REAL BREAD
II Corinthians 8:1-16

A sermon given by the Rev. Richard H. Taylor
May 1, 2005 / 6th Sunday of Easter

Today we will be writing letters to our legislators to encourage them to pass legislation to end hunger in America. I hope this is something you will do. Please do not scurry off to something else. If you have other appointments, please at least pick up an envelope, some addresses, some materials so that you can write later today or tomorrow. Please join in this appeal to end hunger.

I can not stress enough how important feeding the hungry is to the Christian. I can not stress enough how using our personal and national resources to help the poor are essential marks of a Christian person or a moral community.

There are many forces out in the world today who are trying to tell us what are the most important moral issues for Christians. Some people put in first place things Jesus didn't even talk about. But, in fact, there are 2,350 verses in the New Testament that deal with money and possessions. And 19% - nineteen percent - of what Jesus talks about in the Bible deals with money and possessions. "Go and sell what you have and give to the poor." Nearly one out of every five things of Jesus recorded sayings deal with this topic.

What if I were to for every one sermon in five - about once a month - talk about money and possessions, and giving to the poor? Would you feel you were being harangued? Yet this is what was really important to Jesus. Compare that to the religious leaders you hear on the television.

And then, in addition to Jesus, Paul puts incredible energy into responding to the famine in Jerusalem. He tells the Corinthian Church that how you respond to hunger tests "the genuineness of your love against the earnestness of others." Love is measured by the generosity of response to hunger.

And right now we have to do a lot about hunger. In a new survey of twenty-five large American cities it was found that 61% of people requesting food assistance held jobs. Requests for emergency food assistance have increased an average of 17% over a year ago. Last year there was an 11% increase in families with children requesting food. These cities report that about 14% of the requests for emergency food assistance have gone unmet during the year.

There are also world wide problems. Of the twenty-three wealthiest nations in the World by per capita income, the United States ranks 22nd of the 23 nations in the percent of Gross National Product given to development assistance World wide. We like to believe the myth that the United States is a generous country. That myth may have been true during the Marshall Plan sixty years ago. But now we rank 22nd of 23. The World knows the truth. We are stingy.

Can't you write a letter? And you can give something to PICA while you are at it, too.

But let me push this issue from beyond immediate action to spiritual roots. Is helping the hungry and poor something that you do once and a while, perhaps to move on from a pan-handler? Or is helping the hungry and the poor something essential about who you are? Is it something in the very fabric of your being?

I think Jesus spoke about these things so often not to harangue us to momentary fits of charity; but instead to inspire us to become people deeply motivated to care for others; to become people whose very core resounds with compassion for the other.

Jesus made the central act of the Christian Church a ceremony of real bread. Sit down at the table and break bread "in remembrance of me." This is the essential act of Christians, and the Church reminds us of it again and again by acting it out in front of each of us. It is the Church's drama, the Church's theatre. Sit down at the table. Break bread. Pass it around.

But it is not meant merely to be some pageant or holy mystery on top of golden tables. It is supposed to be a drama that you learn so well that you repeat it in your own life. Sit at table. Break bread. Pass it around.

The way that Jesus intends to solve the hunger problem is not only that you send bread in a box to PICA or to Tsunami victims in Sumatra, even though that is good. There is an element of what Jesus is suggesting that requires not only passing bread, but sitting down with other people.

You can probably feed your children by leaving them a note and telling them what is in the refrigerator. But that is an entirely different feeling from when you sit down face to face and talk to each other as you pass the bread around. The survival of the family depends not so much on what is in the refrigerator, but on how often you sit down, pass bread, and talk.

Jesus designed communion as the model for human living. Not only must all God's children pass bread. They must also sit down and talk. It is the table where all the world - rich and poor, male and female, all races and nationalities, sit down, pass bread, and talk.

And I really mean talk.

Eric Law is a student of multi-cultural communication. He tells us that many attempts in America to get people of different races to talk fail. After observing many such failures, he tells us why they usually fail. White Americans think they should dominate a conversation. They are not inclined to let empty spaces fall into conversations. They are eager to move things along. They drive meetings to quick conclusions by filling in all the empty spaces, and then later say they regret that the other racial groups said so little. They do not invite the other race to speak, they do not let them set the agenda, they do not let them work at a pace which is typical of their culture.

They want to pop their money on the table and leave, rather than to sit down.

Historian Timothy Hall demonstrates how elitist groups desiring to maintain power and influence will often attack the grammar, language, and syntax of their opponents. They ridicule accents. They make grammar into a moral issue. Snobbery becomes its own defense.

Many of you know that I have become very concerned about the opening of debate and conversation in America. I think we are not talking to each other.

Listen.

The poor spend most of their time listening to the rich. They hear the rich on television because the rich own the television stations. They hear the rich on the radio stations because the rich own the radio stations. The Providence Journal, the billboards, the signs in the stores, all the same. Even from the politicians, for the politicians' campaigns are paid for by the rich.

There are even religious congregations where the poor must listen to the rich.

But there may be a few religious congregations where the poor get to hear the message of the poor. For those congregations are led by one who - "though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor."

And yes, there are some places even more blessed - where the rich come and for once are quiet, and they actually listen to the poor, and hear what they have never heard, and are transformed.

There are a few such places where people come - and sit down - and give thanks - break bread, and pass it around. There are people who are so generous that they will give their time until the other can trust enough to speak their true heart. There are people who are so loving that they will not judge by grammar, or accent, or culture, but who are willing to sit down, break bread, pass it around.

It is a new kind of vision - this table. Two thousand years old and hardly known, hardly understood. Here is this idea of a whole world that can sit down, and pass bread, real bread, life, real life, words, living words, and give each other enough quiet to hear.

Let us break bread. Together.

Amen.