I love the voices on this blog: Lana eating snow and shopping for a GMO-free meal; David probing our call to social justice; ELCA camp directors talking about the carrots and lettuce their campers are growing, eating, and giving away.

And then there’s me, carrying on about public transportation, old socks and shoes, and how, while we profess our belief in God, we act as if The Market is at the center of our lives.

“Maybe,” Nancy suggested gently the other day, “it’s time to remind blog readers what your topics have to do with World Hunger.”

What a good idea! Even I forget, sometimes, when I get carried away. So, here goes.

Most of my 33 posts since April 2009 focus on stuff: buying and selling stuff, storing stuff, having too much stuff, recycling stuff, giving stuff away, disposing of stuff, and transporting ourselves and our stuff. Recently I’ve looked at our notions about our economy—the role it plays in our lives; the assumptions we make about it; the possibility that the Market, not God, is the deity we really serve.

Figuring out how to reuse or recycle several hundred unmatched socks at Holden Village was my September stuff preoccupation.

My corner of the hunger discussion is our North American lifestyle. It’s about how our overstuffed lives keep us from walking our anti-hunger talk—and sometimes completely contradict the beliefs we profess to hold.

Consider this: Statistics show under our present system, a child born in North America will consume, waste and pollute in his or her lifetime as much as 50 children in developing countries. This good-sized tendril of the root causes of hunger starts in our own backyard.

We Lutherans love to cooperate in starting and supporting water projects in other countries. We rejoice that in Chiapas, Mexico, our support is helping an indigenous community irrigate its fields. Meanwhile, speaking of consuming 50 times more than everybody else, at home we treat our water with little respect. We run our faucets while we brush our teeth, take 10-minute showers, and insist on bright green lawns no matter what the climate. It took three liters of water to make our 1-liter plastic water bottle? 70.5 pounds of water to manufacture (in Asia, probably) a 2-gram, 32-megabyte memory chip and its plastic package? Not our problem!

It’s odd to me that our passion for water in Chiapas doesn’t inspire us to connect the dots between green lawns and the fact that, for example, the United States consumes 95 percent of the Colorado River’s water.  The paltry 1.5 million acre feet of Colorado water we give to Mexico is about what farmers in Sonora used in 1922. They can’t farm; the indigenous living along the Sea of Cortez, where the Colorado once emptied, can’t fish. And how are the farmers down the road from that thirsty computer microchip plant faring? All we know is that we can get a computer for a song at Best Buy, and when it wears out, we can recycle it. We don’t want to know streams, groundwater, and children will be poisoned when an offshore e-waste recycler sends it back to Guiyu, China—increasing the very poverty, hunger and environmental degradation we claim to oppose.

My little blog posts fall under the World Hunger program objective, “to encourage members of this church to practice responsible stewardship of their lives and their financial resources toward the prevention and alleviation of hunger.” To me, responsible stewardship means making sure our left hand knows how the plastic water bottle it plunks  down at the cash register aggravates a situation the World Hunger dollars in our right hand hope to alleviate.

As consumers we are discouraged from connecting the dots between our stuff and its consequences. As Christians, we’re obliged to. Convenience and personal comfort at the expense of others are not gospel values. The opposite is true: the gospel exhorts us always to act with our brothers and sisters in mind.

See? My blogs are not stuff and nonsense, but stuff and challenge. Thank you, Hunger Rumblings. I’m grateful for this space and everyone blogging along with it.

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

Did you take a few days off during the holidays, or fill every “free” moment with something to do?

Could you use a few more vacation days, or are you under the gun to use them up because you have “too many”?

Whenever I facilitate sessions around time, people get emotional right away. Crazy schedules; expectations that can’t be met at home or at work; fears of being fired for refusing overtime; pressures imposed by software that tracks when you arrive, when you leave, how long your phone calls last, and how long you took for lunch—intense stuff gets shared. These stories reveal a political and cultural system of time that is getting steadily more oppressive.

This system is not outside of but within us. As we live and breathe it, we internalize and try to meet its expectations. Our expectations as consumers, for 2:00 am pizza and round-the-clock customer service, also feed its demands.

