One of Jesus’ most striking miracles, particularly in view of the large numbers of individuals affected, is the feeding of the five thousand. In some ways the miracle is a very strange one. The religious leaders of Christ’s day were planning a way to get rid of him. On the other hand, there was a movement afoot, probably known and encouraged by the disciples, to compel Jesus to come forth and declare himself as king of Israel. Now, he performs this amazing miracle which could only serve to fire up their enthusiasm and intensify their desire to crown him as their king.

This was not, of course, our Lord’s purpose in this miracle. If we were to figure out just what his purpose might have been, we would have to begin with Mark’s assertion that Jesus “saw a great throng, and he had compassion on them.” His concern for them led to his efforts to teach them to draw them to himself and the life he had come to bring to God’s human creatures. That, in turn, led him to reveal his power to meet people’s needs in the feeding of the five thousand.

It is a beautiful expression and example of God’s concern for his creatures. The Lord will provide. It is God’s desire that we continue to rely on his promises, to demonstrate the audacity of faith that expects great things though there be nothing visible upon which to build.

We have an almighty God and Father, Helper and Friend, at our side who is at all times concerned about our material needs. May our faith embrace and trust Jesus for our material and spiritual needs as we go day by day into the future.

There is a bird that lives in the forests of Africa, a common, awkward bird. Africans honor this bird because she is a bird most exquisite in teaching us about our Creator. When she nests, God is telling us a parable about life with God.

This bird, the hornbill, inhabits the forest canopy. Her world is loud with the shrieks of animals and dangerous with predators. She lives in a perilous place but she is swift on her wing, and eludes her enemies. Yes, she flies – that is her nature – except when she mothers her children. She’s called the hornbill because she’s got a beak as big as a hollow log, and on top of that beak, a horn. In every sense it’s a megaphone beak, magnifying her cries and covering her whole face.

But if we watch her, she is most loving a mother bird for the sake of her children. For when the time draws near that she should lay and love a clutch of eggs, this “ugly” bird transfigures herself by sacrifice. She soars through the forest in search of the tree that has a hollow trunk to receive her, her beak, and her eggs. When she has found it, she enters the tree and flies no more.

Immediately, with the help of her mate from outside the trunk of the tree, she sets to work to wall the doorway shut. Mud and dung make a hard cement: no predator will break in to terrorize the small chicks or to eat them. They are protected by her loving care. Out of her bowels comes the stuff of their fortress wall.

But the wall that saves her children imprisons her! There is no alternative. For the sake of her babies, she has exchanged the spacious air of the forest for a tight, dark cell and a very cramped imprisonment.

This means that a mother has sacrificed her freedom, which is to fly, and sacrificed her independence, too. She trusts her mate absolutely. If the hornbill is to survive, she has to eat. If she’s going to eat her mate must bring the food – fed to her beak to beak through a slot in the wall exactly the shape of her beak. But for the love of her children, a mother bird accepts the loss and reduction.

When the chicks are hatched and young, their mother fires her feathers through the slot – one by one - an act that makes her so desperately lovely. In the small space of her nest, the shafts of these feathers would scratch and trouble her children. Therefore, in mercy, she strips her wings of their primary feathers, and she cannot fly any more. She has sacrificed her very nature for the sake and the saving of her children. In this way the mother hornbill becomes a parable about love – about Jesus.

Jesus is just like the mother hornbill. He chose to leave heaven, willingly, compelled by love alone. He denied himself for the sake of His people. He placed himself in time and space, that he might be a refuge for the weary. He chose to be totally dependent for the salvation of a people who thought themselves so marvelously independent. He plucked himself of power, sheared himself of his most glorious might, his blinding radiance, lest it harm us when we drew near to him. He emptied himself and became an infant, swaddled in humanity, cradled in a manger, flightless, bound to die.

Jesus loves us that much!

