Are You Hungry? Sermon for 8-6-06
Scripture: Psalm 51, John 6: 24-35, Luke 6:24-25
Much of what I’m going to preach today is based on a sermon entitled “The News of the Day” by Fred Buechner in his book, Secrets in the Dark.[1] How many of you watch the nightly news? Some of you early birds may listen or watch news in the morning. I read the NY Times online every morning and then catch either the 6:30 or 11 pm news on the TV. Now of course every day the news is different; however there are certain themes that always seem to appear. There’s always something going on somewhere: most often there is conflict, if not killing, in the Middle East, in Africa, in our own streets. People are always fighting for more power, for revenge, for oil, for freedom, for land. On the other side of the news, there’s always some group or some nation trying to find ways to bring about peace: “the Arab sits down with the Jew. Labor sits down with management.” One of the most overriding themes in our news around the world is the topic for this sermon this morning: hunger and its close cousin, homelessness. So many people are starving to death, especially children and yet we know that there is enough food to feed everyone if it could be evenly distributed. In preparing for this sermon, I read that on Super Bowl Sunday, a period of less than 4 hours, Americans eat 4 million lbs of popcorn, 9 million pounds of tortilla chips, 12 million pounds of potato chips, 13 million pounds of guacamole dip! Wow! I wonder where they find that many ripe avocados!
As for the homeless, estimates—which are probably low—say that there are over 3.5 million residents of the US that have been homeless for significant periods of time, including 1.35 million children. Every night there are over 37000 people in NYC shelters. In rural areas the homeless are harder to count as they often sleep in their cars or in the summer at camping sites. Home has been defined as the place where if you have to go there, they have to take you in, and these people in the statistics as well as many others have no such place anywhere in the world.
So there we have some of the major themes of the daily or nightly news: wars and other violence, peace seeking, hunger, homelessness. Most of us watch these events unfolding on our TV screen almost every day. What we choose to do about it, individually and as a church,--how much money we donate, or how much of our time and energy we expend on these problems; what political candidates get our votes are all issues of great importance both for saving the world and for saving our souls.
Have you ever been really hungry? Maybe you have missed lunch or been out hiking or biking without stopping for any snacks. Or maybe you were fasting. I’m sure most of you can remember at some time having a gnawing in your stomach. However, there was no need for anxiety as you knew you would soon be able to eat. If you happen to be in a situation where there was not going to be much if anything to eat for an extended time, you might move from that simple longing in the gut for food, to a restlessness like an animal that has not been fed—a pacing back and forth, the longing hunger becomes the gnawing hunger. Finally weakness sets in and there’s just not enough energy or strength to do anything. When Jesus came to the crowds of people and tells them that he is the bread of life, he’s talking about a hunger that isn’t in the stomach, but a spiritual hunger. The first stage is an unsatisfied longing for meaning in our life. Maybe some of you started going to church because you recognized this lack of meaning in your life. You needed “food for thought” or a good sermon to “chew on”. The second stage is that restlessness where you pace and look hither and yon for something to satisfy us. You may go to ashrams, take up meditation, try Buddhist fellowship and spiritual reading, take up astrology or drumming, or many other things to try to find meaning. If this goes on long enough without success, you may become apathetic, bored, no zest for life, sometimes even to the point of wanting to end one’s life.
Jesus promises that he can take away this spiritual hunger. “I am the Bread of Life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry.” From Jesus we can receive food for our heart and souls. First we have to admit that we have a void in the deepest part of our being. Next we have to turn to Jesus. That’s pretty hard if your not use to it. This is the point where you may want to talk to a minister, attend church, share with friends who have a strong faith. In your prayers you can just say, “I’m desperate; I don’t know what to do. Please help me. I need to be fed.” When we come to Holy Communion, we have an opportunity to symbolically be fed by Jesus’ body and his blood.
Earlier we talked about the news of the world. Let’s now turn to the news of our own little world. Most of our news is not really big stuff, yet to us it is important. It is the kind of news that tells us that we are moving towards where we want to be or not. It may not be a war like that in Iraq and Lebanon; however it is a war that we all go through much of the time. It’s helpful to choose a time of day, often just before going to sleep at night to go over the battles of the day. What battles if any are we winning, or losing? “Which battles might we do better not to be fighting at all?” Buechner says, “We are churchgoers. We are nice people. We fight well camouflaged. We are snipers rather than bombardiers. Our weapons are more apt to be chilly silences than hot words. But our wars are no less real for all of that, and the stakes are no less high.” He goes on to say that maybe the highest stakes of all are the wars we wage within ourselves—“the battles we fight against loneliness, boredom, despair, self-doubt, the battles against fear, against the great dark.” We always have that “battle to become what we have it in us at our best to be, which is wise and loving friends both to our own selves and to each other as we reach out not only for what we need to have but also for what we need to give.”
