Sermon at Grace Episcopal on by Lynette

HUNGRY? Feed yourself

Message given at Grace Church, Molokai 27 Dec 2009

This week has been one big party in the Schaefer household. We've had our granddaughters: Lehiwa who's almost 11 months old and her sister Kawehena who's 5 and joined us at Thanksgiving. What an incredible gift to see Christmas through their eyes and to celebrate our son's 28th birthday with his two girls!

And then yesterday, Scotty and I went to the Willows Restaurant. My best friend from hanabatah days, our matron of honor at our wedding, was surprised and honored for 40 years of teaching in the DOE.

This Wednesday will be Scotty's and my 32nd wedding anniversary and of course Thursday is New Year's Eve!

Wow! So much ono food - it's going to take most of 2010 to recover.
But what do you do before you party? You get ready. Whether you are hosting or going, you get prepared.

To get ready for the girls' time with us we had to baby proof the house again by putting locks on certain cupboards, putting dangerous things up high, setting up gates to enclose the lanai so the baby doesn't tumble down our stairs.

Last Sunday I left after worship to pick up Lehiwa and bring her back. But I was not prepared to do that simple task. Carrying an extra 20+ pounds is strenuous when you're already carrying too many other extra pounds. Since my asthma I hadn't even walked much. And because I had some skin cancer surgery I couldn't get in the pool either. So carrying this little girl left me exhausted when I came home. And my body hurt.

Now if you drive up to our house and look in our carport you'll find exercise equipment: a bow flex, a bicycle, weights and a rowing machine all designed to make us healthy. Any one of which could have been useful if I had taken the time to prepare myself over the past few months. I've known I needed to increase my endurance and exercise especially to help my breathing. Because breathing is good. And I had a little warning that the girls were coming. I could have used that equipment to get ready. But there was always a reason that I didn't. And I suffered the consequences for not being ready.

Do you know what the number 1 use of exercise equipment is in most people's homes? YES! They're clothes hangers. In other homes, jars of expensive multi-vitamins and shelves of cookbooks teaching healthier ways to prepare food are all gathering dust. We have the healthiest dust and the strongest clothes in the world.

How many of you have a Bible in your home? In many of our homes we also have other books and CDs or DVDs that could help us live spiritually healthy lives. And most of them are gathering dust too. Not only do we have the healthiest dust, we have the holiest dust too.

Every week on the top of our prayer list it says:

To accomplish our vision we want to grow and go through strengthening our CORE
C - committing our life to Jesus
O -offering our gifts and talents
R - reaching out to a broken world
E - enjoying the presence of God in our lives

I put it there to remind each of us that by making our core muscles strong we have more balance, more strength and are less likely to get injured. Core conditioning has to be done regularly and become a habit to actually become stronger. And it helps you prepare and be ready when unexpected demands come in to your life.

But you have to use the equipment instead of hanging clothes on it
A few months ago, I saw a t-shirt that simply says on the front,

"HUNGRY?" On the back it says, "Feed yourself!" My first response was, "Wow. That's kind of in your face." But it came from New Hope Christian Fellowship, a church that has grown from a few people on Oahu to over 10,000 members all over the state and all over the world.

The numbers don't impress me. But on any given day, at all times, if you walk into any coffee house on Oahu you will see people in their teens, twenties, thirties and even in their seventies reading from their Bibles and using the New Hope journals that we have in the bell tower here. They are feeding themselves to satisfy their spiritual hunger. Every day. And that impresses me, especially after spending time with my 2 mo`opuna.

Lehiwa is the baby. She wants to chew on everything but she isn't able to really feed herself. Sometimes she gets fussy and grumpy and can't understand why. Yesterday she was grumpy and ready to go into hyper-cry. Just as she took that deep breath to scream, some eggs and fried rice found its way to her mouth. Suddenly she stopped crying and even started jumping and laughing. She was hungry, very hungry. But all she knew was that she felt junk.

