Bring Them Here to Me

This sermon was preached by Pastor Ted Carnahan for the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, August 2, 2026.

Grace, mercy, and peace be with all of you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I think sometimes we imagine that Jesus is sort of a different kind of critter than you and I are. And in one way I think that's true, because of course Jesus is the Son of God—and most of you are probably already aware of this, but you aren't. But to say that Jesus Christ is fully human and fully divine, both the Son of God by his heavenly Father and also the Son of Mary by his human mother, is to say that Jesus is 100% human and 100% divine, all in one. And this is an important thing for us to remember, because in his humanity Jesus experienced all of the same things that we experience. He experienced heat and cold, hunger and thirst. We find he had human desires. He was sad. He was happy. You know, sometimes people imagine that Jesus never once laughed at a joke. I don't think that's true. I think Jesus had the same kinds of reactions to the absurd things that happen around us. I'm sure he smiled and laughed. And also, Jesus got tired.

Jesus Needs a Break

And so in the beginning of our reading from St. Matthew's Gospel this morning, Jesus goes away and withdraws from the place where he has been ministering and preaching to a deserted place by himself, because he needs a break. He needs rest. But of course, just because you do something to get rest doesn't mean that rest often follows.

(Mothers, I know you understand this well. You go off to have a little quiet by yourself, but the kids will find you.)

And the crowds hear that Jesus has gone off to this other place, and soon word reaches the crowds, and more people come from the surrounding towns—from where Jesus has once again come ashore from the Sea of Galilee. And the press of people is so intense: Jesus is becoming famous! People are beginning to hear about the things that he can do, the miracles and the preaching and teaching that he's done. And they find it remarkable, and they are willing to go to great lengths to get there. They're willing to go out in the middle of nowhere, in the desert, in order to hear him speak.

And when he gets ashore again, there's already a great crowd gathered. And rather than turning them away and saying, "Darn you people, I was trying to get away from you—won't you leave me alone for five minutes so I can get a bit of peace?"—instead he has compassion on them, and he cures their sick.

Night Falling in the Desert

But as evening begins to fall, another problem happens. The people aren't leaving. They're still there. And as night is coming, Jesus and the disciples recognize that there is a problem coming along with the fall of night. They are out in the wilderness. They're not in a nice place; they're in a desert. And these people have come from all around, but they haven't come well prepared. They've stayed far longer than perhaps they should have, and now it is getting to be night—and with night in the desert comes cold.

If you've ever spent time in the desert, you know that of course it is very hot during the day, but at night the temperature plunges rapidly. There's no humidity to hold the heat in, no clouds to hold the heat in, and so the temperature in the desert plunges and it gets quite cold at night. And that actually becomes one of the leading reasons, besides dehydration, that people die when left exposed in the desert.

And so the situation is actually quite dire, because there are a lot of vulnerable people—sick people even—who have come to hear Jesus, to hopefully experience his healing. And now they're out in the middle of the desert. Night is falling. It's getting cold. It's getting dark. And they don't have enough to eat.

A Mindset of Scarcity

So the disciples come to Jesus and say, "This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves." You know—they should take care of themselves. They should do this on their own. They should have brought enough money or brought food with them so at least they'd have enough to eat. "Send them away, Lord, so that they can take care of their needs."

You see, the disciples are living in a mindset of scarcity. They look at their own meager resources. They already have checked. Let's not pretend like Jesus's suggestion—"What food do you have?"—is the first time that they've looked into their bags and decided that they know how much food they brought with them. They already know that what they have brought is barely enough to feed them—probably not even enough to feed them—let alone to feed five thousand hungry men, besides women and children. And so, having looked into their own resources already, they say, "Send them away, Lord. There's nothing we can do for them, because the resources available for us to help don't exist."

They're living in a mindset of scarcity. They're living in the mindset that says, "Let's be realistic." In the church sometimes people say, "I need to be the devil's advocate for a second." (By the way—this is a church; we don't need a devil's advocate.)

This mindset of scarcity drives us to curve in on ourselves, to focus on our needs, our desires. This focus on scarcity says there's only a little bit of resources available, and I better hold tightly to what I have, because if I don't—if I'm forced to pry open my fingers in order that I have to share the resources that I've been given—then there won't be enough for me. And that's really where the fear is, right? The fear is connected to me, myself, and I—my three favorite people. "Send the crowds away, Lord, that they might go into the villages and buy food for themselves." After all, the Lord helps those who help themselves. If you ever read that in the Bible—no, you haven't. It doesn't exist. That's just somebody's idea of a biblical-sounding aphorism.

You Give Them Something to Eat

Jesus rebukes them. Jesus said to them, "They need not go away; you give them something to eat."

Notice the pronouns here, the subjects of these sentences that are glued together: They need not go away; you give them something to eat. In other words, Jesus already knows what resources are at their disposal. The problem here is not that the resources don't exist. It is that they don't have a mind that's big enough to encompass what God is able to do with the resources that they think are meager and lacking. And he knows this, and he says they don't have to go away. You already have enough—because in Christ, the meager things which we bring to him are made to be enough. "You give them something to eat," he says.

And then the truth comes out. They've already done the counting. They've already done the ledger. They've already looked at the resources available to them, and they say, "We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish."

Ah—the truth comes out. They do have something. They're just unwilling to share it. They're so concerned that they might not get a bite that they're going to hold on to it tightly.

