L. R. Tarsitano—Saint Andrew’s Church, Savannah

The Sunday next before Advent—November 21, 2004

The Year in Christ

“When Jesus then lifted up his eyes, and saw a great company come unto him, he saith unto Philip, Whence shall we buy bread, that these may eat? And this he said to prove him: for he himself knew what he would do” (John 6:5-6).

We come to the end, this morning, of one year of the church calendar, and we look forward to the beginning of another “year of the Lord” and another “year in the Lord” when we gather together next week.

The church calendar exists, after all, to place our lives perpetually into the context of the life of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, until we are called out of this world of space and time into eternity with the very same Savior. His life becomes our life, as we divide each year of worship and discipleship into two main divisions.

In the first division of the church year, then, we go chronologically through the earthly life and ministry of the Son of God made man. We prepare to celebrate his birth in Bethlehem on what we call “Christmas Day” by four weeks of prophecy, called Advent. These prophecies give the account of how the Father in heaven prepared the world for the first coming of his Son, and these prophecies force us to remember that the Word of God is sure—that the end of the world and the Last Judgment are just as certain as the birth in Bethlehem was and is a divine given.

After Christmas, beginning with the Feast of the Epiphany, the feast of Christ’s first manifestation to the Gentiles, represented by the Wise Men, we enter an entire season in which we review the events and the Scriptures in which the divine nature, the Godhead, of the Lord Jesus Christ was made manifest to the world. After this in Pre-Lent and Lent we are compelled to face the fact that the Son of God did not become Incarnate for an annual festival of “bambino worship.”

The Son of God became man to die for our sins. In the penitential seasons, then, we both admit our sinfulness and acknowledge Jesus Christ as the only cure. In fact, the Epistles and Gospels for Lent began as the final preparation of those who would be baptized on Easter Even, confessing Jesus Christ, once and for all, as their only Lord and Savior.

In Holy Week, we re-live the passion of Jesus Christ with Jesus Christ in his Church. We fast and deprive ourselves during the days when we commemorate the time that the body of our Savior lay in the tomb, and all our sorrow for sin turns to joy when Easter comes—when the Father gives victory and resurrection to the Son, promising the same to all the faithful in his Son.

In the final stage of this shared and re-lived biography of the Son of God made man, we celebrate his final earthly preaching to his disciples, his ascension into heaven to offer himself, once and for all, on our behalf, and the coming of the Holy Ghost to dwell in us, as the Lord Jesus Christ had promised. The bridge from this biographical portion of the church year to the next is Trinity Sunday.

On Trinity Sunday, no matter how improbably, we dare to celebrate God himself—the Three Eternal Persons of equal might, majesty, and dominion who are together One United God—the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost. This celebration is miraculous, not because of anything that we bring to it, but because of the condescension of the One True God in revealing himself to us, so that we might know him as he is, or at least as much as earthly creatures still in their travails may know the perfection of their Creator.

This worship of the Trinity, then, ushers in the second main division of the church year—namely, the teaching of the ways of God. The Sundays after Trinity, which end today, take us through the revealed will of our Father in heaven for the spiritual and moral governance of our lives. The Gospel is presented as news for us, and not just as news about God in Christ. We are called on to believe and to act, not on the basis of what the world around us tells us to do, but on the basis of what our loving and heavenly Father has told us about who and what he created us to be and about how he wishes us to live in this world and in the next.

And so we come to this morning’s Gospel, the final Gospel of the church year. It is St. John’s account of the feeding of a multitude that had followed our Lord into the mountain wastes to hear him preach, near the time of the Passover. We know the story well enough. There is neither money to buy food, nor any place to buy it if the money were available. There is a boy who thought ahead, or whose mother thought ahead, who has with him what amounts to a lunchbox with five little barley loaves and two small fish (along the lines of sardines that can be smeared on the bread to give it flavor).

The boy offers what he has, and our Lord blesses it and tells the disciples to distribute the boy’s little lunch until the five thousand men that had followed Jesus to hear him preach, plus the women and children with them, had eaten as much as they liked. And when the meal is over, there are twelve baskets of leftovers from the original lunch of five barley loaves and two fish.

So, why do we read this Gospel on this Sunday? The key is the twelve baskets of food remaining, corresponding to the twelve apostles that Christ would charge with delivering his Gospel to the world. In the desert of this world of sin, where do we go to feed the multitudes of the earth? Where do we find the bread of life? Where do we find something better than the Passover of the Old Testament.? The answer in every case is “Jesus Christ, who has known from the beginning what he was going to do.”

The twelve apostles have nothing to offer until Jesus Christ gives it to them, whether it is that one miraculous meal or the Gospel for all ages. No man, no human being of any rank or sort, possesses what the human race needs to live, in this world or the next, except for God made man, Jesus Christ. Today’s ministry, just as much as the ministry of the Apostles, is absolutely dependent on Jesus Christ in order to have anything to offer us along the way, and it is the way to life, rather than the way to death, if Jesus Christ is leading.

All of the true teaching, then, all of the Holy Scripture, and all of the miraculous meals of Christ’s own flesh and blood that we have been given in the Holy Communion in the holy year that ends today, came from Jesus Christ himself, at the will of the Father. All of the truth and of the Bread of Life that will feed the multitudes in the coming year will also be gifts from that one sacred source.

There is nothing for the Church to brag about in possessing the twelve baskets of hope and spiritual sustenance entrusted to her by Christ. There is nothing for any of us to boast about in having been invited to Jesus Christ’s table or in having been called together by him to be his people, his flock, his own Body.

And so we end and begin the church year in humility, and with a wonderful promise, represented in the faith and the generosity of that nameless boy who gave up his lunch. Once we have recognized and admitted that whatever we have is a gift from Christ, we are able to notice the fact that Jesus Christ, the Eternal Son of God, who is all-powerful, once accepted the tiny, unneeded help of that boy for the sake of grace and love. Our Savior, then, added to that small gift all of the power of God—the power to feed multitudes, the power to give remission of sins, and the power to give and sustain eternal life.

If we follow Jesus Christ in humility and gratitude into another church year, to be with him and to hear him, Jesus Christ has promised to multiply our tiniest virtues, our smallest gifts to him into blessings for our salvation and for the salvation of the whole human race. He does not need what we have to offer, but he accepts it out of love for us and makes it great.

That is, in fact, a good way of summarizing what the Church attempts for us in the keeping of the discipline of the church year—to feed us from the twelve baskets that Christ has provided and to deliver our everyday lives into the keeping of Jesus Christ, who will, in himself and in his own life, make the lives that we offer him great and everlasting.