Sermon Feeding the 5000

 Rev. Jeffrey T. Howard

First Presbyterian Church of Mt Vernon

Sermon Feeding the 5000

March 15, 2026

2 Kings 4:42-44, John 6:1-14

Before I begin this morning I would like to take this opportunity to address an important issue facing our denomination, the Presbyterian Church USA.   False teaching has come into our church.  We will get to this, but first let's pray.

“Grant unto us, O Lord, to be occupied in the mysteries of thy heavenly wisdom, with true progress in piety, to thy glory and our own edification. Amen.” (John Calvin)

James Talarico is a member of St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas.  He was baptized there at age 2.  Since then the church has nurtured his faith.  The session of the church has permitted him to preach.   And the long-term pastor of the church encouraged him to enter the ministry.  He is currently a Master of Divinity student at Austin Theological Seminary, a PCUSA institution.   

James Talarico is in the news right now because he won the Democratic primary for the US Senate from Texas.    Therefore we will be hearing a lot about him in the coming months.   And this will include hearing about his faith as Christian.   That is where the problem comes in.  James Talarico is a false teacher.

James Talarico claims that God is non-binary and has many genders.   This is false.   God is a spirit with no gender.  God the Son came to earth as a man.  And God created two genders, male and female for humanity.

James also claims that when the Angel Gabriel came to Mary to announce her conception that Mary had a choice.   This choice means that all women can choose to abort her child up to the point of birth.   This is false.  There is nothing in this passage about abortion.   The Annunciation is about the salvation of the world through Jesus.

James claims that all people will be saved.   This is called Universalism.   This is false.   The Bible is very clear.   Everyone deserves the judgment of God.   Some, not all, receive undeserved mercy though faith in Jesus.

So when you talk with people over the next few months about James Talarico remember that he does not speak for us as Christians.   His theological teaching is false.  

I am continuing today with Pastor Grace’s sermon series on the signs or miracles in the Gospel of John.   As Pastor Grace has said, the purpose of the signs was to bring people to belief.   Throughout the Gospel of John we see a common pattern.   A person does not believe, often living in darkness.   Then there is a sign and Jesus’ explanation.   This results in the person coming into the light of belief in Jesus as the Son of God.   We call this conversion, when someone emerges from unbelief into belief, from darkness to light.  The result of this conversion is that the person is “born again.”

Conversion is necessary every generation.   Even today people need to be converted.   So they need to hear about the signs and hear Jesus' explanation to come into belief.    So, this sermon series is vitally important.

Today we turn our attention to John 6 and what is one of the most familiar stories in the Bible.    This is the story of Jesus feeding the 5000.  

Many of you have heard this story a hundred times.    It is found in all four gospels.   And it is a favorite story for many preachers and Bible teachers.   Here is the basic story.

It is just before the Jewish Passover when Jesus and his disciples went across the Sea of Galilee.   A large crowd gathered because of the previous healings by Jesus.   Jesus knew that the crowd would be hungry.   He also knew that a miracle would be needed to feed them.   But he first tested his disciples to see if they would wait for the miracle or try to find a natural way of feeding the people.   Both Philip and Andrew came up with natural explanations that would not work.    The disciples failed the test.   They didn’t wait for the miracle.  And Jesus fed the crowd with his supernatural power as the Son of God.  

But there are some people who call this explanation of the story unscientific and irrational.   They call this explanation nonsense.  And many of these people are leaders in the church today.   

In the 19th century there was a popular philosophy called “Naturalism”.   Naturalism was born in the Enlightenment as a result of science finding natural causes for many natural events.   The Naturalists looked around and said we live in a natural world.   And that is all there is.   There is nothing beyond nature or above nature or invisible in nature.   They said that speaking of things like this is nonsense.  In other words the Naturalists did not believe in the possibility of supernatural miracles.

Naturalism came into the church through 19th century liberals.   They were theologians, Bible scholars, church leaders and pastors who did not believe in miracles.   They said that any belief in the supernatural is unscientific and irrational.  They said that the Bible, which contains stories of the supernatural, was filled with errors and myths.  One of the liberal theologians admitted, “We need to be honest, leave the ministry, and shut down our churches because we don’t believe historic Christianity.”    This created a crisis in 19th century liberal thought:  If we reject the Bible because we don’t believe in miracles, what will happen to all of our jobs and all the churches we have built?

They decided that they had to find some way to keep the church relevant while still purging it of talk about supernatural miracles.

The 19th Century liberals decided to do three things.  First, they had to find natural causes for what appears to be miracles in the Bible.   Second, they wanted to hold onto the ethical insights of Jesus and called him a great moral teacher.   And third, they wanted the church to focus less on God and the Bible and focus more on the emotions and feelings of the congregation.  That way they hoped they could keep the church relevant.  

The feeding of the 5000 is one of the most popular stories in the Bible.   And it is included in all four of the Gospels.   According to all the Gospel writers it is clearly a supernatural miracle.   So how could the 19th century liberals explain it naturally?  Here is what they did.  

