First Baptist Church, Gaithersburg, MD, March 9, 1980; with minor alterations at WHBC radio, June 28, 1981; Calverton Baptist Church, Silver Spring, MD, Oct. 10, 1982; First Baptist Church, Camp Springs, MD, March 11, 1984; Takoma Park Baptist Church, Washington, DC, Oct. 13, 1985)
If today is an average day, statistically speaking, if this is a day much like all other days around the world, then in the time it takes for me to deliver this sermon, something like 140 persons will die of starvation. In this short span of time, about 140 people will find that their tired bodies, unable to feed upon themselves any longer, unable to find any food of lasting substance, will pass into eternity. Don’t start looking around and counting; the 140 will not include you!
Now some wit in the congregation might want to suggest that we shorten the sermon and thus save some lives, but I believe you know what I am getting at. I am talking about the appalling numbers of people in our modern world, our sleek, technologically sophisticated world, for whom the basics of life are absent. Totally absent, not just in somewhat short supply, not just across town at another supermarket than the one we normally use, not just temporarily out of stock, but totally absent.
The statistics of death and of hunger are truly staggering, and I suspect I could regale you with these the entire morning. I will not do that, but I do think we need to be sensitized again and again about this reality. We need to understand what hunger in this world is and what it means in a spiritual sense.
Listen: Each morning as the sun comes up there are something like 203,000 more mouths to feed than there were the day before. Living as we do in a county that was one of the first to achieve zero population growth – that is, to achieve a balance between the number of births and the number of deaths – it is a little hard for us to imagine the astonishing rate at which the world's population is increasing. And the tough part about this is that it is increasing more rapidly in those nations which are already starving than it is in the more developed portions of the world.
Listen: in India alone it is estimated that 30,000,000 people are to be classified as starving, as persons who will shortly die, because they do not have enough food even to sustain the barest thread of life. On top of that, another 60,000,000 are to be classed as malnourished; they will live, but they will pay a terrible price in order to stay alive. Because of poor nourishment, because what they have been able to scrape together to eat has been inadequate, they will have brain damage and will not live up to their potential; they will be subject to a variety of debilitating diseases and parasites and will therefore be unable to work, they will not be productive of enough in food or goods or services to feed themselves and their families and thus they will perpetuate and deepen the cycle of hunger. 60,000,000 malnourished in one country alone.
But that is only one nation. Listen: the United Nations estimates that 460,000,000 people come under the heading of acutely hungry, or permanently hungry. These are not folks who need to wait until they can grab a Big Mac and large fries; they are permanently hungry. These are not individuals who got down on their luck for a few weeks and had to exist on pinto beans and boiled rice; they are people who lack protein, who are missing vital nutrients, They are in some instances people who in order to raise funds are actually selling their own children, and they have to hurry to do so lest the child die before he or she can be sold! These are people who, in one village in Ecuador, rejoice when a child is stillborn, for at least that infant has become an angel in God's heaven without having to undergo the suffering of acute starvation.
But that, of course, is a little exotic. That happens in other places; that happens with other people, other cultures. That is far away and remote, and we are not fully equipped to understand it. Listen: Elsie DeFratus was an elderly widow living in St. Petersburg, Florida, just a little this side of heaven, right? The aim of the American dream, a sunbelt retirement. But Mrs. DeFratus, after paying her rent and her utilities, could budget only an average of 65ยข per day for her food. And as prices rose, she had less and less to eat. When they found her one morning her frail body had shrunk to only 76 pounds. The coroner's official diagnosis: malnutrition.
In these United States, the wealthiest country on earth and the most dynamic and advanced society this world has ever seen, there remain the hungry, the poor, and the desperate. Just this past week I was moved by hearing a pastor in one of the poorest sections of Washington become transformed by his subject as he tried to describe for some of us the desperation and the plight of his people. He talked about how he could see members of that community victimizing one another in order to get their hands of some money; he spoke with eloquence about how, as much as he loved his young people and wanted them to be a part of his church and his community, yet he was glad to see them leave home. At least there was the hope that they would find another way of life and there would be some sort of opportunity. And then – I thought I could detect tears in his eyes at this point – then his voice rose and he exclaimed, "I don't see any solution outside of a revolution, that's what we're going to have to have, a revolution, and I'm a mild-mannered Christian." That's a pastor, you see, in one of our own D. C. Baptist churches, and when he calls himself a mild-mannered Christian and yet feels he must call for a revolution of some sort, then I must listen. That calls me to take notice; that summons me to ask myself, "What do you say to a hungry world?”
When one out of every six children in a school in one American city is suffering from poor nutrition, I have to ask, “What do I say to a hungry world?" When a rural Appalachian family has to exist much of the time on nothing more than homegrown beans and syrup, I have no choice but to wonder, “What do I say to that?” And when I reflect on the fact that I am able, because of where I live and because of the resources which are at my disposal and because the system has worked for me, I am able to eat as much as I like and am able to eat what I like, I am able to feed my children and even to worry about whether some of us are getting overweight, then when I reflect on all that, again I am driven to ask, “What do you say to a hungry world?"
The Gospel according to Matthew tells us that our Lord spoke words pertinent to a hungry world. Jesus tells us that we are indeed to have something to say, something very definite to say, to a hungry world: “Then the King will say to those at his right hand, 'come, 0 blessed of my father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world, for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink. ‘” And a little farther on in the passage there is the other side of the equation, there is the dark side of this question: “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink.”
