Dare to Forgive

September 6, 2026, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.

Then his lord summoned him and said to him, “You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?”

And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart. Matthew 18:32-35

Jesus. What gives?

This is the kind of passage that makes me want to hide my bible. God forbid some CIA agent find it and see a scriptural justification for water boarding.

“And in anger his Lord handed him over to be tortured …”

I’m searching the passage for loopholes (as W.C. Fields reportedly did when he studied the bible on his death bed). It seems an abuse of power for a king to send a flunky to the rack. 

At least it seems that way by our enlightened standards, which require turning a blind eye toward Alligator Alcatraz or the inhumane foreign prisons to which America sends its immigrants, as if they were some kind of anachronistic aberration. 

But kings are only human and we accept that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The unnerving part of Jesus’ intervention is that the reference to torture no sooner leaves his lips than he ups the ante: 

“So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

Pause for nervous laughter.

God will hand us over to be tortured if we nurse a grudge?

I do nurse grudges over past and present presidents who start  unnecessary wars, and I seethe with undiluted anger at Robert McNamara who I regard as a war criminal.

My beef with McNamara is that he knew very early that the Vietnam War was unnecessary and unwinnable. But he never told LBJ.

There are thousands of monuments to the price of his silence. Years later, after McNamara finally revealed his regrets, Martha and I visited the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where her immigrant father once worked as a dish washer after he left Cuba. The cemetery at West Point tends to be organized by the war in which the soldiers fell, and as we passed by the graves of Vietnam veterans I became bitterly mindful of McNamara's silence. A lot of those graves were of men and women who died after 1967 -- after their Secretary of Defense had concluded the war was unnecessary and unwinnable.

Why didn't McNamara speak up? Did he feel honor-bound to be loyal to an intransigent president? What were his thoughts when the casualty figures continued to mount: 16,592 in 1968? 11,616 in 1969? 6,081 in 1970? -- all for a cause he knew to be lost from the beginning?

In his later years, Robert McNamara was eloquent in his contrition. In a 1995 memoir he declared the war had been "wrong -- terribly wrong." He spent the rest of his life trying -- futilely, it turned out -- to prevent similar American disasters.

But the terrible question hanging over McNamara's life can't be avoided: what if he had spoken up sooner? Would the timely confession by the architect of the war that he had been wrong all along have forced LBJ to halt it? Would it have given subsequent warriors, Nixon and Kissinger, sufficient pause to sue for peace? Would it have saved thousands of lives?

Tragically, we'll never know. Personally, I think a public admission by Robert McNamara in May 1967 would have been loud enough to suck the air out of public opinion and silence the bombs over Hanoi.

And that's what I can't forgive. When his voice could have thundered around the world, he chose to be silent.

But I don’t think God cares whether I forgive Bob McNamara who I never met. Unfortunately, I think God is more concerned about my attitude toward my actual neighbor – that is, the guy next door – who curses at my barking dog, or the idiot who snatches all the donuts at the coffee table, or the mad max who cuts me off at rush hour on the parkway. To each I would hurl a Carnac curse from the old Tonight Show: may a bag of pop rocks explode in your shorts. 

Admittedly, that is not the kind of forgiving attitude that would convince God to send the torturer away. 

We all struggle with this, and to further darken our prospects, these annoying folks are easier to forgive than the people we actually live with or cannot escape.

In this category fall rancorous ex-spouses, misanthropic bosses, languid adult children still living at home, hypercritical in-laws who think you aren’t good enough for the family, and obsequious relatives who listen to them.

In each of these cases, you might find it possible to forgive these tormenters once or twice. But they keep coming back at you with new infamies and new miseries. Dear God, how much can we take? Wouldn’t Jesus be an empathetic listener?

You: “Jesus, she drives me crazy!” 

Jesus: “I know, right?”

That conversation will never happen. Jesus already had that conversation and it went like this:

Peter: “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” 

Jesus: “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” (Matthew 18:21-22.

Actually, Jesus was condescending to Peter’s literal mind. He wasn’t suggesting we use hash marks to keep track of the number of times we forgive. A redacted version of the conversation would have the same meaning.

Peter: “Shall I ever stop forgiving someone who sins against me?” 

