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In this video, Fr. Philip Hall talks about how God wants us to come together and multiply love instead of dividing ourselves. Using the story of the feeding of the 5,000 from Matthew 14, he encourages unity and togetherness in faith.
This is a sermon recorded on July 30th, 2023 at the All Saints of Lincolnshire Orthodox Christian Church, Lincoln, England.
Watch the full sermon on Archimandrite Philip’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UofiF4proyw
Fr. Philip:
Division, division, division. People generally love to divide themselves up, don’t they? You see them all the time by their race, their beliefs, their creed, their color, their class, their educational background, their careers, their nationality, their age, their job, their culture, their interests, their hobbies, their sex, and nowadays all sorts of other things. Even in the church you see it. I belong to this Orthodox church, that Orthodox church, this jurisdiction. They say: that diocese, this patriarchate… let alone all the heterodox churches.
Well, people love to divide. We love to decide that I am us and you are they. And that is not the way it is in Christianity. Jesus does not like to divide. He likes to multiply. He doesn’t even want to add. He doesn’t add one person to another. When one person, one person, one person come together, you have more than three persons. It’s as if you multiplied each person by each person because the experience and nature of each of those persons becomes far greater. They multiply each other rather than just add to each other.
And Jesus in the gospel reading here in Matthew 14 took a great crowd of strangers from all sorts of different villages in the area. And He made them sit all together as one group. And then rather than dividing the available food they had with them between them, he multiplied it so that what was a very small picnic fed 5,000 men plus women, plus children, until they’re all fully nourished and satisfied.
And it’s just the same with us now. We might be from anywhere on earth, any background, male or female, young or old, married or single, bishop or newly baptized. But we all of us sit on the same grass. We all of us eat the same food. We all of us listen to the same word. We have the same sacraments. We agree and have one mind about the same creed. We have one mind. That mind is Christ’s. We have one judge and one judgment.
No, not dividing but multiplying. So let us allow the Lord to multiply in us a great love for each other and not just each other but everybody so that we may all together sit on that same green grass in the kingdom of God. Your prayers! God bless you! Amen.
