Why Hunger?

The Rev. Ron Sala

Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford

December 15, 2002

There is an old Jewish tale about a certain legendary rabbi who goes to the house of a wealthy acquaintance dressed like a beggar asking for something to eat. The master of the house turns him away rudely. The next day, the rabbi returned in his own clothes and was invited in to dine. When they sat down at the table, the host was shocked to see the rabbi taking spoonfuls of his fine food and pouring them on his shirt, his coat, and his trousers. At last, the man can stand it no longer and shouts, “What are you doing?”

The rabbi replies, “When I came yesterday, in the clothes of a beggar, would give me nothing to eat. Now, in these clothes, you have invited me in. I could only assume that your invitation was not for me but for my clothes!”

In the same tradition of Jewish storytelling, Jesus told the parable of the feast that Carole read for us. Here also was a story about hosts and guests, rich and poor.

In this season of feasting, celebrating the birth of this wandering storyteller, I would like to share with you about ways this parable can shed light on our situation in the world today, especially regarding all those not invited to the banquet.

Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the French politician and gourmet, said, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are.” There’s a real connection between food and status. I was acutely aware of that the other day when I listened to part of a talk show where they discussed the quality of $70 an ounce caviar. Meanwhile, 800 million of our fellow humans do not have enough to eat. How’s that for a status difference? Such is the world we live in.

Our storyteller, Jesus, was familiar with a similar world of status and despair. The Roman elites that ruled his land loved their ornate banquets or orgies. There was a particular seating arrangement on the couches surrounding the dining table or tables that showed at a glance everyone’s social status. The guest of honor and host reclined on couches near each other in the place of highest status. “…to eat sitting was suitable only for children, who sat on stools...or for slaves, who received permission to recline like their masters only on holidays.”¹

The rich of Jesus’ day had a choice of many delicacies, “...mollusks harvested under a waxing moon, sea urchins from Misenum, oysters from Circeii, scallops from Tarentum, and Umbrian boar raised on acorns”² to name but a few. Meanwhile, the peasants lived a different life. Their economic status was in a downward spiral in the time of Jesus. According to Mark M. Mattison,

“When they could no longer afford to meet their financial obligations through tolls, taxes, tribute, and tithes, they had to borrow money from the elites. When they were unable to pay their debts, the elites confiscated their land and downgraded the peasants from landowners to tenants. When the tenants could no longer afford to rent the land, they were further downgraded to the status of day laborers, finding temporary work on a day-to-day basis. Day laborers eked out a substandard living in desperate circumstances, living literally hand-to-mouth. Once day laborers were unable to work or unable to find work, they became street beggars. Not long after hitting the streets, the downwardly mobile peasants could expect a short and brutal life.³

That’s the backdrop to the story. Enter “someone” giving a “big dinner.” In the Luke’s Greek, it was a megas deipnon [MEG-ahs DIPE-non]—a “mega dinner,” a formal evening meal. And it’s for “many” persons. Only the most wealthy could afford to feed two tables of nine or more guests. This looks like a fabulous feast. Nevertheless, the three friends we’re presented with as typical of the “many” invited all give excuses why they won’t come to dine. Two give economic excuses, land, oxen. One gives a personal reason, a new wife. These presumably well-off people did not seem to count the invitation as anything special. If Jesus were speaking today, he might say these people took the costly invitation and “blew it off.”

And that set off the host. Did you ever throw a party and have less than an overwhelming response? Or did somebody cancel out of a dinner you were making at the last minute with the lamest of excuses? I’d imagine you felt rather like the host of the banquet in the parable—angry at people for letting you down. I’d guess you and he might feel a bit lonely, too.

What does he do? We read that he said to his slave, "Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.'

The word translated “town,” in our reading,” is the Greek word polis or city. The word polis also means the people of the city. We can picture the slave walking among the urban poor of Jesus day, who probably weren’t so much different from our own. Poverty and hunger have a way of being timeless. When you don’t having anything to eat, you don’t care what century it is….

Over a third of a million New Yorkers have been turned away from food pantries this year. Nineteen thousand of these were elderly and 85,000 were children.

To return to the parable, the master of the house, after some time, receives the word, “Sir, what you ordered has been done, and there is still room.” So he says, “Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled.” He tells his slave to search the rural areas for people who might appreciate the meal.

To bring our attention back to our own time and nation, let me ask you something. You’ve no doubt heard of the Bible Belt, the Corn Belt, and the Sun Belt. How about the American Hunger Belt? It stretches from New Mexico to Washington State. Oregon has the highest hunger rate, at 5.8%--and the problem is getting worse.⁴

The Greek word, phragmos [frag-MOS], translated in the last verse of our reading as “lanes” can also be rendered “hedges” or “fences.”. The word can also be used for “that which separates [or] prevents two from coming together,” a, “wall” or a “barrier.”

What are some of the barriers that separate people today? There’s certainly race. We can easily be lured, consciously or not, into believing that hunger among those who look less like us is less tragic than among those who look more like us. And don’t we all have the same basic parts, a mind, a heart, a spirit, and a body that needs regular nourishment to avoid suffering and death.

What about the barrier of gender? Seventy percent of the world’s poor are female, which goes together with the fact that girls are educated worldwide at a lower rate than boys.