Jesus: “No.”

This is certainly one of those utterances of Jesus that we would prefer to ignore. A lot of families have members who haven’t spoken to each other for years because of some terrible and unforgivable thing that happened. Sometimes this happens between siblings. 

My grandfather and his brother hated each other and I never knew why. Those who knew didn’t talk about it or had forgotten what happened. My uncle did show up at Grandpa’s funeral because my aunt insisted on it, and to make sure there was no mistake.

Too bad for Grandpa and Uncle. They couldn’t forgive each other once, let alone 77 times. That did not portend well for their spiritual consolation when they finally met their maker.

In many bible stories, antagonism between siblings was common. 

It’s no coincidence that this Gospel lesson is pared with another simmering sibling rivalry: the one that existed for decades between Joseph and his brothers. Genesis 50:15-21.

As the oldest of five siblings, I have a simple exegesis of the brotherly enmity that existed for so long: Joseph was a twit.

He was the youngest of his brothers and his father, Jacob, adored him. Joseph was somehow conceived long after Jacob had accepted erectile dysfunction as a badge of maturity, along with cataracts and unplanned flatulence. Joseph was obviously a miracle baby, and Jacob, his jaw unhinged and spittle dripping on his apron, stared at the child for hours.

That alone would have annoyed the older brothers, but Joseph made it worse. Either out of insolence or innocence, Joseph boasted of dreams that showed he ranked far above his seniors.

What a schlemiel. As an older brother, I wouldn’t necessarily approve of selling the brat into slavery. But – to quote Chris Rock – I can certainly understand it.

As it turned out, the brothers plotted to kill Joseph but, out of mercy or guilt, they sold the boy to Midianite traders for 20 shekels of silver. In a breathtaking act of sibling cruelty, the brothers killed a goat and smeared the blood of Joseph’s coat so Jacob would think the boy was dead. 

The decades that followed this monumental act of sibling betrayal nursed festering resentments that would defy any possibility of reconciliation. When Jacob’s sons are forced to travel to Egypt to seek relief from a famine, they discover to their horror that little Joseph is now the king’s first minister. Not good news. The revelation was tantamount to a death sentence.

But, thousands of years before Jesus ordered aggrieved people to forgive seventy-seven times, God’s grace was powerfully manifest.

So the brothers approached Joseph, saying, “Your father gave this instruction before he died, ‘Say to Joseph: I beg you, forgive the crime of your brothers and the wrong they did in harming you.’ Now therefore please forgive the crime of the servants of the God of your father.” Joseph wept when they spoke to him. Then his brothers also wept, fell down before him, and said, “We are here as your slaves.” But Joseph said to them, “Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today. So have no fear; I myself will provide for you and your little ones.” In this way he reassured them, speaking kindly to them. Genesis 50:16-21.

Joseph’s forgiving response to his brothers was unexpected. If he had reacted, shall we say, normally, he would have incited a bloody fratricide like the Red Wedding scene in George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones.

In fact, that might have been an easier reaction for Joseph than blithely dismissing all those years of treachery and pain.

But what would have been the point of vengeance? Who would have benefitted? And how would God have been served?

The dark landscape in which we live is satiated with deceit and betrayal, reprisal and recrimination. There may be some small satisfaction in striking back, but in the end retaliation begets more scores to be settled, more pain, more alienation from God’s eternal love.

Your task, Jesus said – as exhausting as it may be – is to forgive and forgive as often as you are hurt.

The only way out of the obscene cycle of resentment and despair is to forgive the ones who hurt you most. 

Seventy seven times.

And that’s only the beginning.

Moses the Fugitive Meets the Bush

 

August 30, 2026, First Lutheran Church, Throggs Neck, Bronx, N.Y. Exodus 3:1-12

RUN, MOSES, RUN!

Who’s that running down the street,

Down the street with feet so fleet?

That our Mose who’ll set us free?

Yellin’ “MOVE, I gotta flee!”?

Moses givin’ us conniptions

Runnin’ like a scared Egyptian!

RUN, MOSES, RUN!