Trying to use our time more effectively is a fruitless adaptation. To really free ourselves, we have to ask basic questions, like why?  Lucky for us, we have Sabbath on our side.

God commands us to rest, yes. But not many people are listening. In part that’s due to  Sabbath’s gloomy reputation after long centuries of legalistic, government or church-body enforcement. Few want to embrace rules that keep us from doing what we want to do.

Our incessant busyness is also to blame. Author Wayne Muller says we Americans have no thermostat – no ability to know when to stop. Even worse, says Muller, “In spite of any compelling physical or spiritual benefits, we fear we have no authentic, trustworthy permission to stop. If we do stop to rest without some very good reason or some verifiable catastrophe, we feel guilty, we worry about getting in trouble, we feel we are just lazy, not carrying our weight, not a team player, or will be left behind. If we just put our nose to the grindstone, give it our all, do our best, give 110 percent, really put our mind to it, never give up, and work more efficiently, then we can, and should, be able to get absolutely everything on our desk, on our to-do list, on our calendars, finished, on deadline, without any mistakes, perfectly, every time. Then, we can rest.”

What a fix: no permission to rest, and a Sabbath that sounds boring and restrictive! That’s why I’m resolving to become, in 2011, a radical Sabbatarian, and try to relearn how to accept God’s permission to rest, and rest creatively.

Today, I almost succeeded. After church, I dawdled for several hours with family and friends over coffee, tea, soup, and leftover Christmas cookies. But now I’m sitting at my computer writing this post. So ends the first Sunday of the year; come Sunday two, I’ll try again. My sitting-around skills could use the practice.

In our rest-averse society, this kind of Sabbath is counter-cultural. To me, it has three radical aspects.

First,  “look Ma, no hands”: when we take our hands off the handlebars, the bike keeps going. While we rest, rain falls. Seeds sprout. The world turns, thanks to God. Sabbath can lessen our illusions of self-importance by reminding us who’s really in charge.

Second, by interrupting the “gotta do gotta do gotta do” tape that pounds inside our heads, Sabbath reminds us we are living things who need rest. We don’t have to keep going. We DO have permission to rest. Permission from God.

Third, it affirms our value as human beings. Says Barbara Brown Taylor, about Sabbath: “Test the premise that you are worth more than what you can produce—that even if you spent one whole day being good for nothing you would still be precious in God’s sight.”

Could anything more strongly contradict an economy that confines our meaning to a long dance of producing and procuring?

If we truly devoted Sundays to enjoying our doing-nothing selves, whose interests would be threatened? If we truly stopped, and didn’t spend our time “off” shopping or running from place to place, filling up calendars because being busy means being important, what would happen? How might our economy change? How might we change?

Viewed this way, Sabbath is not a bunch of rules that restrict activity but a powerful, radical tool for combating systems, powers and principalities that damage humans – that refuse to respect humans unless they are working, earning, and spending. And for combating the point of view that the world is ours to exploit, all the time. Sabbath means rest for the earth!

I try to define myself as for things instead of against things. I’m for active transportation rather than against cars, for example. In this post I’ve framed Sabbath as against the extreme demands of our system of time and our economy. But Sabbath is also for something. By asking us to rest, what is God trying to create more of? As a radical Sabbatarian, I hope to find out.

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

Like many Americans, I have long known the story of Santa Claus, the jolly white-bearded man who fills my stocking on Christmas morning. From the North Pole to Rudolf, I thought that I had my story complete. So I was intrigued when a Christmastime conversation with my Belgian boyfriend provided a new piece of the story.

In the US, depending on the Christmas jingle you listen to, you may refer to the man in the red suit as Santa Claus, St. Nicholas or even Kris Kringle. Well, as I recently learned, Santa Claus comes from the Dutch word for St. Nicholas, Sinterklaas. It turns out that St. Nick is a 3rd century Greek Bishop. He is the patron Saint of children and sailors and is venerated around the world. St. Nicholas is known for his good deeds, his holy life and is even regarded as the Wonder-Worker. Texts that I read often referred to his gift-giving and one described it in this way, “Nicholas gave in secret, alert to others’ needs, and expecting nothing for himself in return.” (www.saintnicholascenter.org)

Fast forward almost a thousand years to modern day holiday gift traditions.

