Exodus From Hunger (10 page)
Read Exodus From Hunger Online
Authors: David Beckmann
Tags: #Religion, #Christian Life, #Social Issues, #Christianity, #General
Jesus’ resurrection confirms him as God’s Messiah and sends his followers into the world. They are given Jesus’ Spirit of love for all people and his boldness in the face of authorities.
The book of Acts is about the first years of Christian mission. The early Christians lived under the Roman Empire; they had no influence over laws or involvement in politics. But the apostles’ teachings provoked conflict with other religious leaders, and that often got them in trouble with the authorities. Paul, who was a Roman citizen, used his citizenship to advance the cause of the gospel—and ended up being executed by the authorities in Rome.
The gospels and the book of Acts are followed by letters from Paul and other teachers to early churches in the gentile world. The letters urge believers to be models of moral behavior, including active concern for people in need. They also explain that Jesus’ forgiving death offers unity with God that does not depend on how moral we are, and that Jesus within us moves us to faithfulness that goes beyond obeying a moral code.
Paul welcomes what governments do to put limits on bad conduct. He writes that governmental authority comes from God (Romans 13). Yet Paul and the other apostolic teachers were clear that a believer’s first loyalty is to God and Christ, and that this might lead to trouble with the powers that be and perhaps martyrdom. Some of the New Testament letters were written from jails.
Revelation, the last book of the Bible, is a kaleidoscope of apocalyptic visions. It portrays Rome as decadent and violent, an enemy of God’s purposes. Revelation envisions the overthrow of the Roman Empire and the evil it embodies, and the beginning of the reign of Christ. Love and goodness will prevail. In the end, the whole creation will be made new, and even decay will somehow be reversed.
The ambiguous relationship between Christianity and political authority has continued for two thousand years. Since the Roman emperor Constantine converted in 312 CE, Christianity has often been used to help win hearts and minds for a regime in power. On the other hand, Christians and Christian churches have always had a sense of accountability to a higher authority and have often worked to reform the structures and laws of society.
Every book of the Bible—from Genesis to Revelation—is clear that God cares about poor people and social justice. The Bible is not only about social justice, but justice toward people in need is integral to any relationship with the God of the Bible.
Hundreds of millions of people have escaped from hunger and poverty in our time, and all the nations of the world have acknowledged that further progress is possible. Given what the Bible teaches about God’s concern for poor people and God’s presence in history, doesn’t it make sense to thank God for this great liberation? Doesn’t it make sense to see it as an experience of God’s saving action in our own history? Isn’t God present in whatever efforts we make to help people escape from hunger and poverty?
People who believe in God struggle with suffering. We cannot explain why a good God lets one child die, let alone why tens of thousands of children continue to die needlessly every day. But we believe that God shares in human suffering and brings good out of evil. So we reach out to poor families and pray for their rescue. We pray for progress against poverty with the intensity of a mother who asks God to rescue her own child from a life-saving disease, and people of faith know that God answers prayers in a wonderful way.
Confessing that God is in the movement to end hunger and poverty does not mean that further progress is automatic. The feasibility of ending hunger has been widely recognized for decades. At the World Food Conference of 1973, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said that by the year 2000, no child in the world would go to bed hungry. Many reports and conferences since have repeated the claim that we can end hunger, if only we can muster the political will to do it.
I have walked the halls of Congress for hungry people for many years, and there is always something else—some politically important, overriding issue—that politicians feel must take precedence. When the Cold War ended at the beginning of the 1990s, the United States could have redirected more of the massive resources we had spent on the Cold War to overcome hunger and poverty in our country and worldwide. But our nation instead decided not to cut military spending much. In the first decade of this century, a booming economy again gave us additional resources, but we spent them on big tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
According to the Bible, God is usually frustrated by the way people and nations behave. People who work for God’s purposes in the world must often wait—and sometimes suffer and die for the Lord. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle.”
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Yet God’s presence in the movement to overcome hunger and poverty raises our hopes. Some optimism is justified by the experience of recent decades and analysis of what is feasible, and faith in God adds a religious dimension of hope. We believe God has benevolent intentions for humanity and will, in the end, bring us to the day when there will be “hunger no more” (Isaiah 49:10; Revelation 7:16). Through the ups and downs of history, those of us who believe God raised Jesus from the dead are always looking for ways God will bring good out of evil, and we are working to seize those opportunities.
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Jim McDonald, my closest colleague at Bread for the World, said it this way in a sermon to his home congregation:
Even when things seem to be going wrong, when it seems like it’s the scoundrels and the scalawags that are in charge, it’s good to be reminded that God has other plans, bigger plans, better plans; and God has purposes in mind for this world that even a calamity, whatever its size, whatever its genesis, can’t put an end to.
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Based on what the Bible says about people in need, doing our part to overcome hunger and poverty is crucial to religious integrity. We can go to church and sing great hymns, but if we don’t help people in need, this is made-up religion rather than connection to the real God. We can read spiritual books and pursue a wholesome lifestyle, but if we don’t help people in need, our faith remains self-centered.
For people who know and love the Lord, awareness of God’s presence in the movement to overcome hunger and poverty adds a dimension of faith that most churchgoers miss. We are connected to God through Jesus Christ, and then see our loving God at work in history. The life of faith becomes exciting and historic, bigger than our private lives. Reading the morning news becomes an extension of our morning prayers. Photos of famine on television are engaging rather than depressing. Our involvement in politics becomes an adventure of faith.
