very young age, not because they make us love God, but because they help us outdo our neighbors. Young people are taught, Romaine says, to live in a world of ubiquitous rivalry, where we are constantly driven not by the loves of our own hearts so much as by the achievements of those that we see around us. Romaine could have just as easily said that young people are hungry people, but often hungry in ways that never leave us truly satisfied. Luke Burgess, who's a professor of business down in Washington, D.C., says it this way. He talks about the kind of hungers that are in the entrepreneurs that he mentors. He tells how often these entrepreneurs suffer from what he calls an existential vertigo, from the dizziness of always looking up, looking up at all of those people around us who have the things that we know are rightfully ours. And I wonder if that insight, even in our churches, still remains.

37:16 That we contain multitudes. That the deep desires of our hearts, if we clutch onto them too tightly, that they can sometimes begin to diminish us. Because at some point, the things that we desire, when we hold them too tightly, become the things that we worship.

37:42 And so these disciples may be just worried about crowd control, feeling the frenzy of the emotions of those building up around them while they try to give the people what they want. Send them away. let them find food for themselves they will probably be happier that way and maybe that's happened from time to time to us as well maybe there have been points in our own lives fifth avenue where we have been yearning to feel satisfied in life but we begin to think that Christ won't be that satisfaction. And so some voice in our heads starts telling us that it's time to turn and to look elsewhere, to look for meaning and purpose somewhere else. But in these moments, even in our dissatisfaction, even in our deepest hunger pains, Christ still says to us, abide just a while. Because the hungry, they will always be filled. They will be so filled in fact that there will be baskets of food remaining. This is the reason I've, I love this painting on the cover of your bulletins. I think the reason I came to love it is because Jesus doesn't feature that much in it. But instead what you see is this young boy with barely any fish, a boy from Bethsaida, a fishing town, and Peter, a cranky disciple, who at this very moment that that boy is handing him those gifts is probably having a lot of doubts about how this whole thing is going to work out. And in the background of that painting, you can see the blurry hordes of

39:49 the people that have gathered, their dissatisfaction growing. But just look at the basket to the left of the painting. An empty basket that the author shines a gentle light on. A basket that as the story goes, will pour over even 12 baskets full. Even as nearly everyone in this particular moment doubts that such abundance will ever be possible. so what does that basket symbolize? I wonder if it symbolizes you and me, empty as we can feel, hungry as we become, our hopes and dreams that often tell us that they will never really be satisfied. But dear friends, we know the end of the story, a secret bounty that awaits more than we ever thought possible in ways that we never thought were probable.

40:58 that he is the one who fills the hungry with good things, even the doubters and the least expectant, those who have turned away, that the hungry, he will never turn away empty. My friends, would you rise in body or in spirit as we say together what it is that we believe, taken from the Presbyterian's brief statement of faith. Would you join me? With believers in every time and place, we rejoice that nothing in life or in death can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.