World Food Day C

World Food Day

Introduction

I find it intriguing that world food day follows thanksgiving. I do not know about you, but in my family thanksgiving is the equivalent of a feast. It is all about celebrating the best the land has to offer. So we are talking Turkey and pumpkin pie, or for this year duck and wild rice stuffing...Very delicious.

But at the same time that we are celebrating the richness of our bounty, we know that there are others who have nothing. From the people on the edges of the deserts of Africa right through to the 400 people who use the food bank in Miramichi, having enough is a constant problem.

Do you remember those ads from a couple of years ago that showed a person in the kitchen opening a can of soup, and when they opened it the roof came off their house. Then you saw the words, food or shelter. 1 million Canadians cannot afford both. Habitat for Humanity sponsored it and the point of the ad was to say that for many the choice is that serious, food or shelter, what is it going to be.

World Food Day was established in 1945 on the tale end of World War Two. The United Nations members took a look at the world around them, a world athat was honestly used to a lot of growth and prosperity ... And realized that with two "world" wars in 20 years, with the greatest depression the world has ever known in between, things were not really that rosy. We needed to take food security seriously, we needed to make sure everyone had enough.

Of course, this idea is ancient... In fact it forms one of the core moral teachings of the Jewish and Christian faith.

Children's Story

Give 1 kid no rice cracker.

Give 1 kid 3 rice crackers

Give 2 kids 2 rice crackers.

Give 4 kids 1 rice cracker.

(Repeat if there are more than 8 kids.)

We live in a world where one in eight people face go hungry every day - can't find enough food to eat.

Even though there's lots and lots of food in the world.

Jesus found himself in situations like that - where some people had food and others didn't.

Put all the food in one basket and passed it around.

Everyone was fed and there was even more food than they needed.

Heading Through the Desert

Everything I said with the kids, the whole bread and fishes feeding the five thousand is all well and good... But the thing is, there are times when it is easy to be so comfortable with that - like when it is lunch and you know you can to home and eat more later, it is fairly easy to share our five fish... But have you ever been hungry? 

The grumbling in the desert is a far far more realistic picture of what it is like when you cannot find enough food. I remember a fishing trip like that, where the friend I was sharing a canoe with insisted we should live off the land for a week, we would fry our catch and pick berries... I think to be honest that we only brought cornmeal and salt and pepper... On the second day when we had caught no fish I was ready to kill him, the trip ended early.

Well, here are the Israelites, thousands of people  who left safety, security and home behind to follow Moses into the desert, the DESERT. Now, I have never personally tried to live off the land in the desert, but I can guess that the people were getting pretty hungry, and pretty grumpy. You can understand their point...

This is one of those stories that shows God is with us. There are number of things like this that happen, the soldiers are outnumbered, the crops dry up, there is nothing to drink, the people are hungry... And God provides.

Don't worry. God is with us. That is the very basic message behind this reading, and why it was kept alive as a story for thousands of years... Now, I don't want to say that there is anything wrong with that sentiment... I jut want us to think a little about the difference between God providing, and expecting God to do the work.

Certainly one of the things God is saying to the people, of Israel is this... "If you would just stop complaining and look around... There is food on the ground and birds in the air, now to out and get them..."

How about our responsibility in the midst of all of this?

Jesus and the crowd get to the shore and there seems to be no food, so they ask around, and everyone, knowing that they might be there a while, claims to have nothing. But then when they look a little further, they find some fish and bread and the sharing begins.

So to go back to my opening point about Thanksgiving and people starving... Perhaps it says more about our unwillingness to share than about whether or not God provides?

The Gleanings

There are a lot of really interesting passages in the Bible about taking care of each other. Most of us could come up with a couple like when the disciples ask Jesus "when did we see you cold and hungry, Lord" and he tells them that any time they help anyone they help him.

But did you know there are very specific laws and rules about helping people and food? For example, according to biblical law a field can only be harvested once. When you go through and cut the grain the first time, then you just walk away... You leave the rest, the leftovers, for the foreigners widows and orphans to go get without cost. You also don't harvest right to the edge of the field, leave the stuff growing there so that anyone who is old and crippled does not have to walk far to get food.

The entire way that crops were grown, used in church, and shared had to do with the idea that God did not want you to be greedy, and that you should do all you could to make it easy for others to help themselves and still have dignity.

I think we have sort of lost this along the way. I don't really know where and when, there are theories.... But it all happened long before any of us. Life became more about making your way in the world, it became  about your family. About your friends, and ultimately about you... Strangers and outcasts became just that, and we stopped talking to them, stopped caring as much, stopped seeing it as a matter of faith.

There was a minister in Germany in World War Two... He was eventually put into a concentration camp himself because of his complaints, the chief among them was that no one would stand up for the poor and outcast... He wrote a poem that became famous which said this:

First they came for the communists,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the socialists,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for me,

and there was no one left to speak for me.

We can be thankful for the food we eat and the life we live, but if we are not also aware of the unfairness of this world, we are not being faithful. We cannot change everything and we cannot help everyone... But we cannot just throw in the towel either.

Conclusion

God has provided. There is more than enough food for everyone in the world. It has to do with whether we are willing to share,  to work together, to be the type of people Jesus knew we could be.

The answer to hunger is so simple we learned it when we were little kids. Share. It may sound simple... But it is the only way we will ever bring true change.

I want to end my sermon today with words from a Spanish poet named Federico Garcia Lorca

who lived in the early twentieth century. As you hear these, may you feel real hope for what is possible.

He said:

"The day that hunger is eradicated from the earth

there will be the greatest spiritual explosion

the world has ever known.

Humanity cannot imagine the joy"