John 6:2-35 - "What Are You Hungry For?" (11-21-07)

Jesus had just fed 5000 at the start of chapter six of John’s Gospel and then goes up to a mountain to get away from the people who want to crown him as the next holy Moses. Then Jesus walks on the water, like Moses who only walked through the water of the Red Sea. They find Jesus and want to eat some more of this great manna! Moses fed the people for forty years in the wilderness. These folks were literally hungry. They were set free from Egypt and started to wander in the wilderness. Then they started to grumble 45 days later to Moses that they were hungry! Yet God provided for them. Yet the people perhaps think it was Moses who is given the credit for feeding them for forty years. These folks were still hungry.

With Thanksgiving tomorrow, what is it that you are hungering to eat? Are you a dark meat or light meat kind of person? I like the dark meat. What is it you are hungry for to eat tomorrow? Football? Pie? Post meal nap? (Wait for responses). I really like sweat potatoes. During the year my wife will make Janette Keller’s sweat potato fries, delicious. The recipe is in the church’s cookbook, on sale in the lobby!

This year I’m hungry to cook stuffing the way my mom made it growing up. She gave me the recipe about seven years ago and I’ll make it and think about her as we share thanksgiving without her for the first time since she passed away this past October.

You see I am hungry to spend time with family and friends and to be grateful even in the midst of the sorrow and struggles of life.

What are we really hungry for? Perhaps we should be hungry for justice in the world. There are more and more working poor in our community, which is one of the main reasons there is an increase in participation in the local food pantries. Your support for these pantries on a monthly basis and through the ELCA Hunger appeal addresses this issue of people who would otherwise go hungry locally and globally.

More than 850 million people in the world go hungry. In developing countries nearly 11 million children die every year from preventable and treatable causes. Sixty percent of these deaths are from hunger and malnutrition. In the United States, 11.7 million children live in households where people have to skip meals or eat less to make ends meet. That means one in ten households in the U.S. are living with hunger or are at risk of hunger.[1]

There are many working poor in our community who work very hard and also have plenty of food in there homes and have plenty of resources available to buy good on an ongoing basis. There are many people in our community who have full bellies but are hungry. We gather because we need to admit we are hungry for mercy from the past, peace in our current relationships and hope for a more just world.

We gather to give God thanks tonight especially during difficult times, for it is during those times we are most hungry for gratitude. It is easy to be grateful when things are going well but when there is grief, pain, illness, or suffering, we hunger more than ever for gratitude. That’s why Abraham Lincoln established Thanksgiving formally as a National Holiday in the midst not of peace but of the civil war.

Yes, Jesus fed them food in the Gospel lesson and they wanted to follow him. They thought he would end their problems just by handing them a fish instead of teaching them how to fish! Jesus would feed the world by offering his body on the cross. He stood up against the powers of evil and injustice and was killed because of it! This is the bread that would feed the world; his very life still feeds us as we remember that it is in being broken that we are filled.

We gather because we are hungry!

Let us pray: Gracious God we gather to be fed your living word; we gather to be fed by the fellowship of those next to us; and we gather to taste and see your goodness. You feed us by being broken upon the cross that we may see you in our broken pieces. Feed us again, in Jesus name, Amen.

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[1] http://www.bread.org/learn/hunger-basics/