An oddity of the Episcopal Church is that we often have 2 different sets of readings for the Old Testament and the Psalm that we can use on any given Sunday. The “primary” Old Testament Reading today tells us the story of David, Bathsheba, and Uriah, a familiar story of betrayal, adultery, and in the end, murder, all because the main character let power go to their head. The alternative reading which we heard today, from 2nd Kings, however, is different.  It tells of another “Feed the people”  event, this time in the time of Elisha. In the reading, there are “only” 100 people instead of the 5000 we hear about in the Gospel and there are 20 loaves of Barley and “fresh ears of grain” which we might assume to be corn. 

The action of Elisha, “Give it to the people and let them eat” is similar to that of Jesus, “Make the people sit down” as is the reaction of Elisha’s servant “How can I set this before a hundred people?” to that of the disciples, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” and “Two hundred denarii would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.” Finally, the answers given by both Elisha and Jesus are similar – “Give it to the people and let them eat, for thus says the LORD: They shall eat and have some left.” And “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets.

Two very different people, two very different incidents, two very different times in the life of the church but a virtually identical outcome.

Those of you who have been at Christ the King for a while know my foible of trying to find a way to tie the Old Testament, Epistle, and Gospel Readings together. Sometimes it works, sometimes not so much. When I saw the reading from 2nd Kings, a light bulb went off. In Paul’s letter to the church in Ephesus, he gives them (and us) a clue as to how these miracles were performed when he wrote, “Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.”

Paul makes a stark distinction between “knowledge” and faith in this prayer. He prays that the “church” may be strengthened in its inner being with power through the Holy Spirit and that the church may have the power to comprehend or grasp the sheer infinite magnitude of the love of Christ, in order that the church be filled with the fullness of God. There is an interesting “sequence” here if you will – in order to be filled with the fullness of God, we must first comprehend and I purposely do not say “understand” here because we mortals usually use the word “understand” to define a logically and empirically derived result – better known as “knowledge” – we must first comprehend the infinite vastness of the love of God, through Christ.

How DO we, as mortals comprehend the infinite? We spend millions on telescopes that peer into the farthest reaches of our universe, only to find that there are still things out there beyond what we have accepted as the “boundaries” of our universe – it is bigger than we thought. We spend millions on researching the infinitely small realms of atomic particles, only to find that, yep, there is something “else” that is even smaller than what we had previously conceived – there are things smaller than what we thought….  And these are the things that we can see, touch, hear, quantify, prove the existence of…. How do we, as mortals, comprehend infinite love? More important, how do we EXPERIENCE infinite love?

We humans are finite creatures. We have our mortal bodies, we live, we experience the world around us that we can touch, see, smell, hear, and taste.  We experience the love that our mortal frame of reference gives us. 

Bishop Jake Owensby described what it means for him to love. He writes, “This is what it means to love. Love can be far more than a strong attraction or a deep affection. To love is to give ourselves so completely to each other as we wander this planet together that, over time, we are woven together. We are still ourselves, and yet we are intimately, undeniably connected. So, finite beings that we are, because we have given ourselves over to love, we will probably know grief.”

No wonder some people resist love’s self-surrender. It leaves such a painful mark. But that is ultimately a fool’s game. It is our very essence as human beings to give and to receive love. We cannot help but yearn to love and to be loved.

When we resist this yearning for very long, we will succeed only in distorting love into a desire to consume or to control. Our hearts will harden with loneliness, bitterness, and cynicism. We will not protect ourselves from love’s sorrows so much as replace those sorrows with self-inflicted spiritual and emotional wounds.

As for me, Bhp Jake writes, this finite love is made worthwhile because I believe that it participates in something more. Through the finite love we give and receive in our brief span on this earth, we participate in the infinite, eternal love that brings all things into existence. We participate in the very life of God.

So, going back to my original premise, the feeding of the people – participation in the life of God through God’s love and power gave Elisha and Jesus the trust in God that God would provide and God did, in fact, come through, even to the point of excess. As Paul prayed that the church in Ephesus, and as descendants of those first Christians, for us as well, that Christ would dwell in our hearts through faith as WE are being rooted and grounded in that infinite love, we too can begin to comprehend and experience and the infinite love at work in the world around us. By being part of that life, of that love, giving of that love we too can accomplish far more than we can ask or imagine. Through the finite love we give and receive in our brief span on this earth, we participate in the infinite, eternal love that brings all things into existence. We participate in the very life of God.

Amen