In the United States, 12 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. (Bread for the World website)

Jesus is known for saying, "If you love me, feed my sheep." At the shores of Galilee, Jesus took a boy's gift, five barley loaves and two fish, and expected his disciples to feed a hungry crowd of 5,000. Jesus gathers the poor, the hungry, and the afflicted to himself, while he's been known to send the rich empty away.

But just how does he do it? How does he take such a meager gift and make it multiply enough to feed a crowd? What was this miracle about?

It looks as though even Jesus himself is unsure of what to do at the onset of the problem. John may report it as a "testing" of the disciples' trust, but it seems like a pretty honest question to me when he asks Philip, "Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?" A dumbfounded Philip reminds him that it would take 6 months wages just to give each of them a little, not even enough to be satisfied. They have a rather difficult dilemma on their hands - hungry people. And for some odd reason, Jesus takes personal responsibility for meeting this basic need.

Now if this story were set in our contemporary situation, we might not even get as close to being faithful as Philip did. We fool ourselves into thinking that it's not our responsibility. So what, they're hungry. They were the ones to come out here after all. They can't expect us to provide lunch too. In our typical way of thinking, it's their own fault if they didn't bring a meal with them. We may worry about the expense for a fleeting moment - but then, we'd dismiss Jesus' question and send our hungry crowd out to find a meal across the street at Burger King or let them wrestle with growling stomachs during the duration of Jesus' talk.

It makes me wonder what thoughts went through your mind when I read to you those opening statistics from "Bread for the World." We might be able to deal with one hungry family. We might even be able to start a "soup kitchen," or a pantry program for the hungry people in Oak Ridge, but to wrap our minds around the kind of hunger prevalent in the United States let alone in the world is close to impossible. The numbers seem not to represent people anymore. We find excuses for not even starting in on the problem. We can't do anything about how whether some other nations crops do well or poorly over a year. We cannot get involved in those developing countries that keep their people at starvation levels. And we certainly can't do anything about those things when we can't even get people here off their couches to work.

But these excuses are just that - excuses - the kind of excuses that Philip used. "Can't you see, Jesus, that even with 6 months wages we couldn't satisfy this kind of hunger?" Our excuses don't get us off the hook with Jesus, and yet these are the kind of reasons we use to dismiss the fact that people, that growing children, are missing meals in our own country so much so that it affects their ability to concentrate on their education. This is our way of justifying living in a country where the "professional" jobs demand higher and higher salaries while the working poor must choose between paying rent and putting food on the table. These are the kind of excuses we use to allow our foreign aid to shrink to less than 1% of the U.S. budget for helping out starvation level economies, while at the same time we give away more money in weapons to foreign nations than we do in food.

As "Bread for the World" continues to be an advocate for the world's hungry people, they recognize by doing this work that hunger is not a problem of producing food, it's a political problem, and I would also add that it's a spiritual problem. People aren't hungry because they're lazy, or stupid, or ignorant. People are hungry because some other people are greedy - for wealth, for power, or for control. People starve to death because of our excuses and our excesses.

Jesus wants us to love him enough to feed his sheep. At the shores of Galilee, Jesus took what was an overwhelming problem, 5,000 hungry people, and solved that problem with 5 loaves of bread, two fish and a blessing. Maybe Jesus knew what would happen, maybe he didn't, but on faith he held up those loaves and fishes and offered a blessing, put them in the empty baskets that were available, and asked the disciples to pass out the food. Now, we may never know just how the miracle took place. Did bread and fish appear out of thin air? Our common sense would tell us no. Things don't materialize out of nothing in any regular conception of our physical world. Perhaps then, our story goes a bit differently. Did Jesus know that there was food and money present among that hungry crowd that needed some encouragement to be shared? When some have too much and others have too little, the problem isn't laziness, or stupidity - but distribution. Perhaps there was a miracle, a blessing of re-distribution on that day. On that day, the top 5% of the people who carried the top 80% of the resources managed to share what they had so much so that there were leftovers - 12 baskets of leftovers to be exact.

We know that the distribution levels weren't as unequal then as they are today, so what we have to do to feed the world seems rather oppressive to us now. We've managed to get ourselves so spread apart between the rich and the poor that it seems impossible to go back. And I say we because it is a we - the we that is the U.S. system of economic justice to those who are poor and hungry is more the problem's cause than anywhere near the problem's solution. If we, the we that is the church, are going to take Jesus' mandate seriously to "feed his sheep," we're going to have to live so out of step with our own culture that it may feel odder than choosing to be Amish!

I say it will be odd because the church has gotten sucked into our cultural paradigm just as much as any political party or position, and it will take a willingness to forego the system in order for us to bravely love as Jesus loved. We, in the church, are just as susceptible to believing the bigger, better, faster, more lie of consumerism as any unchurched person is. Unlike the Amish, we have grown accustomed to our churches reflecting the culture more than being opposed to it. That's why we chart our yearly statistics in terms of numbers on our rolls and why we get concerned when those numbers are down from last year's. They begin to represent our lack of "profit" margin, rather than the actual people we know or love or have lost. That's why it's easy for us to spend our money so freely on ourselves to better the things that the "we" of the particular church think are important. The concern for those who are outside of "we" and "us" grows thinner with each passing watered down Christian generation. Caring for the community is replaced by caring for who's decided to join the club. Why do you think we argue so dramatically about music, and the use of technology, and membership? Usually, we argue not because it's about "feeding God's world," but more often because it's about feeding our own interests.

"Six months wages!" we say with our own chins dropped. That's ok to spend on me or maybe on us, but foolish to spend on one meal for 5,000 hungry people who may go hungry again tomorrow. We are slow to see this alarming trend in ourselves. The benevolent giving here is better than most places, worse than some. We deny that we could possibly be that selfish. We adamantly proclaim that our interests surely are right where they are supposed to be: loving God and loving our neighbor. But we have confessions to make - confessions that we have hid from God in the comforts of our own luxuries. We have lived for ourselves instead of for God, but even more sinfully, we have chosen to pass by our neighbors in need. We have refused to bear the burdens of others. We have ignored the pain of the world.

It's time that the "we" of the church refocus our concerns more directly on the two commandments central to the life and ministry of Jesus Christ - loving God and loving one another. We find all sorts of loopholes for denying both of these great mandates for a life of faithful living. Benevolent giving to charitable organizations is but one small part of God's plea to us, "Feed my world." In a land full of riches, yes people starve from hunger, but people also starve from feeding themselves on pleasure, new technologies, and greed - things that provide merely temporary satisfaction. We need to get food to hungry people; that's true. But, we also need to create an alternative culture that lets us free ourselves to the light, rub our eyes, and imagine the world that God creates for us where there is abundance enough for all.

Thousands, millions of hungry, starving people are out there. Jesus says to us, "Where will we buy the bread to feed them?" That bread may indeed be hidden in our own backpacks. The money we'll need may come out of our own luxuries or perhaps out of the things we thought we "needed" to be a church, a community, or a household of faith. The spiritual courage that it will take may be in a reserve somewhere we didn't even know we had.

May Jesus bless our resources, and multiply our courage to follow him. Then, we can be part of the church that feeds God's world. Amen.

CREED FOR THE WEEK - from the Presbyterian Book of Order -

God calls the Church in the power of the Holy Spirit to participate in God's work of creation and preservation. God has given humankind awesome power and perilous responsibility to rule and tame the earth, to sustain and reshape it, to replenish and renew it.