Today, in Belgium, children celebrate the feast day of St. Nicholas (or Sinterklaas) on December 6^th. They place their shoes in front of the fireplace, or at the door, and hope to receive a gift from St. Nick in them. Unlike in the United States, where we hang stockings to be filled on Christmas Eve, many country’s gift traditions occur on the December 6^th feast day.

As our American Christmas gift-giving has become more commercialized, I am glad to discover it has other roots. It is nice to learn about Santa Claus’s saintly ties in the midst of the miracle of Jesus birth. As a poem from J. Rosenthal and C. Myers reads:

“Santa Claus encourages consumption;

St. Nicholas encourages compassion.

…

Santa Claus, for some, replaces the Babe of Bethlehem;

St. Nicholas, for all, points to the Babe of Bethlehem.”

So as we celebrate the coming of our Lord, may we remember the foundation of our Christmas gift-giving in the kindness of a Saint, living out his love for the baby Jesus.

~Lana Lile

This next Sunday (the last Sunday before Christmas–yikes!) we will read about Joseph’s courage and Mary’s faithfulness.   What follows is a reflection on Matthew 1:18-25 that I wrote for our weekly ListServ, “Hunger Sermon Starters” (if you are interested in receiving in your email inbox hunger related reflections on the lectionary, click here to sign up).  Read the reflection and let me know what you think!

Through the faithful obedience of two normal people, with very real struggles and fears, God incarnate entered the world.  How might God’s presence be needed in our world today?  How is God calling us to be faithful?  When we think about hunger and poverty, what might God be calling us to be and do as the body of Christ, God’s hands and feet?

A deeper look at the Gospel reveals an excellent opportunity to think about systems and structures that keep people hungry.  After telling us that Mary miraculously conceived from the Holy Spirit, Matthew is careful to demonstrate Joseph’s piety (1:19): “Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.”  Joseph, for reasons that are not explicit (Was he worried about how it would look for his betrothed to be pregnant? Did he question her fidelity?), wishes to leave Mary once he discovers that she is with child.  Matthew seems to suggest that Joseph’s status as a “righteous” man is protected by his willingness to put Mary away “quietly.”  It was culturally appropriate to abandon Mary, leaving her to be a young single mother on her own.

Allow for a provocative question: How is Joseph’s desire in any way “righteous”?  Matthew’s justification implies that it is acceptable (even proof of one’s righteousness) to leave a young woman to fend for herself and her child, so long as it is done privately.  In spite of Mary’s manifest vulnerability, her health, security, and status are irrelevant.  To be fair to Joseph (and Matthew), he was simply operating in the norms and mores of his society (here we see the systems and structures).  Moreover, Joseph’s faithfulness to God’s call shows his courage in standing against unjust systems when necessary.

Today, in many parts of the world (and yes, in some sectors of the Global North as well), women and children are seen as second class citizens, and can be simply discarded much like Joseph wished to do to Mary.  Women suffer disproportionately from hunger and poverty and are more likely to be abused (sexually and otherwise) and trafficked.    On the flip side, women are multipliers when it comes to effectively addressing hunger and poverty.  Women produce 60-80% of food crops in the Global South.  Yet they are far less likely to own land.  Women are also more likely than men to invest money in their family.  In short, we see a system (in this case pervasive sexism) that perpetuates and exacerbates hunger and poverty.  (For a host of relevant facts and data and some clever media presentations, see www.girleffect.org.)

This week’s Gospel, in my opinion, does not adequately challenge the system (but it does draw us into a discussion of the problem).  But we can challenge the system.  We can give to programs that support education and empowerment of women (ELCA Good Gifts is a good place to start—see https://community.elca.org/netcommunity/page.aspx?pid=474).  We can advocate for laws and policies that protect the rights of women (see www.elca.org/advocacy).  We can educate ourselves and others about the issues (the aforementioned Girl Effect Web site will give you plenty to think about).  Let’s get started!

