Some years ago, I shared with you that Douglas and I have a personal prayer before we eat at home, our own take on saying grace before our meals. It goes something like this: “Gracious God, we thank you for all things, for each other and for others, and we thank you for this life that gives us life. Amen.” I shared that prayer of grace with you during a sermon where I was speaking of how we need to pay attention to the way our food is produced, that the way we nurture the land and treat the animals we consume, and that such attention is a matter of justice. And when Douglas and I thank God for “this life that gives us life,” we acknowledge that an animal, or even a plant, if you assume that plants live and die, we acknowledge that something had to die for us to be able to live. There is a rhythm to life there that is obvious, though it does not come without its own ethical quandaries, even if Genesis tells us that that God has given us these animals and plants as our food (Genesis 1:29). That topic is for another sermon, but this morning I wanted to tease something else out related to the issue of food and our ethical relationship to it, and that is whether or not we have an obligation to worry about other’s people food or lack of it. Now, you might think that the answer is an obvious “yes” for us Christians, that your lack of food is something I should care about. And it’s obvious that is the case in both the Hebrew and Christian portions of the Bible – caring for our neighbors and helping them is just right there, all over the place. But, there are forces in our culture, even among Christians, who want us divest the church of this notion that we owe each other something, including food, all in an attempt to make the case for a kind of libertarian, you’re on your own, late-stage corporate capitalism. I’ll get to that in a few minutes, but I want us to get a sense of what is happening in our text and how this relates to a larger call for food justice we find in the Bible and especially in the Hebrew Bible, what we often call the Old Testament.

Let’s look at the context of this text for a few minutes. The people of Israel have spent 40 years wandering in the desert and finally have reached the edge of the Promise Land. Moses has died on a mountain overlooking the land he will never enter because of a sin he has committed, sin being the overall reason it took the people of Israel so long to get to this promise land after being freed from Egypt. A generation has died and a new generation has risen, but the men of this new generation have not been circumcised, the male foreskin of these men have remained intact, circumcision was believed to be a sign of the covenant between God and Abraham in Genesis 17 (14-19). But there is historical evidence that circumcision was practiced by the Egyptians and the Bible itself says that other surrounding nations also practiced circumcision, in Jeremiah 9:25. Joshua, the new leader of Israel, calls for this new generation of men to become circumcised and they are, leaving a painful mess for the men that had to take a take a long, long month to heal up. The whole ordeal ends with the first verse in our text today, where God says to Joshua: “Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt.” Honestly, we don’t quite know the obvious meaning of this sentence – what disgrace, other than perhaps the older generation having circumcised their male offspring after they left Egypt, forgetting the sign of the covenant God once made with Abraham.

Whatever that disgrace was, it has been rolled away and the people celebrate a Passover meal, a meal which commemorates the moment when the angel of death passed over every household whose door was marked with lamb’s blood, during the time when God sent the plagues to try to convince the Egyptian Pharaoh to let the Hebrew slaves go free. We don’t how they got this Passover food, but the very next day, the manna from heaven that God had provided the people just stops, this feathery bread-like substance that fed the people is no more. After 40 years of having that umbilical cord to their Creator, they would now have to eat what the land produced, and – this is very important – they would now have to begin to live under the rules around that land and food that they were given by God through Moses 40 years earlier. These rules, these laws that were in THE LAW, were now to be enacted, because they had moved on from complete dependence on God’s gift of guaranteed manna to one where they had to till the land, care for their livestock, and, and use the land in a just way for their sake and the sake of others. They had just left a life in Egypt where they were forced to work on storage cities, the place where the Pharaohs stored their abundance of food, food they would use to control the people, rather than helping out others, outsider even, unlike when Joseph was in charge of these same storage places generations earlier.

And that is important to keep in mind when you hear of the laws of these newly minted invaders of the Promised Land, as they took control of the land from those who were there before them – a reality that would be a tough sermon on its own, but look, I’ve got only a few minutes here. But the whole new system of rules they were to now follow were actually based in the rules of how to use the manna God had been giving them for 40 years. In Exodus 16, in verse 18, the Scripture says this: “those who gathered much had nothing left over, and those who gathered little had no shortage.” In another words, the folks that tried to store away more of the manna then they needed for that day found this stored manna uneatable the next day. And the folks who gathered little to make sure their neighbors had enough found that the little they gathered was enough for the day. The food wasn’t meant to be a way to enrich oneself, especially at the expense of others – that is why manna was useless the next day, to stop the greedy, like the Egyptians they had just escaped from, from using something needed by all to survive as a way to enrich and manipulate others. The manna helped the people keep the Sabbath, the holy day of rest, because the gatherers of this manna were expected to rest as well, and so the manna collected right before the Sabbath would not spoil as it normally did, making sure there would be enough to keep their bellies full. All this was to prevent the Israelites from playing around with their food, so to speak, of using it as a source of wealth building for the few at the expense of the many, as the Egyptians had done.

