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Welcome to Hunger Sermon Starters!

October 26, 2008

• “Which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus cuts right to the center of things with “. . .love the Lord your God . . .”, and “. . .You shall love your neighbor as yourself” “On these two . . .hang all the law and the prophets.”
• In a conversation with my twelve-year-old daughter about writing these “ideas” or “prompts” to help connect the scriptures to the issues of hunger, poverty, and justice, we agreed that it could all boil down to: What else is the Bible about anyway except hunger, poverty, and justice? ----duh!  
• I think it is Jim Wallis of Sojourners who tells the story of himself and a friend as seminarians making a point about this “duh” by laboriously cutting out every mention of hunger, poverty, and justice in the Bible and watching the book literally crumble in their hands.
• At our synod assembly this June, I spoke about the “new” headlines regarding Hunger--”Global Food Crisis—The Silent Tsunami” as devastating in impact as the India-Indonesia-Thailand tsunami that elicited an outpouring of generosity to those undone by the storm. Yet while skyrocketing food and fuel prices hurt the poorest among us the most, they also stir up our own fear of going wanting and can elicit self and family protectiveness.  A turning in and closing off rather than the turning out and opening up of generosity.
• Sadly, in my perspective, while mere moments were spent on our reflection on hunger and God's requirements of us during our assembly, hours were spent on the type of legalistic quarreling over matters of less biblical importance (judging by the amount of press received in the Bible). Kind of like the Pharisees and Sadducees in Matthew 22 whose attempts to show Jesus up in the petty details of superficial ethics and righteousness lead ultimately to Jesus making it simple and taking it deep: Love God. Love your neighbor. Do it with your whole heart, mind, and soul.
• So right now—especially and particularly—is the time to live our faith, to ask God to soften us, to keep us walking the path of generosity. To ask what God requires of us and to respond.
• The media message about hunger may have changed from trumpeting the optimistic and realistic possibility of ending hunger in our time to the pessimistic and disheartening pictures of people rioting over food that has become suddenly too expensive to allow them to purchase their daily bread—but the Gospel message to love God with all our hearts, all our soul, all our mind, and to love our neighbors as ourselves—Jesus' commandment to “Go and do likewise. . .” has not!

• The prophet speaks of those “who cry ‘peace’ when they have something to eat but declare war against those who put nothing in their mouths.”
• It’s easy to be complacent when things go our way and all is right in our own personal world.
• Yet are we, in our complacency, actually perpetrating war against those who do not have enough, whose lives are not peaceful, and for whom equitable distribution of the world’s resources is nothing but an empty promise?
• When over half of the 10.1 million children under age 5 who die each year die of hunger-related causes (ELCA World Hunger Facts), surely this is a war of incredible magnitude.
• Do we assume the Lord is with those who ‘have’ as opposed to those who ‘have not’?
• Do we make of our faith merely a verbal statement rather than an acting fact?
• We who are “filled with power, with the spirit of the Lord,” are called to work for justice and equity and to declare to the nations of the world that it is not right, nor just, nor okay that any should hunger.
• In doing so, we build up God’s Kingdom here on earth. By failing to do so, we risk relegating humankind to a ‘heap of ruins’.

• What is the enemy from whom the psalmist seeks refuge?
• It is those who are ‘deceitful and unjust’.
• Yet it is God’s light and truth that leads.
• Hope is found in following.

• Paul speaks of working tirelessly, as would a father, to see that these Christian ‘children’ might live lives ‘worthy of God’.
• These are lives rooted in God’s word, the ultimate Word, which is Jesus Christ.
• It is this Word which works in every Christian through the Holy Spirit.
• And it is the life of this Word that Christians are to emulate—compassion, kindness, advocacy, truth, justice, and equity for all—even to the disenfranchised poor and to the hungry of the world.

• Jesus tells the crowds and disciples to ‘do as they (the Pharisees) say, and not as they do’.
• Why? Because all is for show. They are too wrapped up in going through the motions of faith to actually live it.
• Are we sometimes too wrapped up in liturgics and the ‘churchy’ stuff we do to realize that true faith is lived outside the doors of the sanctuary?
• We are called to be neither rabbi, nor father, nor instructor but instead servants.
• True servants lift others’ burdens, give honor and respect to those who may not seem worthy.
• It is God, in Christ Jesus—the Servant of all—who makes us worthy and asks us to respond in service to others.

• Hunger is the greatest war ever waged.
• Because of what Christ has done, because of the example Christ has set, we must not let that war win.
• We must step outside of ourselves and our own complacency, quite literally outside of the church doors and into the world, and serve others, giving of our ‘enough’ so that all God’s children have enough.
• As Christians, who by the Spirit have the Word working in us, our hope for building God’s Kingdom lies in following God’s light and truth.
• In building God’s Kingdom, in assuring those who hunger are fed and those who need are cared for, we defuse that war and prevent ruination of God’s will for humankind.