David Creech

I am sitting in an airplane right now and I just finished watching Eat, Pray, Love…while eating airplane food. It is kind of a funny combination. During Eat, Pray, Love I got soaked up in Julia Roberts eating fresh pasta with perfect tomatoes and all of this from the kitchen of a beautiful, old Italian home. It looked wonderful. Food for celebration, food for health, food for the sake of food, but most important of all was that it was real food. It struck me as so beautiful and incredibly wholesome. Not wholesome in the well-rounded hometown-backyard-America way, but wholesome in the way that plants get planted, picked and cut and this is what ends up adorning a plate, seasoning a dish and nourishing our bodies. And for that matter, nourishing our souls. Good food puts in me a place where my heart is happy. I want to do a better job of eating good food, wholesome food, and make my heart happy while feeding my soul.

So what am I doing? I am eating airplane food. Want to know my secret? I LOVE airplane food. I am not really sure why, but my best guess is that  when I am stuck in a little seat for a long period of time a hot plate of chicken or pasta with a little cookie and my choice of beverage goes a long way. Even though I am tens of thousands of miles away from the land on which or under which, it may have grown. I do not know whether it contains genetically modified ingredients or if it is at all organic. It certainly did not come from my yard and its “wholesome level” is quite a bit lower than that of the Italian pasta in Eat, Pray, Love. However, I cannot help but acknowledge that it makes me happy as well.

Food is a wonderful thing. It is necessary for life and growth. It is beautiful and smells lovely (most of the time!). Food beckons family gatherings and marks special occasions. It evokes emotions, opinions, passions and happiness. Today, Italian food looks amazing – fresh pasta, yum! My airplane food, however, is surprisingly satisfying (except the amount of packaging surrounding each of the dishes is mildly disconcerting.) Food is so many things to me. What is food to you?

Lana Lile, Saturday @ 38,000 feet

This is the ninth in a series of posts highlighting hunger-related activities that happened at ELCA Outdoor Ministry locations over the summer with the help of Education/Advocacy grants from ELCA World Hunger. The following is from Carol Joy Holling  Camp in Ashland, Nebraska. It was written the last week of July.

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We are in the final week of camp here at Carol Joy Holling and the garden supported by an ELCA World Hunger Education/Advocacy grant is flourishing! Campers and staff have picked tomatoes, radishes, lettuce, zucchini, and a variety of squash. All the food continues to go to Table Grace Ministries in Omaha; an organization that teaches low income and single parent families how to cook and shop wisely.

The Hunger Garden is located at a central place on site that campers pass everyday to and from their activities. It’s an exciting place where everyone feels that they are doing something beyond our camp. The greatest experience is that many of our campers come without ever digging in the dirt or seeing where vegetables come from. This is a new experience!

Wednesdays’ focus is “Created for Community” and the Hunger Garden certainly brings the theme alive. Campers learn that “community” is much greater that just the camp – it extends out to many – many who we may never meet.

After the campers and staff leave for the summer the garden will continue to give. Members of American Lutheran Church in Ashland will come out on a regular basis to make sure nothing goes to waste. This is a great partnership with the local congregation.

Pastor Brad
Director/Programs, NLOM

Go in Peace. Remember the Poor.

Yesterday, at the end of our church service, the worship assistant sent us out with “Go in Peace. Remember the Poor.” More commonly, I hear, “Go in Peace. Serve the Lord,” so the poignant statement hit me a little more clearly. Instead of just saying serve the Lord, it gave a way to do so. Ever since yesterday morning, I have been thinking about what this means to me.

During my undergraduate years of study I completed a number of projects and papers on issues surrounding the Middle East and Islamic-Christian relations. The topics fascinated me. I think what caught my interest the most was my own need for peace and my inability to fully digest how we become so at odds with each other when we are continually summoned to peaceful ways. So I dove into the topics to learn more. It was, and is, enlightening. So today, when I think about going in peace, I think about our call to act peaceably to others. Our neighbors with whom we may have disputes, those we agree to disagree with, those who are a different color, religion or race than us, and those who seek to provoke anger or violence. We can respond in peace. My favorite Old Testament passage comes from Isaiah 2:3-5…

“³ Many peoples will come and say,

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
to the temple of the God of Jacob.
He will teach us his ways,
so that we may walk in his paths.”
The law will go out from Zion,
the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
⁴ He will judge between the nations
and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
nor will they train for war anymore.

