A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Nina D. Grey

First Unitarian Church of Chicago

February 7, 2010

How many of you know what today is? That’s right! It’s Super Bowl Sunday! The Indianapolis Colts will play the New Orleans Saints. Friday, on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow was in New Orleans and Melissa Harris-Lacewell was one of her guests.  They talked about the hot topic of Super Bowl advertising – how the Super Bowl reversed its decision not to take advocacy ads but then took a conservative anti-choice ad and refused progressive advertising.

I am concerned about that but I was more interested in their conversation about New Orleans. They showed heartbreaking images from the Louisiana Superdome right after Katrina: from those days after the hurricane and the flooding ~ women, men and children, desperate for help ~ for water ~ for food.

Seeing those, I thought of Haiti ~ where images were not of flooding but of recent earthquake destruction ~ piles of jagged concrete trapping living beings. People who thirsted for water, for rescue, for hope.

Humans can go without food for quite awhile. People have fasted for weeks. But we, like every human and other living being, need the basics, water and some kind of food, to survive.  According to the U.S. Geological Survey website:

“60 percent of the human body is water, the brain is composed of 70 percent water, and the lungs are nearly 90 percent water. About 83 percent of our blood is water, which helps digest our food, transport waste, and control body temperature. Each day humans must replace 2.4 litres of water, some through drinking and the rest taken by the body from the foods eaten.”

Ben Harper, a singer and songwriter, wrote The Will to Live, a song about a girl whose heart is on the wrong side, but who against her doctor’s expectations kept the rhythm of her beating heart, and is still alive; a song about a man who, though has to walk on his hands, still walks taller than most of us can. The will to live is a strong will. Most of us are driven by it most of our lives long. But we cannot survive for long without essential nourishment.

And for what do we thirst and hunger? First we thirst and hunger for water and food.. But we thirst not only for these things. Many of us yearn for some kind of nourishment of the spirit, sustenance for the heart and food for the soul.

Some of you remember Wallace Rusterholtz. He came to church every Sunday for as long as he could. He loved this church. He was a devout atheist. He didn’t pray and it wasn’t necessary that he do so here. Often he showed up half way through the service, missing prayer and music, just in time for the sermon. I’m not encouraging showing up late. I’m just telling his story. The companionship of our members and the invitation our faith gave him to think, to read, to write, these all fed him.

In his 94th year, he slowed down. He couldn’t stay awake long enough to read much, or to write anything. This drove him to despair. For 3 years before that, we’d talk about how as he grew more limited, his task was to live the highest quality of life that he could within those limits. He tried as long as he could to do just that, but finally, his body betrayed his desires. He couldn’t do any of what he wanted to do.

Only then, when he lost a will to live, did he stop eating. Food and water were not enough. He needed more.

Food and water are essential for life, but alone they are insufficient. For humans, meaning is also essential. And some kind of love is required ~ family, or community, or friendship, or the love of God  ~ so that, despite our sometime feelings of isolation or loneliness, we know that we are not alone.

Ann Arwe was a Republican in the Keene Unitarian Universalist church, a congregation I served in the 1980s that was half-Republican.

Politically she knew she was not alone, and though she lived alone on Court Street, she was active in the President Ford Committee in 1976, 6 years before I met her. When I met her, she was 85, legally blind, and living in a retirement community. She did everything she could to stay connected, stay involved, have fun with her life, and she succeeded for a long time, in the face of growing physical adversity. Then she began to fail.

We say that, as if growing old and frail was failing. But it is not. If we are lucky to grow old at all, it is natural to grow frail. A strong-willed woman, Ann Arwe yearned for respite from her bodies’ decline. She wanted to die. But her strong heart wouldn’t let her go for what seemed to her like too long a time.

I know so many elders who persist beyond pain, beyond limitation, who exhibit the strongest will to live, to thrive, to contribute, to be in relationship, and to make a difference in this world. Some of you are in this room now.  

How important meaning is! And how important food and water are, to sustain that will, that drive, that connection, that search for purpose, that hope for more days and years of meaningful life.

