Luke 6.20-26
“BLESSED, BLESSED HUNGER”
These are not the Beatitudes we memorized as kids in Sunday School. These are Luke’s Beatitudes. And Luke was a doctor, so he wrote with an edge. By edge I mean Luke was direct. Do you know how doctors bear down on us, “Look, buster, you need to lose umpteen pounds.” Luke wrote with that kind of edge. “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Woe to you that are full now, for you will be hungry.” Whatever could this mean to us in our life today?
Walter Wangerin helps unlock such sacred mysteries as these telling of the hunger and emptiness of a working class couple from his church in Indiana. It’s Denny’s on a Saturday night. Glance around the restaurant, he writes. There is a low hum of voices. People are talking; waitresses slide by on soft shoes; laughter bubbles up now and then, punctuated by the clink of flatware on dishes.
But look around. Do you see the man and woman at the table by the low, dividing wall? The couple by the plastic flowers? Watch them. They don’t really talk. The waitress sets plates of food before them. He stares at his. His wife (she is his wife) smoothes and smoothes the napkin upon her lap. The waitress smiles. The woman smiles; the man does not; they eat. Steadily, the man cuts his meat. Efficiently, he pokes the pieces into his mouth, gazing at his plate as he chews.
It is curious that the woman should be overweight for she takes such tiny bites. She fidgets her peas, sips water, picks at the chicken with her little finger arched. She pats her mouth with the napkin and sighs. Every bite is nibbled to death.
He is done long before she is. So he sits sideways at the table, with his thumbs hooked in his belt. Now he stares at nothing, at no one. His eyes are lost in middle distance. When he happens to remember it, he blows on his coffee and drinks. But the woman—her nervous gestures multiply, they intensify. When anyone passes them, she looks up, looks down immediately, smiles too late, then blanks her face. She is an anthill of twitchy motion. Her husband? He clears his throat, gazing away, saying nothing, uncommitted and absent in that moment.
As they rise to go, the man is not one whit changed from the solemn fellow who first sat down. He marches directly to the cashier and she follows. This is how they always walk together: she follows. They see us. It is surprising how they almost look alike, big and factory hard. He nods and greets me, “Evening, reverent.” She gushes about the beautiful night, and how Henry insisted they enjoy it together with an evening away from the kitchen. The night must be beautiful. For Henry has left to enjoy it before Matilda can finish her sentence.
Maybe saddest of all, Henry and Matilda “treat themselves” to a café dinner like this every Saturday. And this is how they satisfy their urge “to be together”. She does not know (because she cannot admit) that they never talk together. Henry is a realist. He knows they do not talk, but doesn’t consider it all that important. They get along all right. They have no big problems. They are married. They survive…Neither of them knows they are—both of them—dreadfully lonely. What can a preacher say to such people on Sunday? Wangerin asks. What indeed.
Simply because Valentine’s Day looms in three days it would be worth telling this story as a parable for couples not taking each other for granted. Where is our hunger to appreciate each other’s gifts, to live fully together in each moment, to not waste even one day? Our widows and widowers could preach more eloquent sermons on this subject than I. But much more lurks here underneath. “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Woe to you that are full now, for you will be hungry.” Let’s back up and get a running start into this mystery.
Have you noticed the endless stream of ads on television for this diet program or that slimming pill or this exercise equipment since the feasts of the holidays?
It is a powerful vortex sucking in money. Maybe that’s because we Americans get larger and larger every year. And maybe that has something has something to do with the loneliness out there in the world. It’s a cold, empty place for so many, and I am not talking about winter finally arriving in the East either. For it is all too easy to put food in our mouths and chew so we can feel full when it is really another deep-soul emptiness that gnaws at us. Frederick Buechner once described gluttony as raiding the refrigerator seeking to cure spiritual malnutrition
Society treats the phenomenon of hunger that Jesus blessed as a real curse. The times I get in trouble with stretching out my waistband are often hard and stressful times when hunger looms as one more threat and creates a kind of fear. I can convince myself that I should never feel hunger for any real length of time. Hunger is the enemy; grab something quick. But for hundreds of generations our forebears likely felt hungry much of the time. It was natural, the way of things. Of course, they were leaner and healthier than we are, at least heart-healthy. Trying to control my eating, I’ve had to convince myself maybe it is not such a bad thing to feel hungry for intervals. Boy, does that fly in the face of our consumer society!
