Please Help. We Need Food.

This month, our congregation has been participating in an Offering of Letters drive. It is an initiative of Bread for the World—“a Christian advocacy organization urging U.S. decision makers to do all they can to pursue a world without hunger”—where we offer handwritten letters to our state representatives encouraging them to prioritize food justice. With our congressional and senatorial representatives both being incumbents in an election year, we wrote as many letters as we could to the four people vying for election, asking that they consider the hungry in their campaign promises.

We set up tables in the sanctuary for people to pull up a chair after worship services and write their letters. Sample letters were provided to help us write our own:

“As a [Christian/person of faith/follower of Jesus], I lament the cutting of SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) funds as a result of the passage of H.R. 1. This will have a catastrophic impact on the more than 3 million Texans who rely on SNAP to buy groceries, 75% of whom are children, seniors, and people with disabilities. As you seek elected office, I hope this letter will urge you to consider feeding the hungry as a top campaign priority. Over 5.4 million Texans experience food insecurity, making ours one of the hungriest states in the country. Food justice is a matter of moral urgency, and our God demands justice. We must care for our neighbors in need.”

Monday morning, I went into the sanctuary to start gathering those letters for delivery. Some of them were written in crayons on paper plates by our children and the young at heart. Bread for the World has testimonies of congresspeople being particularly moved by letters from kids asking them to make sure everyone has enough to eat. Looking through the notes written by our children, one of them stopped me cold. All it said was, “I want food. Please help. I need food.”

The Offering of Letters drive was not supposed to be about us, but about those in need. Our letters were meant to advocate for others, to speak up for those whose voices are often ignored by people in power. Still, one of our children understood their neighbor’s need to be their own and wrote, perhaps instinctively, “Please help. I need food.”

When it comes to that part of the greatest command where Jesus reminds us to “love your neighbor as you love yourself,” our children seem to understand this better than we do. They get it. And, as Jesus says when he turns his adult followers’ attention to a child, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3).

Consider this through the eyes of a child: The apostle Paul writes about the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12, telling the church at Corinth, “Just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ…If one member suffers, all suffer together with it” (1 Corinthians 12:12, 26a). In other words, if your neighbor goes hungry, you go hungry. If someone else is starving, so are you. You may have food on your table, but until every human being—every child of God—has enough to eat so that they can fully live out the dreams that the Creator of every good thing has for their life, you will never be truly filled. So long as we do not see the plight of the hungry among us as our own problem to deal with, we will remain spiritually famished. Our children understand this.

This, I believe, is what is meant to be at the core of the Christian conscience. In order to love one another as we love ourselves, we must see one another as we see ourselves. In order to love my neighbor as I love myself, I must see that my neighbor is me. If she is hungry, I am hungry. If he is thirsty, I am thirsty. As the modern day prophet Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of reality.” Or, as Jesus puts it, “This is the kingdom of God.”

So, when our children write on behalf of others, “Please help. I need food,” they are restating the prayer we know so well, but might not really get: “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:10-11). Us. My neighbor and me. Please help. We need food. Amen.