Now let's not pretend that that's a large amount of food—five loaves and two fish. I don't know how much that would feed exactly, because is it a big fish or a small fish, right? Is it a big loaf of bread or a small loaf of bread? We know that they probably didn't have twenty-ounce loaves of Wonder Bread wrapped in plastic. But they were probably loaves of bread kind of like this, right? Because if you're making a free-form loaf—you know, not in a bread pan like we do today, but just a free loaf of bread—any bigger than that, it's hard to bake it through to the center, right? So it's probably something like this. And you know, as a meager meal, if I took one of those, broke it in half, and I gave you one and I kept one for myself, we'd have eaten and would be relatively less hungry after we were done with that. Perhaps there is enough here to feed twelve or fourteen people. And so they say, "It's not enough, Lord. We don't have the resources, so we better hold tightly to what we have here and make sure that by holding on tightly we have what it will take."

Bring Them Here to Me

Instead Jesus says, "Bring them here to me." Take the resources which you have—which, by the way, have come to you by the provision and by the hand of God—bring them here, he says, to me. Because in your hands the resources are small and meager, and you can understandably want to hold on tightly to them. But when you put them in the hands of Jesus Christ, something amazing is going to happen.

And so he says, "Bring them here to me." And he orders the crowds to sit down on the grass. And he takes the five loaves and the two fish, and he lifts them up to heaven—sort of a pre-image of what Communion is like. He lifts them up to heaven, and he blesses them, and he breaks them, and he hands them to the disciples to start handing out to the people. And the disciples start going around and handing them out to the crowds.

And it says—it just jumps straight to verse 20—to this: "All ate and were filled."

Hold on a minute. How did that happen?

Unfortunately Matthew—and actually all four of the evangelists who speak of this—they don't tell us what it looked like. But I would love to know what it looked like. Can you imagine? To take a loaf of bread, break it in half, and then I hand one to you and I hand one to you—and when you receive it, it's a whole loaf of bread. And then from there they take it and you break it in half and you hand it to your neighbor, and they get a whole loaf of bread too. And then they break it in half, and they get a whole loaf. Same with the fish. I don't know—it's kind of weird to talk about taking a piece of fish and breaking it in half, you know—but take a loaf of fish: here, have a fish—and then it's got the whole fish there. Think of how many fish heads were laying around on the grass when they were done!

He looked up to heaven. He blessed and broke the loaves. He gave them to the disciples. The disciples gave them to the crowds. And all ate and were filled.

All Ate and Were Filled

I was talking to somebody last night who never had noticed in this story—I mean, we're all very familiar with this. Even if you're not a regular churchgoer, or you haven't been to church in a long time, you know this story, right? The feeding of the five thousand is one of the most famous stories about Jesus. And she had never noticed this detail. She thought that everybody ate and they got a little bit—right? That it's a story about sharing: so I take my bread and I break it in half, and then I keep a little for myself and I give some to you and I give some to you—right?—which is kind of how things go in Communion here at our church. Right? We take the bread and we break it and we give out a little bit so that everybody participates.

But that's not exactly what's going on here, right? Because it's not that you got a little bit and you got a little bit and you got a little bit and little tiny dust-sized particles of bread. All ate and were filled! They had so much, in fact—how much did they have? All ate and were filled, and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces. And now what barely would have filled the bottom of one large basket fills up twelve large baskets with leftovers.

(I love leftovers, don't you? We had pizza last night, and we have leftover pizza in the fridge. I know what I'm having for lunch. If I had never-ending leftovers, that'd be better than Olive Garden and never-ending breadsticks.)

All ate and were filled. This was not the meager sharing of one person taking a bit of their bread and breaking it off to give to another. This is an abundance—an overflowing abundance—an overflowing abundance that leads even deeper, so that what is taken up and what is left over in the baskets is more than what they started with.

Five Thousand Men

And then we find out how many people are there. I love that Matthew leaves this detail to the end. There is no reason he had to do it that way. "And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children."

Consider how many people that probably actually was! There's no count of the women and children, but five thousand men who have been out in the desert all day hearing Jesus preaching, and now at the end of the day they are hungry men—and five thousand of them, five thousand of them are fed. But if they came out in families, as many of them do—imagine a mom and a dad and three or four kids, maybe more—there could have been twenty or thirty thousand people. This is not a small gathering of people. It would have been a miracle if it had been a group of people this size. But imagine a stadium full of people—twenty or thirty thousand people. Jesus the rock star, taking five little loaves of bread and two fish, breaking them, giving them out—and now there is an abundance.

Because God provides for his people not out of a sense of scarcity and a storing against the future, but God provides for his people out of abundance.

Close

Too often, people of God, we live in a spirit of scarcity: there's only so much, and there's not enough to share. And Jesus goes to the cross and gives abundantly of his life so that you might learn to open your life to his love—to recognize that we're all in this together—and not only that, to forgive your sins and to give you his peace and his promise, so that you no longer have to be curved in on yourself and concerned about yourself and putting me, myself, and I ahead of all other concerns. But instead you can trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God made flesh for you, who knows your needs and meets them, who gives to you not just meagerly but abundantly—and not just of bread and fish, but of his very life, welling up in him to eternal life for you.

May you trust this Lord Jesus who gives to you out of his abundance. And may the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord, to life everlasting. Amen.