Are you hungry? Most us have more than enough food to eat in a world where thousands starve to death every day, yet we do have our own terrible spiritual hungers. “We hunger to be known and understood. We hunger to be loved. We hunger to be at peace inside our own skins. We hunger not just to be fed these things but, often without realizing it, we hunger to feed others these things because they too are starving for them. We hunger not just to be loved but to love, not just to be forgiven but to forgive, not just to be known and understood for all the good times and bad times that for better or worse have made us who we are, but to know and understand each other to the point of seeing that, in the last analysis, we all have the same good times, the same bad times, and that for that very reason there is no such thing in all the world as anyone who is really a stranger.”
When Jesus commanded us to love our neighbors as ourselves, it was as much for our own sake as for the others. “Not to help find some way to feed the children who are starving to death is to have some precious part of who we are starve to death with them. Not to give of ourselves to the human beings we know who may be starving nor for food but for what we have in our hearts to nourish them with is to be, ourselves, diminished and crippled as human beings.
In Luke Jesus says, “Woe to you that are rich for you have received your consolation. Woe to you that are full now, for you shall hunger. Woe to you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. We could add Woe to us if we forget the homeless ones who have no vote, no power, nobody to lobby for them, and who might as well have no faces even, the way we try to avoid the troubling sight of them in the streets…” And as we listen to the news each night, woe to us too if we forget our own homelessness. “To be really at home is to be really at peace, and our lives are so intricately interwoven that there can be no real peace for any of us until there is real peace for all of us.” This is the truth that underlies the news of the world and the news of our own humble lives.
Jesus told the crowd and his disciples, “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the son of Man will give you.” It is so easy to focus on our physical needs that we forget there are greater things, things that satisfy not only the body but the soul. As we celebrate the Lord’s Supper/Holy Communion in a little while, the one whom we call the Bread of Life is broken and given to all of us that we may eat and live. Bread is a good image for us Westerners as it is such an important part of our diet. In some countries or regions of the world, we might use tortillas or even rice. Not all people in the world are familiar with bread. The point is that Jesus, whether we call him the bread of life or the tortilla of life, can satisfy those inner hungers as he becomes for us the God of love, the food that fills us and leads us through the Holy Spirit to go forward and bring about the K
[1] All unspecified quotes are from this source.
Much of what I’m going to preach today is based on a sermon entitled “The News of the Day” by Fred Buechner in his book, Secrets in the Dark.[1] How many of you watch the nightly news? Some of you early birds may listen or watch news in the morning. I read the NY Times online every morning and then catch either the 6:30 or 11 pm news on the TV. Now of course every day the news is different; however there are certain themes that always seem to appear. There’s always something going on somewhere: most often there is conflict, if not killing, in the Middle East, in Africa, in our own streets. People are always fighting for more power, for revenge, for oil, for freedom, for land. On the other side of the news, there’s always some group or some nation trying to find ways to bring about peace: “the Arab sits down with the Jew. Labor sits down with management.” One of the most overriding themes in our news around the world is the topic for this sermon this morning: hunger and its close cousin, homelessness. So many people are starving to death, especially children and yet we know that there is enough food to feed everyone if it could be evenly distributed. In preparing for this sermon, I read that on Super Bowl Sunday, a period of less than 4 hours, Americans eat 4 million lbs of popcorn, 9 million pounds of tortilla chips, 12 million pounds of potato chips, 13 million pounds of guacamole dip! Wow! I wonder where they find that many ripe avocados!
As for the homeless, estimates—which are probably low—say that there are over 3.5 million residents of the US that have been homeless for significant periods of time, including 1.35 million children. Every night there are over 37000 people in NYC shelters. In rural areas the homeless are harder to count as they often sleep in their cars or in the summer at camping sites. Home has been defined as the place where if you have to go there, they have to take you in, and these people in the statistics as well as many others have no such place anywhere in the world.
So there we have some of the major themes of the daily or nightly news: wars and other violence, peace seeking, hunger, homelessness. Most of us watch these events unfolding on our TV screen almost every day. What we choose to do about it, individually and as a church,--how much money we donate, or how much of our time and energy we expend on these problems; what political candidates get our votes are all issues of great importance both for saving the world and for saving our souls.
