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.

Seeds and Pearls

July 26, 2026, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.

Have you ever heard a rock song and didn’t understand the lyrics?

I often don’t understand the lyrics of songs on the Z100 Hit Music Station. Usually I need Martha to interpret them for me. Perhaps this is an aging issue (I turn 80 in September) but I have taken cognitive tests and they’ve all been perfect. It’s just that some lyrics are hard to understand.

The most famous example of incoherent lyrics took place during my high school years. The Kingsmen's 1963 hit “Louie Louie” was banned by several radio stations and the state of Indiana because slurred, unintelligible lyrics led panicked parents and politicians to believe the song contained hidden, sexually explicit messages. In reality, the poor audio quality was due to a cheap recording session where the lead singer had to shout into a high-hanging microphone. 

Because lead singer Jack Ely’s vocals were so difficult to make out, teenagers began inventing and circulating their own "dirty" lyrics.  Indiana Governor Matthew Welsh banned the track, and the FBI launched an official investigation. For over a year, federal agents studied the lyrics line-by-line, slowed the record down, and even played it backward searching for profanity. 

Finally, the FBI concluded the lyrics were unintelligible but not obscene, and issued a written transcript of song:

Louie Louie, oh no, you take me to where ya gotta go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, baby
Louie Louie, oh baby, take me to where ya gotta go
A fine little girl, she waits for me
Me catch a ship across the sea
Me sailed that ship all alone
Me never think I'll make it home
Louie Louie, oh no no no, take me to where ya gotta go, oh no|
Louie Louie, oh baby, take me to where ya gotta go

Whatever that means.

The point is, if you don’t understand something the first time, get a written clarification or keep listening.

In Matthew 13, Jesus is making sure his parables are understood by employing a classic teaching method:

Tell them what you’re going to tell then.

Tell them.

Tell them what you told them.

“Every preacher knows the terror of the metaphor that does not work,” writes Zina Jacque, Board Chair of National Senior Communities in Washington, D.C. “You build a whole sermon around an image, and you watch it sail clean over the heads of half the congregation. A metaphor is only as powerful as its audience’s capacity to understand it. Jesus knows this. So he does not offer one parable and move on. In rapid-fire succession, he offers five, with each one hoping to land the metaphor for a different pair of ears.”

In the wildly hilarious and often offensive musical Book of Mormon, a group of missionaries are sent to Uganda to preach their faith and win converts. 

One of the missionaries, Elder Cunningham, is at a disadvantage because he has never read the Bible or the Book of Mormon. But he has read Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring and he has considerable expertise in Star Wars and Star Trek. 

While other missionaries are preaching about Jesus and Joseph Smith, Elder Cunningham regales his listeners with stories about Mordor and Middle Earth and Darth Vader and the attack of the Sith. The people love the stories and begin to call Elder Cunningham a prophet. But when he has Boba Fett turn people into frogs, the other missionaries have had enough. They accuse him of lying.

Not so, a Ugandan woman replies scathingly. “It’s a met-a-phor.”

It turns out the Ugandans are not so naive as to believe Elder Cunningham’s stories. They understand them as allegorical promises that their life of misery will not last forever and there is hope on the horizon. And that is a prophetic message indeed.

Metaphors can be very powerful and very confusing. Christians who believe Bible stories are literally true may be perplexed by claims that Adam and Eve were not real people, or that Eve is not merely a morphing of Adam’s rib. For many, the Song of Songs seems like poetic eroticism between a man and a woman and is not immediately understandable as a metaphor of God’s love for creation.

Jesus’ use of parables to teach higher truths may also be confusing. Even the disciples had occasion to ask him what he meant. And sometimes the fictitious characters Jesus made up – the Prodigal Son, the foolish virgins, the rich fool, the woman’s lost coin – seem very real. I was once in a bible study class when a student exclaimed, “Wait. The Good Samaritan wasn’t real?”

Not real? Of course the Samaritan becomes real every time people reach out to one another in love, every time we come to each other’s aid, every time we have each other’s backs. But a real person? 

Sorry. It’s a metaphor.

Yet in Matthew 13, notes Zina Jacque, whichever parable draws you in, the message remains the same: the kingdom of heaven is immeasurably valuable, active even when unseen, and demands your full commitment.

Despite their surface differences, all five parables follow a shared pattern. 

First comes hiddenness: the mustard seed vanishes into the soil, the yeast is mixed into three measures of flour, the treasure lies buried in a field, the pearl must be discovered, and the fish remain beneath the sea. Jesus insists that the kingdom of heaven is not immediately obvious. It does not arrive with fanfare; it works below the surface and must be sought by those who long for it.

Second comes disproportion: a tiny seed grows into a tree large enough for nests; a bit of leaven transforms enough flour to feed more than 100 people; and one discovery in a field is worth selling everything. The kingdom does not follow ordinary expectations. It is expansive, abundant, and extravagant.

Third, the parables call for a complete response. The man who finds the treasure sells everything; so does the merchant who discovers the pearl. These are not lessons in smart investing, but stories of people who encounter something so extraordinary that they reorder their entire lives around it. As John T. Carroll observed in his 2023 Working Preacher commentary, these parables ask every listener the same question: “Are you all in?”

Looking back at Jesus’ parable of the sower, we hear the question put another way. Jesus uses the parable to describe opposition to his ministry. The seeds he is planting bear the fruit of love, salvation, eternal life, peace, and justice. But not all these seeds will germinate. The Devil grabs some seeds and crushes the life out of them. Some people briefly embrace Jesus’s words but soon get bored and wander away. Some people are so emersed in the thorny minutia of their own lives that they can’t hear Jesus’s words.

Sometimes we are so unkind as to call such people buffet line Christians or Christmas and Easter Christians or part time Christians. They are not “all in” as members of God’s Kingdom. This is not to suggest that such Christians are lost because God’s love is eternal and unconditional. But if they’re only along for the ride, others in the community have to work harder.

Happily and perhaps miraculously, some seeds – metaphorically – do get through to rich soil. 

The final promise of all these parables is that opposition, denial, and indifference to Jesus’s message of love and salvation will not prevail. 

The life blood of the church are people who are “all in,” who walk the walk and talk the talk at home, at work, at play, and at church.

Lord, we pray each of us will be “all in” at this crucial time in history.

And may we all proclaim the good news.

Heaven – metaphorically – has come near. Come and enjoy the ride.