Moses the fugitive? We always knew there was a reason he had to hide out among the smelly sheep in Gideon, but the notion of a wanted desperado is a hard to sync with our image of Moses the Liberator. We are more comfortable with Moses di Michaeangelo, the massive granite sculpture of a fierce, horned Moses scowling as he gathers his long beard. Or, of course, Charlton Heston’s Moses, covering his pecs with crude shepherd’s cloth and raising his staff against the mighty Pharoah. 

Moses the fugitive?

Most of us remember famous media depictions of fugitives, including the 1993 movie starring Harrison Ford and the 1963 television series staffing David Janssen, both actors playing Dr. Richard Kimble, an innocent man convicted of killing his wife. Both fugitives were entirely justified because – unlike our Moses – they did not do the crime they were accused of.

When I was in the Air Force, so long ago that the aircraft I supported are in the Smithsonian, my base commander was a famous fugitive during World War II. Colonel William W. Parramore, Jr., was a quiet man who never missed a chapel service and always wrote a 20-dollar check to the chaplain fund – a princely donation in 1966, worth about $193.10 in today’s money. When he was referred to in military letter codes, William Parramore was Whiskey Papa, which seemed amusingly inappropriate for this ascetic, teetotaling man. I don’t think anyone ever told him his lady wife was called Whiskey Mama behind his back. I always enjoyed using the military alphabet and often considered using Papa Juliet as as a nom de plume.

Be that as it may, William Parramore was a fighter pilot over Germany in the Second World War. His plane was shot down and he bailed out just ahead of a Wehrmacht patrol. He managed to elude them for days, sometimes finding himself crouching behind a thinning hedge row as enemy troops walked by so closely he could read their insignia. Finally, after several close calls he managed to escape across the Swiss border where he was taken in by sympathetic farmers and hunkered down until he could be rescued. William Parramore – Whiskey Papa – was a wartime fugitive and I was proud to serve under him.

But we don’t want to overlook another famous fugitive who, like Moses, was also guilty of the crime for which he was being sought. That fugitive was our own Martin Luther and his crime – at least in the view of Papal authorities – was heresy. Refusing to retract any of his 95 theses or the scores of heretical tracts he was circulating, religious leaders sought him out to be tortured or burned at the stake. Like Moses, Luther ran. Frederick III of Saxony pretended to kidnap Luther to keep him safe at Wartburg Castle. Luther discarded his monk’s robes, grew a beard, and used the name Junker Jörg until the coast was clear.

But let’s return to where we left Moses, a fugitive surrounded by sheep and Reuel’s daughters and possibly reconciled to living out his life in those cozy fields.

And that is where our scripture lesson today leaves him, a wanted murderer, a fugitive, content just to be alive.

But we all know that is not where the story ends. The texts that have been set aside for our summer readings will jump from here to Exodus 14 and 15, the deliverance of the Hebrews at the parting of the Red Sea. But what happens between Chapters 2 and 14?

Most of us know those wonderful stories very well, and that’s because most of us rely on scripture, not Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 epic, The Ten Commandments.

But not everyone is as biblically literate as we are. Martha had a parishioner at North Baptist Church who was distressed by the fact that the story Martha read from the pulpit was not the same drama she had viewed in VistaVision. In 1956 wags would go the movie so they could tell their neighbors, “I liked the book better.” But in fact, millions who saw the film had never read the book.

Many of the film’s characters are absent from Scripture but the actors are well known. Yul Brynner displays a frozen scowl with emotions ranging from angry to angrier. Edward G. Robinson plays a thuggish Israelite but we miss the cigar he made famous in Little Caesar. Vincent Price as Baka displays the cinematic creepiness that made him famous. John Derek’s sinewy body glistens with so much grease Debra Paget would have slid right off him. Yvonne DeCarlo previews the same character she brought to life in The Munsters. And Charlton Heston expresses the same righteous rage as when he defied NRA critics to pry a gun from his “cold dead hands.”

But we know very well that the crucial development that transforms Moses from a cowering fugitive to a mighty liberator is God’s miraculous appearance in a bush that burns but is not burned.

In the movie, if you listen carefully, the voice of God is Heston’s own baritone, inadvertently creating the illusion that Moses is talking to himself. That raises some Jungian issues that are far too complex to go into here. But it is a dramatic scene.