Pastor Dennis Drews

Christianity is a faith religion. No other religion in the world makes so much of faith. “Abraham believed God,” we read concerning the father of believers, “and it was reckoned to him as righteousness” (Romans 4:3). “Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid,” proclaimed Isaiah (Is.12:2). “Let not your hearts be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me,” stated Jesus (John 14:1). “Daughter, your faith has made you well,” Jesus said to the woman of our Gospel reading for this Sunday. When hearing about the death of Jairus’ daughter, Jesus told him, “Do not fear, only believe.”

Many of us who profess to follow Christ have never really grasped this, the prime essential of the Gospel. We press upon Jesus as did the crowds who gathered to witness His miracle- working power, but we often fail to embrace Him in a reckless, all-out, totally trusting faith. We believe in God; we pray when we are desperate; we try to follow the example of Christ, yet we hardly know what it means to allow this Christ to be living and active at the very center of our beings. We come to Him; we hear Him speak to us through the Word; we express our needs through the liturgy and the prayers; we proclaim His praises in the hymns we sing; we indeed touch Him in the Service of Holy Communion – and yet we are still assailed by guilt-feelings, plagued with weaknesses, defeated and overcome with failures, incapacitated by tragedies, and very much in doubt about the outcome of it all. The reason? Perhaps our touch has not really been the touch of faith. We may be jostling Jesus rather than embracing Him.

May our faith not just be “belief in spite of evidences,” but “a faith-life in scorn of consequences.”

World population is exploding. Our economy is on a rampage. Our environment is endangered through carelessness and waste. Our natural resources are being depleted. Our government is often ineffective and sometimes corrupt. Crime is increasing toward frightening proportions. Millions in our country are jobless. Hundreds of millions throughout our world are starving. Drought, earthquake, natural and man-perpetrated calamities are wracking our world. That should be enough so that we begin to feel something of what the disciples felt as the “storm of wind arose and the waves beat into the boat,” and they awakened the sleeping Jesus crying out, “Teacher, do You not care if we perish?”

Maybe Jesus is saying to us what He, in essence, said to those disciples: “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith? I have created, redeemed, and appointed you for just such times as these. I am always with you, working out My will through you. Trust Me; I won’t let you down. There is a quiet harbor somewhere at the end of your journey, but for now you are to abide in Me and work for Me in the mist of storm.”

What this Gospel portion is saying is that God truly does care about us and, in the mist of our insufficiency, His grace is sufficient – and it is available. It is not something we have to earn, merit, or work for; it is grace, Jesus’ great gift of love. While Jesus does not promise to cancel out all the storms of our lives as He did that storm on the Sea of Galilee, He does promise to be with us as we face and endure the storms that whirl about us. We need only, in faith, to recognize and accept His promises and power and to lay claim to His loving, supernatural peace even in the mist of these raging tempests that beset us.

We lay hold of the grace of God which is sufficient to keep us steady and faithful whatever the storms that ravage our small craft.

Jesus is a master story-teller. He uses a variety of ways to share the truths of God’s Kingdom, including the parable of the mustard seed in the third Sunday after Pentecost on June 13.

We live in a story-telling age. Television, a device so powerful that it commands how a significant percentage of the nation spends its time, is primarily a storytelling medium. It is so dominant that communication experts estimate that the average person watches 30,000 or more electronic stories before he or she reaches the age of 21. Like all stories, these electronic tales teach while they entertain. As we sit in front of the “plugged-in-drug,” we absorb the values and life-styles that pass before us. The little picture box in our homes has become one of the most influential teachers for both adults and children.

In a sense all television stories are commercials. They urge the listener (viewer) to accept a point of view or to assume a new position. Television sells attitudes, values, and life-styles as well as deodorants, mouthwash and pills.

Although those who study the impact of television on the lives of people are not in total agreement, there is increasing evidence that we are strongly influenced by the stories we watch. Most of the television stories create a fantasy world that breeds fear, or fail to create a new or better world that is more caring and humane.

