During the long, hot days of summer, dinner-time seems to get pushed back further and further into the evening.

In some places it's just too hot to think about cooking and eating a big meal until well after the sun has slid below the horizon.

Families who have kids running a hundred different directions - to day-camps, to the pool or the lake, to friends' houses - can't seem to get everyone collected back home for a meal until the evening is well advanced.

But maybe we can all stand to wait for dinner a little bit longer because during these high days of summer the best things to eat are simply slurped down hand-to-mouth any time of day. Peaches, plums, nectarines, cantaloupes, raspberries, blueberries: all provide us with the most sumptuous snacks of the year.

Who needs a sit-down dinner when you can slice and eat a fresh whole tomato that still tastes like the sun. Although most of us still buy our produce instead of growing it ourselves, the resurgence of farmer's markets and local organic suppliers have made it easier to get that just-picked flavor without keeping a garden. Sure we still sit down at an evening meal now and then, but the simple, unadorned deliciousness of summer-fresh foods makes it an entirely different kind of meal-time experience. There's considerably less emphasis on the cook's creativity than there is on our thankfulness for the Creator's gracious bounty and variety.

Simple food is often the most satisfying and the most life sustaining. It's hard for us to understand, with our supermarkets filled with foodstuffs from all over the world, with a vast selection of meats and produce always available, with dairy goods always fresh and ready, it's hard for us to understand how for centuries the most basic and vital commodity upon which people depended for sustenance was simply bread. Bread, whether leavened or unleavened, was a sign of civilization. For to create bread there had to have been a grain crop, and a place for that grain to be properly processed, as well as some sort of cooking source to bake the bread.

In today's gospel text the importance, in fact the imperative of bread is brought sharply into focus. The devoted crowds that follow Jesus out into the deserted place don't have zip-lock bags and coolers filled with sandwiches or tail-gate barbecue fixings.

Those who followed Jesus on this excursion were poor, simple people; people who worked all day to get the wage needed to buy their daily bread. When John's gospel retells this event he provides the detail that when the food is gathered the few morsels found are barley loaves, the cheapest, coarsest kind of bread made - in other words, the bread of the poor. But this simple sustenance is what kept people going. In Jesus' day the daily bread was the difference between a full belly and clutching hunger.

The disciples' concern for the crowd's need for bread, for simple basic food at the end of a long day, was realistic and sensible. Out there at night in that deserted place all would go hungry. Yet Jesus' reply to the disciples demand that he send the crowds away (verse 15) shifts focus from the hungry crowd back to himself. If Jesus is Master and Teacher, then his twelve disciples are to listen to his words and directives, not be giving Jesus orders themselves. What Jesus now demands of his disciples is a set of two directives which at first glance appear at odds with each other.

First, Jesus declares a call to action. But not the action of sending the crowd away that already had been suggested. Instead the action Jesus demands is from the disciples themselves: "you give them something to eat." Imagine if you were one of The Twelve. How would you have responded to this directive? Here is what the disciples did: they don't actually refuse Jesus' command, but they reveal that they have already been gathering whatever meager provisions they could find and their take is paltry: five loaves and two fish. Yet it's this inconsequential amount that's the focus of Jesus' next call to action - "Bring them here to me" (verse 18).

Having urged his disciples to take decisive, if apparently massively insufficient action to deal with the crowd's needs, Jesus' turns towards the crowd itself. When Jesus calls out to the people and orders them to sit down (verse 19), his words are akin to ringing the dinner bell or calling the family to the table.

"Sit down."

The disciples, looking at their paltry pile of provisions, must have been horrified. What could they do for this huge, hungry, now expectant crowd . . . the multitude Jesus had now clearly called to dinner?

In fact, what Jesus has ordered with his command to sit down and prepare to eat isn't any physical action that might bring more food but a spiritual action. Jesus' call to dinner is a call to TRUST him.

The disciples had done what they could with their limited human resources. They had obeyed their Master and gathered what little food was available. Now Jesus asks all his followers - both his disciples and the willing crowd - to trust him, to trust him with their stomachs, to trust him with their hearts, to trust him with their lives.

The obedient act of sitting down to the yet-to-be-realized meal is an act of trust. Once these people sit down they are relinquishing their own power to feed themselves. They are putting their future in another's hands. It's as the crowd trusts Jesus to feed them, and it's as the disciples trust Jesus to take and use the small gleanings they have to offer, that the miracle occurs.

