Hunger

 

There are three kinds of hunger that humans have to deal with on a daily basis.  Some of the world battles with physical hunger, a portion of the western world loses the battle to psychological hunger and almost no one pays attention to spiritual hunger.

I’ve never really been hungry before.  That’s not to say that my stomach has relayed a message to my brain that it is, indeed, time to refuel.  Usually, though, the message is not that I’m running on empty, it is simply that my body has gotten used to eating at certain times of day.  The psychology of hunger kicks in: I am not hungry because I am hungry; I am hungry because I’m supposed to be hungry.

It is said that Australians eat five times per day and that when they do eat, it is in moderation – small proportions to take the edge off the gnawing edges of the belly.  My own stomach has grown used to this repetitive encouragement of filling my gullet and I find that even though I may have eaten a large breakfast, the Australian system of eating would require that I eat something at 10:30.   They call it morning tea.  I call it justified gluttony.  I’m not being harsh, but I’m not sure that the body needs to eat every two hours in order to wash down an inordinately small cup of tea.  As I raise my pinky finger and gaze around at the rest of those partaking, I think to myself, This is completely cultural.  If I don’t cram a scone smothered in Strawberry jam and whip cream down my throat, they will be offended.  I’m sophisticated, too.  You can tell by the four ounce cup of tea in my right hand.

They call it having a ‘cuppa.’  Just like every other phrase in Australia, it is shortened as if saying the words, ‘let’s have a cup of tea,’ would be too exhausting. 

Let’s have a cuppa while we discuss hunger, shall we?  Give me a second while I butter up two pieces of toast because I haven’t eaten for thirty-nine minutes.

In Western cultures, for the most part, we don’t have to worry as much with physical hunger.  By and large, we have enough food to go around fifty times over, but if we ever actualized what hunger does to us, we might be a little more careful with the way we spread around the calories.

I once led a youth group event where my high school kids had to come to church to stay overnight.  These events are called ‘lock-ins’ because once the youth have arrived they are not allowed to leave the premises of the church – essentially, they are locked in.  We had been doing a month long theme of understanding the epidemic of homelessness that pervaded the southwest portion of the United States.  Because winter is relatively short and not very harsh, many transient people made their way to the southwest to live out their months on the streets living in cardboard boxes, cooking over open fires started in fifty-five gallon drums. 

Because we had been studying life on the streets, our overnight at the church would go with the theme of homelessness.  In order to attend the event, the kids ‘entry fee’ was a can of food from their parents’ pantry which would be, in turn, used at the local homeless shelter.  Little did the kids know that the church would be the homeless shelter. 

As the youth arrived, everything that they had brought for the twelve hours of the lock-in (about ten changes of clothes, jewelry, perfume, walkmans (yes, it was the 90’s), snacks, extra bags of just-in-case) would be stashed in my office.  Essentially, we were making them homeless.  Earlier in the day, the chaperones and I had traveled around Mesa stopping at appliance stores gathering large boxes which would be the kids’ homes (and beds) for the night.  There would be no entertainment – no movies, no planned games, no MTV – nothing.  The kids had to fend for themselves and the only thing that they were allowed to eat for the night was the can of food that they brought. 

The kids were not informed of this particularity before they arrived.

We had a large contingent show up that night.  As usual, parents who normally have nothing to do with the life of the church dropped their kids off early, squealing off into the desert sunset, heading home to disconnect their phones so as not to be interrupted during a teenager free night. 

As the kids arrived, about forty of them, they were asked to pile up all of their belongings in a corner of the auditorium.  The cans of food that they had carried with them were to be placed in the kitchen window.  I smirked as I saw what the kids had brought for the night.  It was as I suspected – they had rummaged through their parents cupboards picking out those things that they most hated at home; cans of spinach, beets, creamed corn, a jar of pickled onions.  This was what they would be cooking for the night.  Cooking, that is, if they could figure out how to get the cans open.

A few kids showed up that I guessed would be difficult.  Dennis already had been arrested for auto theft – he was thirteen; his brother Manny was already flirting with the idea of being part of a Phoenix gang; two girls, Darla and Hannah, who had already perfected professional flirting and as they would be the oldest ones there were probably thinking that any young male would be fair game. 

I prayed a little prayer for me.

Priceless was the moment when we began to take away their belongings.  Dennis thought it was funny as Darla and Hannah began to moan loudly that they wouldn’t be able to change clothes for the night.  Desperately they tried to stop us, asking for just a few moments to pick through their bags for ‘necessities.’  To no avail.  We stayed strong.

Then, to top it all off, the largest complaint came when we told them the menu for the night.  As their eyes focused on what they had brought, it finally hit them: these are the things that we hate to eat and yet we were going to foist them off to the homeless people as if somehow they should just be thankful that we gave what we did.  Hungry people should just be happy that we are so generous.  Hungry people shouldn’t be so picky.   They were going to be hungry and they were going to perhaps understand, even just a little bit, what happens when you aren’t fed.

