“Put out into the deep water, and let down your nets for a catch.” I do love it when Jesus says that. In some very real way, I feel as if Jesus has been saying that to us in the Church ever since: if you would be faithful to me, if you will be fruitful for me, put out into deep waterwading in the shallows. In the shallows, we at least get a sense of the water looks and feels like. But it takes so much less - what’s the word - risk if we limit ourselves to wading. Going out into deep water takes a certain amount of knowledge, demands a certain commitment, and emphatically requires risk.

I want to share with you another story today - about someone who felt led to take an enormous risk. I will admit it’s not the most familiar of Bible stories. In fact, it is one of the texts I chose to use for our Fall Bible Study, appropriately called: “Untraveled Waters: the Greatest Bible Stories You Never Heard.” As told in 2 Kings, Chs. 6 and 7, the northern Kingdom of Israel has come upon hard times. A terrible drought has laid waste to her crops for several years without relief. To make matters far worse, seeing an opportunity in Israel’s weakness, a Syrian king named Ben-Hadad has massed a huge army and laid siege to the Hebrew capital at Samaria.

So, in about the year 840 BC, Ben-Hadad’s well-provisioned army completely closes off the city, such that absolutely no supplies go in, and nobody gets out. 2 Kings tells of a ghastly famine that stalks behind the walls of the city, sparking a black market that puts astronomic prices on things that are barely edible. Episodes of human cannibalism are reported, as people begin to turn on each other like rats, in desperately-malnourished insanity.

Sadly, in our own time we have seen both these causes for episodes mass starvation - the natural and the unnatural, drought and war. In failed states like Somalia, millions risk a death no less awful than what the Bible speaks of in Samaria; in war-ravaged nations like Sudan, a people’s own government turns its gaze away from mass malnutrition and violent atrocity, with its own sinister political ends in mind. This very morning, approximately 1 billion of the world’s people are hungry; accordingly, nearly a billion and a half of our planet’s inhabitants make a real income of less than $1.25 a day. Again, before midnight comes, this very day, some 16,000 children will have died from causes directly related to severe malnutrition. So if there are some tales in the Bible that sound very strange in our day and time, tragically mass starvation isn’t one of them.

But however miserable 2 Kings says that things were inside Samaria’s walls, there are a few poor souls for whom things are even worse. These are the wretches who live outside the city’s gates, feeding on refuse, the garbage that the city’s residents pitch over the walls to rid themselves of disease-causing filth. Indeed, that is how this ragged edge of humanity outside the gates is seen: as disease-causing filth; for these are lepers. They live outside the walls because the Levitical law demands it (Lev. 13).

Desperate, dying with not even garbage now coming over the walls to feed upon, four lepers hatch a reckless plan - they will defect to the enemy, the encamped Syrian army. Maybe the soldiers will show mercy and give them food. Maybe they won’t, and instead kill the pitiful quartet. Either way, they decide, it’s a better shot at life, or death, than just starving.

But wait - because in the mysterious ways of God, the four lepers discover a miracle has unfolded - and nobody even knows it! Just before dawn, a panic has swept through the Syrian camp - rumors of rumbling chariots and mercenary armies come to rescue the Israelites. The mighty force laying siege to Samaria breaks ranks, and flees helter-skelter into the pre-dawn gloom. What the lepers find in that abandoned camp is food, rich, heaping piles of it, more than four tottering wraiths could ever eat! They also find the finery of mighty Aram: silks and linens, silver, even gold. Eating until they are gorged, the astounded lepers begin systematically to run around and loot the camp.

