December 12, 2010 sermon on hunger, St. James Episcopal, West Hartford
Christopher J. Doucot
I was 18 when I first came across today’s canticle, the Magnifact; I was visiting the Catholic Worker in Worcester and we were praying from the office of the Hours. Being Catholic I was ignorant of scripture and unaware that this song of righteous expectation, attributed to Mother Mary, was found in Luke’s Gospel. I remain awestruck by three verses in the middle: “He has shown the strength of his arm, he has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.” During the remainder of my college years, reading the works of philosophers across the spectrum, I would not encounter a more concise call for justice. Chanting this passage as a student attending an exclusive private college I was oblivious that I was the proud about to be scattered or that I might be the mighty whose throne was soon to be pulled from under me. I couldn’t imagine that I was the rich one about to be sent away empty; and yet these are all facets of the promise God made to Abraham.
God has promised us the Kingdom- a time of endless mercy and a place of everlasting bounty for his faithful servants. Elsewhere in Luke the fate of the unfaithful followers of Jesus, his fans who aren’t willing to commit to discipleship, is made clear. In the story of the rich young man we learn that he keeps his riches but walks away from Jesus sad because he is unwilling to practice the radical sharing that was not yet called Christianity. And in the story of poor Lazarus and wealthy Dives we see the sadness of the rich young man become eternal isolation. Luke doesn’t mince his words: the lowly will be lifted when the mighty are cast down, and the hungry will be filled when the rich are sent away empty. In these stories Jesus is not calling for a simple reversal of fortune but rather for the profound multiplication of fortune that will result when we recognize that we are all equal in god’s eyes and thus equally deserving to fully partake of god’s bounty. The apostles took seriously Jesus’ instruction to the rich young man, they shared everything they had with one another so that “there was not a needy person among them.”
This is not a claim that today’s Christians can make. Today we are surrounded by needy persons. From the desperate mothers in Haiti baking biscuits of mud and flour in the mid-day sun, to the families in New Orleans, (who were helped by your young people this summer), eating in soup kitchens because their ramshackle homes, washed away by broken promises as much as by broken levees, have yet to be rebuilt. And of course just down the road in the capital city of the nation’s wealthiest state reside some of the nation’s neediest families. According the City of Hartford Advisory Commission on Food Policy, 52% of Hartford’s low income households, which in reality is nearly %52 of the city, are uncertain of where they will get their food; the commission also determined that in the past year at least one quarter of Hartford’s families went to bed hungry at some point. This is despite the fact that more than 25 million pounds of food were distributed by foodbanks in CT this year. Stating the obvious the Hartford commission on food policy concluded that: “the chief reason why more CT residents are experiencing food insecurity despite the expanded availability of food assistance is because poverty is also rising.” It took a government study to learn that people are hungry because they are poor.
My young friend Floyd is one of these poor and hungry people. Floyd is a first year student at Manchester Community College. To get to class on time Floyd hits the bus stop at 6 in the morning. One day last week he called from school to see if I could give him a ride home because he stayed to watch the women’s basketball team. I picked him up around 7:30 in the evening; he had not eaten since breakfast. Over a dinner of chicken fingers at Friendly’s I asked him why he did not pack a lunch- he told me there was no food in his apartment. I asked how his Thanksgiving was. He told me his family didn’t have a Thanksgiving dinner- “but we gave you a turkey and a box of food I said”. “I know”, he replied, “but the gas has been turned off so we couldn’t cook it.” He went on to elaborate how his mother is heating the apartment with electric space heaters and they bathe with a pot of water warmed on an electric hot plate. Eventually the inflated electric bills will be too much and their electricity will be turned off too. When this happens Floyd’s, or another family members’, name and social security number will be used to open a new account with CL and P. In turn this account will also become delinquent and service will again be terminated. When Floyd eventually moves out he will have bad credit and he will be unable to get electrical service in his own apartment without paying off any outstanding balance. This is what it means to be poor and hungry.
