Hunger is something we feel at every stage of life and every day of our lives. In fact, when you are no longer able to get hungry, you know you are very sick. Being hungry is a sign of health.
Hunger is something felt by the youngest infant, from the very beginning. I had the rare chance this week to hold in my arms a child less than a week old. While I worried about whether I still remembered how to handle so fragile a subject, and while her mother went to get the camera, what did I see but a tiny mouth begin to make sucking motions? Six days old and hungry already! But that means a healthy baby!
Those of you who are parents of teenagers: can you assure that mother that the situation will improve any time soon?
But hunger is felt by those not so young, and again, being hungry is a sign of health. One of our senior members was in the hospital recently for a surgical procedure, and, in reporting on his progress, he said, "I knew I was getting better because I was ready to eat again, even hospital food.” Now that’s hungry, when you even like hospital food! But it meant he was getting well.
Hunger is, then, not only something you feel at every stage of life; it is also a sign of health to be hungry. The only thing that is unhealthy is for hunger to go unsatisfied. It’s healthy to feel hunger; but if you just stay hungry and never feed the hunger, then you are in danger. If you have a thirst but never slake that thirst, then you are in trouble.
Too large a portion of today’s world is caught in that trouble. Too many in today’s world face that danger. On this World Hunger Sunday, the sobering statistics have not improved much, if at all, since this time last year.
Figures recently published by Bread for the World tell us that every year 40,000 American babies die before their first birthday. A large number of these die because they are poorly nourished. Now that’s 40,000 per year in the United States. If you go worldwide, it becomes 40,000 children a day – 40,000 children a day! Can you even grasp that statistic? 40,000 children a day die from hunger-related causes around the world.
And if you want to know why, if you wonder why such things happen, one answer is that, more than anything else, misplaced priorities snatch food from the mouths of children. We have read for years of the starving children of Ethiopia; yet that government has spent 60% of its national budget on defense and has maintained the largest army in Africa. Its neighbor, Sudan, with perhaps 11 million starving people, spends a million dollars a day on its military machine. Elsewhere in the world, more than 300,000 Cambodian refugees have been eking out a campground existence for more than twenty years. Nearly 4 million Afghans are camped in Pakistan, with no prospect of returning to their homes. Following the Persian Gulf War, the Kurdish people of Iraq suffered untold misery, sent into exile by Iraq’s war machine and all but ignored by other nations. Thousands died as victims of war though no bullets were fired at them. Misplaced priorities, a hungry, ravenous war machine.
I tell you, if God is just, there will someday be a very, very warm spot in the deepest hell for those who have cynically maneuvered the nations of the world into vast, useless, degrading arms expenditures! If God is just, the hunger of the masses of this world will not go unnoticed. And I just dare to believe that the dramatic political changes of the last two or three years are in some measure the justice of God at work. Mind you, I don’t think He’s finished yet, either.
But just hold those thoughts in your mind for a while. I’ll return to them. Right now I just want to focus on our basic premise: that hunger and thirst are things which we feel at every stage of life, and to feel hunger and thirst is healthy. I am saying that it is only when you do not feed that hunger and slake that thirst that you are in trouble.
I do not think I would get any argument if I were to remind you that there are different kinds of hungers and thirsts. In addition to the very physical hunger I’ve been mentioning, you and I know that there is also a spiritual hunger and an emotional thirst. We wouldn’t be here today if that were not the case. It’s at the core of what it means to be human to sense a spiritual hunger, a desire for God. It’s central to what it means to be alive to feel a spiritual thirst, a longing to be in touch with someone who refreshes the heart and cleanses the spirit. "As the hart pants after the waterbrooks, so thirsts my soul after Thee, 0 God.”
That’s a given. This we all know. As one philosopher put it, “There is a God-shaped emptiness in everyone.” There is a hunger, an emptiness, that only God can fill. We hunger and thirst at the spiritual level as well as at the physical.
And our basic premise is still true. Our basic idea is still accurate: hunger is something which we feel at every stage of life and every day of our lives. In fact, when you are no longer able to get hungry, you know you are very sick. When you no longer know how to satisfy that hunger, you are in grave danger. When all you know is that you have a spiritual hunger and an emotional thirst, but you do not know how to satisfy them, then you are in trouble.
I
I hear us, as Christians, trying to do a variety of things about our spiritual hungers and our emotional thirsts. I hear us, for example, complaining when we believe that our needs are not met. I hear us expressing our hungers and ventilating our thirsts. We express frustration when what happens here at church is not up to par.
Pastor, the sermon just didn’t hit me today. Choir, the music just didn’t do anything for me this morning. Teacher, your lesson didn’t touch me. Deacon, you didn’t greet me with very much warmth today. Sometimes when we are spiritually hungry and emotionally empty, we express it by complaining. And we say an awful lot about me, me, me!
Now before anybody gets defensive or gets upset at what I am saying, remember our basic idea this morning: that it is a sign of health when you can express hunger. It is a positive, healthy sign when you can focus on and complain about your spiritual starvation. When somebody is too weak to complain about being hungry, he’s about to die. And when somebody is too lazy or lethargic to pipe up about their spiritual food, he too is about to die.
So I see some of us struggling with our spiritual hunger by complaining about it, and that’s all right. I hear some of us trying to deal with our spiritual thirsts by holding the church accountable, and that’s appropriate. That’s all right.
Don’t ever worry about whether you hurt or offend the ministers by your concerns. Don’t hold back from speaking to the leadership of the church about your needs. I worry more about those who deny their needs and run around pretending that they are self-sufficient than I ever will about those who tell me that they aren’t fulfilled. If you’re hungry, say so.