We can share Christian faith in God’s love by working for social change in the name of the Lord and making it clear that we see strides against poverty as one aspect of God’s gracious presence in the world. Bono, the Irish rock star, says he reconnected with his Christian faith because he was inspired by Christian activists who were working for the cancellation of the debts of poor countries.
Many people who have a hard time making sense of traditional theology understand that the escape of millions of people from extreme poverty is something wonderful, even sacred. Some of the Hebrew people who took part in the original exodus were probably not religiously observant either. But they had an extraordinary experience of the saving God that marked them and their descendants for many generations.
Jesus Christ is my connection point to God. Jesus suffered and died forgiving the people who crucified him. Jesus was God incarnate, so his forgiveness extends to all people. God raised Jesus from the dead, and I experience the Spirit of the living Jesus within me and within the community of Christian believers. I also experience this Spirit in many people who are not Christians and in nature as well.
Many Christians use different language than I do, but all Christianity is grounded in Jesus and his love. Christians experience God’s love for them, and we then share God’s love with others.
As Paul’s letters argue, God in Christ forgives our sins and accepts us as we are—even if we aren’t very committed or don’t have much faith—and this divine embrace moves us to share the love we receive. The Spirit of Christ within us nudges us to be more generous than we would be on our own.
I experience God’s grace as a spring of living water gushing up within me. It is the best thing in my life.
I have not given away all my worldly goods to help people in need. Yet in Jesus Christ I know that God accepts me and uses me anyway. My faith could be stronger, too. But Jesus said that faith the size of a tiny mustard seed can move mountains, and that is my experience.
Some people end up doing very little for people in need because they know they don’t have the commitment of a Mother Teresa. Awareness of God’s forgiveness allows us to reflect God’s goodness in our own halting ways, and God uses even modest acts of faith and compassion to make big changes in the world. God invites us all—gently, patiently—to be part of the great exodus of our time.
It was not obvious that the young Martin Luther King Jr. would be an exceptional religious and political leader. When he decided to go to seminary, ministry was one of the most likely ways an African American man could make a good living. He was serving his first church in Birmingham when Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a bus. According to historian Taylor Branch, King arrived late to a community meeting that night. When the group decided on a bus boycott, this young Baptist pastor was elected to lead it because the group was sharply divided between two more obvious candidates.
Leading the boycott put huge pressures on King. His telephone rang all day and all night—calls from fellow organizers, calls from cleaning ladies who needed a ride to work so they wouldn’t lose their jobs during the bus boycott, and anonymous calls that threatened violence against King and his family.
In the middle of one sleepless night, he had a conversion experience:
King buried his face in his hands at the kitchen table. He admitted to himself that he was afraid, that he had nothing left, that the people would falter if they looked to him for strength. Then he said as much out loud. He spoke the name of no deity, but his doubts spilled out as a prayer, ending, “I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.” As he spoke these words, the fears suddenly began to melt away. He became intensely aware of what he called an “inner voice” telling him to do what he thought was right. It was for King the first transcendent religious experience of his life.
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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s powerful challenge to our nation emerged from God’s presence with him that night.
The exodus from hunger and poverty is God moving in our time. Being part of it is important to our spiritual life and to the future of our nation
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GETTING SERIOUS ABOUT POVERTY WOULD BE GOOD FOR AMERICA
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ur country faces big challenges now. We have economic problems, including high unemployment and out-of-control government debt. We don’t have as much money as we thought we did a few years ago. Society is deeply divided, our political processes aren’t working very well, we are still at war, and our relations with the rest of the world are strained.
A bigger effort to overcome hunger and poverty in our country and worldwide would help our nation cope with these problems and contribute to a more hopeful future for America. This idea comes from the Bible, but you don’t have to believe in God to find it convincing.
The Bible isn’t alone in drawing connections between morality and the prospects of nations. Other ancient texts make the same point. Confucianism, for example, taught that China’s empires rose and fell depending on the morality of those in authority. Plato’s
Republic
argues that a city ruled by good and wise men will prosper.
Legitimacy is also a theme in modern political science.
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Some regimes stay in power by sheer force, but people in power almost always seek some moral justification for themselves because legitimacy helps them hold on to power:
States often resemble banks, which cocoon themselves in pompous buildings and rituals to create an illusion of solidity and to win public confidence, since without that they are remarkably fragile. In the political equivalent of a run on a bank, the astonishing collapse of communist states in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s shows what happens when such legitimacy is lost.
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The Hebrew prophets portrayed the Lord moving through history, insisting that nations and kings turn away from idols, immorality, and the neglect of poor people. The prophets speak the word of the Lord about national failings, and that moral word has power. God is patient with evil, and the prophets sometimes wonder out loud, “How long, O Lord?” But in the end, proud empires fall and oppressed people are delivered.
The historical books of the Hebrew scriptures show how the prophets’ teaching worked out in practice. When the kings and their nations worshiped carved images or other gods of their own making, they felt less obliged to behave morally, especially toward poor and powerless people. Even members of the royal household pursued their individual interests. As a result, the nations of Israel and Judah suffered from self-serving conflicts among their leaders, with the faction of a prince sometimes inviting a foreign power to come in and help him seize the throne from his father or brother. Over time, such behavior led to political instability, national decline, and domination by foreign powers.