As Floyd’s circumstances illustrate hunger is just a symptom of the disease of poverty. Accordingly our response must seek to ameliorate the immediate pangs of hunger while simultaneously attacking poverty. That is, our response must be at once charitable and justice seeking. We are absolutely obliged to immediately feed the hungry. We must generously donate food and money to food banks, food pantries and soup kitchens throughout the year and not simply at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Food pantries and soup kitchens are the emergency rooms that take care of the immediate needs of hungry people; but they cannot end hunger.
To end hunger for more than a night we need to seek justice and not simply practice charity. Acts of charity alone leave unchallenged sinful social structures and relationships that impoverish. The most profound theological lesson I’ve learned in twenty years of living with poor people is that charity, when done without justice, is sinful because it reinforces a domineering relationship between the giver and the receiver. In fact the pride we feel when performing an act of charity is directly proportional to the humiliation experienced by the recipient. A justice response to hunger and poverty can only be had by entering into meaningful, honest, and equal relationships with poor and hungry people. We who are not poor or hungry cannot pretend to know the experiences of Floyd and his family and we cannot feign to be experts on how to end their suffering. When we remain aloof from the poor in our midst, we set legislative agendas, craft regulatory responses to poverty and cast judgments about poor people, that tend to blame them for their poverty while holding ourselves faultless. For poor persons to object to this and instead question a society whereby they are hungry while others have excess is to risk biting the hand that feeds. Jesus challenges this analysis of the privileged minority by turning it around and declaring that wealth is the problem- not poverty.
Ultimately, the problems of hunger and poverty are not the result of technological or logistical shortcomings but rather moral shortcomings. The abundant resources in our world today are enough for all of God’s children to be respectfully housed, properly educated, tenderly cared for when ill, and amply fed. Focusing on food alone for a minute consider that in any given year the United States throws away 27% of our edible food. A recent study out of the University of Texas calculated that by throwing away this food every year we are also throwing away the 350 million barrels of oil used to produce and transport it, that is more oil than 194 countries individually use every year.
Poverty and hunger are the products of our wrong relationships with both wealth and the poor. A wrong relationship with the poor involves domination- which can be sinister in the form of exploitation or seemingly innocent in the form of anonymous charity. Meanwhile a wrong relationship with wealth is one that confuses control with ownership. When we presume to own the wealth that we control we have usurped God’s authority. The bounty of this planet belongs to our generous and merciful God who alone has created it. As disciples we are called to be responsible stewards of this wealth ensuring that all of God’s children have a place at the table. If we can seek right relationships with the poor and with god’s wealth everything else will quickly fall into place.
In the lingo of those who fight hunger poor communities like Hartford are food deserts. That is, the vast majority of Hartford residents do not have access to sufficient amounts of healthy food. Major supermarkets like Stop and Shop or Shaw’s don’t open in poor neighborhoods because they will not likely turn a profit, and poor folks have a difficult time shopping at existing supermarkets because they don’t have cars. The solution, though, is not to build supermarkets in the ghetto; the supermarket was designed to meet the needs of the middle class and assumes car ownership because the logic of the supermarket assumes that customers will be buying large quantities of food. People without cars cannot buy large quantities of food. If you’ve never done it, I challenge you to do your grocery shopping by walking or using the city bus to get back and forth.
It isn’t the absence of supermarkets that makes a food desert but rather the absence of healthy whole foods. The majority of calories consumed by my neighbors are from highly processed food items purchased at the corner bodegas. These small stores typically have a very small selection of fresh fruits and vegetable relative to processed junk because the profit margins are so different. These stores must sell junk in order to turn a profit. In turn the people of our neighborhood experience much higher incidences of diet related disease like diabetes and hypertension. We know that people, children in particular, are not eating these empty calories because it is their preference, they do so because this junk is what is available. Our experience has shown that when given choices our neighbors, and, again, especially the children who come to our place, will choose to eat fresh fruit and vegetables when they are made available and when they are well prepared. Our nation subsidizes food and farmers in a variety of ways and we have done so for generations. A first simple step in ending hunger in Hartford is to make quality fresh produce available in our neighborhoods by finding a way to financially reward bodegas that devote shelf space to good whole foods. That it is not profitable to make good food available to poor people is a moral problem.
