
Clap your hands, all peoples! Shout to God with loud songs of joy!
The Seventh Sunday after Trinity
O God, Whose never-failing providence orders all things both in heaven and earth, we humbly implore You to put away from us all hurtful things and to give us those things that are profitable for us; through Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
Amen.

An Overview
This is one of my favorite Sundays in the Church Year. 100% of the Old Testament reading shows us what the world was like before sin entered into the world. We catch a glimpse of untainted Beauty, in which God dug His fingers into the ground so that He could form Adam from clay and then breathe life into him. That same God uses His hands to plant a garden so that the man can be fed and nourished.
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Thousands of years later, Jesus does the same thing: He manipulates creation so that people can be fed and avoid death.
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We see in this Sunday a command to eat, a command to not eat, a desire to eat, and a gracious feeding from God. We should reflect what it means that God wants to feed His creation with food, and how we can teach our bodies and our bellies to treasure the Bread that comes from heaven even more than the bread that comes from the oven.
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Artwork: Miracle of the Bread and Fish, Giovanni Lanfranco. Italian, 1620s. From the National Gallery of Ireland.
The Old Testament
Genesis 2:7-17
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v. 7: Previously, God spoke everything into existence, but now God uses a different method for creating man: He forms man, and then imbues him with His divine breath.
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v. 8: This active creator doesn't stop with man, but also plants a garden. Again, note that God is not speaking the garden into existence, but is actually planting it.
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v. 9: After planting the garden (and presumably watering it) it is still the Lord God that causes all the plants to spring up from the ground. One can hear the echoes of God's work when Paul tells the Corinthians, "I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth," (1 Corinthians 3:6-7).
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v. 9: this is the first mention of the two trees that are the center focus of the garden: One of Life, and One of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
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vv. 10-14: We may be tempted to skip over these verses, but the Holy Spirit is reminding us that before sin entered into the world, there were flowing waters, and precious metals and stones ripe for mining. To say it another way, God wanted structures and gold carvings before sin entered into the world. Such resources prefigure Revelation 21-22.
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v. 15: work, specifically manual labor, precedes the fall into sin.
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v. 16-17: the first commandment ever given is permission to eat certain fruits, but the man must abstain from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
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Translation Notes
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Anytime you read LORD God in the Bible, it's a rendering of the Hebrew YHWH Elohim. A combination of the proper name of God (Yahweh) and the title of God (Elohim, which simply means "God"). In 2:7 the Greek translation of Genesis simply says "God."
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v. 7: "became a living creature," literally "a living soul."
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v. 9 :Greek OT: "the Lord God planted a paradise in Eden."
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vv. 16-17: Poetic structure in Hebrew that repeats words as a way of intensifying them. A literal translation would be "Eating, you will eat of every tree . . . but in the day you eat of it dying, you will die."
The Epistle
Romans 6:19-23
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The beginning of chapter 6 dealt with baptism as a participation in Christ's death, and the life of the baptized as participation in Christ's resurrection. Paul goes on to forbid sin from reining in mortal bodies, and instead to live according to the word of God. Such grace "by no means" allows us to keep on sinning so that grace may abound.
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v. 19: Paul uses human terms like slaves and free (see v. 18) so that human readers can understand: if we allow ourselves to be enslaved to sin, we should repent and seek a new identity as "slaves" to righteousness.
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vv. 20-21: the liberty of those enslaved to sin is always abused, the end of such crass liberty being death.
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vv. 22-23: Slaves to sin embody and mimic their master and find themselves lawless and dead, so too slaves to righteousness and God mimic their master and find themselves sanctified (made holy) and participants in the same eternal life of Christ Jesus.
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Translation Notes
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v. 19: "natural limitations" literally "fleshly sickness"
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v. 20: it's a beautiful accident of history that the Greek word for freedom (Eleutheros) sounds like Luther.
The Holy Gospel
Mark 8:1-9
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vv. 1-2: Jesus reports to the disciples that the crowds need food since they haven't eaten for three days. While this is a different miracle than the feeding of the Five Thousand, we hear echoes of Saint John's words in describing that event: "Jesus said to Philip, 'Where are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?' He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he would do," (John 6:5-6).
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v. 3: Because this great crowd hasn't eaten for three days, if Jesus sends them to the market to find food, they won't make it before they collapse, or worse, die.
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v. 4: An inverse of Jesus' question to Philip, the disciples ask Jesus how anyone could be fed in the middle of nowhere.
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vv. 5: Though we should never make too much of the symbolic nature of numbers, the facts of history and the words of the Holy Spirit do not happen idly, so we should note the "three days" as well as the fact that there are seven loaves, the picture of completion (e.g. seven days of creation).
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v. 6: There are overtones of the Lord's Supper here: Jesus takes bread, gives thanks, and breaks them before distributing them to the disciples who in turn give them to the people.
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v. 7: Much has been made about the fish. Is it a sign of triumph over the leviathan (Job 41)? Is it recalling when Jesus first called the disciples (Luke 5)? Or is it anticipating the Easter season meal in John 21? Whatever is happening here, we shouldn't lose the larger picture in a sea of details. Jesus blessed the fish and also gave them to the people. This is, quite literally, man not living by bread alone (Deuteronomy 8:3; Matthew 4:4).
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vv. 8-9: Not only do people eat so they don't faint on their way home, they eat until they are satisfied. So much so that there are seven (there's that number again) baskets full. God doesn't merely give us the daily bread we need to survive, He gives us the daily bread we need to be spiritually full and satisfied.
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Translation Notes
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v. 2: "compassion" is a strange Greek word that speaks about the kind of longing to help someone that comes from the depths of the stomach. The Greek word is the root of our English word "spelunking," or "investigating the depths."
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v. 7: we shouldn't skip over the fact that the fish are "small fish." A curious inclusion by the Holy Spirit.
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v. 8: "Satisfied," some dictionaries render this Greek word as "to gorge oneself full."
Poetry Used in the Liturgy of Trinity 7
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Psalm 47- This is a very "loud" Psalm: there are claps, shouts, trumpets, and songs of praise. While the Introit may initially seem to not "fit" with the other readings, when we realize that Christ has fed us to the full, we cannot help but clap our hands and sing a song of praise.
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Psalm 33- This is another Psalm of praise. In verses 6 & 9 we hear an explicit confession of God as creator, and verses 13-14 teach us that God is still an active and vigilant caretaker of Creation. At verse 16, the Psalm takes a curious turn, but when we read the entire Psalm, we can see that the pious believer puts his trust only in the God who made him and still preserves him (this is especially clear in 18-22)​​​
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Psalm 34- This Psalm includes the subtitle of early scribes that tell us this was written by David when he changed his behavior before Abimelech (also called Achish). This is a very strange episode in the life of David you can read about in 1 Samuel 21. Knowing the context makes the Psalm that much sweeter: this is David breathing a heavy sigh of relief after he was spared destruction.​​​
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Artwork: Drawing of Adam and Eve, from the School of Johann Adam Eyer. American, March 2, 1821. From the Philadelphia Museum of Art.


Further Reading & Listening
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George MacDonald on the connection between miracles and nature (scroll down to point 4 where he begins on the feeding of the 4,000)
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A sermon on the feeding of the Four Thousand by The Rev. Michael Larson (Luther Memorial in Shorewood, WI)
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Artwork: An illuminated manuscript from Armenia. This piece is from Daniel of Uran'c Bible of 1433. From Wikimedia Commons