Texts: Psalm 116; Luke 24: 13-35

In 1961, India was on the brink of famine. American plant agronomist Norman Borlaug had developed new forms of high yield crops to Mexico in the late 1940s under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, doubling production; he was sent to India to apply his techniques and crops to stave off starvation. As a result of his work, wheat yields nearly doubled in the space of less than ten years. Called the Father of the Green Revolution, Borlaug was credited with saving over a billion lives and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. He saw his purpose in life as providing enough bread to go around to all.

The Green Revolution came at a price, of course, decreasing biodiversity and flooding fields with pesticides and now, with genetically modified crops pushed onto farmers by the likes of ADM and Monsanto. Borlaug, before he died in 2009 at the age of 85, criticized what he called the elitism of organic farming, which he saw as an assault on his life’s work to feed the world. As we consider on this Mother’s Day the impact of his work and of the work of people who are trying to change food policy, it’s important to remember that bread enough to go around is more than simply growing enough crops. The horrible famine in Ethiopia during the 1980s is but one of the more recent examples demonstrating that what is politely called “food insecurity” is the result of politics.

Food insecurity, hunger, and, yes, famine, have more to do with politics than the lack of food. Who can forget the image of an emaciated woman with no milk in her breast to feed her baby? We shudder and turn our concentration to other images. We cannot even remotely imagine our babies starving. We give to food banks as Congress argues that as a Nation we cannot afford to feed everyone. What Congress means, of course, is that the rich cannot afford to give up their luxuries so that the poor can eat. After all, the poor don’t give thousands of dollars to Congressional political campaigns.

How do we deal with the issue of persistent hunger? One potential Republican presidential candidate commented that the poor shouldn’t have so many children; of course, that same candidate opposes abortion and family planning. I guess he thinks the poor should just disappear. The poor we will always have, commented Jesus, not as a justification for stingy policies but as a commentary on the insatiable demands of the Must Have More" culture.

The Must Have More culture is not just limited to the page 2 jewelry ads or the luxury home pages of The New York Times; it encompasses all of us, including me. It’s really difficult for me to pass up a good book or a new seasoning. I have to admit there are mornings as I make my coffee and look at my spice rack and wonder if I really need or use all those seasonings. I have to admit that I have fewer qualms about my books justifying myself because I usually order from Amazon or go to a used book store.

In this morning’s reading, Jesus is known to his friends through the breaking of bread; in so many ways, we are also known to our friends through the breaking of bread. Eating together is probably the second most intimate shared act we engage in. This past week I read an old New York Times Magazine -- that’s right, I don’t put them in the recycling bin until after I’ve read them and the old ones are piled up. It was a letter to “The Ethicist” questioning the value of a class assignment in a social work program. The professor had students pretend to be homeless, go to welfare offices to apply for benefits, and a few other kinds of activities. One student asked if this was ethical, bristling that he would not “learn” anything valuable; the follow-up comment was that “learning” was more than simply seeing how others were treated. It was experiencing how the student himself was treated by others. Perhaps that was the point, commented the Ethicist.

I daresay that none of us in this room have ever been hungry -- really hungry and not just when we’re trying to lose weight. Our children haven’t cried for the lack of milk or food, partly because we have been taught how to make good choices, partly because we had certain advantages of race, class, education, work. Making sure there’s enough bread -- or veggies -- to go around is more than simply teaching good decision making to the poor. It is about changing our entire approach to poverty and hunger in America, not to mention the world. It is about making political choices on tax policy, education, and public benefits.

The assault on government led by the right wing talks about government as if it is something apart from us. Well, it is not! Our church graveyard contains the remains of men and women who died because they believed that they should be the government and we are the beneficiaries of their courage and determination. We the people -- those are the words enshrined in the Constitution -- are the government. Listen to the words: “We the people of the United States in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”

As a Nation, we need to take a different approach on the problem of hunger not just by feeding people through food banks but by radically changing the way we treat the poor. We need to really utilize the old adage of giving a person a fish and there’s food for a day but teach a person to fish and there’s food for a lifetime. It means as a society we need to invest more in benefits that are truly public, like education and job training. The cry of “we can’t afford it” is short-sighted. We cannot not afford it. Just think: doesn’t it make more sense to beef up education, spend the money on teacher salaries than to pay unemployed teachers unemployment, which yields a lower tax rate? Doesn’t it make more sense to have a ,real system of food security rather than doling it out through church food banks? Obviously, I’m not saying we should stop feeding programs but we also need to go to the root causes of food insecurity, as it’s called, and attack the problem there.

This means investing in our society in a way we have not done for many years. It means that each of us must study the issues, consider the questions involved in light of our Christian framework, and do that thing which we really hate to do, contact our state and national legislators with our opinions. Jesus made himself known in breaking bread and sharing it with others. Reflecting Jesus, shouldn’t we do the same?

Let us pray: Magnificent Creator who has given us a world with so much, help us to develop new and creative ways to care for your children so no one will be hungry. Amen.