Hunger, Shame, and Wholeness

A sermon on John 6:24-35 and Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15.

[for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by Mae Mu on Unsplash.]

The week before last a mother and daughter came to the church for food from our pantry.

They stayed for a bit of human interaction, or at least that’s how it struck me at the time.

They shared bits of their story: snapshots of trauma and various hard knocks that life or other people had dealt them.

I wasn’t sure whether they felt obliged to share or if it felt like a relief. It can go either way.

I know from my first career working in anti-poverty programs that people experiencing extreme poverty and homelessness often don’t get treated like human beings in many of their interactions… so finding a person who will actually listen can be a much-needed affirmation of one’s humanity.

On the other hand, exposing one’s trauma can also be the price that our social safety demands of those who are asking for help: to prove that they are deserving of charity… that their need for aid is not the result of poor decisions on their part, but rather is a result of being victims.

And then there was the way they kept repeating, at least three or four times, the intention to give back to the church once they were on their feet.

They kept saying thank you for the food, which couldn’t have been worth more than $50, maybe, in total?

And then they would follow it up with some version of. “We’ll come back and donate to the church if we can.”

Of course, that is in no way the expectation.

None of it is! We don’t ask people why they need food. If they show up and tell us they are hungry we believe them.

And we don’t want people to ever feel like they owe the church for the little bit of assistance we can offer. We are happy to help and never expect to be “paid back.”

I can understand the instinct, though.

I think it is a natural consequence of the shame that is consistently associated with poverty and hunger in American society.

It’s in the way that we demand people expose their trauma to be judged worthy of compassion;

and it’s in the work requirements for food stamps or the most minimal and inadequate cash assistance.

There is this persistent message that any need for help represents a moral failure… so if you do need help and you want to avoid the shame of it you have to do something to compensate, whether that be exposing all the ways you have been mistreated to a stranger or promising to pay it back as soon as possible.

This was one of the things that broke my heart most consistently in my anti-poverty work.

It might even have been one of the reasons that I left that work to become a pastor… because in Jesus I find grace, not shame.

But then I read a story like today’s gospel, and I don’t know what to do with this Jesus… because it seems like Jesus is shaming people for being hungry.

You aren’t here for me, but because you got a free lunch. You’ve got the wrong priorities – focus on the things that come from God, not the perishable things like food.

That’s how I hear the beginning of Jesus’s discourse in John 6, and it makes me kind of want to shout back at him:

Hey, Jesus! I know Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs won’t be published for another 1900 years or so, but you should still know better than to shame hungry people for being focused on their next meal. It’s how you made us! Our brains cannot actually prioritize higher-order motivations like spiritual fulfillment if our basic physical needs are not being reliably met.

I know that the metaphor of Jesus as the Bread of Life is this deeply meaningful source of insight for understanding the ways that Jesus nourishes our lives.

But at the same time, subsistence-level peasants – who are the people Jesus is talking to in the Galilean wilderness – just aren’t functioning on that level.

Getting enough food was always a question for them.

So, when Jesus shows up and can miraculously feed a crowd of thousands from the contents of one family’s picnic… of course that is what they are going to focus on!

And that’s nothing to be ashamed of! It’s just what anyone would expect.

So, I tried an experiment this week. I tried reading this story with the assumption that a focus on their next meal is exactly what Jesus did expect of them.

Not in the sense of “I wouldn’t expect any better from these people,”

But rather in the sense of him knowing people and thus knowing what will connect for them.

Maybe I am reading shame into this story because I’m so used to that frame, and Jesus isn’t shaming them at all.

Maybe he’s saying,

I get you. I get where you focus is AND I know I have more to offer you than what you are looking for, so I want to help you understand how much I am really offering.

And maybe, in the context of that intimate understanding, he is recognizing their struggle to look beyond the miracle and so he is going with what works. In essence saying,

Ok. Bread is what gets your attention. I can work with that. Let’s talk about bread. I am the bread of life….

We are going to have more time to talk about the meaning of that I Am statement (the whole month of August, in fact, is going to be spent in the 6th chapter of John, buckle up!).

But, for today, I want to stay with this question of responding to people seeking physical help with a spiritual teaching.

Because, even if Jesus didn’t invoke any shame in his response… even if I am reading all of that into the story… he is still suggesting that they are hungry, right? And in response, he is NOT feeding them, even though he could.

So, OK. Let’s try another thought experiment.

Let’s say he recognized that they were staying around because they wanted another miraculous meal, and so he gave them one. And then another one. And then another one.

There’s a story in the Hebrew scriptures about God providing food in the wilderness for a hungry people.

The story is referenced by the people in the gospel and we heard the first part of it today in the reading from Exodus, where God provided a fresh meal of “bread from heaven” every morning for 40 years.

The book of Numbers recounts a different part of the story, after the people had been eating this same heavenly bread for a while and they were getting bored with it.

That account tells us that the people complained, saying, “We remember the fish we ate in Egypt for free, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. Now our lives are wasting away. There is nothing but manna in front of us.” (Numbers 11:5-6).

Jesus would have known that story too. I imagine it was in his mind as he talked about perishable food, and as he promised that those who come to him will never be hungry.

And I think he cared too much about the people to offer them ONLY such temporary bread.

Because unlike the Israelites wandering in the wilderness for 40 years, the people following after him were not constrained to stay.

If they got bored with his miraculous bread, they could leave. Go back to their subsistence life, insecure as it was.

And Jesus didn’t want them to leave having received from him only perishable food. He wanted to feed them something that would last longer.

In the end, that’s what the Israelites who ate manna in the wilderness got. They were fed for forty years, but they were also taught.

Barbara Brown Taylor, in our Summer Book Club read An Altar in the World, writes about this teaching in her discussion of sacred lostness. She reflects that, rather than destroying the people who complained about the monotony of manna, “God strengthened (the) wilderness gene in them, the one that made them strong and resourceful even as it reminded them how perishable they were. By the time they arrived in the land of milk and honey, they knew how to say thank you and mean it.”[1] 

 I think we “say thank you and mean it,” when we are able to receive without shame.

When we can feel happy to receive care and not feel like we are now on the hook to pay it back.

When we know that our worth is unquestioned and thus we will be given whatever help we need without the need for justification.

That, I would say, is the true bread from heaven. And it is what Jesus wants to give us all.

Because the truth is that God’s response to the neediness of humanity is not an either/or proposition: either practical help or spiritual truth.

It’s always both.

Jesus feeds people throughout the gospels AND he teaches them.

He does this because he understands something that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – true as it is – can distract us from:

We are always whole people.

Rich or poor. Hungry or well-fed. God sees all our needs and will not short-change us by responding to only one of them… even if that’s all we ask for.

Thanks be to God.

[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World, p. 74-75.