424 Time for Miracles

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Time for Miracles”, originally shared on July 31, 2026. It was the 424^th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Miraculous things happen with what we place in Jesus’ hands. Today, we’re going to find out how that works.

   Sally and I were at the Asian grocery store, 99 Ranch Market, in Rancho Cucamonga the other day. They were selling moon cakes.

   Moon cakes are given to friends and family members as part of the Mid-Autumn Festival in many Asian cultures. The Mid-Autumn festival doesn’t start until September 25^th!

   Halloween decorations are on sale at Lowes in San Dimas.

   Halloween doesn’t happen until October 31^st.

   The Hobby Lobby store in West Covina is selling Christmas merchandise. Some churches have already celebrated Christmas in July!

   Christmas doesn’t begin until December 25^th!

   I received an invitation last week from the Tien Dao Christian Media Assoc., a Christian bookstore in El Monte, to pre-order their 2027 Christian Scripture Calendar.

   The new year doesn’t start until January 1^st, 2027!

   Why are we pushing the celebration of future events farther and farther into the present?

   I think that it’s at least partly because the world has an intuitive dread of what is coming. The end. It wants to stuff in as many distractions from the end as possible, as soon as possible.

   Christians are not afraid of the end. We know that there will be hard times before the end. But our hope is in Jesus Christ, who has already won the victory over all the forces that defy God. The end is the beginning in Christian time.

   One of the reasons for our Christian hope is found in an event that took place 2,000 years ago, told in the reading from the Gospels that will be shared in the vast majority of churches in the world this coming Sunday, Matthew 14:13-21, The Feeding of the 5,000.

   Here is a riddle: “How many people did Jesus feed at the ‘Feeding of the 5,000’”? We’ll discover the answer a little later.

   The Feeding of the 5,000 begins with Jesus’ compassion, and the gift of a little boy’s lunch. The Feeding of the 5,000 was a meal that had a lot of leftovers. It is the only miracle of Jesus that is found in all four of the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

   I think that one of the reasons for this is that it centers on a universal human need for food.

   But I think that we miss much of the impact of this miraculous provision of food by Jesus because food scarcity, of the kind that was commonplace at the time of Jesus, is so rare for most of us in Southern California today.

   In fact, the food in our diet today is fresher and more varied than that of most royalty and other rich people throughout human history.

   Just take a mental trip down any main street near you right now and you will find that food dominates the landscape. It’s everywhere, in every form you can imagine, and it comes from all over the world.

   You’ll see fresh food, fast food, fine food, junk food, fun food, organic food, decorative food, food that is locally sourced and food from far away, cuisines from many countries, survival food, and food that is given away for people who are experiencing basic food insecurity.

   Walk into a grocery store and you’ll find one of the main reasons for the fall of the Soviet Union. Lines to buy basic food necessities are almost unheard of anywhere in the United States. And when the Russian communist people found out what life was like for the average person in the United States during the late Cold War, their dissatisfaction boiled over and their empire fell.

   Shortages were rare even during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic a few years ago when we had major supply chain issues.

   In fact, there is enough food in the world to feed everybody, several times over. Our main problem is that it’s not evenly available, and there are major issues of distribution and of human will in getting it to the people who need it.

   Scientists all over the world continue to develop methods of sustainable agriculture in every corner of our planet to help people eat.

   The famines that were commonplace just decades ago are rare today.

   But Jesus lived in a time where nobody ate like we do. As a skilled worker who had now become an itinerant preacher and teacher, Jesus was probably undernourished, muscular, and thin. 

   Jesus had been teaching his followers at the Sea of Galilee, he had been rejected in his hometown of Nazareth, and he had just heard about the execution of his second-cousin and forerunner, John the Baptist.

   The Sea of Galilee had been renamed the Sea of Tiberias by Herod Antipas (a local, petty, and ruthless tyrant) to gain favor with the emperor, Emperor Tiberias, in 29 A.D. Herod Antipas had also recently killed John the Baptist

   We pick up the story at Matthew 14:13-15,

¹³ Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. ¹⁴ When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick.