What do you say to a hungry world? In fact the question now becomes more pointed, more clear and more grand in scope. The question now becomes, “What do you say to a hungry Christ?” What do you do with a Lord who so identifies himself with the poor and the needy and the homeless and the imprisoned and the desperate? How do you understand a God who ties himself so closely to those whom he calls the least of these my brethren? “Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”
You see, a part of our problem is that we have wanted to make our Christian discipleship a matter of inner obedience, inner feelings and inner beliefs, and have neglected the outer side. We have said so often that it’s not good works that save you, and of course, that’s true, in its own way, but then there is this terribly concrete, terribly definite word of the Lord here: “As you did it ..” Did it, not thought it or believed it, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.
I say that our problem is that we have so often seen only half of the truth. We have supposed that all that was needed was that we have good feelings about Christ and all that we had to do was to believe certain doctrines and to walk the aisle in the prescribed way, but that was only half of the truth. That was the inner half. There is also the outer half. There is also the question of what I do with my discipleship, there is also the issue of what I do with and for the Christ who is at work in me. And believe me, that is every bit as spiritual as anything you might want to deal with concerning prayer or church-going or witnessing or all the rest. Outward obedience, outward expression, that's what our Lord is talking about here. He is saying that if we truly love him, then we will see him mirrored in every other creature and we will understand that as we serve others we are in every way that counts truly serving Christ himself.
I think I've said before from this pulpit that we have just come through what has been called the "me" decade. We are just emerging from a period of some years in which everything in our culture has said “me first." “Give yourself a treat” has become the slogan that underlies a whole era. And there are certain kinds of religion that go right along with that idea; you can get so wrapped up in certain sorts of religious highs that you can easily forget the depth and the sorrow and the urgency of human needs around you. As one wag put it, you can become so heavenly minded that you are of no earthly use. But our Lord, if you hear what he is saying in this passage, will not allow it. He simply will not allow us to spend so much time with out eyes closed in prayer that we cannot see the hurts of our brothers and our sisters who may be the least of these his brethren.
Now take a close look with me, if you will, at one aspect of this passage that seems to speak to me with clarity and with forceful insight. It comes in that negative part, that dark and shadowy part, in which he speaks. Can’t you just imagine Jesus uttering these words? Can’t you just picture him with fire in his eyes and with his fist pounding into his hand? No gentle Jesus meek and mild this time! Anyway, this is the passage in which he speaks of those who had not fed the hungry, had not quenched the thirst of the parched, had not clothed the needy. Notice that what Jesus condemns is their passivity, what he condemns is that they did nothing. It is not so much that they did anything evil; no one pulled out a sword and murdered another, no one stole any goods belonging to someone else, no one took away anyone's home or his freedom or his clothing or anything else. There is here no list of what you and I have decided to call serious crimes: no drug-peddling, no boozing, no womanizing. Here the Lord does not deal with actions; he deals with non-actions, he deals with our passivity, he deals with our failure to get involved where we see need. What do you say to a hungry world? Well, one of your choices is to say nothing; one of the options is to leave it alone and assume that it will solve its own problems; but when you have done that you have turned your back on the world of need, and you have turned your back on Christ.
And when you have done that, what have you said to a hungry world? The poet put it well, "I never cut my neighbor's throat; My neighbor's gold I never stole; I never spoiled his house and land; But God have mercy on my soul! For I am haunted night and day By all the deeds I have not done; O unattempted loveliness; O costly valor never won.”
Passivity, keeping out of trouble, that's not a sufficient answer to a hungry, needy, broken world.
Someone else has put it this way, taking the words and phrases of Jesus' teaching in this passage and making something of a contemporary parody of them. It goes something like this: “I was hungry and you complained about the price of bread; I was thirsty and you attended a temperance lecture; I was a stranger and you worried about what I would do to real estate prices in your neighborhood. I was naked and you commented distastefully about my appearance; I was sick and you prayed abstractly and coolly for my recovery; I was in prison and you said I got what I deserved. Thank you.”
Well, maybe that’s a little cruel; maybe that’s unkind. But the question still remains, "What do you say to a hungry world?”
One thing I want to say to a hungry world is that my lifestyle priorities will need to change. The hungry world needs to hear from me that I will consume less and use up less and will be more interested in preserving the resources that God has given me. One thing I can say to a hungry world is that I am no longer comfortable with being a part of a nation which has only about 6% of the world's population but uses 40% of the world's resources. If I were to reduce the entire world to a village of 1,000 people, only 60 people in that village would be Americans, and yet those sixty Americans would be receiving half of the town's income. And many of the remaining 940 people – certainly over 200 of them – would be starving. One thing I need to say to a hungry world is that I cannot remain comfortable with that. I cannot be comfortable wasting food. I cannot be comfortable or satisfied with taking, taking. My lifestyle needs to change.
And then I would want to say to a hungry world that a part of my financial and personal resources would be used to deal with the human needs I am encountering. I would want to say today to a hungry world that it can count on me to make some sort of gestures toward contributing out of what God has given me to see to it that both physical and spiritual hungers are dealt with. You've already been reminded that at this season of the year we are turning our attention to the missions offering, much of which goes to provide workers and materials and other things needed among the poor and the suffering in our own land. I'd want the hungry world to know that I have realized that I have realized that something is out of line in this global village, in this village of 1000 persons which represents the whole world. Something is out of line when those sixty Americans, holding half of the wealth of the village, were spending $850 each per year to arm themselves, but were contributing only $4 each per year to share the gospel with the others. I'd want a hungry world to know it could count on me to take some concrete pocketbook steps to correct that and could on some political action too.
But most of all, what I want to say to a hungry world is that it can count on me to keep my eyes open and to keep my heart compassionate. I'd want the hungry world to know that at every turn of the road I would expect to find that there is someone who needs my help and that I would not be passing by on the other side. I want a hungry world to know that in this follower of Christ there is one who will see in every person in need the face of the Christ himself.
What do you say to a hungry world? Come, share in the Father’s goodness. Taste and see that the Lord is good.