While an almost humorous image, their behavior is certainly true to human nature. We know what it is to get while the getting’s good, because after all, we can expect everybody else to be looking out for number one! Plenty of those who love Jesus still feel they can never acquire enough, never save enough to be safe in a world of dangerous downturns and unstable markets. In the United States, the average person eats three pounds of food each day, while 96 billion pounds of food are wasted, left in the fields or thrown away, representing 27% of the food available for human consumption in our nation. More than one-quarter of our food, wasted, thrown away, like rubbish over the wall that no one outside the gates will ever reach. No, in our land, we won’t likely starve like the lepers. We have no intention of going hungry for a day, going ill-clad for a winter, as our neighbors might in Roanoke or Appalachia, in Rwanda or Afghanistan. In our world’s economy, people and nations have to look out for themselves - just like the lepers of 2 Kings. They, after all, have no one in the world who cares a whit about them. Who can blame the lepers for looking out for themselves on the luckiest day of their miserable, disposable lives?

But then, in what I can only describe as a shining moment, something stops them in their looters’ shopping spree. These Hebrews, members of a people set aside before Holy God, realize that this is a day not of luck for a few, but one of good news for the many. They say to each other: what we are doing is not right! This is a day of good news. We have to share it. And share it they do - in a single day, the famine in the city is broken, the hungry are fed, the war-profiteers see their lucrative margins collapse. No one will ever know what those lepers’ names were, no one but God. The God who made them knows their names. The Lord, the One, True God, knows the name of every starving man and woman on the planet. The Lord knows the name and the number of the children who will die this day, waiting for good news that will not come. And the Lord also knows the location of every languishing food palette, stolen by a greedy warlord or hoarded by a wealthy nation.

Sisters and brothers, I proclaim to you the dream of a shining moment, a season in which Jesus’ people will awaken the world to a day of Good News. Outside these walls of ours, Jesus is calling us, calling us to go in mission, calling us to give generously of our time and money to ministries that transform human lives, calling us to count on God’s economy of abundance, not the world’s deadly abacus of scarcity. For those with the courage to open that gate, beyond and behind which there are rumors of starvation, Good News is waiting.

What might that look like? It was in Fall 2008, that a frightful rumbling was growing louder, terrifying the mighty up on Wall Street. A season of scarcity and anxiety was sweeping over our land - and it was also the season in which a new ministry was born here at St. Mark’s. In witness to the simple belief that God’s hands hold enough for everybody, the ministry was called That All Might Eat. This group of believers, of its own accord, organized around a plan to make 10,000 meals to be distributed by an organization called Stop Hunger Now to those who live at the very edge of starvation.

But supplies and expenses for the meal-making event cost $2,500, and again, this was a season of national fear and scarcity. Still, the “TAME Team” announced plans to raise the money by means of three fundraisers over a period of six months. The goal seemed ambitious in a season of want. In fact, nobody knew what was coming. Within four weeks of the launch of this hunger initiative, the target of $2,500 was met and exceeded - without a single fundraiser. The generosity continued, and continued. 10,000 meals were made in April, the weekend we celebrated St. Mark’s 40th Anniversary. On our behalf, TAME also made a generous gift to the Botetourt Food Pantry in Fincastle. The children of our Sunday School then gave a small ark-load of animals to the world’s poor through a group called Project Heifer International. 10,000 more meals were slated to be made at the end of this month, October 31st. And the Good News just keeps on coming.

Outside in the Narthex, you will see an invitation to get involved with TAME in a number of ways. But more than that, you will see a hint of something new, an awakening to a day of Good News. Thanks to a few visionary laypeople, who became a team of many, and still more so thanks to God’s Holy Spirit of abundance, we discovered that when the need is great, St. Mark’s doesn’t step back, we step up.

Of course, one might look at the enormity of the needs of our world, and say that 10,000 meals, 20,000 meals - it isn’t much. But our economics are shaped by the One who told us that what we do for the least of these, we do for him. So, may you find reason for hope in a world that fears the future. May you learn to live with what little you’ve been given, in response to a shining moment - the dawning of a day of Good News.

Thanks be to God.

Note:

These hunger stats referenced above, shocking as they are, are only a few of the well-documented statistics regarding food waste that can be found at the Society of St. Andrew’s website, www.endhunger.org.