Today I am hungry.
We haven't run out of food; we're not that poor, and even if we were my congregation would never let us starve. I'm hungry because I've committed to fasting one day each week during lent, from sunset to sunset, and to give what I would have spent on food to those who go without on a daily basis.
Maybe it's because of that second commitment that when I fast my mind isn't necessarily on God the whole time.
For me being hungry is out of the norm, and being hungry makes me think about God, for sure. It makes me grateful for how incredibly blessed I am and it reminds me of God's desire that all might live. God wants me to have what I need.
But that always brings my thoughts around to the fact that there are 925 million other people in the world who are hungry today, and they didn't choose it as a lenten discipline. God wants them to have what they need, too.
Meanwhile, I probably have way more than I need. I'm choosing to abstain from it today, but it's there, waiting for me.
Coincidentally, in my postcolonial voices class today we read and discussed 1 Corinthians 11:17-34, where Paul writes about the abuses of the Lord's Supper. Some people in Corinth were overindulging on food and drink while others were leaving the table hungry. This is also the passage that I've heard as a warning to never take Communion without confessing my sins first, because Paul says that whoever eats and drinks (takes Communion) without discerning the body eats and drinks to their own judgment. Today it was offered as possibility that Paul is actually referring to the Body of Christ, which he describes so famously in the next chapter. In some early copies of this text it actually says "without discerning the body of the Lord."
What if this warning is actually to the Church that lives in abundance while so much of the world goes without? What if, by our tacit acceptance of our own abundance in the face of so much need, we are opening ourselves to judgment? Isn't the continued suffering and want in the world the very indictment that so many lay against our claims to seek the good of all creation? We eat and drink to excess while one seventh of the world is hungry. My congregation would never let me starve, but we let 5,000,000 children starve every year.
Our Communion table, our place where all are made equal and made one in the Lord, judges us.
God wants everyone to have what they need, and God wants us to be a part of that. I don't know whether you decided to give something up or to take something on for this lenten season, or if you even observe lent at all. But as Christians, as human beings, I ask you to start to think for these next 38 days (and beyond) about what you can live without so that others might live.
