October 14th, 2025

Thanks for preaching while I was away, Bob.
-Pastor Chrissy

John 6:1-14 
After this Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias. 2 A large crowd kept following him because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick. 3 Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. 4 Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near. 5 When he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” 6 He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do. 7 Philip answered him, “Two hundred denarii would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.” 8 One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, 9 “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?” 10 Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.” Now there was a great deal of grass in the place, so they[b] sat down, about five thousand in all. 11 Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. 12 When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” 13 So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets. 14 When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.”

The miracle of feeding 12,000 (Delivered Oct. 12, 2025, at Winthrop Congregational)

  Okay, so where does this guy (point at self) get the idea that Jesus fed 12,000 people and not 5,000? Let’s just say that the times have caught up a bit with the scripture. The feeding of the 5,000 is one of only two parts of Jesus’s life that appear in all four gospels. (The other is, of course, the resurrection.)

  Verse 10 of today’s reading tells us, in parentheses, that about 5,000 men had followed Jesus up the mountainside, in awe of his miracles of healing. Well, in the times that the Bible was being written, the only people who were counted were men. Women, if not chattels, were simply seen as attached to “their man.” And forget about noticing children. They were often not seen and probably seldom heard. As if they didn’t count.

  So, when the Gospel according to John was written, most likely between the years of 70 and 100 AD, women and children were an afterthought. Or not thought of at all. If we were scanning an aerial photograph today of the crowd on that mountainside we might see, say, 4,000 or 5,000 wives and fiancees and girlfriends with the 5,000 men. And, having no child-care centers, the couples probably brought along their kiddos, too.

  Now, if the couples were rugged enough to follow Jesus up the mountain, they probably were young and had only a child or two. Or none. And if the couples were older, no children still living at home. So, let’s say that along with 4,000 to 5,000 wives, fiancees and girlfriends, the crowd included 2,000 to 3,000 children.

  That puts us at 11,000 to 13,000 people. So, let’s call it 12,000. All hungry, all needing to be fed.

  Just a side note. Let’s not be smug about our enlightened inclusion of women and children under the heading “people.” After all, women did not exist legally, as voters, in the United States until 1920, so for 1,900 years after the Gospel of John was written, women and children weren’t counted. Or didn’t count.

  We heard about the loaves and fishes, and that story frames our theme for today, which is how God – and we – can make something great out of very little.

  We have a guide we can follow who will walk us through the story of the feeding of the 12,000. She is Dr. Leah D. Schade, an associate professor of Preaching and Worship at the Lexington Theological Seminary in Kentucky, a seminary of the Disciples of Christ Church, which was called just the Christian Church in Missouri, where I grew up. Dr. Schade is an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the largest of the Lutheran church bodies.

  Let’s get back to the feeding. The story is so amazing that millions of words have been written about it. Literally. But, don’t worry. I haven’t read all of those millions of words, and I’m certainly not going to try to shovel anywhere near that many into your heads today.

  This story has been with me for, I don’t know, maybe 75 years. The feeding of the five thousand or twelve thousand is one of the Bible stories that made the biggest impression on the boy Bob Neal in Sunday School. I still find it persuasive, even as I have grown to read the Bible more seriously than literally.

  And, just as I first heard the story as a boy, Dr. Schade notes that a boy plays a big part in feeding the crowd. The five barley loaves and the two smoked fish were in his basket, and Jesus took them to begin the feeding.

  Even though kids were very much in the background in biblical times, this is far from the only time the Bible looks to a child to serve God and humankind. For example, Isaish 11:6 contains this famous passage, “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together, and a little child will lead them.”

  And here in John, as Doctor Schade notes, a small gift from a small child inspired a feast, blessed by Jesus and shared in the spirit of generosity and faith in God’s abundance. A miracle. And perhaps also a metaphor for the large miracle of food and nourishment, both bodily and spiritual.

  This fusion of child, food and abundance wasn’t just in the Holy Land and in biblical times. Locally and today, the students at Troy Howard Middle School in Belfast grow food every year. Their project, called “Get Growing,” blossomed from a small garden that a teacher had begun as a teaching tool in 2006. By 2010, the students were hosting a harvest meal every autumn using the veggies they had grown and turkey and a few other items they couldn’t grow at the school. I was happy to supply the turkeys from my farm.