⁵ Come, descendants of Jacob,
let us walk in the light of the LORD.”

I love the imagery of nation not taking up sword against nation, disputes being settled and resources being used to produce food instead of weapons. This makes me think about how peace can lead to food; to a decrease in poverty.

“Remember the Poor,” the worship assistant said.

I think it is rather easy to forget the poor when we, ourselves, struggle daily to pay our bills and make ends meet. Sometimes, it is hard to remember the poor when we see the same man with an “out of work” sign standing by the traffic light month after month. It is easy to wonder why he has not gotten some kind of work yet. So this is when I remember the work of ELCA World Hunger. This probably sounds like a marketing plug, but it is true. When I do my best to remember the poor I remember the projects we support around the world, the goats that change lives, the school meal programs we advocate for and the food desert I visited as a World Hunger intern two summers ago. “Poor” is such a general category that encompasses so many life experiences. So often, we think of those in our immediate sight, people on the street corners asking for money, and so often we forget those just beyond our vision. Families like those with a roof over their head but not enough food to go around the table. The little kids I saw walking to school a couple of weeks ago wearing shorts in the snow…those who can only afford winter gloves if they come from the clothing bank…those with beautiful hearts, positive attitudes, undying faiths and empty pocketbooks. Likewise, those with sad hearts, negative attitudes, dying faiths and pocketbooks which stream unendingly.  There are many types of “Poor.”

Who will you remember this Christmas? How will your peaceful call decrease poverty? How can we, as Christians, “Go in Peace. Remember the Poor,” this season?

~Lana Lile

Do we really worship the Market and not God, as I asked in last week’s post?

After rereading Harvey Cox’s seminal essay, “The Market as God,” I thought I’d watch my own actions this week and see. Is my life all about the Market, with a little lip service given to God, or is God at the center, and the Market at the fringes?

Because it was the end of the month, I spent last weekend checking my balances on various accounts. I updated my Quicken records with recent interest and expenses. I paid my VISA bill and thought about end-of-year donations – how much, to whom?  I wrote an offering check for the church where I would worship Sunday evening. Reading the Sunday New York Times business section reminded me that Cox calls the market omniscient, a source of “comprehensive wisdom that in the past only the gods have known.” And there I was seeking, through reports from Times business writers, to know the Market’s mood and direction. Poor God! There is no religion page anymore—not in the Times, not in my hometown newspaper.

Cox says that the Market is also omnipresent, making decisions that used to be private. I like to think that trying to live simply shelters me from this aspect of the Market, but  the certified letter I received from a lawyer on Friday had a different message. It informed me that in mid-2011, after the estate is settled, I will receive a few thousand dollars from an elderly friend who recently died.

This made me uncomfortable. I was a friend, not a paid attendant!  With no spouse or children, he wanted to distribute his estate among a dozen friends and cousins whose company he enjoyed. But does this legacy somehow commodify our long friendship, assigning it a price tag, as Cox might say?

The commodification of labor turned up Wednesday night, when an midweek Advent event tackled the subject of time—what it means to us, how we use it, how we feel about our schedules. The last time I punched a time card, I was 20 and weighing asparagus in a freezer plant. In the 90s, a company I wrote for made a big deal of removing its punch clocks to demonstrate its confidence in its employees. It was news to me that the new incarnation of the punch clock is the “electronic time card.” At this Advent supper, folks complained about having every moment of their work day  monitored virtually: start time, end time, break time, break length, even the length of customer service phone calls, all measured by software lurking on their computers.

One woman worked for a prominent shipping company. Guess who is demanding the World On Time, as the slogan says? Not some murky “they.” We’re the ones insisting on those electronic time cards, every time we check the status of a package or the value of its company’s stock.

While there has always been a place to trade, says Cox, today we elevate the Market above everything else. We abide by the Market’s rules, not God’s, and our whole system—like those electronic time cards—is designed to enforce them. A short week’s worth of observation confirmed that I am completely tangled up in that system.

