August 2, 2026 - Tenth Sunday after Pentecost: Holy Hospitality

August 2, 2026 Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Matthew 14:31-21Psalm 145:8-9, 14-21
“Holy Hospitality”
Carol DeVaughan

A couple of exegetical points before I read this story from Matthew’s gospel: first, this miracle story is the only one that is in all four gospels. That should alert us to the value placed on it by those early writers. And, secondly, if you read the first part of chapter 14, you’d know why Jesus needed to withdraw and pray, regroup. His cousin and the “preparer of the way” prophet John the Baptist had been killed in one of the nastiest stories of acting on a whim that exists. So going on retreat seems a pretty human response.

When I was a girl, my family lived several miles out from town, just off a main highway.
Occasionally, especially during the summer, a person would come to our door asking for something to eat – at that time we called them “hobos.”  My mother would tell them to sit in the yard, and she would fry eggs and fix toast and take it to them with a glass of milk.

After they had eaten, they would bring the plate back to the door, say “Thank you,” and disappear again.  Sometimes they would ask if there was some work they could do to pay her back for the food.  She might let them chop some wood or some other small chore outside.

I asked my mother how these folks knew that she would feed them.  She told me that they had a way of marking or indicating a place where they might be fed.  It was one of my first lessons on our responsibility to respond to another’s need.

Today we read Matthew’s version of the loaves and fishes story. Each of the gospel writers presents the story in a unique way, emphasizing points according to the point or context of the writer.

It’s been a long, tiring day. Jesus and the disciples want to retreat, to mourn, to rest, but the crowds have followed. The disciples want the crowds to go away, but Jesus has compassion and ministers to them.  One writer has said that it shows that Jesus’ compassion for people was not abstract, but compassion based in the real, a compassion that cares deeply about the most basic needs of all people.

Jesus did not feed the 5000; he told the disciples to do it. There is no little boy with 5 loaves and 2 fish in this version, although that is what the disciples reported having. Jesus took and blessed what they had, and it was more than enough.

I think this story is about more than personal charity. There is a societal element. Our individual response is certainly important – bringing food to donate to food pantries, filling our “Scouting for Food” bags, and donating school supplies. This gives us a personal connection to the need that is out there.

But sometimes it is easy to think that is all that is required – “we are good people; we help.”

Sometimes there is such an enormity of need that we are paralyzed – starving multitudes in Africa, or even those overwhelming our social systems right here at home. 1 in 5 children in Missouri experiencing food insecurity. Jesus said, “You feed them.” Obscene school lunch debt in most of our schools. Jesus said, “You feed them.” Our ability to respond seems so meager as to be not even worth trying.

Maybe that is what the disciples were feeling – the enormity of the crowd.  

If it had been a half dozen or so, they might have felt compelled to do something.  But 5000 men plus women and children – that’s a major stadium-full with no concession stand to be found!  If they could just send the crowd away, the enormous need was out of sight.

The disciples felt they had nothing, especially compared to the need all around.  But in God’s holy power, they had more than enough.  What a witness of working together, of sharing, of opening the way for the miracle to happen. Jesus’ miracle made the feeding possible, but the disciples were the active agents, and in fact, Jesus said, “You feed them.”

God has entrusted us to be the body of Christ – the hands and feet through which God’s work is done in the world.  God does not work alone, but through people – you and me.  Remember, later in that wonderful depiction of the final judgment, Matthew quotes God’s question about what each one has done for the “least of these.”

But if we look no further than what we as individuals can do, we miss the larger imperative, miss the larger question, the societal, justice issue of inequality and our resistance to facing it and really admitting our duplicity in allowing unjust policies that hurt real people.

When Jesus said, “You feed them,” it became a moral imperative to take our responsibility as a society seriously. Where revenue comes from and how it is spent is the responsibility of all of us. And it is up to each of us to look at the big picture, beyond how some policy just impacts me personally. How does the income inequality keep getting larger?

This story is about more than sharing out of our abundance, although that is important. It reminds us, as the Psalmist said, that God is “good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made,… that God gives food in due season.”

Whether you read the Old or the New Testament, the commandment is clear – as disciples we are not to hoard what we have, but to share with those who need.

We follow a God of unbelievable abundance, and we are to reflect our God in the way we live, in the way we respond to the world.

This is election week, and I am certainly not going to tell you how to vote. I do tell you TO vote, and also to consider how your vote helps all of God’s people.

It is appropriate that this story comes on a Communion Sunday – for this is a Eucharistic story.  We Presbyterians consider one of our main points of faith, that God’s grace comes to us not through any merit of our own and then we live our lives in a response of gratitude.

The foreshadowing of the Lord’s Supper here shows that Jesus was sponsoring more than just dinner. It is a foreshadowing of the fulfillment of God’s vision for the creation.

So let’s all add our loaves and fishes and be part of the bringing of the Beloved Community.