Will We Feed Them

 

The hungry sit at our gate…

While reading an article in the journal, Christian Century, http://christiancentury.org/article/2010-09/hunger-political, I was confronted by a stark fact – one BILLION people in our world suffer from hunger, and twenty-five thousand people a day die from hunger-related causes.  1 in 6 people on our globe will go to bed hungry tonight, and of that number, children are an uncomfortably high percentage.  While millions of Americans are struggling to lose weight due to over-eating, hundreds of millions of people starve from not having enough to eat.  The image of a person starving of hunger in our world of plenty is a difficult one for us to wrestle with as we read about the rich man Lazarus and the poor man begging at his gate.

I suppose what has made this issue very real for me has been the up-surge of people who are coming to the food distributions held by our church.  This past year, we went from serving about 120-130 families/week to now serving from 170-200 families, for a total of over 3100 people.  That is a significant increase in the number of people in our community who do not have enough to eat.  Some of these people could be your neighbors, your children’s friends at school, maybe even your relatives – and they are going to bed hungry.  How many more will come out for food in another year?  What can the average person or church do to stem this tide? 

As bad as the hunger in Flint, MI may be, how much worse are the conditions in Haiti or other struggling places around the world?  The percentage of people in Haiti who are hungry is even greater, with millions lacking access to basic food and water.  In many cases, food is not even available, unless one has a great deal of wealth.  The hungry sit at our gate….

“There was a certain rich man, who ate sumptuously every day.  At his gate lay a beggar named Lazarus, who desired only to eat the crumbs off of the rich mans table…”  Even in the greater Flint area, most of us eat like the rich man.  We eat most of what we want – maybe not at 5-star restaurants – but we have more than enough, and then some to spare.  One needs only to go to Old Country Buffet, Ci Ci’s Pizza, or China Wok (a Chinese buffet in Grand Blanc) to see the sumptuous (if not gourmet) tables set before, brimming over with food.  At the same time, hundreds of people stand in line for the left-over, expired food that grocery store chains are forced to throw away.  How many beggars sit at our gate?

Do we turn a blind eye to their hunger?  Do we ignore their hungry voices?  One of the core purposes of Holy Spirit Lutheran Church is to Share God’s Word.  We share God’s Word through both our words and our deeds.  If our actions do not support our words, then they are just so much hot air.  We talk about God’s love, but unless we are willing to take action, those who are not part of God’s family will not take us seriously.  Jesus didn’t just come to save people only after they die, he came to save them in the here and now as well.  Jesus shared God’s love in both word and deed.  He did this, both through telling people about his Father’s love for them, as well as showing them this love by feeding them and healing their illnesses.  Jesus’ words meshed with his actions.

The beggar is lying at our gate.  What will we do?  We are scheduled to hold two more food drives in October.  These are very real ways to at least meet the here and now needs of hungry people.  However, we are out of funds for food drives, and we can no longer purchase additional food to supplement what the food banks gives us to distribute.  With the added numbers of people receiving food, we are in great need of additional food from the food bank to give people some basic staples for their diet. Consider asking your business to partner with Holy Spirit to provide more food for these distributions – one dollar will but fourteen dollars worth of food.  For more information on our food distributions, check out the food bank’s website at www.fbem.org.  If you choose to donate to our food distributions, you can make a direct donation to the food bank and benefit our local distribution by directing to our Agency ID: M1018.   At the minimum, consider coming out to see the faces of those we serve and to hear their stories by volunteering at a food drive on Oct 2 or 30 at 9:00am.

Another way to help both locally and globally is to support the CROPWALK, either by walking and getting pledges or by pledging those from the church who are walking.  Either way, hungry people will benefit.

For more information on ways to help alleviate world hunger, check out the website of ELCA’s world Hunger appeal at http://www.elca.org/Our-Faith-In-Action/Responding-to-the-World/ELCA-World-Hunger.aspx. 

The beggar is at our gate, will we turn our backs?

The Culture of “Me”

Recently, I was shopping in a local store, when I heard a child screaming at her mother.  As I pushed my shopping cart past this scene, I noticed that the child was pointing at an object on the shelf and demanding that her mother give it to her.  The mother refused, which led to the screaming fit.  I felt bad for the mother who appeared to be attempting to set some boundaries for her daughter.  My sympathy was tempered, when I noticed that the 7-year-old was holding a super-sized slurpee and an open pack of cookies – probably right off a shelf in the store.  This mother’s attempts to enforce a boundary were undermined by 1) the large quantity of sugar the child had consumed, and 2) the inconsistency of telling her “no”, while letting her open a pack of unpurchased cookies.  I hope this was simply an isolated incident or a bad day for this family.  Unfortunately, it is not an isolated incident in our culture. 

We live in a “Me, First” culture.  We are all familiar with the excesses of our society.  One example from the news this week – our local NFL football franchise, the Detroit Lions is negotiating a contract with a first-round draft pick for many millions of dollars – a franchise that has a perennial losing record.  The sum total of all the salaries on this losing team runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars.  At the same time, the school districts in the state (for a variety of reasons) are closing hundreds of buildings and failing to educate our young, thousands of local and county employees are being laid off, and thousands of children are living in hunger every day.  The contrast between the “haves” and “have-nots” is growing ever wider, and our culture tends to encourage these types of excesses. 

In the lessons that we cover this week, the writer of Ecclesiastes chapters 1 and 2 talks about the futility of work and labor – “Vanity, O vanity, all is vanity.” He is talking about the fact that we work our whole lives, and at the end of our lives, we leave it all behind.  Jesus also takes a dim view on the ultimate value of our possessions.  He tells a parable about a rich landowner who takes great pride in building bigger and bigger barns to hold all of his stuff.  The landowner is quite smug about his possessions and the life of luxury that they grant him.  However, at the end of the parable, God has a sharp word of condemnation for the landowner, saying that his life will be taken from him at that very moment.  Jesus wanted his followers to understand that a person’s happiness cannot be based on stuff, accumulation, wealth, security, or worldly concerns.  In the end, it will all return to dust, and we will have nothing.  The “Me, First” culture of north America often leads to disappointment and sadness, no matter how much stuff we accumulate.  In fact, some of the richest people often have some of the lowest levels of happiness.  Did you know, the majority of all professional football players are in bankruptcy within two years of retiring from football – Vanity, O vanity, all is vanity?

The old Bible song points us to the antidote….

Seek ye first the kingdom and his righteousness.

And all these things shall be added unto you.

Alelu, Alleluia.

We can best overcome the “Me, First” attitude, when we make sacrifices for God and God’s children.  We ome closest to God’s ideal for us, when we take time out of our schedules to volunteer to help those in need.

Next week, our church will be working on a Habitat for Humanity project in Burton.  Paid for by Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, this Thrivent Build will ensure that a struggling family is able to buy a decent affordable house.  This is a great project to help us battle the “me, first” attitude on the world around us, by first encouraging us to put someone else first in our own lives.  For more info about the Habitat Humanity project and Thrivent Builds, follow this link: http://www.geneseehabitat.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=35&Itemid=91.  

Together, as individuals and as a church, we can battle the “Me, First” Mentality and replace it with a God-first mentality, which will lead us all to real life.