The most profound revelation in the scene – in scripture and on screen – is when God reveals his name to Moses:

God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, “I AM has sent me to you … This is my name forever, and this is my title for all generations.” (Exodus 3:14-15)

We know the name in Hebrew – Yahweh – is so sacred that Jews will not pronounce it aloud, some times substituting HaShem, “the name,” in conversation. One of our Diakonia teachers – now our Bishop, Paul Egensteiner – declined to pronounce the name aloud out of respect to Jewish brothers and sisters. 

But when God revealed God’s name to Moses, the importance of this revelation is enormous. God is revealing to Moses that God is not merely present today, but present outside of time. 

Referring to the past, we say, “I was.” God says, “I am.” 

Referring to right now, we say, “I am.” God says, “I am.”

Referring to the future, we say, “I will be.” God says, “I am.”

This is no rhetorical exercise. It is a mind-boggling disclosure about the nature of God. It is a stunning revelation that our concept of God may be too small.

Because God exists in all of time. If, to us, the bondage of the Jews in Egypt took place five millennia ago, we must try to grasp the fact that to God it is happening and is always happening.

That is one reason events reported in the bible are so important to our lives. To our feeble frontal cortexes, the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian bondage is a dim, distant historical event. But in God’s time it is happening.

To our feeble frontal cortexes, Jesus was crucified two thousand years ago, so long ago that it’s difficult for us to even imagine it. We rely on ancient scrolls and archaeological digs to remind us what happened, and sometimes it’s difficult to comprehend why the dusty past would have anything to do with us.

But in God’s time, the death and resurrection of Jesus is not an isolated historical event from long, long ago. In God’s time, it is happening now. It is happening yesterday, it is happening today, it is happening tomorrow, it is happening for all time, forever and ever.

And that is the message of the burning bush: a declaration to Moses that God’s liberating and saving power extends not only to the enslaved Hebrews, but to all creation, wherever and whenever we walk the earth.

Praise be to HaShem. Praise be to God.

Amen.

Was Jesus Rude?

August 16, 2026, First Lutheran Church, Throggs Neck, Bronx, N.Y. 

Have you ever said something you regretted? Something that was rude or uncalled for?

I could write a book about my verbal faux pas. 

Chapter one would date back to my youth when I was a teenage airman. Perhaps my youth would explain my indiscretions. I joined the Air Force when I was 18 and was discharged four years later at 22. The entire time I was a cold warrior, my frontal cortex was still years away from adult maturity. Looking back, I tell myself: that explains a lot.

On some week nights I would visit the base Airman’s Club, a large Quonset hut that was equipped with a bar, a dance floor, and juke boxes. Although NCOs and officers were excluded from the club, the wing commanders would drop by on occasion to schmooze with the airman.

One night Colonel Daniel “Chappie” James strolled through the doors. He was a massive African American man who seemed too big to fit into the F-101 fighter jet he flew so adeptly. “I don’t get into the aircraft,” he explained. “I put it on.”

The airmen in the club that night started to snap to attention but Colonel James waved us down. “Let’s have a beer and take the night off,” he said.

He made the barstool look fragile and small when he sat down. “How about a brew?” he asked the airman tending the bar.

Soon several airmen began to gather around the Colonel, enjoying his friendly banter and asking questions. “Are we going to Vietnam?” “Are you bothered by G-forces when you make a max-effort takeoff?” “What do you think 0f LBJ?”

The Colonel answered each question with good humor and the airmen, soothed by several beers, began to relax around him. We laughed uproariously at something funny he said (as one does when a Colonel says something funny).

The airman sitting on the stool next to him, apparently drunk enough to think the Colonel could take a joke, lifted his full glass and poured it over the Colonel’s head.

The room froze. The Colonel looked dumbfounded at the airman and for a minute I thought the Colonel was about to hit him or rip the chevrons off his sleeves. But the Colonel accepted a towel from the bartender and wordlessly dabbed it on his head.

The big man stood up and the other airmen moved several paces away from him. The airman who poured the beer looked like he was going to cry.

I was feeling the effects of too many beers myself and I decided the airman needed support.

“He didn’t mean it, Chappie,” I said, my words slightly slurred.

