Grace, mercy and peace be unto you from God, our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. Our text is the Holy Gospel reading which has already been read.

Dear friends in Christ, with Jesus there is always more than enough to go around. Bread. Fish. Forgiveness. Life. Salvation. He multiplies seven loaves and a few fish to feed the four thousand until they're stuffed and there are still seven baskets leftover. Today He uses simple words, water, bread, and wine to fill our need for forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation and there is still an unlimited supply to go around. Overflowing abundance, given freely to the world, to give us food that truly satisfies.

Come now, all you who thirst for righteousness, come to the living waters that flow from the side of Jesus. You sinners who have no merit or worthiness in yourselves, come be given the bread of salvation, the Word of the Lord at no cost. Listen carefully to the Lord this day, and eat of His good Word, and let your soul delight itself in the abundance of what Jesus shows in the Feeding of the Four Thousand.

The four thousand people had been faithfully listening to Jesus for three days with nothing to eat. Their devotion really puts us to shame, doesn't it? We give up an hour or two a week and think about Sunday dinner in the meantime, and they had gone three days without food! But their feast was the greatest kind, for they had been feasting on the Bread of Life, the Word of God from the lips of Jesus, and so they had already received food that satisfies the soul and brings eternal life. But they still needed to eat regular food too, and so Jesus has compassion on the crowd. And this compassion is not just an attitude of pity, but it actually accomplishes something. Jesus shows mercy to the crowd with a feeding miracle.

Jesus can take weak, little things and multiply them beyond measure. He takes seven loaves of bread and a few small fish and feeds the four thousand until they are satisfied. How could he feed so many with so little? Well, He is the Lord. He is the same one who in the beginning said, "Let there be light" and there was light. So now, when He says, "Let the bread and fish be multiplied," they are multiplied. And boy were they multiplied! Can you picture the disciples with their arms full of food to give out, returning to Jesus after each trip, only to find more and more food?

The Lord's greatest pleasure is in giving and giving and giving. The people ate until they were absolutely stuffed and couldn't eat another bite. There were even seven big baskets leftover. The Lord provides superabundantly to these people. First they receive His healing and preaching and then they receive a feast. All because Jesus had compassion on them.

So what does this miracle mean for us today? In this miracle Jesus shows us what sort of Savior He is; He wants to feed us with food that satisfies, both at home, and at church.

Let's start at home, where the Lord feeds us our daily bread. In one episode of the Simpsons, Bart Simpson folds his hands and prays this dinner prayer: "Dear God, We paid for all this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing." As ungrateful sinners, we often forget where our daily bread comes from. That's why we do well to ask the Lord's blessing on our meals beforehand and return thanks afterward-so that we don't forget to receive it from the Lord with gratitude.

The first point this miracle teaches is that the Lord provides daily bread. Just as the Lord provided manna for the children of Israel as they wandered about in the wilderness and just as He provided bread and fish for the four thousand in the wilderness, the Lord will always provide for the Christian's needs. Now that doesn't mean that He'll give us everything that we want, because many times our wants are corrupted by sinful greed or lust. But as far as your daily bread goes-food, water, clothing, house, home, wife, and children-you needn't worry that you'll ever be without; the Lord will provide what we need. And that's all we really need for our bodily life. As St. Paul writes to Timothy, "We brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that." (I Tim 6:7-8)

Faith trusts that the Lord will give us enough. So we pray the Lord's Prayer every day, asking the Lord to "Give us this day our daily bread." And the Lord answers. In response to that petition, the Lord gives us farmers and ranchers, millers and bakers, grocers and truckers and everything else in between that delivers daily bread to our tables. In this creation, God always works through means, whether supplying our daily bread or forgiving our sins. When Jesus feeds the five thousand, He doesn't turn stones into bread and scorpions into fish; He multiplies bread and fish. He works with ordinary, earthly means.

When we pray for daily bread, it doesn't simply plop down from heaven onto our dinner table. God uses His instruments-the farmer to grow the grain, the miller to grind it, the baker to knead it into dough and bake it, the truck driver to transport it, the grocer to distribute it. Jesus did the same thing in the wilderness. He used the means of some loaves and fish and His disciples to distribute the bread and the fish to the people. Jesus did not feed the crowd directly. He used means, instruments, middle men. He handed the multiplied bread and fish to the disciples, who distributed them to the crowds. The disciples were the waiters; Jesus was the farmer, the miller, the baker, the chef.

