Our readings this morning open with an old story, about a young man named Elisha, living almost 1000 years before the time of Jesus. Elisha was a prophet, a person whose job is to listen and to speak the words of God to the people of God, a job which often entailed miraculous signs that would help reveal something of God to the ones God wanted to speak to. From what I can tell, some prophets, like Elisha, did not work a trade, nor did they accept payment in exchange for miraculous signs or for delivering the words of God to their hearers. Instead, they relied on the generosity of God and God’s people to provide their daily bread, and so our first lesson opens with a man providing Elisha with 20 barley loaves and a sack of grain out of the first-fruits of his harvest. This is a generous gift, enough to feed Elisha for some time, but instead, Elisha commands his servant to share the gift with the hundred-some people gathered around him. You heard the reading, so you know how this goes, the bread (which could never be enough to fill the bellies of over a hundred people) is somehow multiplied — all the people gathered are fed and there is even extra left over. There is something beautiful in this story, and it is certainly a display of God’s power, but what exactly is the point? What are we supposed to glean from this story and from the very similar (but even bigger) story we hear about Jesus feeding thousands in our gospel reading today? Well, if we look around 2 Kings a little bit, we’ll notice a few things. For one, we’ll see that this story about the barley loaves is just one of a series of signs that Elisha performs. In one story, God raises a young boy from the dead through Elisha’s intervention. In another, Elisha saves a widow from destitution by causing her small jar of oil to miraculously multiply into enough oil that she can sell it to pay off her debts and provide for her family. In the passage after our reading, a mighty foreign general named Naaman is healed of leprosy through Elisha’s intervention, learning that God is the true source of power in this world, not the armies or wealth that this general commanded. All these stories display God’s power to heal, to provide, to defy expectations and make a way where there seemed to be no way. This is a theme in the prophets, one that stretches all the way back to the stories of Mosess and the Exodus, where God parts the sea to deliver his people and rains miraculous bread upon them to sustain them in the wilderness. God, the prophets tell us, is the one who provides. Another thing we notice when we look around the context of Elisha’s story, is that he, and many of the Hebrew prophets, lived in a time when the kingdom of Israel was ruled by a series of corrupt kings. According to 2 Kings, Elisha prophesied under the reign of King Jehoram. In this time, the kings of Israel had taken religion into their own hands, building ‘holy places’ all over the kingdom to worship a variety of gods, installing priests who reported to the King and most likely paid tribute to the king from the peoples’ offerings. These kings conquered and enslaved neighboring nations, forcing them to pay tribute and sometimes conscripting them into forced labor, accumulating resources and amassing armies to further their political and military conquests. These kings had long since shed any real reliance upon the God of Israel, trusting instead in gold and ‘chariots’, wealth and power to provide for them — only consulting with prophets of God like Elijah when things went sideways and desperation forced them to remember the God who had delivered them from Egypt long ago, the God who they were always meant to serve and rely upon. And as the kings forgot God and instead turned to greed and violence to provide for their kingdom, so too did they lead the people of God, whom they were meant to shepherd, down this path. With this context in mind, these stories like the one with the barley loaves start to make more sense. Signs like these would show the people of God where the true source of power and provision was — would remind them of what their kings had helped them forget: that they were meant to live differently, to discover and to show the world what it would look like to rely upon God, to trust in his abundance rather than in the strength of men. And so, we start to see, I think, what Jesus has for us in the gospel reading this morning. Jesus spends much of his time in the gospel of John confronting the leaders of Israel, trying to show them that they have been putting their trust in human systems of power and security and have forgotten the love of God. Jesus, like Elisha, does many signs displaying the abundant power of God to heal, to provide, to love without boundary or measure. Jesus too wants to help his followers remember and rely upon God instead of any other source of power or security, and so he miraculously feeds them, demonstrating God’s abundant provision to thousands. But, in today’s gospel, when the people try to take Jesus’ miracle and make him king, he resists, he disappears up the mountain where they cannot find him, refusing their attempt to turn this sign of God’s provision into just another idol. Because here’s the thing, I’ve been speaking a lot about how God is in the business of providing for his people, and that’s all true; God does provide for our needs, often in very concrete and material ways, but God is not a vending machine. And it’s all too easy to turn the gospel of Jesus Christ into some kind of ‘prosperity gospel’, to read stories like this in the Scriptures and then start to believe that as long as you do the right things, or think the right things, or just believe hard enough, everything will go well for you and you will have all of the comfort and security you could want. But that’s not the promise of God’s Kingdom. That’s just treating God the same way the kings of Israel in Elisha’s time treated their gold and idols and armies — as a means to an end, to protecting ourselves and our security. But we follow the risen and crucified Lord, and like I mentioned a couple months ago when I preached on the Good Shepherd passage, God does not promise that we will always have a life free of pain and uncertainty, but that, if we turn towards him, he will always be with us, that we will have what we need, even if it’s not always what we expected or what we would have chosen for ourselves. He invites us into a different kind of kingdom, which offers a different kind of security. Instead of wealth or social standing or any of the other things we seek to secure ourselves in the world, he offers “the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” — he offers the security that comes with knowing that at the center of all things, we are fully known and utterly loved by God, and the promise that, if we begin to let go of all of those other things we cling to to protect and provide for ourselves and entrust ourselves and cling to Christ instead, that we will have joy and peace, and that Christ’s love will overflow out of us to bring healing to the world around us. He promises that, somehow, our simple acts of Christ-like love — generosity, patience, kindness to those in need, however we are called to follow — will really have an effect, will really be taken up into his own work of bringing new and abundant life to our world, in ways that we could not ask or imagine. Barley was the poor man’s flour in Israel, it was cheaper to produce and of rougher texture and taste than the finer wheat, often costing half the price. That boy in today’s gospel was likely poor, and giving up his bread and fish to help Jesus feed the crowd was a precious thing, it was an act of real generosity and kindness. In using the humble gift of this boy’s barley loaves and fish to feed these thousands of people, Jesus shows us that not only is God in the business of providing for his people, but that he takes even the smallest, humblest offerings we make and transforms them into instruments of his abundant love and provision. But tomorrow is Monday, and for most of us, as soon as we walk out of these doors, we are plunged back into a world — a kingdom — where we are inundated with a whole bunch of other narratives about how we can find security and comfort and fulfillment, where it is all too easy to forget, to become deaf to the promises of Christ’s kingdom, to trust a job or a 401k or our reputation in our community or a million other things to provide for us. All too easy to become numb to those little holy nudges to love those around us. This is why Paul has to pray for the Ephesians as he does in the epistle reading today: it requires the power of Holy Spirit to make us able to comprehend and remember “the breadth and length and height and depth” of the love of Christ for us, to keep us rooted and grounded in God’s love when there are so many alternatives offered to us. This is why we gather for worship and do this whole liturgy, why we gather, why we read the Scriptures or meet with faithful friends or listen to beautiful music, or read stories or poems that wake us up to the realities of God’s kingdom — why we pray: to remind ourselves that we live in another kingdom, that we are followers of another way, that God is “able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine”, if we only put our trust in him. So, in the words of Paul: this week, may we remember the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that we might be filled with all the fullness of God. Amen