Sometimes the things that seem most extraordinary in the Gospel stories turn out to be straightforward comments on the most ordinary things of life. Consider today's lesson from John's gospel. It tells two stories that appear to focus on Jesus reaching beyond the natural order of things to the miraculous. One tells of 5,000 fed with five barley loaves and two fish, while the other narrates a short tale of Jesus walking on the water.

What if we dwell on these stories for a few minutes not as easily dismissed legends of the miraculous but as comments on choices we ourselves face in ordinary life? Or at least as examples of how the most miraculous things take place mainly in the midst of ordinary life and the decisions that challenge us day in and day out?

In the first of these stories, Jesus was being plagued with a large crowd that kept following him because they saw what Jesus was doing as he passed through their towns and villages - healing the sick, drawing near to him those who mattered the least in the eyes of the world, in order to show them what it means to count the most in God's sight.

For Jesus' disciples, day after day seemed just one experience of scarcity after another - never enough time, never enough sleep, never enough Jesus to go around. And even their imaginations seemed impoverished unable to see beyond the pressures of the day and the limitations they faced in provisions or human energy.

So when 5,000 show up needing food, Jesus knows what's on the minds of his followers: "Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat? As far as we can tell, there is only a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish."

And then the gospel lets us see it all through God's eyes. Surely Jesus was as tired as the disciples. And Jesus knew that arithmetic was all you needed in order to calculate the impossibility of feeding those who needed to be fed that night.

Unlike everyone else, however, Jesus saw the needs around him not as an impossible demand, but as opportunity not to be missed. He didn't clench his fists to hold onto the few loaves and fishes for his own followers' sake. Rather, he opened his hands to feed the multitudes, a gesture of utter abundance and reckless hospitality. Jesus took everything they had, gave thanks, and gave it all away. Everything. It didn't matter what it was going to be used for; the point was not to hold anything back. Anything.

And a miracle happened. By giving away all they had, by withholding nothing from availability for God's work, the disciples fulfilled the needs of many more than they had dreamed was possible, who in turn had enough left over beyond the fulfillment of their own needs to fill twelve baskets for others.

Jesus responded to the opportunity to feed the multitude not by giving a budget report on the scarcity of available resources, but by giving away absolutely everything they had, withholding nothing from God. Such extravagant hospitality, Jesus knew, often breeds the fear of having nothing left. More importantly, however, it has the capacity to breed a kind of generosity that knows no bounds. Once we focus on what needs to be done, the lives waiting to be changed, the hungers that long to be fed, there will be enough not just to meet the immediate needs around us - there will be more left over than we even started with. Generosity generates generosity!
Such is the miracle of ordinary hospitality acted out with extravagance. Such is what's possible when compassion overcomes scarcity, when generosity trumps fear in our everyday affairs of the world. I call it "the Gospel of Abundance," because it's Good News that we can look scarcity in the face without being ruled by it. It's Good News that God calls us forward with a new vision of what can be done, long before we can see exactly how we're going to manage it. A Gospel of Abundance is not based on what we don't have, but on what we have yet to do to be faithful to God's calling to us in the communities where we live.

The crowds gathered around Jesus not because he was rich, powerful, or important, but because of what they had seen happen to others who had drawn near to him. Here at St. Thomas' Parish, we know a lot about what happens to a congregation when it chooses to respond to the needs of others.

St. Thomas' never decided to be "a gay parish" - we simply opened our doors with extravagant hospitality to the needs of the neighborhood around us, and learned to love and be loved, to bless and be blessed, by all those who've come through our doors the past forty years. We're a parish with doors wide open!

As our community has changed and grown over time, we've adapted to a more youthful demographic, to straight and same-sex couples bringing their children to grow up here, and to the changes in our diocese, national Episcopal Church, and the international Anglican Communion. We've measured ourselves not against the size of our staff or budget or endowment, but against the immensity of need that's never ceased to come knocking at our doors.

We've been at our best when we have put our spiritual growth above our numerical size, making God's standard of love our life's "ruler and guide," in order that "we may so pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal." In fact, each lesson this morning challenges our spiritual maturity in understanding God and our relationship with God in the everyday-ness of our lives.

