Written and Delivered by The Rev. Philip Schaffner

Are you hungry? What do you hunger for? What do you thirst after?

Everywhere I look, I see hungry people who are doing everything in their power to feed themselves yet to no avail? We are a culture obsessed with eating. Our supermarkets are filled with a previously unimaginable diversity of food options. Most of our food is processed to be some combination of cheap, fast or sweet. Although we are awash with calories, we often lack many of the key micronutrients and or have the wrong balance of nutrients. As a result, we have an epidemic of obesity and chronic heart disease and diabetes are on the rise.

However, when I say we are a hungry people, I don't just mean food. We are hungry for possessions. Whether it's the latest fashion trend, the newest cell phone, the fastest or largest car, the biggest house, you name it. There never seems to be enough, even though we are surrounded by a super abundance of riches and material possessions. Moreover, we are hungry for security and safety. We want to be able to control our environment to make it void of risk. As a result, we often recoil from conflict and instead prefer to gossip and congregated with only like-minded individuals.

At the end of the day though, we are left wanting. We are still hungry for that next thing. We feel the emptiness of our possessions and the superficial nature of many of our relationships, and so we self-medicate with alcohol, gambling, shopping, fast food, and reality television.

The Good News is that Jesus offers us food that satiates our deepest hunger. Through belief and participation in the Eucharist, we are fed with living bread that transforms us from within. Indeed, we do not live by bread alone.

However, I think we are tempted to view this like every other possession we seek. Faith is not a commodity that can be purchased. If we treat church like a store and come here for a meal, only to go back to the race then we've missed the point. Eternal life is not something we purchase, but rather a free gift from our creator.

Perhaps a better way to put it is that we have been given an invitation to the most amazing banquet--one that never ceases. Yet this banquet is unlike other meals. It is an invitation into a way of life that feeds itself. Eternal life is just that it is life...it is to live fully in the presence of God at all times and in all places. We are fed when we recognize and respond to God's invitation for each moment of our lives.

Does this mean that there won't be pain, loss, suffering and confusion? No. God invites us to co-experience life and to be open to the nourishment present at each moment. This nourishment can be difficult to comprehend at first, because it looks outward rather than inward. Participating in God's invitation connects us to other people, and rather than shielding us from the world with all its shortcomings and snares, God's invitation is to embrace the world and to feed and care for the world.

The evangelist and preacher Brian McLaren once described the invitation to eternal life as an invitation to be a secret agent for God. It is to approach each moment with a hidden agenda: to bring the love and restoring power of God into the world. To see the hunger around us and to share God's invitation to life with others. To do that means offering ourselves as servants. It means recognizing the abundance of gifts in our midst and using them for the Kingdom.

Being a secret agent often means following Paul's advice to the Ephesians: be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving and not letting the sun set on our anger. It means being willing to confront and help a friend in an abusive or violent relationship. It also means serving the fringes of our community. For example, a group of secret agents from our congregation will be serving a meal with Loaves and Fishes in Minneapolis on the 31st of this month.

Sometimes being a secret agent for God means participating in a larger mission like the Millennium Development Goals that I described last week whose primary goal is the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger. Despite the culture of hunger in this country, so few of us actually have experienced real hunger. I'm not speaking of fasting for a few days or skipping a meal or two.

In her book The Eucharist and the Hunger of the World, Monika Hellwig describes the total nature of hunger in extreme poverty. It weakens the body and shuts down the mind. Hunger controls us and narrows our imagination. It sharpens the senses, but forces our attention on getting food. It overpowers everything else and becomes an all-consuming drive.

As we think about the scripture passages we heard this morning, it's easy to lose site of the power of extreme hunger. As Dr. Hellwig wrote, "the church may stand before the world proclaiming that man does not live by bread alone, but the voice of the poor cries out that man does not live without bread" (p. 26).

Interestingly the poor and scripture agree on this point. The Bible is filled with examples of God providing food to the poor and instructions for us to do the same. The invitation to life is an invitation to feed others. It is not to save our lives that we seek God, but to save others--quite literally. This is our mission as secret agents for God. I do not have time to go into all the ways we can do this collectively or individually, but in our land of abundance we have all the resources we need. Indeed, if each of us gave just 0.7% to support international development efforts, we could meet our mission.

Paul wrote to a diverse and growing church in Ephesus and admonished them to be imitators of God. We are God's agents in the world through our acts of love. I pray that we may find ways to manifest that love in our every day lives and actions. And I pray that we answer God's invitation to mission in the affirmative, being open to a life lived to the fullest through service.