St George's Cathedral, Cape Town

You give them something to eat

A Sermon preached by the Reverend Bruce W. B. Jenneker in the Cathedral of St George the Martyr on the Eighteenth Sunday of the Year, 13 July 2005

Jesus said to them, “You give them something to eat.”

Bread is a political commodity. The politics of bread is rooted in its universal essentiality as the staple food of the people. While you and I usually live in the luxury of viewing bread as an optional and perhaps even elegant accompaniment to a savoury dish of meat and vegetables, for most of those who share the earth with us bread is all they can hope for. When they have it, it is the main course, the only course, everything. When they don't have it, they starve – ours is a hungry world. And when they starve, they die. Ours is a world of death.

There are over 6 billion people on this fragile earth, our island home. Of them, more than 840 million go hungry every day – that means that about 2 in every ten people are starving right now, as I am speaking to you. And most of those starving millions eke out their painful, seemingly meaningless existences in the developing world. 49% of the population in Zimbabwe are starving. 30% of the people in Lesotho are perilously malnourished. 29% of the population of Malawi are famished. 26% of the population of Zambia are starving. 24% of the people in Swaziland are perilously malnourished. In Niger 1 in 4 people is under immediate threat of death from starvation, that means 3.6 million people, Africans like you and me, 800,000 of them children.

Food is a political commodity. Food Insecurity is a geo-political reality. The hungry nations are powerless, with a history of imperialism and colonialism that enriched their exploiters while robbing them of their land and its rich treasures. Today, hungry and depressed, these nations so perilously at risk are in debt to the nations that exploited them. Food is a political commodity. Food Insecurity is a geo-political reality.

Right now, today, this morning, throughout our world that has the expertise, resources and energy to hurl astronauts into space, 840 million people have no food at all, had none yesterday, and will have none again tomorrow. Right now, this morning, throughout our world that spends billions developing nuclear weapons and waging unimaginably costly wars, 150 million children under five are doubled over with hunger pangs, their bodies are skeletal and their bones are brittle, their stomachs constricted and their tongues perpetually parched.

Of the 6 billion people in the world today, 1.2 billion live on less than R6.00 per day. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has set the minimum requirement for caloric intake per person per day at 2,350. World-wide there are currently 2,805 calories per person available. That's 455 calories more for each person than the basic minimum requirement. Yet, more than 6 million children in developing countries will die this year from causes related to hunger. 90% of the world's births occur tin the developing world and this year 77% of those infants will die with hunger being the most frequent principal cause, or the most significant contributing factor. 12 million children die each year because of lack of water. Each day 30,000 children die from mostly preventable and treatable diseases such as diarrhoea, respiratory infections, measles and malaria – all of them diseases which are more deadly to undernourished, underweight children

Closer to home, a survey of families in Khayelitsha conducted by the Research Program in Development Studies of Princeton University found that 60% of the adults surveyed skipped a meal every day, that means that six out of every ten adults who live in Khayelitsha will skip one meal today. The researchers found that three out of ten people living in Khayelitsha went all day without eating, and that four out of ten children skipped a meal. This means that more than half the people who live in Khayelitsha live in households that experience actual hunger or the risk of hunger, meaning that they frequently have to skip meals or eat too little, and sometimes go without food for a whole day. When one recognises the enormous place of HIV & AIDS in this already devastating scenario, then words become inadequate to describe the peril we are in. Our words are inadequate also to sound the clarion call for engagement and commitment.

How often do we take our places in this world of hunger, starvation, suffering and death? When you and I are sitting at our extravagant tables, surrounded by family and friends, with overloaded plates, the refrigerator still packed and the pantry still full? When you are making budget decisions about how to spend your money, what charities to support, what property to buy, what investments to make? When you are making political decisions, what party to support, what political actions to advocate? How often do we take our places in this world, allowing ourselves to be counted among the countless hordes, sharing a commonwealth of those who have and those who have not, stepping up to the plate to share the world's resources, suffering the common pain of world hunger, participating in shared plans for a healthy planet and healthy people? How often do we take our places in this world?

Jesus cared passionately about the physical welfare and well-being of those around him. He fed the hungry, he healed the sick, he reconciled the estranged, he raised the dead. Filled with compassion and love, he was alert to human need and suffering, and sought always to relieve it. But Jesus was not merely concerned with individual suffering and particular pain; his concern was with the whole human condition. He desired that the hungry should be fed and that the wounded be healed, and his ministry would always include the dimension of immediate aid and relief – but he yearned more desperately for the radical reformation of the human spirit so that the experience of being human would be forever changed – from the narrowness of self to the broad horizons of true humanity, from the selfish greed of possessiveness to the grand scope of shared abundance, from the rigid security of self-righteousness to the wide liberality of respect and understanding.

You are looking for the quick fix, Jesus told those who chased after him. You are living life on a petty, narrow and selfish plane. Look, he says, God is doing something new. God is giving you a new kind of bread that will change you and the human condition forever. Jesus says about them, “This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.” Jesus offered himself as the Bread of Life given for the health and salvation of the world. He offered himself as the bread of God which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. This bread which Jesus is and offers has an origin and an a destiny: it comes from God and is destined for the world. Coming from God, it is divine, it carries God's hopes, it serves God's purposes. Destined for the world, it gives life to a dying world, it redeems a world that has imprisoned itself in its own greed and selfishness, it reaches into the hard realities of life to make them radiant with God, to open them to the abundant life of God. To eat this bread is to be alive as never before. To eat this bread is to understand as never before. To eat this bread is to love as never before. To eat this bread is to belong as never before.

Are we ready for this Bread of Life, you and I? To eat it is to become one with him who is passionately on the side of the poor and the outcast. To eat it is to be filled with the life that conquers disease and death. To eat it is to take up the cause of the downtrodden and the scapegoat. To eat it is to sign up to ensure the right of all to food and shelter, dignity and respect. In Zimbabwe and in Niger, in India and in Khayelitsha. To eat it is to be committed to the safety and security of the children of the world. To eat it is to hand yourself over to the life-long transformation of all that is selfish and mean and blind and deaf and dead in you, allowing yourself to be changed into the very life of Christ, giving yourself for the welfare and wellbeing of the world.

Perhaps it will mean learning about the Millennium Goals, the programme to end poverty and the challenge of world debt. Perhaps it will mean being serious about the Month of Compassion that begins tomorrow and doing something about our world at risk. Perhaps it will require you, and you, and you, to do something real, practical and achievable. Call up the Mayor's Office. Write to your Member of Parliament. Be the catalyst to launch a course of study and a programme of action.

“Ho,” the prophet says to everyone who thirsts, “come to the waters; come buy milk without money and without price!” Are we by your daily actions giving expression to God's invitation to all – in which everyone is assured of a place at the world's table, and no one is left behind? Are we extending Christ's kingdom – by how we use our time, by how we spend our money, by what we eat and what we throw away? Come let us take our places at this table, to eat this bread and drink this wine, and let it make us one with Christ in his compassion. Let us listen to what Christ calls us to be and do. Then, in Christ's grace and by Christ's mercy, let us be what Christ calls us to be and do what Christ calls us to do. Let the Church say, Amen.

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