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Text: Matthew 5:6 (Phil 3:1-11, Is 25:6-9) A Feast of Rich Food for All People In the name of him who sets a table
before us in the presence of our enemies, dear brothers and sisters in
Christ: Today I’d like to talk about
being hungry. We all know what that’s
like because we experience it every day.
It’s that feeling of emptiness and desire; that rumbling in the stomach
that tells you, “Hello! Have you
forgotten me? It’s time to put something
in here again.” I’m sure you know what
I’m talking about. But I’d like to take
it a step further. Though we experience
the sensations of hunger every day, I doubt seriously that there are many
people here who have ever experienced chronic
hunger. Oh sure, sometimes when we’re really
hungry we might say things like, “I’m starved”, or “I’m famished”; but the fact
is that few if any of us have actually known starvation or famine first
hand. Now, there may be some here who did
have a tough go of it during the depression years, say, or perhaps at some
other period of financial crisis in their lives. People who were prisoners of war in the
Pacific, or But it’s actually a fairly recent development in world
history that such conditions have existed for any people. And while it’s
true of developed nations today, it’s certainly not that way in all places. Chronic hunger remains one of the world’s
leading causes of death. An estimated
815 million people across the globe are undernourished; that is, they have
diets that include fewer calories and nutrients than are needed to maintain
basic health and body weight. Mind you,
I’m not talking about people who are starving to death in famine stricken areas
– that’s over and above this figure of 815 million; I’m talking about people
who have some food; but not enough to live on, and who are slowly losing ground,
and who, if their situation does not change, will eventually die of hunger or
other conditions caused by malnutrition. And if it’s still that way today in much of the world, you’d
better believe it was that way for the ancients. For them, chronic hunger was a concern even
in the best of times. But a year of low
rainfall, a bad harvest, an infestation of locusts or rats, a marauding enemy
army – any of these things and more could mean big trouble. It didn’t just hit you in the pocketbook like
today; it meant you were going to be hungry.
It meant that you might die. And
because the ancients understood so well what it meant to be hungry, we find
that it’s a major biblical theme. But of
course, the concerns of Scripture are first and foremost spiritual, and so what
we find is that in the Bible the idea of physical hunger is often used to
express the even more important hunger of the human soul. Take for example the story of our first parents. Adam and Eve were placed in a garden full of
food. It was hanging all over the trees.
They didn’t work for it; it was just
there. All they had to do was walk up
and take it. But it’s a picture, you
see, of how all their wants and needs were satisfied by God. And as the Bible is primarily concerned with
spiritual issues, it’s important to see that God provided them with all their
spiritual needs as well. We have a tendency
to think that because Adam and Eve were created without sin, they were
automatically righteous on their own.
But that’s not the way it was. Their
righteousness was derived from who there were as God’s children. It involved their ongoing relationship with
the Lord. Specifically, it had to do
with their absolute trust in him and what he had told them. So, just as they needed to eat food to live
physically, they needed to keep trusting the Lord to remain righteous. The thing to see here is that even in the
Garden, people were totally dependent beings; both physically and spiritually
they had to “eat” to live. Now, interestingly enough (and not coincidentally), the
first sin had to do with eating – eating something that God had forbidden. That sin broke the perfect relationship that
people had with the Lord. And while it
was indeed an act of disobedience, the bigger spiritual issue involved was that
it was an act of mistrust. By eating what
had been forbidden they showed that they stopped trusting what God said, and that
they believed the lies of Satan instead.
Specifically, they believed that by eating they would be improving their
spiritual condition – remember, Satan had said to them, “You will be like God.” So they trusted in lies rather than in God,
and as a result, they were no longer righteous.
And when Adam was thrown out of the Garden, he was told that from then
on he would have to work hard for his food.
