SERMON SPOTLIGHT: 10 Pentecost, Proper 13A
The Rev. Aron Kramer
10 Pentecost, Proper 13A
August 2nd, 2026
Matthew shares the story of the feeding of the five thousand almost as a second thought. But notice where the story begins. "Jesus withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself." There are five words that significantly change this story. Five words that have been cut out of the Gospel with very interesting repercussions.
Those five words are: “Now when Jesus heard this,”.
What was it Jesus had heard? He had just heard that John was dead. His cousin, the one who baptized him. John's head had just been served on a platter at Herod's birthday party, brutal, horrific, simply absurd, demeaning and inhuman. Hearing this, and probably knowing exactly how it all went down, Jesus got in a boat, to grieve the loss of his loved one. Grief is cut out of this Gospel without a second thought, the idea of Jesus in pain, crying, grieving the loss of someone is too much to bear for even the men and women who curated our lectionary.
Grief is something we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about, it is hard, challenging, and it make us all very uncomfortable. We like to isolate, and separate ourselves from people during times of grief, but in this moment, Jesus could not take on his grief, he wanted to, clearly, but he couldn’t. The crowds follow him. Some on foot, around the shoreline, carrying their sick, because Jesus had been healing them, they followed him into that deserted place. And Matthew says that when he came ashore and saw them, he had compassion.
These short few words, “he had compassion”, always have an impact on me, emotionally. There is something simple in the statement, something unique and different. It's almost like it's a moment when exegesis and scholarship are no longer needed. It is just the humanity of Jesus reaching out to the humanity within each of us.
I want you to hold onto that. One of the most famous meals in the Gospels, told multiple times, the only miracle all four gospels insist on telling, does not happen on a good day. It happens alongside grief, Jesus does not wait to finish mourning before he feeds people. The mourning, the healing, and the feeding happen in the same moment, on the same afternoon, in the same body. Whatever else this story is, it is that first: abundance growing up through grief like grass through a sidewalk.
At the end of the story Matthew gives us a number, and he gives it the way numbers were given in his world: "Those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children." The word “besides” is an important one. That's not Matthew being careless, that's Matthew being accurate about how his world counted. A census counted men and we are not talking about the idea of men being the universal word for human, we are talking strictly about men. Everyone else was besides. The women were besides. The children were besides. Most of the hillside was besides.
We have called this Gospel story the feeding of the five thousand for two thousand years, and that may not change for another 3,000 years. We have named the miracle after the smallest group of people present.
In Nicaragua, popular kitchens offering food for the poorest women and children are called ollas de soya, or "pots of soya." The women who run these kitchens manage to gather vegetables and fruits from their own gardens to mix with donated soya flour to make a variety of nourishing drinks and main dishes to feed the poorest women and children.
They can only feed those who are on the brink of starvation, the poorest women who are pregnant or lactating and the children who are dangerously underweight. Once the children are back to more normal weight (undernourished but not starving) and the women are not pregnant or lactating anymore, they are not fed in these kitchens, in order for the limited supply to be reserved for those most in need.
Rosemary Radford Reuther, a theologian I have read a lot of, wrote in an article about the practices of these kitchens as they might apply to this story of the loaves and fishes. She writes, “Applying these realities to the gospel story, we can assume that the number of women that gathered to hear Jesus was about twice the number of men and each of these had at least two children with her. This means the uncounted women and children were about 30,000, six times the number of men who ate. Each of the 10,000 women brought along a picnic basket with enough food for themselves, their two children and one or two neighbors who might have forgotten their baskets or had mishaps along the way. This means they brought along enough food for 50,000.”
Reuther continues, “There were actually many more baskets than the 12 taken up by the disciples of Jesus. The other baskets were taken back by the women to feed those left at home. This is the real miracle of the multiplication of loaves and fishes.” 50,000 may have been fed that day with Jesus, but many more were fed by the leftovers from this extravagant meal.
I imagine the people that would have received this blessed and broken bread, brought to them by women who kept their lives in the front of their minds, women who cared for the well being of those who were in need, any kind of need. The people fed by the leftovers, the baskets full of food given for those that could not make the trip to see Jesus, those who could not see, those who could not walk, those who were bound by rules and laws that limited their ability to experience freedom in any sort of way, those baskets brought life and miracle, sustenance and nourishment.
Does that minimize this miracle that is so memorable to us? Does the idea that families, women, came with more than enough food shrink this miracle to nothing really special? Was it a miracle? I have stopped asking that question the way I used to ask it. Because notice what the question assumes, it assumes the miracle has to be either magic hands or a nice lesson about sharing.
The grace of this miracle was already on the hillside, carried in by people nobody counted. This story is reminding us how it is that God works, how God is always present, extraordinarily in the ordinary ways of our lives, abundance was hidden in uncounted hands, until somebody blessed it and gave it.
