Chew the Fat

For these past few weeks, our lectionary has invited us to investigate what it means to eat of the Break of Life. This coming Sunday, we are asked to chew on the verses recorded in the gospel of John 6:51-58, in which Jesus challenges us to eat his flesh and drink his blood. We are not asked to eat the fluff that still keeps us hungry, the empty calories, or the un-healthful. We are asked to partake of the real sustenance, the real "soul" food, to eat better so that we could be filled spiritually and soul-fully.

As I think about these verses, I can't help but remember Millennium Development Goal #1 of the UN Millennium Campaign: Eradicate hunger and extreme poverty.

Did you know?

One third of deaths – some 18 million people a year or 50,000 per day – are due to poverty-related causes. That’s 270 million people since 1990, the majority women and children, roughly equal to the population of the US. (Reality of Aid 2004)

Every year more than 10 million children die of hunger and preventable diseases – that’s over 30,000 per day and one every 3 seconds. (80 Million Lives, 2003 / Bread for the World / UNICEF / World Health Organization)

I'm quite certain I have never been truly hungry in all the years that I've been alive. A friend of mine from Viet Nam described it artfully, but I can't remember the words he used in the analogy. True hunger is agonizing pain. It is absolute, extreme gnawing pain. You feel like you can eat 10 bowls of rice in one sitting, but you are given half a bowl to eat for the entire day. You want to stuff the entire breadloaf into your mouth but you only get a morsel that disintegrates in your fingertips. You get just a bit, but never more. This abiding hunger stays with you for days and days without relief.

How, then, does one chew on the flesh and bone of Jesus for eternal life? How do we fill aching stomachs and soothe empty, protruding bellies with the spiritually nourishing Bread of Life?

In Brazil, the project called "Fome Zero" (Zero Hunger) carries a very lofty (and perhaps unrealistic?) goal of providing every Brazilian with three meals a day. I don't imagine that the meals are elaborate five-course meals or sushi buffets, but this goal might very well be considered an insurmountable challenge, considering that "one quarter of Brazil's 170 million people live below the poverty line" (according to EndPoverty2015.org).

When a nation's citizens are starving with physical hunger, how can we bring them to, or bring to them, the Bread of Life? How do we embody the Bread of Life? After we eat the bread which is the bread of life and drink from the cup which is the cup of salvation, how do we embody that newness, that fulfillment, that nourishment, that satisfaction?

Chew on this, chew, chew, chew...