“By the sweat of your face you will eat your bread”, the Lord tells
him. It’s a life of constant labor and
unceasing toil driven by hunger that God describes. And it will be that way until “you return to
the dust from which you were taken.” So
after all that work to stay alive, you still die. You still end up in the grave. It’s a losing proposition. But again, it’s another picture of their
spiritual condition. Driven by a spiritual
hunger to be “like God” they would work, work, work to try to be righteous, to
be full and complete in a spiritual sense, to work their way back into a proper
relationship with God; but they could never attain it. If they could, they wouldn’t need to
die. The fact that they still had to die
proved that all their work to be righteous would end in failure. Similarly, hunger plays an important role in the story of
the Prodigal Son. You remember how he
leaves the plenty of his father’s house to strike off on his own. He pursues a dissolute life of reckless
abandon trying to satisfy his hunger for the pleasures life has to offer. He has his fling, and for a while he’s
satisfied; but it cannot last because he’s eating forbidden fruit. Soon enough, he finds himself broke,
friendless, and hungry – so hungry that he’s willing to eat the indigestible
husks he feeds to the pigs just to trick his stomach into thinking it’s full. At length it’s his hunger that causes him to
decide to return to his Father’s house – but not as a son. Because he knows he’s offended, he decides to
offer himself as a servant. He’s willing
to be a slave just so that he can eat.
But even in this his pride is showing.
The thought is that he can work to stay alive and so, in a sense, earn
his keep and in that way “be righteous again” in his father’s eyes – if only in
part. Of course, you know the
story: the father will have none of
that; but I’m getting ahead of myself. In today’s short Gospel lesson we heard Jesus say, “Blessed
are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” What he’s speaking of is a longing, a
deep-seated internal desire to be acceptable to God. It’s that sense of need to be seen by God as
righteous, and to be in a proper relationship with him. Now, to some degree, everyone has it. And what I mean by that is that we all want
to be thought of as basically good people who God finds acceptable. We all have that hunger But there are many ways of dealing with this
hunger, and most of them aren’t very good. There are, for example, what we might call the negative
methods of dealing with the “hunger to be righteous”. One is simple denial. It’s the “I didn’t do it” approach. This might fool some of the people some of
the time, but it’s hard to deny your sins in front of an actual witness. So it sure doesn’t hold up well before God
who sees everything. Closely related to
denial is the cover up method. You
remember how Adam and Eve first tried to pretend that everything was normal by
pasting fig leaves all over themselves.
That didn’t work very well either when God came calling. You can’t conceal your sins from him. That’s when they resorted to another tired
and true favorite: the ol’ run and
hide. Maybe God won’t find me. That doesn’t work either because sooner or
later, you’re going to have to face the Judge.
A variant of denial is to claim innocence by saying, “Yes, I did it, but
it’s not wrong” or to plead ignorance, as in, “I didn’t know it was wrong.” There’s a whole lot of this going on today. Things that the Lord has clearly forbidden in
his Word are being reinterpreted by so-called Bible scholars who give people a
green light to engage in just about anything you might imagine. But I’d surely hate to be in the shoes of
someone who saw that God’s Word said, “Thou shalt not” and then turned around
and decided that the Lord didn’t really mean it. Then there’s the ever popular comparison
method. That’s the, “Yes, I’m a sinner;
but not so much a sinner as others.
Compared to them, I’m really pretty good.” A lot of people go with that one. But the Lord says the wages of even one sin
is death and damnation, and that he who breaks even one law is guilty of
breaking them all; so that doesn’t help either.