And what about the barrier of nation? Is it worse when Americans go hungry than Africans? Afghanis? Iraqis? Central Americans?

Consider the life of a small girl in Ethiopia, related by a special correspondent to the Addis Tribune in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia:

At the tender age of seven Nuria Ibrahim shouldn't have to worry about starvation or death. But like many children in Ethiopia she soon learnt the harsh realities of life in one of the poorest countries in the world. The familiar cloud of despair once again hangs over Ethiopia where famine has a stranglehold on 15 million people - one in four of the population.

Nuria, dressed in tatty, dirty rags, knows that starvation and death are not far away. "I am very worried about the hunger," she says sitting on a rock and drawing shapes in the dust. "But I would rather die quickly than starve slowly waiting for food," she adds, her chilling words spoken so matteroffactly.

Her modest ambitions are unlikely to ever become reality in a country where even in a good year five million people need food handouts. Her parents, subsistence farmers eking out a pitiful day-to-day existence, could never afford to let their daughter study.

It’s a chilling account, but so common in a world where 24,000 people will die this Christmas Day of starvation and other preventable causes, just like any other day of the year.⁵

We’re pretty far from that vision of Jesus of a great banqueting table to which everyone is invited. Too few of us have been invested with the spirit of the master in the tale who throws open the doors of hospitality to the world who makes sure his house is filled and won’t take no for an answer.

The Greek word for house here is oikos [OY-kos], from which we derive our word “economy.” For, really, this earth is a household on which we all rely for our daily bread. We all know that the pantry of the planet is not open to all. In the midst of our feasting, we know that there is an impediment to the fullest joy. We tell ourselves lies, pretending that the status quo is not so bad. We ignore it as best we can or explain it away as “those people” not being as deserving as ourselves, we tell ourselves someone else will help them, or that’s just the way things are.

But none of us can feign ignorance. We know. We do not have the excuse of so many “good Germans” that we have no idea what is going on on the other side of the barriers. We know, or we refuse to find out.

A wise person once said, “Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels so good.”

So, why is there hunger? Oxfam America lists a number of reasons: lack of education, lack of access to power and resources, the patterns of trade, militarization and war, and discrimination.

What would it take to save the world’s poorest? By the estimate of the United Nations Development Organization, an additional $13 billion a year would be necessary to provide the basic nutrition and healthcare needed. How much is $13 billion dollars?” About as much as Europeans and Americans spend on pet food every year!⁶ I know we love our pets, but would it kill us to feed the humans, too? Maybe somebody should start a movement to donate a can of food for the food pantry for every can of pet food they buy…. Just a thought.

But it’s not really our pets that are starving the world. We consume so much and spend so much on things we don’t need. And then there’s military spending. After all, $13 billion is chump change compared to the $839 billion the world’s governments spend each year on their militaries—that’s 839 billion and rising!

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a general, shone light on the sad state of affairs in his day in the words of his farewell address:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

I’m not pointing fingers at any government in particular, though several come to mind. I’m just saying that we’ve got a pretty messed up way of allocating resources on this planet. Those of us who don’t sit on the world’s legislatures should be rightfully angry, just like the master in the parable, that the exquisite banquet set forth is being wasted. As the bumper sticker proclaims, “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.”

What can we do? Before I answer that, I’d like to highlight the work of Leslie Weinberg here at the Society and all she does with the anti-poverty organization RESULTS. Leslie is always looking for others to join her in keeping active in lobbying our government to see access to food as not a privilege but as the human right it is. I want to thank Leslie for her research help in writing this sermon.

One response to hunger is, of course, to give, locally, nationally, and internationally.

Another is to conserve food and energy and eat lower on the food chain. In "THE FOOD REVOLUTION" John Robbins tells us that 90% of the soy beans, 80% of the corn, and 70% of all grains grown in North America are fed to animals. It’s a miserably inefficient way to feed ourselves.

Perhaps the biggest impact we can have is by influencing policy makers to view hunger as a priority. And, if we have any notion of human life as sacred, what could be a higher priority?

In short, we need to proclaim and live by the fact that the economy, the household of the world, is too important to be left to the economists, the politicians, the corporations. It is for the people, to share in the bounty and the joy of life. It exists that we might join together at a common table. This is the dream that Jesus lived and died for.

This Christmas, let us remember the words of Howard Thurman,

When the song of angels is stilled,

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flock,

The work of Christmas begins:

to find the lost,

to heal the broken,

to feed the hungry,

to release the prisoner,

to rebuild the nations,

to bring peace among

the brothers,

to make music in the

heart.

¹ Carcopino, Jerome. Daily Life in Ancient Rome: The People and the City at the Height of the Empire. New Haven, Ct. Yale University Press, 1940.

² Berg, Deena. "The Mystery Gourmet of Horace's Satires 2." Classical Journal 9.2 (January 1996): 141-151.

⁴ “HUNGER RATES HIGHEST IN WESTERN STATES” (Santa Fe New Mexican, Santa Fe, NM, November 30, 2002)

⁵ http://www.oxfamamerica.org/advocacy/art751.html [accessed 12/14/02]

⁶ http://www.bread.org/hungerbasics/index.html [accessed 12/15/02]