  Think about it a moment and you might ask how do you get a gang of pre-teens to come to school every day during the growing season, which overlaps summer vacation, to tend an acre of veggies? How indeed! But the kids at Troy Howard spend part of their summers at school participating in the miracle of food, even if they didn’t fail a class and have to attend summer school.

  The Reverend Schade asks us to imagine the crowd with Jesus, seeing five small loaves and a couple of fish is a boy’s basket, tittering when Jesus offers a prayer of thanks for the “feast.” “We’re gonna have a feast with that?” you can almost hear them murmuring. Snickering, even.

  But Jesus knew what he was doing, and as the basket containing the five loaves and two fish was passed through the crowd, more baskets filled with food began to appear. With the boy’s basket multiplying into many baskets of food, I want to plant a seed with you. We’ll come back to the idea of seeds in a while.

  Doctor Schade takes up a couple of possible worldly explanations for the sudden appearance of all that food.

  “Perhaps a child in the crowd had heard the prayer and surreptitiously pulled a loaf from his mother’s bag,” she wrote, “and slipped it into the large basket as it passed.” But, to feed 12,000 people, how many children would have to have purloined loaves from their mothers? And if 2,000 children were in the crowd, wouldn’t nearly every one of them had to have sneaked a hidden loaf from Mom? Not a likely explanation.

  She offers another worldly explanation. “Maybe an older man in the crowd remembered he had a few extra smoked fish from last week’s catch and tossed them in, as well,” she wrote. Well, not to get gross, but as a retired farmer who smoked a lot of turkeys, I can tell you that if enough smoked fish to feed the crowd had been stashed under people’s cloaks or in their packs, everyone would have caught a whiff, would have breathed in the aroma, and surely the Gospel writers would have taken note. Smoked meat smells as wonderful as it tastes, but it is noticeable. Especially en masse.

  “No one,” Dr. Schade wrote, “saw how the extra food appeared, and no one cared. All they knew was that everyone had been fed.”

  And remember, after the feast, the disciples retu0rned to Jesus with 12 baskets of leftover food.

  What Jesus taught that crowd that day was that even the smallest gift offered to God has the potential to inspire abundant generosity so that everyone is fed. Remember, from other scripture, the planted mustard seed that grows to a height of three feet or more.

  “Jesus placed his faith in God that somehow a feast was about to happen, and God came through,” Doctor Schade says. “On that grassy mountain, they learned that they could do so much more together than they could ever do alone.” Just as the kids at Troy Howard Middle School in Belfast do so much together to grow food for their school cafeteria.

  And that’s where I want to take us now. From that mountainside by the Sea of Galilee to what we can do. Alone or together. What seeds can we plant and nurture? How can we help feed if not the 12,000 then the 12 or the seven or the three or however many we can manage?

  For 30 years, I provided turkeys and as many as 46 other turkey products to feed people, one or two at supper, maybe 20 or 25 around a Thanksgiving table. After we had had gotten the farm on its feet, we were able to contribute some of our turkey items to the Good Shepherd Food Bank and to persuade some of our best customers to do so, too.

  We began each flock with baby turkeys, called poults. You might think of the fluffy little critters as our seeds. We drove to hatcheries in Quebec and West Virginia to pick them up within minutes of their hatching, drove back to New Sharon and nurtured them just as the farmer and gardener nurture the seeds they put into the ground.

  In addition to 30 years farming, I’ve been gardening for at least 50 years. Making the miracle of food for my family and others. On the turkey range or in the garden, I feel closest to God. I feel that I’m doing God’s work.

  Maybe it’s better to say that on the range or in the garden is where I feel God is closest to me. Now, for some, God feels closest while they are praying. For others, it’s during family time. For still others it’s while hiking in the mountains or navigating sea currents.

  But for me, it’s growing things. After all, we came to New Sharon as back-to-the-landers, and almost all the back-to-the-landers were gardeners before they became haulers of firewood or gatherers of eggs. Or threw up their hands in frustration and high-tailed it back to New Jersey or Massachusetts or wherever.
 