In the first reading, David's maturity will only deepen as he painfully confronts his own immorality. The psalmist, like each of us, needs maturity to face troubling things only she knows about herself. St. Paul knows well that it requires a mature faith to grow into the fullness of Christ. And in the gospel lesson from John, Jesus is trying to teach the disciples a more mature way of seeing what they can do if only they can give all of what they have to the service of God, rather than worrying so much about what they don't have, or thinking about what they should have before stepping out in faith with radical hospitality claiming lives of spiritual abundance.

In the midst of our own anxieties and fears about the faltering global economy, we as a parish are addressing our need for worship facilities that have the capacity to serve the next generation of those who come through our doors seeking to find and be found by God. And sometimes the spiritual boost -the miraculous perspective we need when we're tired and our fears get in the way of our best selves--comes from outside our own community.

Last Sunday we hosted a guest in our midst, Tiffany Stanley, who's a writer with the Religious News Service. This past week she wrote a feature for USA Today, "Straight believers find a home in gay churches, synagogues." As part of her research for that story, Tiffany not only sang in our choir last week, she also spent a great deal of time interviewing Kristen Jones, a 25-year member of St. Thomas' Parish. Kristen told just one of the many stories you know yourselves, about the effect of extravagant-hospitality on the life of someone who came through our doors, was welcomed, and stayed.

As Tiffany Stanley tells it, "Kristin Jones ... stumbled upon St. Thomas' nearly 25 years ago when it was, as she put it, full of elderly church ladies and young gay men. She came because she liked to sing in the choir; she stayed even though women - let alone straight women - are still the minority. The church has seen Jones through single motherhood; 60 members threw her a baby shower as she prepared to adopt her first of two daughters from China. With time, "I started thinking of St. Thomas as my tribe," she said.

As our parish faces important decisions about how to face the future not with fears of scarcity but through the eyes of abundance, we're asking how to ensure that when the next Kristen shows up, she, too, will find our doors wide open, our worship vital, and Christ like-hospitality rampant. We stand on the shoulders of all the Kristen's of the past forty years - as well as the shoulders of rectors such as Henry Bruel, Jim Holmes and Elizabeth Carl - as we seek to discern what God's calling us to do in our generation in order to feed the 5,000, rather than being paralyzed by the realities of fewer loaves and fishes than we would like to have on hand.

Are we still the same community that spoke out with courage in the face of the Viet Nam War, 1960's racism and classism, not to mention homophobia? Do we still have what it takes to respond strongly to the resolutions passed at this 76th General Convention begging our attention not to what's wrong with the church, rather than what's being asked of us by the world we live in ... and how we as God's people can faithfully respond?

Can we be a part of making a difference, for example, of our National Church budget's slash that eliminated the entire Women's Ministry division, and sliced the budget for Children's Ministry, for the whole church, to $30,000? Will we react fearfully to such scarcity, or respond faithfully out of a confidence in God's abiding abundance, capable of providing all we need with the proverbial 12 baskets left over?

It's reassuring to be reminded that even when we see God doing the miraculous in our very midst - doubling our average Sunday attendance, growing our budget and pledges to record amounts, transforming lives throughout this congregation that once seemed to others beyond redeeming - we're no different than the first disciples. We can lose faith and fall back into fear, ruled by the challenges of scarcity rather than emboldened by God's generosity to us...or not.

On the night after they had just seen 5,000 fed, the disciples went out in their boat to find a quiet place to sleep. And as Jesus came to them, their response was not to be overjoyed and thankful. Instead, "They were terrified." Such is the way with miracles, even in ordinary life. Such it is with us, as well. Even when we see the miracles already done by God in this place, some of us are tempted to draw back from God's challenging presence and are terrified of what God may be asking us to do for the next 5,000 who come here knocking at our doors.

We do well to remember that God's answer to us is just the same as to the first disciples facing Jesus arriving among them in an improbable way: "It is I; do not be afraid." This is what gives us confidence to pray in the words of today's Collect: "O God, Increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal." May we each so pass through the proclaimed scarcities of the world that we reach the abundance of God's never-ending love, mercy, and grace. And may God bless you extravagantly these summer days, with at least, 12 baskets-full left over.

Amen