“I have learned the secret of being well fed and going hungry, of having plenty and being in need.
I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”
Philippians 4:12-13
I have officiated at hundreds of weddings in my 38 years of pastoral ministry. It is one of the privileges of playing the role my calling invites me to play. People invite me into their lives and ask me to sit awhile in their world in order to give witness to God’s presence and pray for God’s blessing. So for that time, I sit with them and talk with them and pray for them. Yet when the four weeks of pastoral counselling and the weekend of celebration have passed, my notes from the ceremony and the couple’s results from the Prepare Inventory go into a file; I bless this bride and groom on their way, and for the most part they pass out of my readily accessible memory.
Yet some have found a place closer to the front of my mind. Their stories and my experience with them make a memorable impression; they become God’s gift to me, the Spirit’s tools in my own spiritual formation. One such couple came across my path in the early years of my work. This rather affluent, ok let’s just say it, REALLY WEALTHY, couple asked me to perform their wedding. Their union was no doubt as much merger as marriage. They were not a part of the church where I was serving but asked me to perform a ceremony that was to be held at the yacht club. In the fourth week of our pre-wedding meetings when it came time to plan the ceremony, I went over various examples of wedding vows from which they could choose. They settled on the traditional vows in the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship. But one phrase caught the groom’s eyes and pointing to it he said, “I don’t think we need to promise this.” The phrase was in the list of conditions in which a bride and groom both promise to remain faithful to each other. He was pointing at the line “in plenty and in want.”
This young man could not conceive of the contingency that would necessitate making this promise. He had plenty, he had never not had plenty, and the thought that he might one day not have plenty was not accessible to him. It was a dumbfounding experience for me. I knew in my heart he needed to be challenged on this but I also knew that this was not an arguable point with him. So in the inexperience of my early years of pastoral ministry, I had neither the confidence nor the categories by which to express my dismay. I silently acquiesced to his wishes and we left this line out of the ceremony.
As I periodically ponder this exchange I always feel sad and Jesus’ words about rich men and the camel passing through the eye of the needle come to mind. For what I know now beyond any doubt is that the state of wanting, the experience of poverty, is essential if we are ever going to follow Jesus and walk on the way of faith. The gnawing emptiness of want is the gateway to abundant life. We need only go to the first words in Matthew’s rendering of Jesus’ stump speech, the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are the poor. . . , blessed are those who mourn. . . , blessed are the meek. . . , blessed are those who hunger and thirst. . . . In short: Happy are those in touch with their emptiness because they are ready to be filled.
Poverty and the discomfort of want are not the normative experience for most middle and upper class North Americans. We might at times compare ourselves with those who are more “well-heeled” than we are and feel a bit disadvantaged; but for the most part our relative degree of affluence in comparison with the rest of the world keeps us in a sort of steady state of not thinking that much about wealth or poverty. I know I didn’t ever feel economically privileged until I spent two weeks at a theological seminary in Pune, India in 1985. On that trip I spent one night in the Centaur Hotel near the airport in Mumbai (Bombay) before I flew out to Pune the next day. The cost of the room was 700 rupees, about $55 at the time. In talking with other pastors at the seminary a week later, I discovered that for a one night stay I had spent the equivalent of the average monthly salary of a pastor.
Hunger, poverty, grief and meekness, are not our norm. So when they encounter us we find ourselves ill-prepared for the work of mining them for the blessing hidden in this ore. Covid-19 and the racial unrest of these days are presenting us with the invitation to engage in this work of excavation. The poverty of isolation from one another, the weight of a deeply rooted and seemingly insoluble problem, the threat to our peace that we feel, the loss of freedoms that we had taken for granted, or the fear that comes with facing into the truth of an uncertain future all have embedded within the them the severe mercy of facing into our hunger. They give us a vehicle by which to identify with the deer longing for flowing streams (Ps. 42), the prisoner sitting in darkness and gloom (Ps. 107) and the famished longing of a soul wandering aimlessly in dry and weary land (Ps. 63).
When we know we are in want, when we feel hunger, when we are consumed by the truth that we have nothing to consume, we are ready to be filled. We are invited beyond that vague sense of restlessness that otherwise occupies the waking hours of most of our days. That restlessness is not hunger so much as it is a fear of hunger. It is this fear that fuels our consumer economy and sends us on that futile quest for the thing that will bring us peace because it holds out the false promise of ending our waiting for the unknown thing we are wanting.
There is no better feeling than eating when one is deeply hungry and drinking when one is truly thirsty. Awareness of deprivation is the gateway to joyous fulfillment. Thank God for the opportunity of these days to recognize just how hungry our world is. And more importantly, thank God that God is ready and waiting to feed us.
David Rohrer
06/12/2020