Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

The Rev. Melissa Skelton
July 30, 2006

I look at the departure board in the Manchester airport and find my flight number. Next to it in large, red capital letters is the word “CANCELLED.” After a trip to the counter to confirm that I’ve been rebooked for a flight the next day, I call a hotel that has an airport shuttle service and check into a nearby Fairfield Suites Hotel. It is, I find, located in an area of suburban sprawl a few miles from the airport. After checking e-mail and calling home, I venture out, making my way on foot to the nearest restaurant, one of those suburban family pubs in a strip mall three blocks away.

It’s a Friday night and the place is buzzing: young women stand in the foyer wearing headsets, taking names and directing people to their tables while families with small children are jammed on benches waiting to go in. I go to the bar, the only place there is to sit, order a glass of wine and look at the menu. I’m ravenous, ready to eat, my appetite fueled by simple hunger but also by my wanting to console myself with food over my missed flight. And I’m thinking about our lessons for today. For both, its seems to me, are lessons about appetite: the lesson from the Second Book of Samuel in which a seemingly ravenous King David spies someone who inflames his appetite and decides to and take her, setting loose a web of violence, and the gospel from John, in which Jesus takes a few barley loaves and fish belonging to a small boy, blesses them and feeds five thousand people.

And so as I sit there looking at a menu full of colorful pictures of baby back ribs and huge margaritas, all meant to inflame the appetite, I think about what our lessons might be saying to us, on the one hand, about the connection between unbridled appetite and a culture of violence and, on the other hand, about God’s choices to take simple things and provide us with not just what quickly satisfies the appetite but with what will satisfy and fill us on a deeper level.

Our readings, of course, begin with unbridled appetite and violence. In what some have called a disastrous turning point in the David saga, we see the moment the beloved shepherd King turns from tending and feeding his people to being a ravenous wolf devouring them.

The story opens with David, now older and no longer accompanying his men into battle, arising from his couch and walking upon his rooftop. From this vantage point above it all, he sees a beautiful woman bathing in a ritual of purification. Without any hesitation, David finds out who she is—Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite—sends for her, takes her, and lies with her.

One way to look at this action might be that it is the simple, private indiscretion of a king, unattractive to us, but understandable given the kind of power that a king has. But this, of course, is not the way the Biblical writer sees it. For the Biblical writer, David’s private act of unbridled appetite signals a shift in David’s and Israel’s relationship with God and has a ripple effect of violence that cascades throughout the remainder of David’s reign and into the reign of Solomon.

And so after Bathsheba sends word to David that she is pregnant, David, with the help of Joab, engineers her husband, Uriah’s death in battle. This, the Biblical writer notes, leads to David’s own infant son by Bathsheba dying shortly after birth and, after this, a web of conflict, violence and death that stretches across David’s reign entangling David’s other sons Amnon and Absalom more immediately, and two other sons along with Joab later.

Interestingly, one of the ways the Biblical writer speaks of this violence is in terms of devouring and being devoured or eaten up. And so just in our readings for this Sunday alone, directly after the passage we heard this morning David himself describes Uriah and the other men who died in battle as being “devoured by the sword.” In our psalm for today, evildoers are those who “eat up (God’s) people like bread.”

This emphasis on excessive consumption, on the appetite out of control, on devouring, if you will, becomes, then, an image of human life out of touch with a God who is the source of all things necessary for life and who provides all things to us.

This God is the focus of our gospel passage about the feeding of the five thousand. If we look at the passage carefully, we find that the passage is not really about the ravenous appetites of the large crowd who have followed Jesus. In fact, the gospel writer makes no mention of their hunger at all. No, the focus of this feeding story is on Jesus, himself, as the incarnate son of God, the Holy One who has come into the world to lead us into all truth and to show us that through Christ, life itself is grace and gift.

And so when the five barley loaves and the two fish, are taken, given thanks for and distributed to the five thousand who then receive as much as they want and are satisfied, when we are told that there is enough left over to fill twelve baskets are to understand that there is enough in the world—enough love, enough land, enough food, enough power for all God’s people to be satisfied.

But for us to experience that there is enough, we need to stay connected to the awareness that God is the giver of all and that we are the daily the recipients of these gifts. It’s only this kind of awareness that keeps us from assuming the identity of bored kings or queens above it all, scanning the world for our latest diversion, ready to take and to use without understanding what already belongs to us, and without understanding how our actions of taking and using, taking and consuming, have a ripple effect in the world.

No, you and I do not want to be these kinds of kings and queens. We want to live the kind of regal human life that Christ brings into the world—a regal human life that has its own hungers and appetites, but also that has a sense of connection to others as well as the freedom to choose what to take, when to be satisfied and what to share.

Choosing what to take, when to be satisfied and what to share--It may strike you as a small thing to be focusing on this morning—a seemingly insignificant thing to focus on while the conflict rages on between Israel and Hezbollah, while the war continues between insurgents and the new Iraqi government and Americans, and while a person in own city storms into the Jewish Federation Offices and shoots six people. A small thing to focus on in the midst of these large and overwhelming acts of violence.

But know this. Our small acts—the choice to take too much, too eat too much, to own too much, to control too much are connected to a larger world that though we do not always see it, is there. It is a world, the writer of Second Samuel would suggest, where our own appetites can turn against us and devour us. It is a world, the writer of the Gospel of John would suggest, that is already shot through with grace and gift.

In a moment we will be invited to a table that is all about helping us to see and know and receive that grace and gift. Unlike where I was in that restaurant two days ago, what we will receive has nothing to do with the money in our wallet or what and how much we would order for ourselves. For each of us will receive the same gift: the same morsel of bread, the same sip of wine as we enact our common dependence on God for everything and the equality of our need and promised satisfaction with each other and with neighbors near and far. For as our letter to the Ephesians says, “our God is the one from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name.” Our God is the one who “fills the world with the fullness of God.”