I was stunned by my abject familiarity as soon as I said it. The Colonel looked stunned, too, and staired at me as if he was memorizing my face. I staired back, horrified.

Finally the Colonel threw the towel on the bar and hauled his six-foot-four inch frame off the stool. He stood long enough to allow his wet uniform to settle and marched resolutely out of the club.

That was in 1965, which makes it 61 years since my most egregious faux pas. My terrible bad choice.

Our adult daughter Katie is a developmentally disabled adult on the autism spectrum. This doesn’t slow her down much and she often has insights the rest of us miss.

We often tell Katie that when she does something inappropriate, she’s not being bad. She simply made a bad choice.

The scripture Katie quotes most often is Matthew 15:21-28. Jesus is approached by a relentless Gentile woman screaming “Lord help me” and begging him to drive an evil spirit out of her daughter.

Jesus pointedly ignores her. The disciples’ testosterone spills out in manly resentment and they growl at Jesus to send this trash away,

Jesus continues to ignore her. When she persists, he dismisses her emphatically.

“I was sent only to the children of the house of Israel.”

Katie’s commentary is precise.

“Jesus made a bad choice.”

Perhaps Katie is seeing a side of Jesus we rarely talk about. The human Jesus, tired and harassed by crowds seeking his attention. The human Jesus who, out of exhaustion, might say, “Don’t bother me.”

We know Jesus relents because of the woman’s faith and we may think Jesus was just testing her.

But Katie sees another side of Jesus.

“He made a bad choice.”

Eunyung Lim, Assistant Professor of Religion at Middlebury College, says, “I often introduce this to my students as the ‘When Jesus goes low, the woman goes high moment.’”

Are we disturbed by this side of Jesus? Do we agree he is making a bad choice?

“Jesus’s replies are cold, if not disrespectful, from the outset,” says Professor Lim. “His indirect refusal to heal her daughter echoes Matthew 10:5–6, where he clearly circumscribes his disciples’ mission within an ethnic boundary (‘Go nowhere among the gentiles … go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’).

Some scholars suggest this is the first time Jesus has encountered a woman outside his own ethnic family and he may need some time to work his way out of the prejudices of his people. He is surrounded by his disciples who complain about the woman, reflecting the enmity Jews feel for Canaanites as well as their rancor that an apostate woman has the impudence to approach the Master.

But the woman is so worried about her daughter’s suffering that she overcomes the fear she must feel in the presence of hostile and powerful men.

She persists. She kneels respectfully and refers to Jesus by his Davidic title, Lord. She remains respectful and calm despite Jesus’ harsh responses. 

“It is not fair,” he tells her, almost cruelly, “to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

The woman’s response is one of the most courageous and faith-filled declarations in Matthew.

“Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumb’s that fall from their master’s table.”

Was Jesus only testing her? Or was she testing him? Did she dramatically expand his understanding that his Messiahship was for all God’s people, not just Jews? Did she convert him? Did he suddenly understand he had made a bad choice?

Matthew uses the story to express his and his followers’ determination to shed the binds of ethnic prejudices and declare that Jesus came not just to Jews but to all people.

“The petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, once uttered by Matthew’s Jewish members,” says Professor Lin, are now actualized in the lives of gentile believers, Professor Lin notes “the Canaanite woman hears, ‘God’s will be done’ for her as she wishes; on earth as in heaven, she too finds her share in God’s daily ‘bread.’” 

And praying those petitions is always a good choice.

Bad Choice No Choice

August 9, 2026, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.

Our adult daughter Katie is a developmentally disabled adult on the autism spectrum.This doesn’t slow her down much and she often has insights the rest of us miss.

The scripture she quotes most often is Matthew 15:21-28. Jesus is approached by a relentless Gentile woman screaming “Lord help me” and begging him to drive an evil spirit out of her daughter.

Jesus pointedly ignores her. When she persists, he dismisses her emphatically.

“I was sent only to the children of the house of Israel.”

Katie’s commentary is precise.

“Jesus made a bad choice.”

Perhaps Katie is seeing a side of Jesus we rarely talk about. The human Jesus, tired and harassed by crowds seeking his attention. The human Jesus who, out of exhaustion, might say, “Don’t bother me.”