"You give them something to eat," Jesus told his disciples. We have always heard that as an impossible demand. Hear it instead as a statement of fact. You can give them something to eat, it is already in your hands, you just haven't counted it yet. Jesus knew the food was there, the disciples simply assumed, as counted, privileged people do, since they didn’t have any, or had prepared anything, no one else did either.
Earlier this winter, here in the Cities, fear stood between our neighbors and their food. You remember, you lived it. Children were learning at kitchen tables because school didn't feel safe. People weighing whether a trip to the grocery store was worth the risk of not coming home. By the city's own count, some 76,000 of our neighbors went food-insecure this winter.
And we all know what happened, the baskets were opened, groceries appeared on doorsteps, neighbors drove neighbors. Church basements and mosque kitchens and school cafeterias became ollas de soya, and nobody who packed those bags asked for a receipt. We did this while we were grieving, Renée Good, Alex Pretti, worries about what we had held sacred in the constitution and law and order, so many others whose lives were radically overturned whether sent to a country where they did not belong, or thrown into camps and most often left with little food and no care.
We mourned, and the baskets kept arriving where they needed to go, because it turns out the mourning and the feeding happen at the same time, and in the same place. In May, “the people of the Twin Cities” won the prestigious Profile in Courage Award. Not a mayor. Not a governor. It was accepted by an imam, an organizer, a woman who founded a neighborhood watch, and a school superintendent. The uncounted, standing in for the uncounted. The world looked at what happened here and called it courage, and it was. But I wonder if we shouldn’t call it Minnesota’s feeding of the five thousand.
Hospitality leads to action. We've been saying that all summer. This is what it looks like: seed that wouldn't stay in the barn, patience with a mixed field, and baskets, baskets walking out of this building in every direction, to the hungry and the frightened and the quietly heartbroken, to everyone the census missed, to all those who are uncounted. Those who are “besides”.
In a few minutes we will do what Jesus did. Take bread. Bless it. Break it. Give it. And there will be leftovers, and Ellie isn’t here to take them all. There are always leftovers, that is the signature of this particular kingdom, the tell that gives God away. Twelve baskets. More than twelve. And leftovers exist for one reason: to invite those who are uncounted to also participate in the already of God’s Kingdom.
"You give them something to eat." We can. It's already in our hands. Count on it.
10 Pentecost, Proper 13A
August 2nd, 2026
Matthew shares the story of the feeding of the five thousand almost as a second thought. But notice where the story begins. "Jesus withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself." There are five words that significantly change this story. Five words that have been cut out of the Gospel with very interesting repercussions.
Those five words are: “Now when Jesus heard this,”.
What was it Jesus had heard? He had just heard that John was dead. His cousin, the one who baptized him. John's head had just been served on a platter at Herod's birthday party, brutal, horrific, simply absurd, demeaning and inhuman. Hearing this, and probably knowing exactly how it all went down, Jesus got in a boat, to grieve the loss of his loved one. Grief is cut out of this Gospel without a second thought, the idea of Jesus in pain, crying, grieving the loss of someone is too much to bear for even the men and women who curated our lectionary.
Grief is something we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about, it is hard, challenging, and it make us all very uncomfortable. We like to isolate, and separate ourselves from people during times of grief, but in this moment, Jesus could not take on his grief, he wanted to, clearly, but he couldn’t. The crowds follow him. Some on foot, around the shoreline, carrying their sick, because Jesus had been healing them, they followed him into that deserted place. And Matthew says that when he came ashore and saw them, he had compassion.
These short few words, “he had compassion”, always have an impact on me, emotionally. There is something simple in the statement, something unique and different. It's almost like it's a moment when exegesis and scholarship are no longer needed. It is just the humanity of Jesus reaching out to the humanity within each of us.
I want you to hold onto that. One of the most famous meals in the Gospels, told multiple times, the only miracle all four gospels insist on telling, does not happen on a good day. It happens alongside grief, Jesus does not wait to finish mourning before he feeds people. The mourning, the healing, and the feeding happen in the same moment, on the same afternoon, in the same body. Whatever else this story is, it is that first: abundance growing up through grief like grass through a sidewalk.
At the end of the story Matthew gives us a number, and he gives it the way numbers were given in his world: "Those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children." The word “besides” is an important one. That's not Matthew being careless, that's Matthew being accurate about how his world counted. A census counted men and we are not talking about the idea of men being the universal word for human, we are talking strictly about men. Everyone else was besides. The women were besides. The children were besides. Most of the hillside was besides.
We have called this Gospel story the feeding of the five thousand for two thousand years, and that may not change for another 3,000 years. We have named the miracle after the smallest group of people present.
