Let us pray: O God, you meet us in so many ways, in bread and wine, in everyday encounters, in surprising and unexpected breakthroughs, with insight and comfort. May your presence be known through these words and the silences between them. Amen.

I'll explain the title in just a moment, right after I tell you about a few connections. Lateral thinkers and the internet were made for each other. If I were a betting person I would be willing to put some money on the notion that it was a lateral thinker who invented the term “web surfing”, and probably Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with the invention of the World Wide Web was also a lateral thinker. The whole idea of hypertexting seems to be something invented by a so-called lateral thinker which wikipedia describes as someone who can solve problems by taking an indirect and creative approach.

Incidentally, one of the first examples of hypertexting that I can recall was in hard copy form in a big five volume set of books called the Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible. I remember getting a really good deal on this set of books which during my time at seminary was considered to be the best set of reference books a neophyte minister could every hope to have. I jumped at the chance to pick up the substantial set of volumes and was pleased to discover that I had a revised version. The original set was only four volumes but in the revised version, the editors added a whole volume of extra material that updated some of the earlier entries as well as adding a number of new articles. In the original four volumes, if an entry was updated in the supplemental volume it's entry in the original had a small asterisk added to it, so that the person consulting it would know there was new material in volume five. In other words, the asterisk was a hypertext to the new entry in volume five.

In a completely unrelated moment this past week I glanced over at my bookcase and happened to take special notice of those five volumes occupying a prodigious amount of space on one of the shelves and thinking that the internet and having the world at the ends of our fingers on a keyboard, and now even more quickly linked through touch screens and gestures, has made previous gems like the Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible kind of irrelevant.

Well, I think I've just proven that I have a surfing kind of brain – leading from one connection to another – hopefully with the ability to follow the trail of breadcrumbs back to where I started. I think I was talking about lateral thinkers. Namely that the World Wide Web and the term web surfing were probably created by lateral thinkers.

This week in a surfing episode I happened upon some kind of oblique reference which led me to something else and then to something else and so on and so on until I found myself reading some history in which I had a role. It was in part a history of a network called Ecunet – of which I was an early member, as well as a bit of history about an important time in the history of The United Church of Canada. The occasion was the 1988 General Council of our denomination – a meeting which was dominated by discussions of sexual orientation and ministry. There are two connections there – one is that this week I was chatting with Kirk – my colleague from down the hall and who will be with you next week as worship leader – about the convention he attended a couple of weeks ago, of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada. It sounds as if a good deal of the agenda at the convention concerned itself with some of the same issues. I'll let him say more about that, but it was interesting just the same to make connections. However, I am increasingly convinced that there are always connections. In fact the word connections is a strong and important image of God for me these days. The other connection is one I already mentioned, namely the connection with Ecunet. I ended up reconnecting myself with Ecunet this week, re-establishing an identity I had let lapse over the past few years even though it represented a significant part of my life in years past.

And that leads me back to the connection with the title. Ecunet was doing social networking and computer communication as far back as 1985 – about five years before the world wide web was invented. It was there I first encountered emoticons and the little abbreviations that have become a part of our language these days – you know lol, rotfl, fwiw, imho, imnsho etc Perhaps, you already know what TANSTAAFL means, or perhaps you've figured it out. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

I remember it coming up in Ecunet discussions somewhat frequently. Of course it encapsulates the idea that everything has a consequence, an idea that you don't get anything for nothing, and even if something appears to be something for nothing, there's a hidden cost somewhere.

The fact that I chose that as my title had nothing to do with anything I've said so far (or did it? - part of my point is that connections happen whether they were intended or not – perhaps sub-consciously or because of some other power that is working in the world.).

No, I chose to use that acronym because of the way it spoke to me about two of our passages today. The two passages I refer to are the story about Jacob and his dream and the feeding of the five thousand.

The two stories seem to give us a different message. We've been following Jacob for the past few weeks, staring with the trick he played on his brother Esau to wrest the family birthright from him, followed by running away to avoid a dangerous encounter with his betrayed twin brother, and then his subsequent meeting of the two women who would become his wives – involving being involved in a bit more trickery, this time however as the victim of some subterfuge instigated by his uncle Laban. In one part of the story, Jacob goes to sleep and dreams a dream of connection with God. Today we heard of another dream – this time by the Jabbok river, where it seems his past finally catches up with him. He is returning to his homeland – probably both looking forward to it after many years of being away in a kind of exile, but also dreading the reunion with his brother Esau. Would the old grudge still exist. The wrestling, as we heard is not with his brother, but with God, presumably a kind of inner wrestling where he is forced to think about the situation and his role in it that placed him here. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch indeed, the story seems to be telling us, as he wrestles with God and even sustains an injury from the experience.

Our justice attuned hearts and minds I think are pretty comfortable with TANSTAAFL. There's a good part of us that hopes and wants there to be consequences for the actions that are taken. There's the “it serves them right” attitude which undeniably can give us pleasure from time to time.

TANSTAAFL is severely challenged by today's gospel passage. The people gathered literally do get a free lunch (supper actually as Matthew desribes it), as they are miraculously fed from five loaves and two fishes.

It's pretty good when we are on the receiving end of a free meal. We're not so caught up in concerns about whether we deserve it, as we are when we want someone to get what they deserve when they take advantage of a someone or a situation.

The corollary of TANSTAAFL is something we should be well acquainted with as Christians. Lutheran Christians in particular, because the great contribution of Martin Luther to Christian theology is the corollary to TANSTAAFL. It's called “grace” - the free gift of God to us as God's people.

Martin Luther warned us about “cheap grace” - the sense that if we know we are going to be forgiven, that there will be a metaphorical free lunch or supper somewhere down the road – that we can just live our lives to the full without fear of consequence. It's not about “cheap grace” - the “oh well, God will forgive me anyway” attitude. The story of Jacob is an example of that. There were consequences for Jacob and he had the scars to prove it, a limp that reminded him of the wrestling he had had with God. Of course, grace appears later in the story – not in the passage for this day, but in the additions I read for you from Ralph Milton's paraphrase – Esau demonstrates what grace is all about, as he greets his returning brother with a smile and open arms.

The faithful life will always be a dance between grace and consequences. Our gut instincts along with our hearts are satisfied by the desire for justice, that actions will result in consequences, that even when someone appears to get away with something that they will eventually get their just reward, just like Jacob who while he received forgiveness and acceptance from his brother, also had to endure the dark night of the soul as he reflected on his own misdeeds and deceitful actions. But our hearts and consciences are also buoyed by God's grace – that God provides abundantly for us without charge, that forgiveness is offered lavishly.

TANSTAAFL – probably not when human beings are involved, but the equation changes when God is involved – grace in abundance. Thanks be to God. Amen.