We know Jesus relents because of the woman’s faith and we may think Jesus was just testing her.

But Katie sees another side of Jesus.

“He made a bad choice.”

In Matthew 14:22-33, we see another side of Jesus we haven’t seen before.

The disciples are used to – dare we use the phrase? – gentle Jesus meek and mild, the unflappable Jesus who teaches in parables, the Jesus who patiently persuades people to enter the kingdom of God, the Jesus ever ready to cure the sick, the Jesus who welcomes sinners and tax collectors into his presence.

In Matthew 14:22, he’s not asking. He’s telling. He’s ordering his disciples: get in the boat.

The updated edition of the New Revised Standard Version puts it clearly enough: “he made the disciples get into the boat.”

The writer of Matthew chooses the word anagkazō. This word means “to compel, to constrain, to force.” The New American Standard Bible translates it plainly: He “compelled” them. This verb appears only nine times in the entire New Testament, and in every instance it carries the weight of compulsion rather than invitation.

New Testament scholar Zina Jacque notes Jesus had no intention of allowing the disciples off the hook. “He put (the disciples) in that boat the way a teacher puts a test on your desk. You did not ask for it. You may not be ready for it. But it is here, and you are going to take it.”

This is where the rubber of faith hits the road. The disciples have been talking a good game but their faith has not yet been tested. Now they have been compelled to board a small boat that is being tossed about violently on a churning sea.

“Look how Matthew describes it,” Dr Jacque writes. “Verse 24 says the boat was basanizomenon, tormented, by the waves. Our English Bibles may say ‘battered”’ or ‘tossed.’ But the Greek is far more violent. Basanizō is the word used elsewhere in Matthew for demonic torment (8:29). This is not rough weather. This is the kind of experience that exhausts every resource you have brought with you. The disciples’ arms are spent. Their strategies have failed. Every skill they have for managing a boat in a storm has been used up. This test has left them defeated and in despair. And this is precisely when Jesus shows up.”

That’s the test: will we have the faith to endure the worst, trusting that Jesus will show up?

There are many in our church history who summoned great courage to pass the test. Foremost among them was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor, teacher, and writer.

For Bonhoeffer the cost of discipleship was severe. He had left a tenured position at Union Seminary to return to his native Germany to oppose the Third Reich. On April 9, 1945, barely a month before the war in Europe ended, Bonhoeffer was cruelly executed by the Nazis for participating in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Piano wire was wrapped around his neck and he was strung up until he slowly strangled to death.

Eberhard Bethge, a student and close friend of Bonhoeffer, writes of a man who saw the execution:

“I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer... kneeling on the floor praying fervently to God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the few steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”

For those who ponder discipleship, this account should be kept in mind. When Bonhoeffer decided to become a Lutheran pastor he may have anticipated a quiet life of writing and teaching. Instead, he died a martyr at 39.

He passed the test. God grant that we will never be tested that severely.

Back on the tossing boat, the disciples are struggling to submit to God’s will.

In this scene, the storm is not merely the setting for a miracle; it is the place where Jesus reveals himself as the sovereign I AM and teaches his disciples where true rescue begins.

As the disciples hold on for dear life on the raging sea, we must remember that the tempest is not merely the backdrop for a miracle.

Jesus appears walking on the water with reassuring words: “Take heart. I AM. Do not be afraid.” (Tharseite, ego eimi, mē phobeisthe.)

“He says the bare, unfinished, unqualified I AM, the name that needs no completion because it contains everything,” says Dr Jacque. “He is the one who walked on the waters at creation (Job 9:8), the one who rules the surging sea (Psalm 89:9), the one who was present before the foundation of the world. The one who can help them finish this test.”

But Peter, who makes us think of the student in class who reminds the teacher no homework has been assigned, is determined to get extra credit for the test.

Peter cried out, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” (Matthew 14:28)

Jesus may have stifled a smile when he said, “Come.”

We all know what happened next.

“Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened and began to sink.” (Matthew 14:29-30)

Moments later, sitting on the boat as lake water drizzled from his nostrils, did Peter feel embarrassment? Chagrin? Did he feel liken he had flunked the test?

The lesson, ultimately, is not to seek extra credit or to strive to be head of the class.