What to do? Perhaps revisit the powerful tools God has given us to keep the Market—previously called Mammon—from consuming us. Tools like Sabbath, a radical practice most of us have abandoned. Suppose tired Christians decided to observe an economic Sabbath and not purchase anything on Sunday, so as not to stoke consumer expectations that trap folks into Sunday work shifts. Could we let the World On Time be the World As Is, the World As Appreciated, instead?

Watching myself interact with the Market is a tentative first step in a different economic direction. In coming weeks, the Advent gathering I’m part of will explore Christian practices of Sabbath and jubilee. Harvey Cox wants the Church to recognize the Market for the idol it is so it can provide some serious alternatives. Fair trade, socially responsible investing—these are nice places to start, but how can Christians go deeper? Sabbath may hold a powerful key. Stay tuned.

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity: A Journal

Tomorrow is the 22nd World AIDS Day, a day to raise awareness and fight the stigma of HIV and AIDS (see also the very informative aids.gov Web page).  As I have written earlier,

AIDS and hunger are closely intertwined.  AIDS is rapidly spreading in the most impoverished areas of the world—places where education, women’s and children’s rights, and peace are hard to come by.  Many areas, especially Sub-Saharan Africa, are trapped in a vicious cycle in which the symptoms of poverty facilitate the spread of the disease while the lives and productivity lost to the pandemic further impoverish vulnerable communities.  Moreover, AIDS is especially devastating to hungry persons.  Malnourished persons cannot take anti-retroviral drugs—an empty stomach cannot handle the powerful medicine.  In the absence of drugs and adequate nutrition, HIV develops into AIDS more quickly.  Once a person has AIDS, more food is needed to fight the illness and counteract weight loss.

On the flip side, when someone is given the food and drugs that are essential to effectively addressing the disease the results are miraculous.

This year, take some time to watch the Lazarus Effect and learn more about HIV and AIDS and the amazing transformations that can happen if someone is simply given access to life saving drugs (drugs that cost less 40 cents a day!).   After watching, do something about it: learn more, share the film with a friend, give.

David Creech

This is the eighth in a series of posts highlighting hunger-related activities that happened over the summer at ELCA Outdoor Ministry locations with the help of Education/Advocacy grants from ELCA World Hunger. The following is from Agape Kure Beach in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina.

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Worms. Food Waste. Campers.  You might be thinking, “Wow, what a mess!” or maybe even “Ewww, gross!”   It may be a little messy, but at Camp Agape we have been teaching campers about how to reduce our carbon footprints and world hunger by combining worms and food waste!  For the last two years, Camp Agape has been vermiposting (composting with worms).  Volunteers built vermiposting pits outside our dining hall and extra worms (red wigglers) were bought to start the process.  

After each meal campers separate their waste into two tubs: worm-friendly and trash.  Examples of waste that worms can eat include: fruit or vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, newspaper, and other organic waste.  Our campers and guests catch on very quickly not only to what foods can be composted but just how much food waste they create.  Campers also take part in maintaining the vermiposting bins: adding food waste,  shredding extra newspaper to cover the composting materials, and using water from our rain barrels to make sure there is plenty of moisture in the bins.  The more aware campers are of their waste, the more likely they are to think twice when piling up their plates with unnecessary, large serving sizes! 

Once they get into the habit of it, campers and guests find vermiposting easy to do, but often stop vermiposting when they leave simply because they don’t have vermiposting bins at home.  This summer with the help of the ELCA World Hunger Education/Advocacy grant we received, we were able to provide campers with the materials needed to take what they learned at camp about vermiposting home with them.  Campers in our SIT (Staff In Training) – Servant and Nature! Camp programs made their own vermiposting bins.  Camp Agape’s naturalist, Mir Youngquist-Thurow, led the sessions on how to create the bins, compost at home, and why composting can be so beneficial in our world.  We hope that campers will not only use their bins at home to continue vermiposting but also as a tool to teach their family, friends, and neighbors. 

Alissa Oleson
Program Director