Not only is there food enough for all; not only is just the edge taken off their hunger: most amazing of all, all are filled (or "satisfied"). Jesus' ability to provide spills over into an amazing abundance. And instead of scrounging for crumbs after every person has been nourished, there are twelve baskets full of left-overs. The same broken pieces that had miraculously multiplied to fill the bellies of the five thousand are still available to be consumed again.

Our lesson for today teaches us that if we trust in Jesus, if we follow his commands, the table will never be bare. There will always be a box lunch. And there will always be more than enough, more than can fill the box.

But notice something extremely important here about trust.

We're called to trust God with providing our daily bread, with taking what we have to offer and making it enough. But this trust doesn't negate a personal call to action. This trust in Jesus doesn't negate our own initiative and industry. Just as the disciples had to take on Jesus' challenge "you give them something to eat" and work to find a solution to the problem of a scarcity of resources (five loaves and two fish), so we have to take on the challenges of our day with our own scarcities and brokenness even as we trust that God will take care of the outcome.

In other words, there's more to trusting God than a free lunch.

But to trust in God means the ultimate in freedom - freedom from the limits of life and freedom from the power of death. To trust in God means trusting in the power of Christ's death and resurrection, trusting that Jesus' death defying action on the cross broke the stranglehold of death for all of us.

For one day, we will all end up in the same box. Regardless of who we are, or how much we have, or the power of our connections, we all end up in the same place: we all end up in the same box.

For many years Walter R. Bouman taught theology at Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio. Earlier this year, Professor Bouman was informed that he had inoperable cancer, with only a few months to live. At a chapel service (May 18, 2005) hosted by Bexley Hall, the Episcopal seminary that's part of the Columbus consortium, Professor Bouman told of his faith as he faces his impeding death. The sermon was entitled "The Foolishness of the Gospel is Our Wisdom."

He began the sermon by telling some of his favorite jokes about death.

Woody Allen: "It's impossible to experience your own death objectively and still carry a tune." "Some things are worse than death. Have you ever spent two hours with an insurance salesman?" Johnny Carson is my favorite so far: "It's true that for several days after you die, your hair and fingernails keep on growing, but the phone calls taper off."

But very quickly Professor Bouman began taking about the future, not just his future but the future for every one of us. "First and foremost," he said, the gospel is "a vision for the future."

Because Jesus is risen, everything has changed radically. We're set free from serving the powers of death with our lives, our fears, our policies. We're set free from having to protect ourselves at whatever cost to others. We're set free from the dreadful necessity to grab all the gusto we can because we only go around once. We're set free from the compulsion to cling to every day and hour of life in this world.

"Because Christ is risen," he said, "the messianic age has come, and Christ's messianic people are identified by our participation in the messianic banquet." That means we're ordained to be table waiters. That's what it means to serve. Ordained ministry isn't about meeting people's needs, although that's a dimension of the whole church's ministry to the reign of God. Still less is it about accommodating people's bondage to the powers of death so that we can keep our jobs. Ordained ministry is quite simply that we wait on table, where Christ is already embracing us with his victory, and eating and drinking new with us in the Father's kingdom (Matthew 26:29).

And as table waiters, "God continues to call all of us, even me counting my days, to be grasped by the great good news that Jesus is risen, to be taken up into Christ's offering in the meal, to be the church by putting up with each other in love, and to care for our world."

Professor Bouman included in his final sermon a children's prayer he learned first in German. His translation into English goes like this:

Lord Jesus, who does love me, Oh spread thy wings above me, And shield me from alarm. Though evil would assail me Thy mercy will not fail me. I rest in thy protecting arm.

The version of this prayer I learned as a child came in the form of a song. It was written by a minister's wife, which she entitled "God Will Take Care of You." The words go like this:

Verse 1 Be not dismayed whate'er betide, God will take care of you; Beneath his wings of love abide, God will take care of you.

Refrain

God will take care of you, Through every day, over all the way; He will take care of you, God will take care of you.

Verse 2 Through days of toil when heart doth fail, God will take care of you; When dangers fierce your path assail, God will take care of you.

Refrain

Verse 3 All you may need he will provide, God will take care of you; Nothing you ask will be denied, God will take care of you.

Refrain

Verse 4 No matter what may be the test, God will take care of you; Lean, weary one, upon his breast, God will take care of you.

Refrain/End

Let's stand and declare our trust in God by singing this together this morning. Trust in God doesn't mean that we do nothing. But it does mean that whatever we do, and whatever feeble fragments and broken pieces of our lives we bring to God, we're trusting that God will make something bountiful out of it, something that will be a blessing to others and to our world.