There may other negative approaches to dealing with the hunger to be
righteous; but all of them are inherently dishonest. They are means to avoid facing the truth. By them people pretend that they are really
not hungry, that they don’t need to eat; and if they continue in such ways they
will surely starve to death. So we see that the hunger of which Jesus speaks that is
truly blessed stems first and foremost from an honest recognition of one’s own sinfulness. It must start by admitting that there’s a
problem that has to be dealt with. The
mistake we make is to try to satisfy this hunger on our own, “by the sweat of
our face and work of our hands”. We’ve
already seen that that’s a losing proposition; but this method is very
deceptive because it has the advantage of looking good. All that work makes it appear that progress
is being made. And so people go to great
lengths to “make themselves servants
of righteousness”. That’s what the
Pharisees did at the time of Christ, what with all their rules and regulations
they followed so scrupulously, keeping the letter of the law; but not its
spirit. It’s what the medieval Christian
church at the time of the Reformation had degenerated into with its system of
penances and satisfactions for sin. The
thought was if you sinned, you could make up for it with some act of charity,
or humiliation, or by saying a number of prayers, or honoring the remains of
some saint, or going on a pilgrimage, or buying a indulgence. In such ways you could work your way
righteous before God. The whole approach
came to its greatest glory in the monastic system. If you were really spiritually hungry you
could enter a cloister and devote your life to godliness. There you’d have a stead diet of quiet
contemplation and prayer, of fasting and renouncing worldly wealth, of taking
advantage of all the graces the church offered through pilgrimage and penance,
and by so doing you could fool yourself into thinking that your soul was
filled. The problem with all such
approaches is that they are analogous to eating the husks fed to the pigs; or
like people sometimes do in times of famine, they eat grass, or leaves, or the
bark off trees. Such things were never
intended as food. Yes, by eating them
you can fill your belly and stop the hunger pangs; but you can derive no
nutrition from them. So you starve to
death with a full stomach. Today we celebrate the presentation
of the Augsburg Confession. It is the
foundational exposition of the true Christian faith as expressed by the
Lutheran Reformers over and against a church that had, by degrees, subjugated
itself to the lie that people can indeed work themselves righteous – that by
the work of their hands, they could eat, be satisfied, and live forever. We credit the correction to one who was truly
blessed in that he really did hunger and thirst for righteousness. As an Augustinian monk, Martin Luther pursued
one of the most rigorous humanly devised approaches toward attaining godliness
through works. But what he found was
that the more he ate of the bread of human sweat, the hungrier he got. In the midst of what seemed to be plenty, he
knew that he was dying. It was in
absolute desperation, in the starvation of his soul, that he rediscovered the
truth that Paul, you will recall, was a
Pharisee. He was one who thought he could
be righteous before God by his own works.
And he was good at it. He says in
this section, “If anyone thinks he has reason to put confidence in the flesh, I
have more.” He means that he was as
humanly righteous as a person could make himself. But he goes on to say that having discovered
the truth, he counts all that a bunch of rubbish. He means, “I was eating garbage to fill my
stomach.” In truth, the word he uses is
a bit stronger than garbage. It’s
actually a crude term for dog droppings that he mentions here. But he uses this strong language to express
what he feels. He’s saying that now he
despises everything he had once been so proud of, everything by which he would
have counted himself righteous before God. What made the difference? He found the feast that Isaiah speaks of in
today’s Old Testament reading – a feast of rich food, fine meats, and aged wine
– the feast for all people prepared by the Lord himself. It’s the same feast the prodigal son found
when he returned to his father’s house and was told, “No, you’re not a
slave. You’re my beloved son who was
dead and has come back to life”. It’s
the fruit of the Tree of Life that when you eat, you live forever. It is the righteousness that comes from God
and is by faith in Jesus Christ. He, his
perfect life on earth, his death for our sins, and his glorious resurrection
and ascension: these are our
righteousness before God. And these he
gives to us freely when announces that for his sake our sins have been
forgiven, and when he tells us, “Take and eat my body given for you” and “Take
and drink my blood shed for you”. Dear friends in the Lord, by
celebrating the presentation of the Augsburg Confession we remind ourselves
that we are the blessed heirs of the rediscovery of this feast of rich food for
all people. And by marking this day we
remind ourselves of the many dangers and deceptions that abound all around us which
have led people astray in the past and that still have the potential to rob of
us this feast. And while we have to be
wary of all the ways we might be deceived, I think the biggest danger to us is
that having grown up in this abundance and never having known any real spiritual
hunger, we might lose our appetite. We might
become complacent, taking these gifts of grace for granted. We might push back from the table thinking
we’ve had enough. We might think it’s
time to go on a diet, as people sometimes do.
In such ways, we might lose our hunger for the righteousness that God
gives us in Christ Jesus. Jesus said that blessed is the
person who hungers for the righteousness of God, who feels the emptiness and
seeks to fill it. And there is none so
blessed as our Lord Jesus who hungers and thirsts to fill you with his
righteousness. It is the deepest desire and
longing of his heart. May our prayer
therefore be that he would instill in us always this hunger, a deep, chronic
hunger, a continuous desire to be filled with him who is the Bread of Life that
comes down from heaven. And in this way,
may he keep and bless us until we join him and all the faithful at the heavenly
banquet table where the feasting will never end. In Jesus’ holy name. Amen. Soli Deo Gloria! |
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