For elders who live alone it is sometimes a struggle. Elders who live alone often hunger for spiritual support and the companionship of other thinking, loving, caring people. Later in life elders have a special need to tell our stories, to make meaning of what we have done or failed to do, place our life experience into context, seek a sense of reconciliation or forgiveness, affirm the lives we have led. This can be a need at any time, but it is a special need as one ages.

We hunger and thirst for meaning and connection in our later years. That is one reason why faith communities are so important! Intergenerational gatherings are life-giving. We need to tell and hear each others’ stories. Telling and hearing our stories in faith communities feeds our souls, our hearts, and spirits.

Many elders live with a hidden anxiety. They struggle and sometimes fail to get enough good and nourishing food to eat. The Chicago Food Depository and the University of Chicago studied low-income older adults in Chicago. They talked with elders that they found at congregate meal sites, and through flyers in grocery stores, apartment buildings, and laundromats. They discovered that 72 percent of these low-income older adults were at “high nutritional risk”; low-income older adults often skip meals, eat less often, eat smaller meals, or eat food they know is bad for their health. 37 percent eat less than they should because there was not enough money to buy food. 56 percent said that often or sometimes the food they bought ran out in ten days and they did not have money to buy more. Most of the participants in this study live alone. Many could not buy food sometimes because they were ill or physically limited.

Almost half report a lack of access to fresh fruits and vegetables. If I don’t eat my necessary protein and fruits and vegetables. I get light headed. I feel weak. It’s hard to focus, hard to meditate, to pray, to read, to think, to be physically active. I’m not good company. When I’m too hungry, I’m too cranky to be nice. It’s hard to think of someone else’s needs, hard to be thoughtful, hard to be generous.

I might delay a meal because I’m working on something, and I wait for hunger to remind me to eat. But even though I live alone I rarely miss meals. If I did miss some of them, you might not notice. You might just think my personality was changing a little, or that I was trying to lose weight.

The thirst and hunger of the people of New Orleans after Katrina, the hunger of the people of Haiti, these were visible, thanks to television. But though we sometimes see panhandlers on the street, asking us for a little something, chronic hunger in Chicago, in America is often invisible.

Who experiences food insecurity in America? Who is undernourished, who skips meals, who chooses between food and rent, or food and healthcare? In Cook County, according to the statistics of the Greater Chicago Food Depository, 678,000 people each year rely on emergency and supplemental food provided by the Food Depository and its member pantries, kitchens and shelters, 36 percent more than in 2006. 51 percent were women, 49 percent men. 64 percent were non-Hispanic Black, 21 percent Latino or Hispanic, and 12 percent, non-Hispanic White. “Assistance” the report states “helps make ends meet, but hard choices lead to hunger.”

The director of the Food Depository, Kate Maehr, said, “Thirty-seven percent of the people we served last year were children under the age of 18… nine percent of the people we served were under the age of 5.”

The Chicago Tribune reported that “The report’s statistics paint a chilling picture of the impact the nation’s economic crash has had on families here and across the country.

At the Chicago Area Liberal Ministers’ meeting on February 2nd, we talked about parents who are losing jobs, and who are telling their children to keep it a secret. We talked about families and children feeling ashamed, as though their situation of homelessness or hunger were entirely of their own making. Is shame a legacy to leave to Chicago’s children, America’s children?  How can a child who is hungry and maybe homeless and ashamed be one whose heart is filled with wonder and delight, a child who is not afraid to love?

President Obama submitted his budget on Monday. 8.1 billion for nutrition programs, a $400 million increase from last year; plus $10 billion over 10 years for greater access to USDA food programs; 50 percent higher government spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly food stamps.

What are we called to do and why are we called to do it? We are called to respond to hungers of the spirit, because we believe in encouraging each other to spiritual growing; so let’s develop and enhance more church programs that feed hungry hearts and souls.

We are called to recognize, name and contribute to healing for hungers of the body, because we believe in justice, equity and compassion; so let’s buy Empty Bowls, let’s support hunger programs; let’s help reduce hunger. Let’s be fierce advocates, speaking out for more federal hunger relief, job creation, justice for every child, family and individual in our city ~ in our land.

Good food is fuel for human bodies. It fires up our bones, our muscles, our brains, our senses. Fired up, we can feed our souls and be the meaning-makers, and society changers we are meant to be. Amen.