It works that way with all the gifts of Christ, and that is the second point of this story: Jesus shows that He works through means, through instruments, through middle men to deliver His gifts to us not only at home but especially in the Christian Church. Where does our Lord give out His Baptism, His Word of forgiveness, and His Holy Supper? He gives those gifts out at Church! The Church is the distribution point of the Lord's gifts in the Means of Grace. That's why the Lord gives us pastors: for distributing the gifts of Jesus to the people, just as the disciples did for the crowds.

Jesus died for the sins of the whole world on the cross. He cried out, "It is finished!" and all the sin of the world was answered for. "He died for all," wrote St. Paul. But while our salvation from sin was achieved on Calvary, that salvation still needs to be given out. We can't go back in time to the cross to be forgiven there. So Jesus comes to us in the present-at church-to give out His forgiveness through the very lowly and meager means of water and words and bread and wine. These Word and Sacraments don't seem like much, and to the eye they appear far too weak and earthly, but Jesus multiplies them with His creative Word. He amplifies their blessing and does what we cannot do. What Jesus did with ordinary bread in the feeding of the four thousand, He does even more with the Bread of Life, Himself. The flesh that Jesus gave on the cross for the life of the world, for your life, He multiplies it throughout the world in His Word and Sacraments to feed the nations, that all who believe and are baptized might live forever.

God always works through earthly means-instruments-and He has not promised to deal with us apart from those means. If we got this one piece of theology straight-and if we believed it-we would never conceive of a single day without meditating on the Word of God, and we would never let a week go by without listening to preaching and seeking out the Lord's Supper.

God does not tell us that we can learn about Him apart from His Word and Sacraments. I saw a very godly bumper sticker that said, "Don't believe everything you think." If you think that God can only fit into the categories you can think up on your own, God starts looking like you want Him to. You can't look inside yourself and find God. All you can come up with that way is a god of your own creation. No, in His compassion, the Lord gives us His true and sure Word in our own language through the means of the Bible. Apart from that Word, you cannot know about God and how He loves you. In God's Word, you have a daily source of comfort and instruction in holy living right in hand.

Likewise, God uses means or instruments called the Sacraments to forgive our sins and strengthen our faith, and He uses those instruments at specific times and specific places. Jesus has not promised to deliver His life-giving body and blood to us while we're out at the lake, sitting on the couch, or mowing our lawn. But Jesus has promised to be here, in this place, as He said, "Where two or three are gathered in My name, there I am among them." That is why we gather here regularly, to receive the Lord's gifts, where His Means of Grace are doing their work.

And we know that gathering here provides us with food that satisfies because God's powerful Word does what it says. St. Paul tells us that faith comes by what is heard, that is, the Gospel proclaimed into our ears. If we really understood and believed that the Lord uses preaching and the Lord's Supper to forgive our sins and sustain our faith, we would view the Sunday Divine Service as the high point of our week. We would cling to the Sermon and the Lord's Supper the way a hungry man clings to a loaf of bread. At the feeding of the four thousand, can you imagine one of the hungry people in the crowd rejecting the bread and fish that the disciples were handing out? "No thanks, I ate a couple months ago. I don't need to eat again now." They would starve to death!

If Jesus is our Bread of Life, then we cannot live apart from regularly feeding on Him. The feeding of the four thousand foreshadowed a greater feast to come on the night when Jesus was betrayed. That feast was the one in which our Lord took bread, gave thanks, broke it and distributed it to His disciples with the words "This is my body." The feast in which He took wine and gave it to His disciples with the words "This is my blood." That is the same feast that we receive here at church. The One who multiplied bread in the wilderness, multiplies the bread of His body; the wine of His blood. And as great as that feast is, it points to a yet greater feast to come, when we will eat and drink in the face to face presence of Christ in His kingdom in the resurrection. That's what eternal life will be like-all of us gathered around our Lord's table, together, an unending feast with Jesus. Sounds pretty good, doesn't it?

The Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman once wrote a book entitled, "There's No Such Thing as a Free Lunch." That's true, except for one. Where Jesus sits at the head of the table, where Jesus presides at the meal, we receive it "without money, without cost." Utterly free, undeserved grace to us, which was utterly costly to Jesus, who shed His holy, precious blood and suffered an innocent death in our place. And just as we didn't contribute one bit to Christ's redeeming death on the cross, so also we don't work to earn the meal of the Lord's Supper, any more than the crowd in the wilderness deserved a free dinner. But we eat and drink as Jesus' guest, out of His compassion for us, a meal He died to provide. He is our host, our cook, our waiter, our food, our bread and fish in the wilderness. And since Jesus is Lord, you don't have to worry about there not being enough of Jesus to go around. With Jesus there is always more and more food that satisfies, because He is the Bread of Life. In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

And the peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus unto life everlasting. Amen.