A Sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

I speak to you in the name of God the father, the son and the holy spirit. amen.

The other day, Blake and I went out for dinner to celebrate our wedding anniversary. We received a gift card for L’Opossum so decided to go there. I’m sure some of you have been or heard of it. You have to get a reservation months in advance because it’s this tiny corner restaurant in Oregon Hill, but it is so worth budgeting the time and money for. The staff made us feel relaxed but celebrated. The decor is quirky and unique. And, of course, there was the food and drink. We sipped on a refreshing glass of white wine and had oysters, halibut, crab cakes, and a lavender-infused limoncello creme brulée.

And because of the price of these items but also the craft that went into them, we tried to really pay attention to our meal, savoring every sip and not taking any bite for granted. We worked through our meal slowly and intentionally and at the end of it all had this sense of satisfaction that most meals don’t provide.

Have y’all had a meal like this? It’s quite different from going to a Mexican restaurant and stuffing your face full of tortilla chips, then working your way through some combination of bean and cheese and rice, and somehow still managing to make room for a churro or four. Or even Thanksgiving, when you’ve waited all year for the family’s famous dishes and how could you possibly NOT have a helping of every single entrée, and also, if you don’t try both your grandmother’s pie and your uncle’s homemade ice cream, then they may never speak to you again.

Now, these types of meals make me feel full, and usually also full of regret. I don’t love the sensation of eating till I bust. It’s makes me feel sleepy and bloated and sort of unpleasant. But the former experience, the one of slow bites and small plates and savoring, well, that one is much more pleasant. I left L’Opossum with some room in my stomach and the reminder that I actually am glad to be married to this person and we do have a lot to be grateful for and yes, I would like to go on a little after-dinner walk. I left feeling satisfied.

Being full versus being satisfied. It’s a familiar concept, to us, I think, and with this L’Opossum experience fresh on my brain, I couldn’t help but see this concept written all over this week’s gospel. Looking at the passage, the crowds were following Jesus, interested in being cured from their sickness or really just interested in being around him, and they’ve been walking and walking to keep up with him and now they’re hungry and the disciples are trying to figure out how to feed all these people. They see the boy with just five loves and two fish and how could that ever fill the stomachs of five thousand people? But Jesus takes what is there, gives thanks, and gives it out, and everyone took as much as they wanted.

Sitting on the grass, eating just bread and fish with friends, they were satisfied. In the presence of Jesus, fed by this miracle, they were satisfied.

There was no gorging, no greediness, just simplicity and a slowness. Hearts and minds and bellies were content on the bread of Christ.

I wonder, when was the last time you were satisfied? What would that even look like, or feel like? Maybe it’s akin to a good meal or the sweet spot on vacation when you’ve finally let go. I polled the office this week and the answers I got were “when I was at the beach and my kids weren’t there to ask anything of me” and “that one special dinner my family had and nobody was being a jerk.” It feels like a calmness, a roundedness, a peace, maybe even this 30,000-foot view that all shall be well.

When was the last time you were satisfied? If not completely, then when did you perhaps catch a glimpse?

In our modern lives, a sense of satisfaction is hard to come by. In fact, I don’t think our world wants us to be satisfied. We live in a society that wants us to want more, wants us to fill ourselves up past the point of what we actually need. Every day, we are being sold things that promise to fill us and that if we only take more and more, we will be satisfied. We are told that that hole in our life can be filled with things. More fabulous vacations will do the trick. Things would be better if I could just get that bigger house with the open kitchen concept. Enough straight As and AP classes and work promotions is the answer. And we are under constant pressure to fill our lives with sports, with social events, with status, with something that makes us feel special, valued, important, happy, whole, healthy.

And all of these can be a fine part of life, they aren’t necessarily harmful in themselves, but what is harmful is when we think they will complete us. If we believe the world when it tells us that these things give us our meaning or our value or our worth, then we will only find ourselves consuming more and more, stuffing ourselves full of the things of this world, these things that will still never make us feel satisfied, at rest, at peace.

Yes, there is plenty of food out there to fill us up, but the only thing that will ever begin to give us that sense of “it is well with my soul” is God alone. It is only in God that desires can be met, our value made known, our joy be complete.

It is held here in our gospel today, when the thousands are content in their communion with Christ, it’s held in all our scripture and has been a part of our story since the beginning of time. The psalm for today, 145, says “You open wide your hand and satisfy the needs of every living creature.” Psalm 107 reads “Let the redeemed give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds for he satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things.”

It’s something we know with our head but need to be reminded of in our heart, that God, our creator, redeemer and sustainer, is the only one in whom we can truly be satisfied.

We will always hunger, eating but never being full, when we feast on anything other than the bread of life, the one who broke his body for us on the cross, the one who continues to offer himself to us by His Spirit and His Word and His Sacrament, day after day and year after year.

Now it’s a question worth asking, is that even really possible? Am I just spouting spiritual fluff at you that is actually unattainable? Can we ever have that wonderful feeling this side of heaven? I myself ask those questions. And I’ve found some wisdom in the statement of Saint Augustine that our hearts are restless until they rest in God, and we cannot truly be at rest, at perfect peace, with God until we are at home with Him.

And even so, I suspect that we get glimpses here on earth, dinners like L’Opossum, where we’ve slowed down enough to sense the satisfaction that can only come from Christ. When we give ourselves a break from more, more, more, then we make space for the reality that the bread of life is actually enough. And that what seems like just five loaves of bread and two fish is plenty to feed each and every one of us, with baskets leftover.

Amen.

The Rev. Kilpy Singer