Peter sank beneath the waves and had no power to save himself.

The test Jesus compelled Peter and the disciples to take is distilled into a three word lesson:

Kyrie, sōson me. “Lord, save me.”

All the Kefelta You Can Eat

August 2, 2026, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.

Millions of sermons have been preached over two millennia of the feeding of the five-thousand. Most of them stress how utterly miraculous it is to feed five-thousand hungry people.

Naturally we are in awe of the man who could instantly multiply a few crumbs into a banquet. For the rest of us, that requires strategic planning and a substantial fortune, as anyone who has planned a wedding reception or a bar mitzvah knows.

Few sermons ask why the crowd was hungry. Why did so many people leave home that day without adequate provisions for snacks? Was it an epidemic of poor planning?

And even fewer sermons ask why the people were hungry in the first place. Of course, Jesus was concerned about the poor and hungry and he talked about them all the time. But when Jesus stuffed his sizable congregation with loaves and kefelta fish that day, was he also making a point about endemic poverty and systemic hunger?

That’s an interesting question. Some will say no. At the same time, when the sermon of the loaves and fish is preached in Christian churches this Sunday, worldwide hunger will be the specter at the feast. As we meditate about the careless five-thousand, 795 million persons live on the edge of starvation. 

In the very recent past, American largesse and USAid were around to support people living with famine or natural disaster or war. Most of that munificence was cancelled in early 2025 by the Department of Government Efficiency and no one knows how many deaths resulted from those cuts.

Today there are millions of hungry people displaced by wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. 

Although the civil war in South Sudan has disappeared from our daily news feed, more than 25.6 million people are facing crisis levels of hunger. Both sides in the on going conflict, now in its fourth year, have restricted aid delivery, and both sides are accused of using starvation as a weapon of war.

Save the Children reports that 75 percent of children are now going hungry each day.

Writing in The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof painted a chilling picture of one woman dying of hunger. 

As I was driving into this city, a woman was lying inert on the road. She was Nyanjok Garang, and she said she hadn’t eaten for three days. She had set out to look for work, maybe washing clothes, in hopes of keeping her two children alive. After a day of fruitless walking she had collapsed. “My children are hungry,” she said. “I’m hungry. There’s not even a cent left to buy bread.” Her husband is a soldier in the government forces fighting in South Sudan’s civil war, but she doesn’t even know if he is still alive. So she left her children with a neighbor and set out in hopes of finding work — “and then I blacked out.” 

Multiply that woman by five-thousand, and are we closer to the point Jesus was making when he multiplied loaves and fish?

What should we be thinking about as we read these verses in Matthew 14? Many puzzling passages are included, beginning with the fabulous feeding and climaxing with Jesus’ flabbergasting feat of walking on the rolling waters of Galilee.

Some theologians speculate that the walking-on-the-water scene appears out of chronological order, that it is more likely something that happened after Jesus’ resurrection. Their reasoning is that this feat of aqua-levitation matches the abilities of Jesus’ post-corporeal body, which walked through walls. 

Regardless of when the disciples witnessed this astounding event, it is certainly a tale they would have told and retold for the rest of their lives. Theologians speculate that evangelists writing about Jesus three centuries on, looking for ways to illustrate his godliness, may have dropped the story into their narratives without regard to its context.

Interesting. But the pleasant thing about theological speculation is that no one really knows for sure and everyone gets to do it.

There’s a lot of theological speculation about the feeding of the five-thousand. Again, millions of sermons have attempted to offer miraculous or logical explanations for the event.

The most dramatic explanation is that Jesus caused the existing bread and fish to replicate miraculously. This is the theory my Sunday school teachers embraced, and it is heartwarming to imagine: mundane food stuffs replicating supernaturally as hungry people stuffed their mouths. One of my favorite writers, Father James Martin, is among the scholars who believe this was an out-and-out miracle. I tend to agree with Jim, perhaps more than a Lutheran ought, so count me in on the side of miracle.

Other theologians look for a more practical explanation. In their view, people in the crowd were so moved by the generosity of a little boy who offered his lunch that they followed his example. As Jesus blessed the food and offered the meager helping of bread and fish, a handful of people pulled out extra morsels from their own packs and offered them to their neighbors. Soon scores followed suit, then hundreds, then thousands were sharing their lunch, from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.