And what is true of our bodies might also hold true in matters of spirit. Maybe hunger is not the enemy. Maybe it simply needs to be recognized and accepted. Maybe Henry and Matilda need more than anything to open up to each other about their hungers deep within or even recognize the near absence of real hun-ger for their union of spirits. And maybe then confessing the deepest hungers in their hearts and souls, God would be in the position to do something about them. I know this much: God can work few wonders with the satiated. For our too easy satisfaction gives God little room to work. But God does miracles with those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. For they allow God all kinds of leeway. This is maybe the biggest reason why Jesus spoke the Beatitude of blessing and woe.
Do you know that book of a few years ago, Walking the Bible. Bruce Feiler literally walked through the holy lands and recorded his journal-like impressions. “First, you get thirsty,” he writes. “You wake up thinking about water, you go to sleep thinking about water, you dream about water. Go wandering in the desert for days, weeks or years at a time, and water becomes the most important thing, the only thing. Water becomes life. Water becomes salvation. Next, you get hungry. And you stay hungry. Finally, you get tired. You get tired of the heat, you get tired of the cold, and mostly you get tired of the sand. Sand is relentless.
The sheer demands of the desert — thirst, hunger, misery — ask a simple question: “What is in your heart?” Or, put another way, “In what do you believe?” We tend to treat hunger as enemy—personally and globally. But maybe Jesus blessed the hungry because they walked on the royal road to encountering God.
I remember 20 years ago when I was a pastor in downtown Columbus, Ohio. I would lunch with a young African-American pastor from a leading congregation. We swapped stories at how ministry is finally ministry despite the kinds of people.
Then our conversation suddenly turned on the single biggest difference between the two congregations. My First Congregational Church had mostly affluent folk who drove in from the suburbs, twelve Deacons from twelve different zip codes. He was itching to ask me about this. Moments before, he had shared some of the struggles that his own people faced on a daily basis: drug infested neigh-borhoods, embattled schools, teenage pregnancy, unemployable and idle adults. At the very least, he sighed, they get to church on Sunday hungry for God’s word
“Tell me something,” he whispered edging closer. “What can you say to the well-to-do comfortable people that is of God that they will eagerly and willingly hear?” He was asking me this because he was dealing with the new phenomenon of upwardly mobile blacks. He found them less responsive to ministry than those living closer to the edge who were hungrier to hear a saving word from God. How do we deal with the indifference and complacency of the well-fed? he was in ef-fect asking. “I don’t have the answer to your question,” I said. “But this much is sure: the key is helping those already full discover how empty that can be. The best way to do that is for those of us who are full to stay near to the truly hungry. If we will stay close to them, then God’s blessing over them will rub off on us.” And we thought the outreach of our mission work was only for those we help. What other ways can we find our hunger, describe it, nurture it, and keep it alive?
Ask any retired pastor here about the toughest worship services they ever led. Was it the painful, emotional memorial service where the deep grief of the people was palpable? Or was it the lovely Sunday morning in July when everyone pre-sent was anticipating the day out on the boat or already halfway off on vacation? In a sense, memorial services are easy in that during deep loss we come here so hungry for a word from God. In this sense, the services after 9/11 were easy. But what can a preacher say to people already off on an emotional half-holiday?
Only the beauty, the blessing, and the being of God will satisfy us at our deepest. Mother Teresa said: “In each of our lives Jesus comes as the bread of life — to be eaten, to be consumed by us. This is how he loves us. Then Jesus comes into our human life as the hungry one, the other, hoping to be fed with the bread of our life — our hearts loving, our hands serving.” Friends, there is such deep hunger in this world, such hunger within us to be in full relations with God and one another. Don’t bury or deny it. Our deep need is not the enemy. Instead let it become the bridge across which God can come to take us to where God dwells. Amen.
Eternal God, we adore you for your mighty and visible acts of creation, but we praise you no less for quiet and hidden acts as you move upon hungry hearts. Yes, God, your glory shows forth in obvious ways like sunsets and snowstorms. But we also notice how you entered this world and became one with us through a poor preacher who owned nothing more than the tunic upon his back. He knew all of our hunger, all of our need, all of our yearning, and all of our deep longing. In his pure simplicity was revealed the beauty of your will and way for the world.
You know our hunger, O God, before we can name it. You understand it more deeply than we ever will. We pray in the confidence that you would minister to our every need would that we yield ourselves to you. May those who languish in hospital rooms and in homeless shelters, by refugees and the mentally ill, by those who live in the shadows—the poor, the hungry, and the loveless, know this comfort. We pray for Mabel Creighton in the hospital and for Rhoda Mealy, mother of our Joan Buffington whose strength is ebbing. On a brighter note, we celebrate with Todd and Joan Williams as the pass the 50 yr milestone in their marriage. Let your light shine in the darkness, O God. And purify our hearts as only you can. We lift our prayers to you in these moments of meditative silence.