A second step is to bring farmer’s markets, currently active in the west end and downtown, into the heart of our neighborhoods. This effort can also work to overcome the alienation that some city children have with the natural world. A few years ago I grew corn behind our place. Despite it being delicious some of the kids refused to eat it because having never seen corn on a stalk before they thought it was dirty. There is abundant empty land in Hartford and the reality is that it will probably never again be used for retail, industry or housing. Perhaps Hartford could follow the lead of Detroit which has begun experimenting with urban agriculture as a way to restore the city and feed the hungry. These efforts will take a re-prioritizing of funding- another moral question.
A final suggestion on how to combat hunger in our midst is to use the cafeterias in our schools to feed children and their families. Despite 91% of Hartford school children being eligible for free breakfast and lunch at school only 35% of these children eat the free breakfast. This lack of participation is largely the result of the food being unappealing. We all remember what school food was like; it is typically prepared elsewhere and reheated in the school. It is bland, soggy, and unattractive. With a school in every neighborhood our society has in place the infrastructure to feed families if we are willing to invest sufficient resources to purchase healthy whole foods and to hire professionals to prepare appetizing meals.
Earlier I mentioned that following Jesus’ instructions to the rich man to sell all that he had and give the proceeds to the poor would not be a simple turning of the tables but rather a profound multiplication of fortunes. Here’s how this miracle of loaves and fishes would work. Recall in the story that the man asked Jesus what he must do to gain eternal life, to wit Jesus replied that he must follow the commandments. It was when the man replied that he was already following the commandments that Jesus instructed him to sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor. Of course we all know that the man refused to do so, and instead chose to walk away from Jesus sad.
By asking the man to follow the commandments Jesus was asking him to seek shalom with his family, his neighbors, the poor and God. Though we typically translate the Hebrew word shalom as peace its more precise translation is right relationship. Jesus is telling us that eternal life is the fruit of right relationships. Second century commentary on this passage makes the point that the man could not possibly be honoring the commandments and seeking right relationships with the poor because he was still rich, and the right care of the poor, if we are to love them to the extent that we love ourselves, cannot be had on the cheap. Jesus knew this and was offering the rich man more explicit instructions on how to enter into right relationships with his neighbors in order to be in right relationship with Jesus. It is because the rich man refuses to have a right relationship with wealth that he is unable to have the right relationships with the poor that Jesus has invited him to seek. The story of the rich man is simply an illustration of Jesus’ teaching that we cannot serve two masters- god and mammon. The rich man left sad because he chose money over Jesus.
As mentioned earlier, the apostles chose to heed Jesus’ instructions on wealth and thus there were no poor or hungry persons in their community. While the book of Acts does not explicitly declare the apostles to be happy it seems that modern social science may make that claim, and this is where the multiplication of fortunes I mentioned is made real. According to research done by Dr. Ed Diener, a psychologist from the University of Illinois, increasing amounts of wealth does not lead to increasing levels of happiness. In his research he has found that wealth leads to happiness only in so far as it alleviates poverty, beyond that, however, accumulating wealth does not lead to more happiness. Instead, Dr. Diener has found that increased happiness among the nonpoor is achieved through significant and meaningful relationships. Money does not make us happy; rather we make each other happy by seeking right relationships with one another. This is why Mary sings “My soul proclaims the greatness of the lord, my spirit rejoices in God my savior…”
When we open our vaults to fill the hungry with good things, and our hearts to meaningful relationships with the poor we too will be filled with that Spirit of everlasting joy that descended upon Mary. This is not a joy that can be bought but rather a bliss revealed by fully sharing God’s bounty.
We are a nation that can do whatever we imagine and fund whatever we hold dear. We have sent men to the moon and spent trillions of dollars to fight wars on distant shores. It is only our lack of moral imagination which prevents us from being a nation that can instead send farmers and chefs to the ‘hood and it is a gap in our moral courage that refuses to spend any amount necessary to feed all God’s children. As faithful servants of God it must be our mission to overcome this moral poverty and fulfill God’s promise to Abraham, Sarah and all their children now and forever. Amen.