One way they tried to explain it was by calling it a myth.   They said that the early church made up stories about Jesus.   The church did this to extoll their late leader.  This thinking led to “The Quest for the Historical Jesus” movements in the 19th and 20th centuries.   The idea was to determine what Jesus was like after all the annoying miracles are removed.  One liberal theologian said: “What happened in the New Testament record was that this Jesus, whoever He really was in history, was a man about whom many myths were created to extol His significance. We can’t take this record seriously as history.”

But look again at what it says in the Gospel of John.  John 6:1 Some time after this, Jesus crossed to the far shore of the Sea of Galilee (that is, the Sea of Tiberias), 2 and a great crowd of people followed him because they saw the signs he had performed by healing the sick. 3 Then Jesus went up on a mountainside and sat down with his disciples. 4 The Jewish Passover Festival was near.

John tells us that the feeding of the 5000 happened at a particular place, the far shore of the Sea of Galilee, and at a particular time, just before Passover.  John wants us to know that this miracle occurred at a particular place and time in history.  This is not a myth.   It is a historical event attested to by eyewitnesses.  

There was a second theory.   In this theory Jesus and his disciples knew there would be a large hungry crowd.  So they found a cave near where they would be meeting and filled it with an enormous amount of food.  Then when the crowd was hungry they magically delivered the food and said it was a miracle.

But there is a problem with this natural explanation too.  For this explanation to work Jesus and the disciples have to lie and commit a giant fraud.   How could anyone believe that Jesus is a great moral teacher if he stooped so low to lie to his followers like this.    And the Gospel writers are liars too because they must have known about the deception and called it a miracle anyway.

But Jesus did not lie.   He is the truth.  The only rational explanation is that Jesus and the disciples, and Gospel writers are all telling the truth.    The feeding of the 5000 is a supernatural miracle.

And let's turn to the final natural explanation.   This became the most popular naturalist explanation of the Feeding of the 5000.   I am willing to bet that you have heard it.   Here it is.

A large crowd had gathered to hear Jesus’ teaching.   Late in the day they became hungry.  Some of the people had forgotten to bring lunch and were getting hungry.   Some had brought their lunch like a boy who brought 5 small barley loves and a couple a small fish.   The ones who brought their lunch had compassion on those who did not.   And so they shared what they had with those who had none.   That way everyone was fed.  What we have here is an ethical miracle.

The 19th century theologians took this and used it as a principle to keep the church relevant.   The Church would stop talking about those nonsense miracles and focus instead on sharing what they have with others in need, in their churches, their community, and around the world.  And caring for others is the primary focus of the mainline church today.  

But there is a problem with all this.   If all we believe in is the natural world then where do you find meaning and purpose in your life?  The rocks and stones, the plants and animals do not love you.  They cannot give your life meaning and purpose.   You were born, live your life and will die.    Nothing cares about you.  Nothing will remember you.   Nothing will love you.  Because you are nothing too. 

But there is hope.  Let me tell you a story.  I recently read the book Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.  Tolstoy was a 19th century Russian novelist and a naturalist until something happened to him and he wrote about in Anna Karenina.

There is a character in this book who many think is modeled on the author himself.   This character is named Levin.   All the other characters in the book are dysfunctional.   They are adulterers, gamblers, drug addicts, drunks, and some are heavily in debt.   But Levin has led a good life.  He is a landowner and stewards the estate left to him by his grandfather.    Levin loves the estate, manages it well, enjoys working in the field and is looking for ways to make his serfs’ lives better.   He had married the girl of his dreams and they just welcomed their first child, a son.   

You would think that Levin would be overjoyed because life was treating him well.  But he was not overjoyed.  He was depressed.  He was suicidal.  He had already purchased and hidden a rope to end his life.   

It was harvest time on the estate and all the serfs were in the field bringing in the crops.   As Levin looked out over the field he saw a serf he knew well.   This serf was older and had some health problems.  So Levin went out into the field to talk with him. Levin told the serf that he didn’t need to be working.   He should go back home to rest.

But the serf would not go home because God had given him this task.   Bringing in the harvest was what God had created him to do.  This was his purpose in life.   There was no way he could go back home.  

This started Levin thinking.   Could God give his life meaning?   Could God give him a purpose?  Levin began to remember the doctrines and Bible stories he was taught as a child.    He realised that these had revealed to him who God is.   And the creator God could certainly give us meaning and purpose in our lives.  At that moment Levin experienced God’s overwhelming love filling him with love for his estate, love for his serfs, and love for his wife and son.

There is a world beyond the natural world.   The supernatural world is the domain of God, who loves us, cares for us, feeds us when we are hungry and gives our lives purpose and meaning.   Believe in the supernatural miracle of Jesus feeding the 5000, come out of darkness of unbelief and into light of saving faith.   

Father in heaven, we ask for the gift of faith, that we might believe in Jesus Christ, the one who came from heaven to nourish us with the spiritual food that leads to eternal life.   We ask that you fill us with the nourishing food that will sustain us eternally with meaning and purpose.  In your Son’s name and in the power of the Holy Spirit we pray. Amen.