More Than Enough

August 2, 2026

Matthew 14:13-21; Romans 9:1-5

            Outside of the crucifixion and resurrection, this story of the feeding of the 5,000 is the only story found in all four gospels.  I find that really interesting.  In Matthew’s gospel, this story comes immediately after John the Baptist is beheaded.  And before that is the story of Jesus being rejected in his hometown.  I’m just going to plant those two little seeds here at the beginning as we pivot now to our second reading today… from Paul’s letter to the church in Rome.  And to give context to these words we are about to hear, they follow this strong declarative statement… “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

            Listen as God continues to speak to us through Paul…

            READ

            Our challenge this morning is to find the connective tissue between this small five verse section of Paul’s letter and the story of the feeding of the 5,000. 

            While Paul is a master of the rhetorical, I don’t think we can fully discount his sorrow and anguish as mere wordplay.  I think Paul is caught in that space between the wideness of God’s grace… and the understanding that in salvation there has to be some sort of response to God’s grace.  We talked about this in last week’s sermon about predestination.  Salvation shouldn’t be reduced to the magical formula to get oneself into heaven.  It is so much more.  Salvation begins with God’s free choice to be in relationship with people.  That’s election… or predestination, right?  You will be my people.  This is the opposite of idolatry.  In idolatry, we the people choose the god who will best serves us.  We choose the god who will bring water to our crops.  We choose the god who will bring power to our armies.  We choose the god who will put wealth in our pockets.  Idolatry is our taking God’s gracious choice and then creating and placing our own terms and conditions upon God.  We will accept being your people, but in return you must then be this god to us.  God’s unconditional choice of love gets weighed down by our own transactional demands for a smaller and more exclusive god.  

            So… first in salvation, there is election by God… then God does the work to remove the separation between God and people… God removes the sin… and that we call justification.    But election and justification alone are not the whole of salvation… as though God simply moved us from one condition to another.  In justification God reveals who God is… reveals the character of God.  We believe that Jesus is without sin which means there is no separation between Jesus and God.  This is a distinction that John’s gospel makes over and over again… Jesus and God are one.  If you know one you know the other.  If you have seen the one you have seen the other.  Paul’s experience of justification is told through the story of the scales falling from his blind eyes so that he might see again.  He already understood himself as one of the elect, but what it meant to be elect completely changed once he came to know God through the revelation of Jesus Christ.  Suddenly all those things that he thought were the sure signs of his election… and full salvation… things in which he could boast… his Jewish birthright, his strict adherence to the law as had been interpreted through the Pharisees… all that became worthless to Paul once he encountered the true love that is God.  The grace he experienced revealed the idolatry that had surrounded him… the idolatry that he had willingly participated in thinking he was being faithful.

            “You will be my people” does not work without a response from the people.  There has to be some form of change in salvation.  Even free and loving grace needs an accountable transformation.  This is what Bonhoeffer warned us against with “cheap grace”.  Repentance must follow forgiveness.  There has to be discipleship or else baptism is just an empty action of the church.  Salvation isn’t complete without the cross… both Christ’s and our own.  Grace isn’t meant to let us off the hook… grace breaks us open so we can shed the death of sin and idolatry to become the resurrected living people of God. 

            Paul believes fully in a God who is free to do as God wills… and he also believes in the truthfulness and assuredness of God’s covenants and promises which were meant to be a part of the work to transform the elect fully into being God’s people.  God freely bound Godself to the Israelites.  God freely chose to be in covenantal relationship with the Israelites just as God freely chose grace… freely chose to love with a love from which nothing can separate.  If God broke covenant with the Israelites, it would call into question the fullness of God’s love.  It would mean that ultimately God’s love had conditions… and if God’s love carries with it conditions… how can we fully trust that love? 

            Paul knew firsthand how that trust would be put elsewhere.  Again… as a Pharisee, he trusted in the works of the Law.  He trusted in his own acts of self-justification through his strict adherence to the Law.  The Christian church in its history has created and recreated its own sets of law in which we are supposed to place our trust.  Christians have defined our own salvation through the right observation of that law to which we adhere.  Idols are always easier create and far less risky than trusting in and being transformed by God’s free grace.

            Do these new Christians of Paul’s time… do they have to condemn the Israelites… do they have to condemn all non-Christians… or all Christians that are not like them… or can they put their full trust in God’s grace?  That’s the hard question we still struggle with today.  Condemnation is how we try to shore up our own doubts.  What it does is help us to create some idol in which we can be sure.  Such condemnation is not an act of sanctification because it does not follow the same spirit of either justification or election.  Acts of sanctification are to increase our trust in God’s free grace.  Acts of sanctification are to decrease our fear of God’s freedom.  We are God’s people, transformed by grace, living our resurrected lives in God’s kingdom.  Not perfect.  Still falling short. 

            In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus goes to his hometown and is rejected.  At first, they are astounded at his teachings in the synagogue… but they are also too familiar with Jesus.  They know his parents… and his brothers and sisters.  Jesus doesn’t fit their idea of messianic holiness… and they take offense at him because he doesn’t check enough of their conditional idolatrous boxes.  They cannot make a response to God’s grace because they cannot perceive God’s grace.  They do not experience salvation.  John the Baptist loses his head because he speaks a sanctified truth to a power that is neither covenantal nor graceful.  They do not experience salvation because they refuse transformation.  I am sure Herod and Herodias would have accepted John’s message of grace to them… as long as, attached to that message, there was no transformational cost to them.

            The 5,000 were in that place because they sought Jesus out.  They were there to hear his message of grace.  Because of how we see Jesus, we like to blend into the story a bit of awe and the idolatry of fame.  But that crowd was there because of something they had witnessed coming through this prophet.  The disciples come to him with a reasonable request, but this request gets turned back on them and becomes a teachable moment for everyone.

            Now this is where our interpretation of what happens next matters.  Whenever we come to this story, I know I tell you how I don’t like the understanding that Jesus makes the food miraculously appear out of thin air.  I haven’t liked that interpretation for some time… and I’m beginning to understand some of my discomfort.  If Jesus simply produces food out of thin air, he becomes like Caesar… buying loyalty with bread.  The disciples know they don’t have that kind of power. And magically appearing bread and fish makes Jesus the transactional idol that provides for us… and we receive but we are not transformed by the experience to be more than a reliant crowd full wonder and amazement at the awesomeness of God’s power.  If this is a miracle of the people sharing… then it is a story of being transformed by grace… it is a story of sanctification… it is a story of the people being saved by becoming the people of God.  It is a story of sharing what you have… even sacrificially… so that all are fed.  The disciples had five loaves and two fishes among them.  How much more food was already there among the 5,000 plus people who had been hearing all day the story of God’s grace… who felt the call of that grace to become the people of God in both word and deed?

            Paul knows that as a category of people… we can’t say salvation won’t come to the Jews.  God’s promises and covenants are everlasting.  In Christ, though, the idea of salvation is clearly moving beyond parentage… or creed… or social status… or gender… or whatever other idolatrous category that people employ to say that this people or that person cannot be saved.  God’s grace is wide and inclusive… and it must bear real fruit in sanctification.  There has to be a movement from death to resurrected life for the people of God to be saved.  Amen.