So the people are now to follow a new set of rules that would be echoed by their experience with the manna, rules about “land possession, farming, food choices, food sharing, and the treatment, killing and eating of animals” (Connections, Year C, Vol 2 –77). First, these manna based rules would show up in the idea that the land you were given in this new Promise Land was on loan from God – and that no person would ultimately lose their land because of some misfortune. Every 50 years, in what was called the Jubilee Year, the land would revert back to the original owners if they had previously sold it, which helped to narrow the gap between rich and poor (Leviticus 5:10) You couldn’t store up the manna of the land the forever, so to speak – it was on loan from God to you, and you could loan it out to others for a price, but it would always come back to your family every 50 years. Farmers were to reap from the harvest off their lands, but they were told to leave the outer edges of their fields unreaped, so that the poor and the immigrants could gather much needed food (Leviticus 19:9-10). Underneath it all was this idea that food was meant for all of us, and even those who couldn’t farm or who didn’t have a field to plow had a right to food, since the permanent owner of all land was actually God, who simply loaned it out to us human beings. And yet there is an interesting tension that comes in passage in the Bible that is used by some, while ignoring all of the texts and rules I’ve cited today. The anonymous writer of 2 Thessalonians 3:10 says that those that don’t work don’t eat, which seems to be an interesting contradiction of what the rest of the Bible says. Jesus fed 5000 people who unwisely didn’t bring food with them as they were listening to Jesus, as we all remember, and Jesus seems far more interested in scolding those who have much and do little for others with what they have been given. An interesting tension here found in the Bible, but it is noteworthy that the second Thessalonians text is often use as a way to contradict what the bulk of the Christian and Jewish tradition actually says.

But the Thessalonians text is not surprising, not really. There has always been a strain in our scriptures and the history of the church that balked at the idea of people getting something for free, which, I think, shows up in the trouble that some of us have with Jesus’ gift of grace being free and for everyone. Surely we should do something to earn this, and so we do this and this and this, and then it’s free, which, of course, doesn’t actually make grace a free gift at all. I was doing some research on the internet on today’s topic and I stumbled on a website of a think tank called the Institute for Faith, Work and Economics. It’s a right wing Christian organization meant to make the Christian case for a Hayekian, Randian, libertarian, extreme laisses faire style of economics. The website of the organization is quite impressive, reflecting that is a probably well-funded think tank, and its full of articles meant to debunk what Jesus and the Hebrew Bible clearly says by arguing that the ideas I mentioned a few minutes ago, found in Scripture, have been misinterpreted. After all, Jesus telling us to sell everything and give it to the poor, or this whole Jubilee year thing, with land going back to the original owners, is offensive to rights of private property owners – it’s not really God’s land, especially if God’s not going to pay the taxes on it! I read through a couple of articles, and it was obvious that these scholars were doing everything possible to get the Bible to justify our late stage corporate capitalism. Ignore what the Jewish and Christian traditions have taught about this, though rarely followed by the Jewish and Christian people, because these scholars from this think tank will show you that, in fact, the Bible endorses the ideas of, ironically, the atheist Ayn Rand, who called her owns ideas a philosophy of selfishness.

Look, I do think of food as a human right, and water as well, since without them we simply can’t survive as human beings – and I think the Scriptures of both Testaments generally agree with me, and with two thousands of Christian and Jewish tradition, though, of course, a set of traditions not always followed by us over the last 3000 years. Our current government is attempting to roll back food stamps, if not outright eliminate them, though these stamps rarely cover a family’s food budget or needs, even at their most generous. We have a tribe in charge, so to speak, that doesn’t really believe anything is a gift, not really, and they certainly don’t think of anything as being on loan from God. They often believe the land or money is theirs and theirs alone, and if you can’t farm, if you can’t make enough money, you shouldn’t even really be able to glean from the outer rim of the fields – “God didn’t make the miracle of that grain, I did,” some seem to believe, “and we don’t owe our fellow human beings anything.” Certainly food banks are often supported by many of these souls, as if food banks could ever match the government resources to meet food scarcity issues in this country. Places like the Common Pantry are meant to supplement a pay check and/or the little help one receives in food stamps. Private charity should take care of it, they say, but of course, ironically enough, we know though studies that the socio-economic group that gives most to charity are the poor and the very poor – they share what little they have because they know what it means to have so little. The upper middle class or rich, by percentage, give less to charity, especially to those charities that directly affect the poor – endowing the Chicago Symphony is good thing, or the Art Institute, but it is no feeding of the poor. Underneath this call for private charity to help alleviate food scarcity and poverty, and not the government is an idea that we humans will always take care of each other, and that our particular compassion and generosity will be enough. Thousands of years have showed us that this is simply not true, because, to get theological on us, we are sinners, and there is a reason that Jesus keeps calling his earliest listeners to do better, be more compassionate, and take care of the poor. And us being, at times, selfish sinners, that truth shouldn’t cause there to be hungry stomachs when there is so much food here in this country.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve often mentioned to you and others that food has become the central focus of our outreach ministry here at Epiphany. We’ve housed the Common Pantry since the mid-1980’s, this incredible organization centered around food justice, this belief that if food is what you need, here we are and we will do our best to feed you. Their work has grown so much, through things like providing help getting connected to social services that so many rail against, including the food stamps some want to see gone. I think we should be especially proud of being their partners, because I think it led into another food ministry that became completely our own, our Welcome Meal on Wednesday nights. In the early 2000’s some of you right in this room noticed that the Common Pantry guests could use a meal after picking up their groceries, and thus the Welcome Meal was born. I think we sometimes forget that it is actually rare for a small church like ours to be able to pull off a weekly meal for anyone wishes to come – that is not normal, it really isn’t and I’m grateful we decided to do that work so long ago. The funny thing is that more people come into this building to be fed than to worship God here with us. I wish it wasn’t that way because I would love to have it the other way, that there were more people worshipping here than being fed here, but I would only love that be true if it was because food scarcity was on a steep decline and so many didn’t need our help or the Pantry’s help. Otherwise, let’s worship the God who asks us to feed one another, and do it as an act of worship of God, because every act of justice and mercy is also an act of worship of the living God. It’s clear to me that food justice matters to us, that most of us, if not all, feel that food is a God given right, that all God’s children deserve to eat, just like all of God’s children need traveling shoes, to echo he title of one of Maya Angelou’s great books – all God’s children need to eat and we are the ones to feed them. Amen.