Have you ever been really hungry? Maybe you have missed lunch or been out hiking or biking without stopping for any snacks. Or maybe you were fasting. I’m sure most of you can remember at some time having a gnawing in your stomach. However, there was no need for anxiety as you knew you would soon be able to eat. If you happen to be in a situation where there was not going to be much if anything to eat for an extended time, you might move from that simple longing in the gut for food, to a restlessness like an animal that has not been fed—a pacing back and forth, the longing hunger becomes the gnawing hunger. Finally weakness sets in and there’s just not enough energy or strength to do anything. When Jesus came to the crowds of people and tells them that he is the bread of life, he’s talking about a hunger that isn’t in the stomach, but a spiritual hunger. The first stage is an unsatisfied longing for meaning in our life. Maybe some of you started going to church because you recognized this lack of meaning in your life. You needed “food for thought” or a good sermon to “chew on”. The second stage is that restlessness where you pace and look hither and yon for something to satisfy us. You may go to ashrams, take up meditation, try Buddhist fellowship and spiritual reading, take up astrology or drumming, or many other things to try to find meaning. If this goes on long enough without success, you may become apathetic, bored, no zest for life, sometimes even to the point of wanting to end one’s life.
Jesus promises that he can take away this spiritual hunger. “I am the Bread of Life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry.” From Jesus we can receive food for our heart and souls. First we have to admit that we have a void in the deepest part of our being. Next we have to turn to Jesus. That’s pretty hard if your not use to it. This is the point where you may want to talk to a minister, attend church, share with friends who have a strong faith. In your prayers you can just say, “I’m desperate; I don’t know what to do. Please help me. I need to be fed.” When we come to Holy Communion, we have an opportunity to symbolically be fed by Jesus’ body and his blood.
Earlier we talked about the news of the world. Let’s now turn to the news of our own little world. Most of our news is not really big stuff, yet to us it is important. It is the kind of news that tells us that we are moving towards where we want to be or not. It may not be a war like that in Iraq and Lebanon; however it is a war that we all go through much of the time. It’s helpful to choose a time of day, often just before going to sleep at night to go over the battles of the day. What battles if any are we winning, or losing? “Which battles might we do better not to be fighting at all?” Buechner says, “We are churchgoers. We are nice people. We fight well camouflaged. We are snipers rather than bombardiers. Our weapons are more apt to be chilly silences than hot words. But our wars are no less real for all of that, and the stakes are no less high.” He goes on to say that maybe the highest stakes of all are the wars we wage within ourselves—“the battles we fight against loneliness, boredom, despair, self-doubt, the battles against fear, against the great dark.” We always have that “battle to become what we have it in us at our best to be, which is wise and loving friends both to our own selves and to each other as we reach out not only for what we need to have but also for what we need to give.”
Are you hungry? Most us have more than enough food to eat in a world where thousands starve to death every day, yet we do have our own terrible spiritual hungers. “We hunger to be known and understood. We hunger to be loved. We hunger to be at peace inside our own skins. We hunger not just to be fed these things but, often without realizing it, we hunger to feed others these things because they too are starving for them. We hunger not just to be loved but to love, not just to be forgiven but to forgive, not just to be known and understood for all the good times and bad times that for better or worse have made us who we are, but to know and understand each other to the point of seeing that, in the last analysis, we all have the same good times, the same bad times, and that for that very reason there is no such thing in all the world as anyone who is really a stranger.”
When Jesus commanded us to love our neighbors as ourselves, it was as much for our own sake as for the others. “Not to help find some way to feed the children who are starving to death is to have some precious part of who we are starve to death with them. Not to give of ourselves to the human beings we know who may be starving nor for food but for what we have in our hearts to nourish them with is to be, ourselves, diminished and crippled as human beings.
In Luke Jesus says, “Woe to you that are rich for you have received your consolation. Woe to you that are full now, for you shall hunger. Woe to you that laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. We could add Woe to us if we forget the homeless ones who have no vote, no power, nobody to lobby for them, and who might as well have no faces even, the way we try to avoid the troubling sight of them in the streets…” And as we listen to the news each night, woe to us too if we forget our own homelessness. “To be really at home is to be really at peace, and our lives are so intricately interwoven that there can be no real peace for any of us until there is real peace for all of us.” This is the truth that underlies the news of the world and the news of our own humble lives.
Jesus told the crowd and his disciples, “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the son of Man will give you.” It is so easy to focus on our physical needs that we forget there are greater things, things that satisfy not only the body but the soul. As we celebrate the Lord’s Supper/Holy Communion in a little while, the one whom we call the Bread of Life is broken and given to all of us that we may eat and live. Bread is a good image for us Westerners as it is such an important part of our diet. In some countries or regions of the world, we might use tortillas or even rice. Not all people in the world are familiar with bread. The point is that Jesus, whether we call him the bread of life or the tortilla of life, can satisfy those inner hungers as he becomes for us the God of love, the food that fills us and leads us through the Holy Spirit to go forward and bring about the K
[1] All unspecified quotes are from this source.
posted by Sermons given at Deering Community Church @ 1:23 PM
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