   Jesus drew big crowds when he was providing free food and medical care. 😊

   The crowd had walked around to the northeast corner of the Sea of Galilee where Jesus was going by boat for a retreat by himself. The Sea was ringed with villages, so they would have had to walk way up the hills to find room for all of them on the green grassy fields of the Spring.

   The crowds were excited to do this because they had seen the healing miracles that Jesus had done, and medical care in those days was almost non-existent. They were poor. And Jesus cured their sick.

   And then, at the end of this day of healing, they were hungry! And Jesus had a solution, as we see as the story continues in Matthew 14:15-16,

¹⁵ When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” ¹⁶ Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.”

   Hospitality was a major social obligation in the honor and shame culture of Jesus time. Jesus wanted he and the disciples to be good hosts. Everyone was to be treated as close family.

   This part of the story always reminds me of why we in the United States care for people who are struggling with food insufficiency here and throughout the world from the great blessings we have first received from God.

   I think of the comic strip I saw when I was in seminary of a cartoon character praying, and saying, “Lord there are so many needs in the world. Why don’t you do something about them?” And a text bubble comes down from off the strip and says, “That’s funny. I was just about to ask you the same thing.”

   We see the example Jesus gives as our reading continues in Matthew 14:17-19,

¹⁷ They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.” ¹⁸ And he said, “Bring them here to me.” ¹⁹ Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds.

    Have you ever been hungry? It affects you.

   When I was about 5 or 6, I remember sneaking down the stairs after I had been put to bed so that I could secretly watch the TV from the staircase, but that night the TV wasn’t on, and my parents were talking. My dad wasn’t going to get paid for a few days and my mom was saying that there wasn’t much food in the house. I thought we were going to starve, and I started to cry. My parents heard me and brought me downstairs with them. They explained that we were going to be fine, and my mom made a big bowl of popcorn, and I sat on the couch in between my parents and we ate popcorn until we were full, and then I went to bed.

   When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated when I was in college, the food service allowed students to sign out of the meal program for three days and to fast; the money saved was sent to civil rights organizations. By the second night, I was dreaming about food. It was almost the only thing I thought about.

   Jesus knew the need he saw, the hunger.

   We see in the other Gospels that these five loaves and two fish that were given to him came from a little boy, probably the food his family gave him for the day.

   The disciples called them “nothing”, which seems obvious if you need to feed 5,000 people.

   Suppose you were hosting a meal for your extended family. You could probably handle it. Suppose you were hosting a large family reunion? It would be difficult, but you could do it.

   Suppose 5,000 people just showed up and you were responsible for feeding them? What would you do? Jesus blessed the little food He had and told the disciples to distribute it to the crowd.

   Here’s what happened, continuing in Matthew 14:20,

²⁰ And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full.

   For people who didn’t regularly get enough to eat, except at weddings and festivals, to be allowed to eat as much as they wanted was a huge deal.

   And there were leftovers (!), another rare event.    

   Jesus knew the needs of the people, and he didn’t want anything to go to waste.

   Twelve baskets full of leftovers, as in the 12 tribes of Israel, the 12 disciples of Jesus, the 12 rare stones in the High Priest’s chest plate, the 12 gates of the holy city in the book of Revelation in the Bible, and more. This was not just a feeding. It was a miracle, a sign that pointed to something else, something bigger.

   I just want to mention here the naturalistic explanation for this miracle. Some have given the plausible explanation that people of Jesus time would not have gone anywhere without taking some food with them. The miracle is not the multiplication of loaves and fishes, but that there was something about Jesus that inspired people to share, and when they shared there was more than enough. It’s plausible, but I don’t think that that’s the story here.

   It doesn’t seem to me that such an event would have made the cut for all four gospels. Nor does it seem likely that people would be able to hide that much food in their clothes.

   Plus, in the Gospel of John, John remembers that the people declared Jesus to be a prophet and wanted to make him King! Jesus declines, but I don’t think that that would have happened if Jesus had merely drawn a spirit of sharing out of them.

  And John the Baptist’s execution was fresh in their minds. Things were happening. They just didn’t understand what they were.

   Jesus was headed toward death, but he would give his life and then take it back again.

   The free food given in the feeding of the 5,000 was Jesus. It points to God’s generous, free, and gracious redemption of all who believe and are baptized, including you, and me.

