A Sermon on Isaiah 59:1-8 And John 6:1-14: We Need Bread For The World

This Sunday at Parkrose Community United Church of Christ our Scripture readings were Isaiah 59: 1-8 and John 6: 1-14.  There is no podcast of the sermon available this week but my sermon notes are below.

My brother and sisters, I come here this morning to ask for your help.

As Christians, we have been called to be stewards of the earth and to be concerned with the welfare of all of humanity. We offer our praises to God for providing us with a bountiful world that can provide for our every need.

But greed, corruption, inadequate planning and a host of other human sins and mistakes have created a world where many suffer.

Bread for the World, the Christian anti-poverty group, reports that:

More than 854 million people in the world go hungry.

 

In developing countries nearly 16 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. 

Facts and figures like these are often so large that they become difficult to comprehend. But let me stress one of those facts: 16 million children die every year from preventable and treatable causes. Sixty percent of these deaths are from hunger and malnutrition.

These are children with as much potential as any in the United States. These are children as special and as beloved by God as Frances or Katherine or any other child in this church, in our families, or in our schools.

As Christians, we have a special responsibility to work towards the elimination of hunger and poverty. Read your Bible. Throughout you’ll hear God’s call for us to create a more just world where hunger and poverty are eliminate. Jesus calls this Kingdom-building.

Bread for the World has taken this passage we have read today from John and said:

John’s account of the miracle of the loaves and fishes is the only one that includes the little boy. The boy has been better prepared than the rest of the crowd and brought his meal with him. However, he gives it up, trusting Jesus to do what is best.

 

We must follow the boy’s example – not just in trusting God with our financial resources, but also offering our power as citizens in a democracy. When we use our voices to call for Congress to increase funding for effective programs that help developing countries in Africa and other poor parts of the world, we are trusting God to do miraculous things with this small action.   

To take up this challenge of trusting God and caring for the least of these across the globe our Missions and Outreach Team, with the support of the Church Council, has decided to ask the congregation to take part in an advocacy campaign designed to ask members of Oregon’s congressional delegation to support legislation that would help reduce hunger and poverty. Bread for the World, a non-partisan Christian advocacy group, is the organization overseeing this campaign.

Specifically, Bread for the World is asking Congress to increase funding for poverty fighting efforts by at least $5 billion a year, starting this coming year.

They are also requesting that the Congress pass the Global Poverty Act, now in Congress. This act would do two important things:

· Make the the first Millennium Development Goal (to cut in half the number of people who are hungry and the number of people living on less than $1 a day) an official part of US policy.

· Require a coordinated strategy to achieve this goal through

U.S.

aid, debt relief, and trade policies. The strategy would emphasize cooperation with other countries, international institutions, faith based groups, and the private sector.   

How will we as a church engage in this effort? 

Bread for the World is asking that we write letters to our members of Congress about these legislative goals. Next week during coffee hour there will be a table set-up where you can write your letters. We’ll include sample letters and additional information so that you can make an informed argument to your members of Congress. The following week we will collect all those letters and present them during worship as part of our offering to God. Then the letters will be mailed to Congress. You’ll hear more about exactly how this works next week.  

So why should we undertake this project here at church?

We read in James 2:17 that “faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead (NRSV).”

We heard from the Prophet Isaiah this morning that the iniquities we create “have been barriers between you and your God, and your sins have hidden God’s face from you so that God does not hear (Isaiah 59:2 NRSV). In other words, how we treat those who are hungry and suffering determines what our own relationship with God will be. If we work for justice in the world God will be with us. But if we stand by and do nothing it creates a barrier between us and the divine.

I know there are some people in the congregation who would rather that I never preach on social issues such as these. Let me say that I respect that. For many church is a place of respite where you come to be uplifted after a hard week. That’s fair enough.

Here’s where I run into some trouble: As a pastor, I’m called by God to preach the Gospel and the Gospel talks about war, poverty, hunger, disease, etc. and the main character, Jesus, is so radical the state puts him to death. So my advice is that if you ever have a pastor who never talks about these issues please fire him or her because they aren’t preaching the teachings we learn from Scripture.

The work we do at Snow-Cap as a congregation is an excellent example of how we try and live out our faith. We provided needed food and other donations that are distributed to those who need such assistance. We should keep doing this as long as the need is there. 

At the same time, we ought to be dreaming about a time when hunger and poverty are a thing of the past. We ought to be advocating for changes in policy that help create hunger and poverty. Our goal should not be to simply apply band-aids (even though band-aids can save lives) but to change the way the world operates so that suffering of this kind ends.

Through working with Bread for the World and by taking part in the simple act of writing letters to Congress we have an opportunity to witness to God in new ways, to break down barriers that keep us from fully being in relationship with the one who called us into being, and to save millions of lives…lives whose deaths God surely mourns.