That explanation does make logical sense, but this level of impulsive generosity would require a miracle far greater than supernatural fish splitting. In the long history of the world, the miracle we humans have failed to accomplish is the miracle of sharing our wealth so no one will starve. 

Many have tried.

One of the stranger events at the outbreak of World War II was the formation of a Federal Council of Churches commission aimed at preventing war from happening again. The Federal Council’s Program for a Just and Durable Peace called for a democratic redistribution of power and wealth to guarantee future peace. The program called for a controlled international bank to make money available worldwide “without the predatory and imperialistic aftermath so characteristic of large-scale private and governmental loans.” 

The Just and Durable Peace Program also called for worldwide freedom of immigration, the elimination of tariffs and quota restrictions on world trade, and a universal system of money controlled to prevent inflation and deflation.

Any one of these radical proposals could have prepared the framework for a program to eliminate world hunger.

But the proposals were too radical for most, and it’s tempting to wonder what kind of left-leaning socialists could offer such sweeping proposals in the dark opening days of global conflict. Wierdly, the chair of the conference was an active ecumenist and Presbyterian layman named John Foster Dulles – the same who, a decade later, would be named Secretary of State by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Other members of the conference were Harvey Firestone the tire manufacturer and John R. Mott, Methodist layman and future winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

It’s no surprise is that the Just and Durable Peace Conference was a failure. The New York Times and TIME magazine excoriated the conference and suggested it was both unpatriotic and socialist. There was no impetus then or now to reorganize the world’s governments or its economies to provide greater safety, justice, and opportunity for all people. 

If the five-thousand of Jesus’ day were fed because every heart was opened to share with others, that was a greater miracle than the Justice and Durable Peace Conference could manage. No one will ever know if its ideas would have made future wars less likely.

But still the world asks: will the miracle ever happen?

Both the five-thousand persons on the hill and the dramatic walking-on-water scene point to Jesus’ readiness to use his moral authority and divine power to serve persons in need. 

I'm curious what we would learn if we could organize the five-thousand into demographic categories. Except for the boy with the basket of food, we don’t know the age or economic classes that were present that day, although we can deduce they were all male. Even the most open-minded gospel writer would not have seen the need of counting the women present. When both genders are factored in, it’s possible Jesus fed ten-thousand that day.

Whoever and how many they were, we know beyond doubt that Jesus never turned his back on any one in spiritual, mental, or financial need. 

And we can be certain that, because society in Jesus’ day was organized much like ours – that is, 1 percent of the people held most of the wealth – Jesus’ primary concern was for persons living in poverty.

In that sense, the five-thousand were a microcosm of the world we live in today. The difference is that today, when we ask ourselves how we are going to feed hungry crowds, we’re facing millions, not thousands.

We tend to put those millions of hungry persons out of our thoughts because we don’t see how we can help them. We take comfort in Jesus’ observation that the poor will always be with us because it almost makes poverty seem like an acceptable reality. We share the disciples’ despair as we count all the mouths to be fed and wonder where the bread was coming from.

But God had a way then. And God has ways to feed the millions who are hungry today, assuming we don’t let the complications of domestic and international politics get in our way.

The feeding of the five-thousand was the result of a management miracle by the God of Love and the Prince of Peace, working through the Holy Spirit to convince single persons in a crowd that they are intimately connected to the individuals who surround them. 

The feeding of the five-thousand illustrates the power of the Greatest Commandment, to love God with all our might as we love our neighbors the way we need to be loved.

The feeding of the five-thousand is a timely reminder that though the poor will always be with us, God doesn’t expect us to ignore them.

And the feeding of the five-thousand is the scriptural impetus to keep pushing ourselves and our politicians to end the poverty that kills throughout the world.

It’s tempting, always, to share the despair of Philip and Andrew, to look at the enormous needs of the world and the small basket in our hands, and ask, “But what good is this for so many hungry people?”

Jesus’ plan is as workable now as it was then.

The end of killing poverty throughout the world is an achievable goal.

God grant us the faith and the will and the political courage to make it happen.