The Rev. Keri T. Aubert       

All Saints Episcopal Church, South Burlington, Vermont        

July 26, 2009 

Proper 12, Year B, RCL           

2 Samuel 11:1-15

Psalm 14

Ephesians 3:14-21

John 6:1-21

Today’s gospel reading includes not one but two miracle stories, perhaps the two most well-known of all the miracle stories. The feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle story recounted in all four gospels; in three of the four gospels, it is followed by the story of Jesus walking on water.

No matter how important these stories are in the Christian tradition, miracles are a hard sell in our post-enlightenment age. For us, for the most part, science has done away with superstition, and for that we are grateful. Of course, some would say that spirituality is superstition. And so, when challenged, do we really believe that Jesus fed five thousand people with five loaves and two fish? Do we really believe that Jesus walked on water? Does it really matter?

The crowds that follow Jesus are said to have heard about “the signs that he was doing for the sick.” In short, the people may want the healing, but Jesus is interested in the signs. In other words, Jesus doesn’t heal people just because they ask, and he doesn’t walk on water just to get where he is going. He does these things as signs to reveal God’s glory and thereby evoke faith. As one commentator puts it, Jesus came into the world so “. . . that humans might have a certain kind of life for which John’s favorite description is ‘eternal life.’ It means simply the human life lived out of the context of a conscious relationship with God made possible through Christ.”[i] 

Relationship with God through Christ is still what it’s all about for us, regardless of what we think about those original miracles, and regardless of whether we think miracles still happen. And so we might ask ourselves these questions: Can we see signs that reveal God’s glory and thereby evoke our faith? Are there things that heighten our conscious relationship with God through Christ? I think the answer to both those questions is yes, but I do think we have to do some looking. And I think that focusing our collective vision is part of what I do as your preacher.

My looking this week was especially spurred by the story of Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand. In a culture in which information was exchanged by word of mouth and the occasional letter, five thousand would have been a huge number to show up looking for Jesus. In Jesus’ day, the population of Jerusalem is estimated to have totaled only 80,000. When the gospels say that Jesus fed five thousand, I think what they’re really saying is that Jesus fed a whole lot of people.

Thinking about big crowds, I noticed that, in the last few weeks, there have been two major events that have drawn the attention of large numbers of people across the globe. The more recent of these events was this week’s solar eclipse visible across much of Asia. Eclipses are always rare, but this one was extra-special. For one thing, it was the longest solar eclipse this century will see. More strikingly, solar eclipses typically are visible only from the middle of the ocean, but this one was visible on large swaths of occupied land—and therefore by hundreds of millions of people.[ii] In this case, I’m not talking about participation through the wonders of media; this is participation by actually being there.

News outlets reported that reactions to the eclipse varied widely. In India, some pregnant women stayed inside with the curtains drawn; in Thailand, “dozens of monks led prayers at a Buddhist temple to ward off evil.”[iii] What caught my attention was the Associated Press photo in Thursday’s Burlington Free Press. It pictured three Hindu women in India. They’re dressed in saris but are up to their chests in swirling water, with their hands held together just above water level in a position of prayer. The women look very traditional, except that they’re rather incongruently wearing special plastic glasses designed for the safe viewing of eclipses. The photo caption calls their immersion at the confluence of sacred rivers a “holy dip.”[iv] 

The other of the two major global events was the memorial service for the so-called King of Pop, Michael Jackson. There is much that can and has been said about this man who led a difficult life and died an untimely death, a man who broke racial barriers that had stood in this country for generations. But for purposes of this sermon, let’s talk numbers. Michael Jackson’s memorial service at the Staples Center in Los Angeles was attended by 18,000 people.[v] In the United States alone, 31 million people watched on television and even more watched via the internet.[vi] The number of viewers worldwide was estimated to be one billion people.[vii] Surely Michael Jackson’s memorial service was an entertainment phenomenon. But it was still a religious observance, a Christian religious observance, one shared by more than one‑seventh of the world’s population.[viii] Although I wasn’t one of them, I should therefore be careful not to dismiss it too lightly. After all, this shared experience could also be more of a “holy dip” than surface appearances might indicate.

I think there is something particularly powerful about important experiences that are shared collectively by large numbers of people. Also in the news this week was the fortieth anniversary of the first moon landing. People still remember where they were at the time it happened. I was only seven years old but was so excited about it, and I still have my commemorative Apollo moon landing book. Americans shared this experience not just with other Americans, but with people across the world. It changed how people perceive the earth and our own human possibilities and responsibilities. To this day I look at the photos of the earth taken from the moon and I feel an expansiveness that can only be called God.

The feeding of the five thousand was a miracle. But focusing on it only as a miracle leaves the effect of the encounter at the level of the feeding itself. It’s about so much more than that. If that’s all it was about, we wouldn’t even be hearing about it today. If the sign did lead to faith, then we have to assume that those people were changed, collectively, powerfully, forever. The massiveness of the event would have generated a web of association that carried well beyond the initial experience. Apparently that happened, because we are still being changed by it today.

A solar eclipse and a memorial service. Events that involved unimaginable numbers of people and yet offered shared spiritual undertones that carried the power to change. They might not be miracles, but they might be signs, amazing evidence of God’s glory. Signs are all around us, all the time. My task—and yours—is to help point out those signs, for ourselves and for others. You might say that we put on our eclipse-viewing sunglasses and jump in the water, clothes and all. I wasn’t there in real-time for the eclipse, but the photos I’ve seen of it are spectacular. They provide impressive evidence of the incredible beauty of God’s creation. I may have been slightly annoyed by all the media attention given to Michael Jackson’s death, but no one forced all those people to tune in to his memorial service. The experience, at its simplest, was that of witnessing to a human being who had died, a human being who of course turned out to be as vulnerable as the rest of us. I suspect that these events had the power to raise the collective appreciation of all human life and all the rest of the natural creation. For those of us who are looking for them, these are signs. For those of us who are seeking it, such observations intensify our conscious relationship with God. We are changed, and we become change.

I want to return briefly to the story of Jesus walking on water. If the feeding of the five thousand was a miracle for the masses, then the walking on water was a miracle for the devoted few. And so, for us modern-day disciples of Christ, there are not only collective signs, there are more personal ones as well. One of my signs this week was eating the first sun gold tomatoes out of my little backyard garden. It might not be Jesus walking on water, but there’s not much that demonstrates God’s glory more powerfully than biting into a freshly picked sun gold tomato.

This week, I hope you find—or bite into—some truly good news, signs of God’s glory, calling you closer to God.