Bread for the Hungry

Honduras is the second poorest country in our hemisphere, after Haiti. More than half the population lives at below the poverty level-there is significant hunger and malnutrition. A tiny elite owns most of the land, along with the two banana companies, Dole and Chiquita.

My family and I visited Honduras three summers ago with a church group. We spent a week at a boy's orphanage run by the Episcopal Church. For years, our parish had sponsored one of the boys named Wilmer Perez. We raised money for his tuition and board, corresponded with him through letters, and prayed for him every week. That summer, he was turning 18 and was about to graduate from the upper school. We were so excited to meet him at last and we also wanted to meet his mother. Like many of the boys at the orphanage, he was not truly an orphan, but his mother was too poor to support him. She is nearly blind and earns her living selling fruit on the streets of Tegucigalpa. During Hurricane Mitch, she lost the wooden box that she used to carry the fruit and so she had no income at all for a while. So her two children were sent to two separate orphanages, one for girls and one for boys. She would visit them once a month when she was able to scrape together the bus fare.

We had a wonderful time with Wilmer-but he seemed reluctant to take us to meet his mom-later we found out it was because he was afraid for our safety because of the level of gang activity in her neighborhood. But we finally loaded up the van, 16 people in a 15 person van, and headed across Tegucigalpa to see her. She lived at the top of one of the hills that surround the city. As we wound our way up the hill, we ran out of paved road, then we ran out of gravel road, and finally, we were on a narrow muddy track that rose almost vertically to her neighborhood, which was perched precariously on the side of hill. I had my eyes closed and my hands clenched as I prayed the 23rd psalm, expecting the van to roll or slide down the hill at any moment. But we made it. Her house was a 12 by 12 wooden shack, with no indoor plumbing, running water or electricity. She had to get up every morning at 4:30 am and hike down the hill to a stream for water, then get on a bus to go downtown and sell fruit. Wilmer's mother was not home that day-we ended up meeting her the next day when she came to the school. But we learned something about her that day because on the outside wall of her house, she had written in huge chalk letters, "Dios es amor." (God is love.) In the midst of unbelievable hardship and poverty, she was spiritually rich. Her sign was a beacon of hope and faith in that neighborhood filled with despair. When we met her the next day, she was filled with gratitude and love. Her faith shone from her.

We met many other Hondurans who were materially poor but spiritually rich. We were blessed over and over with love, warmth and hospitality. The boys at the orphanage eat mainly black beans and rice, supplemented every now and then with eggs. The week we were there, they gave us all the eggs, partly because we were guests, and partly because they knew we would be hungry because we were working on a construction project. At the end of the week, the boys played marimba, sang songs and danced with us. They all made us cards thanking us. Those boys were thankful for every thing they received. And they were also generous in sharing whatever they had. One day, just before church, the priest who is the director of the orphanage gave one of the boys a chocolate bar because it was his birthday. But he didn't eat it right away. Instead, after church, he gathered his friends together and divided the chocolate bar into 9 pieces, so all of them got a taste.

Somehow, in the midst of poverty, they found spiritual food. Jesus, who is the living bread, filled them with his love.

It's not that Jesus was not concerned with physical hunger. His teachings on feeding the hungry are clear. And today's dialogue on Jesus as the living bread is preceded by the miracle of the loaves and fishes, in which Jesus fed 5000 hungry people. But Jesus is also deeply concerned with spiritual hunger.

As Jesus said to the devil when he was being tempted in the desert, "man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God." God's ultimate word to us is the word of love made flesh in Jesus.

Jesus offers himself to us as food for our spirits. As much as we need food to sustain our bodies, we must also have food for our spirits. We can be alive without really living. In order to feel fully alive, we must be connected with the spiritual, the divine, the source of being. We need a sense of who we are and why we are here. In a word, we need faith.

Carl Jung says that psychological treatment can only take us so far toward healing. Beyond that, a person must find faith in order to be whole.

Finding faith is not just a matter of making a one-time commitment to a spiritual path. We also need to nurture our faith, renew it and enable it to grow. We need spiritual food. As Christians, we are fed by the gospel message. God loves us and has sent Jesus Christ to reveal God's heart of love. In Jesus, we see that God is united with us. God is here with us, in our daily messy human struggle. In Jesus' death on the cross, and his forgiveness of his enemies, we see that nothing can separate us from God's love-we can do our worst, and God will still love us. In the resurrection, we see that God's love cannot be destroyed, even by death.

The word of God spoken through Jesus is a word of love, forgiveness, and hope. It is that word that feeds our souls, just as surely as physical food feeds our bodies. God has given God's self to us as food. And so Jesus offers himself to us as the living bread that came down from heaven and invites us to eat his flesh and drink his blood.

To feed on Jesus' flesh and blood is an odd image. In the early days of Christianity, people sometimes thought that Christians were cannibals. But what a powerful metaphor of union with God. If you are what you eat, then eating Jesus' flesh and blood unites us with Jesus and makes us more like him. It is also a powerful way of expressing the truth that God would give anything, even his own life, in order to give us life and sustain us. One symbol of Jesus is the pelican, because pelicans will peck their own breasts and feed their young on their own blood if they can't find other food. If you look at the tabernacle in the chapel, you will see a pelican there, representing Jesus.

As Christians, if we let ourselves be fed by God, we will be spiritually rich. We will overflow with love and generosity and gratitude, just like the boy who shared his chocolate bar. We will be a beacon of light to all whom we meet.

We are fed by God's word, especially the Word made flesh, and also by the holy food and drink of new and unending life-in other words, the sacrament of the Eucharist. The Prayer Book defines a sacrament as an outward and visible sign of an inward, invisible grace. When we come to God's table and receive the strange little wafers and the sip of wine, the grace that we receive is the assurance of God's love and presence. Our union with Christ is strengthened and our hungry souls are fed.

When we leave this place filled with God's love, we become bread for the world, food for other hungry spirits. Even though our society is still relatively wealthy, despite the recession, there are many hungry souls all around us. People who are discouraged or lost, people who have forgotten or never heard that they belong to God and God loves them. Even as we feed those who are physically hungry through the ministry of the Food Pantry, remember to offer the spiritual food that God has given us to those who are spiritually hungry. Let Jesus who is the living bread, fill you to overflowing and let his message, Dios es amor, shine in you for all the world to see.