In our gospel reading for today we find Jesus on the other side of the sea, having fed thousands with five barley loaves and a few fish. In him the power of God to feed and save has been manifest, and the people cannot help but follow him, longing for more of the miraculous and lifegiving power they have witnessed. What is going on, they want to know – when they ask Jesus, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” I think they are really asking, how can we continue to experience the saving power of God as you have shown us? We are hungry, Jesus – yes, for physical food, but also for the mystery that you have shown us.

I was talking with my friend and colleague, Bob, this week and when I told him I was preaching today, he told me that the Gospel this morning has special meaning for him: “…gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” Bob had once felt like the fragment, the bit not to be lost. “The church that hated me was also the church that saved me,” he said. Readings like ours this morning are reminders of God’s abundance and compassion. Nothing and no one is to be lost to God.

With our Gospel reading focused on Jesus and his disciples’ ceaseless ministry of teaching, healing, and deliverance wherever they find themselves, the theme of today’s collect is prayer, specifically prayers of petition. A petition is asking God for what you want or need for yourself personally.

This time of year is always a little fraught for me. The celebration of the emergence of the United States as an independent nation always provokes in me a mixed bag of feelings. My family celebrated July 4th as many families do, with friends and cook-outs and community fireworks at dusk.

But during those same years, I was also formed by communities whose values challenged any kind of unquestioning patriotism. From kindergarten through 12th grade, and then in college, I attended schools founded by Quakers and governed by Quaker ideals of non-violence, equality, community, simplicity, and absolute truth-telling. Not only that, but these were the years of the war in Vietnam, years in which Americans were learning firsthand (and in a new way) all the gaps between what we said we believed as a nation and what we actually were doing in our own land and across the globe. It was an era of profound disillusionment and skepticism about government and about “American values.” So I learned very early as a child how vast can be the gap between our highest aspirations as human beings and our ability to live out those aspirations.

The gospel for today, you may have noticed, forms a kind of sandwich – the encounter with Jairus and his daughter forms an outer layer around Jesus’ encounter with the woman who has a hemorrhage. This is no accident – the two episodes are meant to be heard together, shedding light on each other, intertwining to convey a complex and compelling message about Jesus.

This is a question I have voiced many times in my life. I’ve preached with you before about my psychological and spiritual wounds as a gay kid growing up in a fundamentalist church. Yet I’ve been lucky that I haven’t suffered physically very much in my life. My body almost always does what I ask it to do. I don’t live with chronic illness or pain.

“Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” These are the words from the disciples’ lips that are still ringing in my ears from our gospel reading this morning. This brief story of Jesus calming the storm is found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke as well, but as he so often does, Mark gets right to the point. Rabbi, teacher, master, savior, don’t you see we are in trouble? Do you not care that we are perishing?

This is a question I have voiced many times in my life. I’ve preached with you before about my psychological and spiritual wounds as a gay kid growing up in a fundamentalist church. Yet I’ve been lucky that I haven’t suffered physically very much in my life. My body almost always does what I ask it to do. I don’t live with chronic illness or pain.