When people get hungry, they do things they normally wouldn’t do – even kids.  As they didn’t want to partake of spinach and beets, they decided to wait out the night and into the morning.  But as the kids noticed the edge of hunger, the anger manifested itself in other ways.  They began to fight – two boys almost got into fisticuffs over a refrigerator box.  They began to argue – a couple of the kids were not happy that can of spinach was distributed so sparsely.  They began to get tired; they learned that homelessness and hunger are not holidays from societal responsibilities, but usually structural identities put in place by ruling authorities. 

Hunger changes whole cultures.

2 Kings 6:24-30

Some time later, Ben-Hadad, king of Aram, mobilized his entire army and marched up and laid siege to Samaria.  There was a great famine in the city; the siege lasted so long that a donkey’s head sold for eighty shekels of silver and a half pint of dove’s dung sold for five.  As the king of Israel was passing by on the wall, a woman cried to him, “Help me, my lord the king.”

The king replied, “If the Lord does not help you, where can I get help for you?  From the threshing floor?  From the winepress?”  Then he asked her, “What’s the matter?”

She answered, “This woman said to me, ‘Give up your son so that we may eat him today, and tomorrow we’ll eat my son.’  So we cooked my son and ate him.  The next day I said to her, ‘Give up your son so we may eat him,’ but she had hidden him.”

When the king heard the woman’s words, he tore his robes.  As he went along the wall, the people looked, and there, underneath, he had sackcloth on.

There, is real hunger – so violently present, that the people would do anything to not be hungry.  Anything – including eating their future, their children, their hope – anything.

This is not one of the Bible stories told in any Sunday school class that I’ve ever been involved in, but it is a biblical story that speaks to our present time.  We are a hungry people, a starving people, a people so hungry that we would even consume our children’s future so that we can stave off this incredible sense of emptiness that is gnawing at the edges of our consciousness.  We hunger for the Word of God, and God himself, but we are not even conscious of it.

When the devil said, ‘Turn these rocks into bread,’ Jesus response was not just, ‘No thanks, even though that sounds good, I’ll refrain,’ he also had a lesson for Satan. 

“Humankind cannot live on bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” 

Yes, it is true that humans can, and do, live without consuming the Bread of Life, but are they really alive?  Are they really living abundant life?

And without knowing it, while starving for the Word of life, society begins to consume its children.  Not physically, of course, but emotionally and spiritually.  Because we don’t offer Daily Bread as the main course, (we don’t even offer breadcrumbs to the kids), they begin to hunger for everything else.  Because they have no sense of the Word of God and its importance or essentialness for life, they learn to consume each other.

In the end, the devil has what he wanted in the first place:  sustainable, perpetual and unrecognized emptiness.

The consumption of our youth is visible in the church’s statistics:  Only one percent of youth have an active faith in Jesus Christ. 

In a Christian studies class, a discussion arose from a group of eight grade students wondering about the realities of the Creation story in the book of Genesis.  The discussion took place mostly between four students; the rest of them stared out the windows, drew pictures on their spiral bound notebooks or picked their noses.  Ideas floated back and forth – a literal understanding of Creation is the only one that works.  No, no, said one student.  There is too much scientific evidence to support that the world is much more wonderfully made than in six days.  Another student questioned the reality of how Adam and Even could bring out the entire human race from their genetic material.

At the sound of Adam and Eve’s names, one young boy at the very back of the class raised his hand and asked,

“You keep talking about this Adam and Eve.  Who are they?  Are they from the Lockyer Valley?”

The physical, psychological and spiritual hunger has enveloped our children in a cloud of despair and we, as adults, have done very little about it.  We have simply replied to the starving,

‘What can we do about it?  If God can’t feed them, how can we?  We’ll just put on our mourning clothes and rue the day the world changed.  We’ll reminisce about the good old days when families came to church, when there was no soccer on Sundays, when this new fangled device called the mobile phone didn’t interrupt existence.  We can’t do anything about this.’

It’s the great Christian cop out that we hold in our hands the Bread of Life, that which can feed the entire world, and we are reluctant to distribute it.  Even knowing Jesus had extraordinary powers to replicate and multiply the power of God through the Bread of Life, we are unable at best, and unwilling at worst, to save this generation of young people from starving. 

The Church is in need of transition also – to lose the mantle of yesterday’s wonder years and gain a whole new generation with dreams and visions for the future of God’s kingdom. 

Let’s feed them.

Later, as Jesus transitions us from humans who struggle with an understanding of scarcity, we will look at God’s abundance and what it means for a wide-eyed world who, for the first time in decades, may never have heard of the saving love of Jesus Christ.  But for now, let’s move to the next temptation to overcome – assurance.