In Nicaragua, popular kitchens offering food for the poorest women and children are called ollas de soya, or "pots of soya." The women who run these kitchens manage to gather vegetables and fruits from their own gardens to mix with donated soya flour to make a variety of nourishing drinks and main dishes to feed the poorest women and children.
They can only feed those who are on the brink of starvation, the poorest women who are pregnant or lactating and the children who are dangerously underweight. Once the children are back to more normal weight (undernourished but not starving) and the women are not pregnant or lactating anymore, they are not fed in these kitchens, in order for the limited supply to be reserved for those most in need.
Rosemary Radford Reuther, a theologian I have read a lot of, wrote in an article about the practices of these kitchens as they might apply to this story of the loaves and fishes. She writes, “Applying these realities to the gospel story, we can assume that the number of women that gathered to hear Jesus was about twice the number of men and each of these had at least two children with her. This means the uncounted women and children were about 30,000, six times the number of men who ate. Each of the 10,000 women brought along a picnic basket with enough food for themselves, their two children and one or two neighbors who might have forgotten their baskets or had mishaps along the way. This means they brought along enough food for 50,000.”
Reuther continues, “There were actually many more baskets than the 12 taken up by the disciples of Jesus. The other baskets were taken back by the women to feed those left at home. This is the real miracle of the multiplication of loaves and fishes.” 50,000 may have been fed that day with Jesus, but many more were fed by the leftovers from this extravagant meal.
I imagine the people that would have received this blessed and broken bread, brought to them by women who kept their lives in the front of their minds, women who cared for the well being of those who were in need, any kind of need. The people fed by the leftovers, the baskets full of food given for those that could not make the trip to see Jesus, those who could not see, those who could not walk, those who were bound by rules and laws that limited their ability to experience freedom in any sort of way, those baskets brought life and miracle, sustenance and nourishment.
Does that minimize this miracle that is so memorable to us? Does the idea that families, women, came with more than enough food shrink this miracle to nothing really special? Was it a miracle? I have stopped asking that question the way I used to ask it. Because notice what the question assumes, it assumes the miracle has to be either magic hands or a nice lesson about sharing.
The grace of this miracle was already on the hillside, carried in by people nobody counted. This story is reminding us how it is that God works, how God is always present, extraordinarily in the ordinary ways of our lives, abundance was hidden in uncounted hands, until somebody blessed it and gave it.
"You give them something to eat," Jesus told his disciples. We have always heard that as an impossible demand. Hear it instead as a statement of fact. You can give them something to eat, it is already in your hands, you just haven't counted it yet. Jesus knew the food was there, the disciples simply assumed, as counted, privileged people do, since they didn’t have any, or had prepared anything, no one else did either.
Earlier this winter, here in the Cities, fear stood between our neighbors and their food. You remember, you lived it. Children were learning at kitchen tables because school didn't feel safe. People weighing whether a trip to the grocery store was worth the risk of not coming home. By the city's own count, some 76,000 of our neighbors went food-insecure this winter.
And we all know what happened, the baskets were opened, groceries appeared on doorsteps, neighbors drove neighbors. Church basements and mosque kitchens and school cafeterias became ollas de soya, and nobody who packed those bags asked for a receipt. We did this while we were grieving, Renée Good, Alex Pretti, worries about what we had held sacred in the constitution and law and order, so many others whose lives were radically overturned whether sent to a country where they did not belong, or thrown into camps and most often left with little food and no care.
We mourned, and the baskets kept arriving where they needed to go, because it turns out the mourning and the feeding happen at the same time, and in the same place. In May, “the people of the Twin Cities” won the prestigious Profile in Courage Award. Not a mayor. Not a governor. It was accepted by an imam, an organizer, a woman who founded a neighborhood watch, and a school superintendent. The uncounted, standing in for the uncounted. The world looked at what happened here and called it courage, and it was. But I wonder if we shouldn’t call it Minnesota’s feeding of the five thousand.
Hospitality leads to action. We've been saying that all summer. This is what it looks like: seed that wouldn't stay in the barn, patience with a mixed field, and baskets, baskets walking out of this building in every direction, to the hungry and the frightened and the quietly heartbroken, to everyone the census missed, to all those who are uncounted. Those who are “besides”.
In a few minutes we will do what Jesus did. Take bread. Bless it. Break it. Give it. And there will be leftovers, and Ellie isn’t here to take them all. There are always leftovers, that is the signature of this particular kingdom, the tell that gives God away. Twelve baskets. More than twelve. And leftovers exist for one reason: to invite those who are uncounted to also participate in the already of God’s Kingdom.
"You give them something to eat." We can. It's already in our hands. Count on it.
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