We may not be able to stop listening or watching “false stories” on TV, but we can begin telling true stories that affirm honesty, fidelity and generosity while exposing the deadliness of self-centered, greedy behavior. True stories are meant to be transmitted.

“Whosoever does the will of God is My brother, and sister...”

We strongly affirm the emphasis on family life in these days when the forces of evil seem so intent upon and successful in their attempts to divide and destroy this all-important unit of society. Our Lord, early in His ministry, also referred to family life. It was, however, a far different family that concerned Him. He was speaking about something thus far incomprehensible to His listeners that was related to another dimension: the family of
God. Human relationships were still important to Jesus, and He continued to reveal a human concern for His own family, noted especially in respect to the pain and sorrow His crucifixion was causing His mother (John 9:26-27). But even at that critical hour He was regarding the family relationship on a different level that we generally understand or experience.

We ought to cherish our families and our relationships. We need, as well, to grow into an understanding of Jesus’ pronouncements concerning the new family He had come to construct, the family of God. He said, in effect, that those who are related to God as their heavenly Father are brothers and sisters to one another – and are the very brothers and sisters of Jesus, the Son of God.

Whatever our race or heritage, class or status in society, our gifts or abilities, we are all the members of the family of God and are, with Jesus Himself, brothers and sisters in that family. It is an eternal relationship that is far more significant than the human family relationships we cherish here on this earth. Fellow Christians in our church, the members of Christian churches down the street, the hundreds of thousands of Christ’s brothers and sister all over the world – they are our brothers and sisters. As children of God we shout our thanksgivings.

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” 2 Corinthians 5:17

Frederick Buechner, an author of renown, has written:

“To “make” suggests fashioning something out of some thing - the way a carpenter makes wooden boxes out of wood.

To “create” suggests making something out of nothing the way an artist
makes paintings or poems. It is true that artists, like carpenters, have to use something else, such as paint, or words, but the beauty or meaning they
make is different from the material they make it out of. To create is to make something essentially new.”
When God created, God made something where before there had been nothing, and

as the author of the book of Job puts it, “...the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy” (Job 38:7) at the sheer and shining novelty of the creation.

The hymnist John Keble writes: “New every morning is the love Our wakening and up-rising prove Through sleep and darkness safely brought, Restored to life and power and thought.”

Using the same materials of earth, air, fire, and water, every twenty-four hours God creates something new out of them. If we think we’re seeing the same show all over again seven times a week, we’re mistaken. Every morning we wake up to something that in all eternity never was before and never will be again. And the “I” that wakes up was never the same before and will never be the same again either.

Christ Lutheran Congregation is a part of the “new every morning” that Jesus creates for us in his love. A part of that something “new” will be a new pastor to “shepherd this flock.” A call was extended already but our first call was declined. We start over soon with another list of candidates provided by our Minnesota South District from which we will look for a candidate we might choose to call as pastor. Whatever happens, we know that our Lord is watching over and controlling the outcomes.

We also know a new pastor, whomever it is, will be new to Christ Lutheran, and will not do ministry in the same way as has been done here in the past. The new pastor will have a unique set of skills that make him who he is. Together with each congregant’s skills, pastor and people will have what is needed from our Lord to do ministry in this building and in this neighborhood.

I commend the members of Christ Lutheran for their “pulling together” during a time of pastoral vacancy. You have continued strong in your commitment to do the work of the Lord without full-time pastoral leadership. You continue to use your unique set of skills to be in ministry to those with whom you come into contact.

You can anticipate new pastoral leadership in God’s time. My prayer is that we will soon rejoice together at an installation of a full-time pastor. We are bold to confess with the hymnist from the 8th century:

“Christ is our cornerstone, On Him alone we build; With His true saints alone The courts of heav’n are filled. On His great love

Our hopes we place Of present grace and joys above.”

Vacancy Pastor, Dennis M. Drews