 I’m not alone in finding God in the garden. I have a friend in Farmington, a professor and former member in discernment at Old South Church, who closely ties her ministry to her organic gardening. That was where she, like me, felt God closest. Other people find God there, too, as in this passage from Genisis 3:8, referring to Eve and Adam. “And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.”

  My gardening began in 1971 when my baby sister, now my late sister, Carol, gave us six tomato plants. We set them into holes dug behind our rented house in Kansas City. We watered and weeded them and, come August, we had fresh tomatoes every day until the frost, which in Kansas City comes even later than the killing frost that we had on Thursday night here.

  Those seedlings from Carol were infected, with the gardening bug, which bit me. Hard. Those six plants were a mustard seed of what was to become my life’s work, making food for my family and for my customers.

  My late wife, Marilyn, fell in love with the tending of tomato plants. I expect she also felt God closest when she was on her hands and knees, pulling weeds, trimming dead leaves and tying up vines to keep the fruits high and dry.

  After we left Kansas City, we lived in a row house in Montreal. I grew greens, squash, carrots, beans and the like along the back fence. And tomatoes, of course.

  In one way, that might have been our best garden ever. We went on a five-week junket by rail in November 1973. I wrapped each of my green tomatoes in newsprint and lined them up on kitchen windowsills to ripen while we rode trains to Florida, New Orleans, Texas, Kansas City, Ohio and back home to Montreal West.

  To our great surprise, nearly every tomato ripened bright red. None rotted. Fresh tomatoes in December! In Canada! Even in our absence, the garden was making something good out of something small. I’ve never again been so lucky at indoor ripening of tomatoes.
 
 Of course, the most obvious reason to garden is to grow food. From June through November, I grow all my vegetables, then eat home-grown from the freezer until the next June.

  My older son has fallen on tough times and lives with me now, so I’m filling a second freezer, not to mention packing dry beans, tomato sauce and V8 juice. I’m sad that his life has soured but grateful to be able to feed someone else. Not 12,000 someone elses, mind you, but at least two are fed by my garden. Oh, and my girlfriend gets a lot of it, too. In fact, she came up yesterday from Buckfield and together we harvested potatoes, tomatoes, onions, turnips, carrots and cabbage for her.

  When I was tending turkeys or, these days when I’m in the garden, I sometimes hear the voices of my late wife or of one of my sons or of someone else dear to me. They are speaking the words of daily life and of love and of aspiration more often than words of scripture or words spoken from the mountain top.

  They speak as I believe God would speak to a troubled or deliberating mind. They speak in wise words that I do well to heed.

  This spiritual benefit from gardening gives rewards beyond the raising of healthful food and exercising and breathing fresh air. It’s the rewards of faith. Faith in the seed. Faith in the soil. Faith in God’s natural processes that turn the tiny seeds into abundant squash or gorgeous bright-lights chard.

  The dirt under our fingernails can be our sign of our faith in God. Our faith that our fellow humans, when properly nourished, will thrive. Gardeners make good candidates to be people of faith.

  Let’s close with several quite short scriptures that tell us or reassure us about the miracle of making food, whether on a farm or in a garden.

  Verse 5 of the 29th chapter of Jeremiah reads: “Build homes and plan to stay. Plant gardens and eat the food they produce.” Sounds like a directive to back-to-the-landers, doesn’t it?

  Genesis 26, verse 12, may help explain why we return to the garden year after year: “Isaac planted crops in that land and the same year reaped a hundredfold, because the lord blessed him.” That is the hope, if not the promise, of bounty.

  And from Genesis 8, verse 22: “As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.” The hope, if not the promise, of centuries of life on earth.
 
  In the end, we may be doing God’s work out there in the garden. “He answered and said unto them, he that sows the good seed is the son of man.” That’s Matthew 13, verse 37. Hard to be much clearer about the link of seed to garden to food to faith.

  My late friend Jo Josephson wrote a poem that contained a line that expresses the bridge between winter and spring. The line went something like this:

  “The seed catalogs arrived this morning at two-below zero.” Faith and a warm woodstove urge us to peruse the catalogs and get ready to plant seeds. Again.

  And, isn’t that what Jesus was doing when he fed the 12,000? He was planting a seed, nurturing it and showing the multitude what could grow from such a tiny beginning as five barley loaves and two smoked fish. Brought to the mountainside by a child.

​  Amen.