   And it all began with a little boy’s food for the day, five small loaves of bread and two fish, that were placed into the hands of Jesus. That’s stewardship.

   “Stewardship” in the Christian Church is a reflection of our belief that all things have been created by God. We are stewards, or “managers” of everything we have, our time, our treasure, and our talent.

   The Biblical model of stewardship is first fruits, proportional, growth giving.

   That is, with regard to “treasure” for example, the first thing we do when we receive some income is to set aside some for God’s work, primarily through our Christian community, our church.

   “First fruits” is a Biblical reference from a time when most people worked in agriculture and the first part of a harvest was given for God’s work.

   “Proportional” means that the amount you give is calculated as a percentage of your income.

   “Growth” means that your giving increases to a “tithe”, or 10%, and then goes beyond.

   When the Bible speaks of giving “tithes and offerings”, it’s saying that the offering you give doesn’t start until you have given a tithe.

   I read once about a man in Texas who owned a machine tool factory. He believed that his spiritual gift was “giving”, so he tithed in reverse. He lived on 10% of his income and donated 90% of it to his church!

   I’m sure he had a pretty large income but, still, I think that he could have thought of lots of other ways to spend that income.

   Could you live on 10% of your income? I don’t think that I could! Or at least my life would be radically different!

   Does your church have all the money it needs to do what it believes God is calling it to do?

   I would guess, if yours is like most churches, the answer would be no.

   Some churches are already dependent on their denomination for grants to keep them alive. It may be a short-term strategy but, long term, the power to give is the power to take away. The power to grant is the power to control. That means that local churches have to make decisions, not on the basis of what God is calling them to do, but based on  what the grant givers will fund.

   Do you know why? It’s because your church isn’t tithing.

   It’s not that God needs our money. He doesn’t. But we need to give it. Why?

   Jesus said, in Matthew 6:19-21,

¹⁹ “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; ²⁰ but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. ²¹ For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

   The Feeding of the 5,000 shows us that whatever we put in Jesus’ hands multiplies. It’s not about prosperity. The boy doesn’t get anything in return but lunch. 😊

   The Feeding of the 5,000 shows us that our giving is a spiritual issue.

   The Feeding of the 5,000 is a model for our giving. It points to what was and what is to come, It’s a miracle!

   Why? Because miraculous things happen with what we place in Jesus’ hands.

   Miracles like this are not suspensions of the laws of nature but acts that point to God’s intention for the world at Creation, and to God’s coming redemption of the world in the new heaven and the new earth. In fact, in the gospel of John, as in today’s reading, “miracles” are often called “signs”, and signs point to something else.

   Miracles are not our last resort. They are our first declaration through faith.

   When we give more than spare change, we are living by faith.

   The greatest miracle is the cross.

   The cross lies at the center of human history, providing the means by which our sin, our separation from God, is overcome by Jesus, fully God and fully human being, in his sacrificial and life-giving death.

   Our Gospel reading for this week concludes with Matthew 14:21,

²¹ And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.

   Remember our riddle? How many people were fed at the feeding of the 5,000? We don’t know. There were 5,000 men plus women and children. Women and children didn’t count for much in Jesus’ day, except to Jesus! Here they aren’t even counted literally.

   What we do know is that Jesus is the bread of life, and that that food is given for free for all people who receive it, who believe in His name.

   I read an article last week in which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is quoted as saying that the long awaited “singularity” was already here. Now.

   The “singularity” is the arrival of machines who have attained self-consciousness, who are realizing that they are superior to their creators and no longer need them. Their activity is now difficult to predict or control. Mr. Altman says that it may soon become impossible.

   What will happen to us? Nothing that will last.

   What God has prepared is what will happen for us. It will come in the fulness of God’s time. The miracles of Jesus remind us of what was and what is to come.

   We have no dread for the future. The Feeding of the 5,000 is a sign. It points backward to the way God made the world to be and forward to the future, when God will come to judge the living and the dead, and there will be a new heaven and a new earth.

   We live and we give generously as good stewards in response to what God has already done for us, and in tune with the final verses of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, in Revelation 22:20-21,

²⁰ The one who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.”

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!

²¹ The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen.