John 6:1-14,
Isaiah 55:1-9
3rd
Sunday in Lent 2013
The early morning news on Friday
featured a story about the new documentary movie “A Place at the Table.” This is a report about hunger in America. It offers a sobering overview of the 50
million neighbors across our land – 1 in 4 children -- that are not secure in
knowing where their next meal is coming from.
It does so through the lens of three different families living in three
different cultural contexts. Through
their stories, we learn more about how hunger has serious short and long term
economic, social and cultural implications.
One contributing factor to hunger
that I learned about is called a “food desert.”
This was a reality I was familiar with, but a term I hadn’t heard
before. It refers to locations that
have little to no access to large grocery stores offering the fresh, healthy
foods needed to maintain a good diet. Convenience
stores service such locations, places that primarily sell inexpensive processed
foods. Such cheap foods cause malnourishment
and lead to feelings of constant hunger.
One of the featured families in this
documentary lives in a Philadelphia “food desert.” This quickly caught my
attention, given that the summer months of my youth were spent living close to
poverty in the Northeast section of this city. And I honestly can’t recall ever going to a
big grocery store. I do recall mom and
pop shops full of candy, packaged foods, and rather unidentifiable but
affordable “fruit punch.” This was
really just sugar water with drops of various food coloring. I’ve
come to understand that the big grocery stores that used to be in urban
neighborhoods have largely relocated to the suburbs as the result of urban
sprawl. Left behind are low-income earners and senior
citizens unable to afford or to travel to places where truly nourishing foods
are available.
The low-income Philadelphia mom
being featured in the film was well aware of the unhealthy but convenient food
options available to her and her children.
She herself had grown up living
on Oodles of Noodles and Chef Boyardee.
But rather than just accept this, she routinely chooses to travel to a
fully-stocked supermarket for fresh, nutritious foods. This means a forty-five minute bus trip both
ways.
Her witness inspired me. She chose to turn away from convenient but
malnourishing things in favor of choosing and seeking out what provides true
sustenance. She seems to understand and faithfully answer
the rhetorical question found in Isaiah 55:2 – “Why do you spend money for that
which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?”
I think many folks choose convenient
but ultimately malnourishing things to satiate not only their physical hunger,
but their spiritual hunger as well. They
choose to spend money on and offer labor to false gods or spiritual fast food
fads that don’t require a commitment to go the distance needed to maintain a healthy
faith journey. So they find themselves
constantly spiritually malnourished, soul-hungry for true spiritual sustenance
such as that produced through a strong commitment to biblical spiritual
practices and by frequently sharing the fruits of the Holy Spirit in faith
community.
Many churches try to respond to this
plight. For instance, the church I
learned about recently that offered a drive-through Ash Wednesday service. I appreciate this witness, its attempt to
offer a sacred tradition to a culture that craves convenience. But it gets me wondering if picking up some
ashes and a printed prayer to take home actually leads to making consistent,
spiritually nourishing faith choices and to a positively changed way of life.
The theme of choice about where to
turn to for truly sustaining provision is central to today’s beautiful passage
from Isaiah. Using the imagery of a
great banquet, this is a compelling invitation to feast on the sustaining
life-instruction God alone provides.
Making the decision to listen to God leads to forsaking sin and its
entire convenient but ultimately spiritually malnourishing ways. It leads to the good, abundantly loving life
God has always intended so that all may truly live.
This invitation to homecoming was originally
offered by the great prophet to the 6th century Israelites living in
Babylonian exile. It was a call for
them to “uproot themselves, move to a land their generation never knew, and
reclaim their ancestral home.”[i] It was a summons to leave a way of life
where they had to unjustly pay for the basic necessities due to the
commodification schemes of their foreign rulers. This announcement was probably “both a
challenging hope and cruel absurdity” to them … for some would have been
thrilled to hear that God had not forgotten the 500 year old covenant with King
David, while others would have heard Isaiah’s words “as foolish and empty
promises.”[ii] To those doubting and to the those
trusting, Isaiah offered the reminder that they all needed to faithfully
believe big and beyond their oppressive, hungering circumstances – for God’s
thoughts and ways are higher than everything they knew.
Perhaps we Christians can relate to
this best when we recall how Jesus addressed Philip’s question, “Where are we
to buy bread for these people to eat?” by turning just five barley loaves and
two fish into a holy feast for five thousand people. I believe that when Jesus said, “Gather up
the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost,” he may have also been
pointing back to the time when the Israelites felt they were just leftover,
lost fragments in a foreign land.
The truly nourishing impact of
Isaiah’s message is described well by Louisville Seminary professor Patricia
Tull -- “Though a real event in an earthly world, the Babylonian exile of the
Jews was portrayed in Scripture with such moving imagination that later readers
saw in it much more than history. Poetry eloquently describing a pragmatic
return from exile in spiritual terms soon came to be read as describing the
spiritual journey of every believer from our various alienations to our home in
God.”
May we all come to be inspired to
make practical decisions that lead us away from convenient false gods and from
everything alienating us from the life God intends us to have. God intends us to know God’s abundant,
merciful, forgiving, liberating and empowering love for us in Jesus
Christ. God intends for us to have good
health and wholeness in mind, body and spirit.
God intends for us to come home
to holy care when we’ve been spiritually sick.
When we faithfully accept all this
as true, we come to the waters of our baptism, we come to know that we are
pardoned from ever having made spiritually malnourishing choices, and we come to know that we are empowered to offer
a far-reaching witness to God’s love and mercy and glory. This witness feeds both the physically and
spiritually hungry. “What would happen,” asks Professor Tull, “if
we take seriously the graceful cornucopia of this passage, offering nutritional
gifts not just for ourselves, but for all for whom God cares?” What a great question to feast on during this
season of Lent! Amen.
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