II
But there is another level to which I want to take this discussion this morning. There is another way to satisfy the spiritual hungers and to allay the emotional thirsts. There is another way besides hoping that the music and the prayers and the preaching and the fellowship will do it for us.
And that is the way identified by the Lord Jesus. Our Christ tells us how to satisfy hunger and thirst. He has a response to spiritual hunger and emotional starvation. It’s very simple and yet it’s very profound:
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled." "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”
You can see right there that truth with which I have been working this morning: that it is a sign of health to be hungry: "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst …” Nothing wrong with that.
And you can also see the promise that comes from Christ Himself that the heart hungers of humanity will be satisfied, they will be filled.
The key element, then, is righteousness. Righteousness. Hunger and thirst for righteousness, and you will be filled. Direct that hunger that you feel and that thirst that you taste toward righteousness, and you will be satisfied.
What is this righteousness business? What is Jesus talking about?
In Biblical language, righteousness means being lined up with the purposes of God. Righteousness means wanting the same things that God wants. Righteousness means living in relationship with the Creator and His intention for His world.
Now our trouble is that we have too often defined righteousness only in negative terms. When we say that somebody is righteous, too much of the time we are thinking about what it is that he or she does not do. "Don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t chew; above all, don’t go with girls who do." That’ s the popular notion of a righteous person: straight-laced, negative, frowning, with a face only a mother could love, and a holier-than-thou quiver in the voice!
But the Bible speaks of righteousness in a very different way. The Bible speaks of righteousness as an active desire to see life lived with God. Righteousness is willing what God wills, wanting what God wants, working for what God works for. Righteousness is living out the mission and the purpose of God.
And so when Jesus speaks of hungering and thirsting for righteousness, and thus being filled, He is saying that the avenue to satisfaction is to be about what God is about. The way to feel fulfilled is to be engaged in what God is engaged in, and that is the redemption of humanity.
Let me put this in the simplest possible terms. If you want to be happy, do something for God, and do something for God’s children. That’s simple enough, isn’t it? And yet it is terribly profound. If you want to be happy, do something for God, and do something for God’s children.
If you are hungry for spiritual food, yes, read the Bible. Yes, listen to sermons. Yes, attend Sunday School and Prayer Meeting. But above all, desire with a passion what God wants to do with His creation, desire and work vigorously for the things that matter for others. Help God redeem His broken world. And you will be filled. You will have a complete hunger.
If you are thirsty for spiritual refreshment, of course, pray. Pray and worship, come into His presence with singing and before His throne with praise. Of course, soak yourself in the mysteries of the faith. Of course, come here and see the symbols of the Gospel and hear the sounds of salvation. Of course. But do more than that. Go beyond that. If you are thirsty for spiritual refreshment, then hunger and thirst after righteousness. See the needs of the world as God sees them. Choose to refresh somebody else. And when you do that, you will be blessed and satisfied beyond measure. You will have a complete hunger and a complete thirst.
I thought, ’How can I illustrate this happiness? How can I tell them about somebody who is deliriously hungry-happy?’ I’m glad that Bob and Alberta Faulkner are out of town this weekend. If they were here, I would not want to embarrass them by saying what I am about to say. But most of you know the Faulkners. You know, if you know anything at all about them, that from morning and until night, every day, they are about the business of the Kingdom. If it is not a church committee, it is Boy Scouts. If it is not the senior citizens, it is American Baptist board meetings. If it is not gathering food and clothing for the needy, it is visiting somebody who is shut in and helping them with their medical appointments and their legal papers and their housework.
Don’t these people ever get hungry? Don’t they ever get tired and just say, “Enough is enough! “? Sometimes you wonder whether Bob and Alberta ever even stop to eat and drink and sleep. Every day, on the go for the Kingdom. Every day, doing something redemptive for somebody. Well, I can tell you, they are hungry all right. They are thirsty. They are just like every one of us. But what distinguishes them is that they hunger for righteousness, and they are filled. They are too busy to complain and too happy to worry about comfort.
"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled."
Blessed are those who have a complete hunger. Blessed are those who are not only hungry for food and clothing and shelter and security; after all, the whole world wants that and needs that. But you are happiest when you have a complete hunger.
And blessed are those whose spiritual hunger gets fed not only by preaching and teaching and worship, but whose spiritual hunger is so complete that they are burdened by the poor and the homeless. Happy are those whose spiritual hunger is complete, so that it drives them to give money to missions work and to share their time with soup kitchens.
Filled and satisfied are those who spend time with the lonely and the abandoned. For only those who have a complete hunger will have it satisfied. Remember: it’s healthy only when you feel hunger; you are about to die when you don’t feel it.
And blessed are those whose spiritual thirst is quenched not only by prayer and Bible study. Blessed are those who don’t imagine they can get satisfaction by just standing around being a pretty good person, because that’s not thirst. That’s spiritual dehydration, where you don’t even know you are thirsty and you’re about to dry up and wither away. I tell you, you will never be happy and satisfied just because you are able to say that you stayed out of trouble. You need a complete thirst.
Blessed, happiest, are those who thirst after righteousness, those who burn with a desire to make a difference, who will write letters and work in campaigns and sign petitions, in order that justice prevail. Happiest are those whose hunger and whose thirst is so complete that they will not rest until, one by one, the engines of war are dismantled, until the things which rob little children’s mouths are destroyed, until the stomachs of the poor are filled and the souls of the lonely are drenched.
Hunger and thirst we feel at every stage of life. It’s healthy to be hungry, it’s positive to be thirsty. Just don’t quit until you have satisfied every hunger and quenched the deepest thirst. Don’t quit until you have a complete hunger and a complete thirst. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for the fullness of God’s Kingdom, for they will be filled.