On the other hand, Lele is 5. Like any 5 year old she could live on candy, cookies. iso peanuts, pizza, and sprunch (that's the new drink - sprite mixed with fruit punch. As if each of them didn't already have enough sugar!). Lele can pretty much feed herself, but she wouldn't be too healthy if she made the choices alone. My job as grandma is to make sure she eats the right things at the right times.

When I watch her diet I am reminded of the fish at Hanauma Bay. Has anyone ever been there? It's a fish sanctuary now and the fish are so tame they will swim right up to you. Thousands of people go there every day to swim and hand feed the fish. To get the fish close they bring - does anybody know? - Yes, frozen peas and white bread. I am not sure why that became such a tradition, but that's what people bring. Then something strange happened. The fish started getting sick. The scientists said that fish couldn't live on wonder bread and frozen peas. They have to feed themselves with the right food to thrive. So they have to close the park regularly so that the fish can feed themselves on healthy food.

One day, about 30 years after leaving the manger, Jesus was all grown up. But He was starving… literally. He was about to begin His ministry and was in the desert praying and fasting for 40 days. Now Satan loves hungry people. Do I hear an amen? He can make you feel junk and weak if he can get you to eat the wrong things. He saw an opening and tried to tempt Jesus. He came and said, "If you are the Son of God, you don't have to be hungry. You can change these stones into bread and eat them. Then you won't be hungry any more."

Jesus replied, "You are right but people can't survive on bread by itself. They need nourishment from the Word of God."

Jesus knew that we have to feed ourselves, and unless we fix our spiritual hunger, we will feel weak, we will be confused and we won't even know why. It is by feeding on the Word of God that we get stronger and get ready for life's challenges. God's Word can prepare us for the struggles that lie ahead by giving us power with the right kind of fuel to keep us patient in adversity, joyful in tragedy, and keep us dancing when times are good.

Jesus didn't just pull that answer from outer space. It actually is a quote from the Old Testament, from Deuteronomy 8:3.

Deuteronomy is the 5th book of the O.T. In this passage Moses is talking to God's people just before his death. He recounts all the miracles that the Lord has done in their lives as they passed from slavery to the Promised Land. They had walked across a vast desert with hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children - a wilderness that didn't have a single Burger King or Pizza Hut. There were no microwaves to heat up leftovers. Moses was remembering that the Lord had literally dropped special bread called Manna from the sky to feed them and keep them from starving as they journeyed through the wasteland. And then Moses said that the Lord fed them so that they might know that "Man does not live by bread alone but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of God."

So when Jesus is weak from hunger and is tempted to do the wrong thing to feed Himself, He draws on the Word of God as an answer to the tempter. From boyhood, Jesus had fed Himself from the Word of God. He didn't let hunger win. He didn't cave in to self-pity or make excuses. His core was strong because He had prepared Himself by feeding on God's Word every day.

Fast-forward about three years. Jesus, weak from lack of sleep and blood loss, is dragging His cross to Golgotha. He has been flogged. The spikes from the crown of thorns have been driven deep into his head because the soldiers have sadistically hit them with a bat. By comparison, the temptation by Satan in the desert was so tame that it looked like Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. Now His hands and legs were screaming from the spikes. He couldn't breathe because of His position on the cross. But that was nothing compared to the pain of the weight of our sins that had wasted His strength and cut Him off from His Father. And as Jesus is gasping His last breath He calls out, "My God, my God. Why have You forsaken me?" These are the opening lines from Psalm 22. In His most painful moments, Jesus cries out from the Word of God that He has fed on His entire life.

And that wasn't wonder bread and peas. He wasn't just crying from pain and abandonment. Psalm 22 starts in hopelessness and ends in victory. It says that God hears all those who cry to Him; that the Lord won't abandon them. It says, "I will tell of your praise to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you."

Think you ever have reasons to be hurt or sad or desperate? Those aren't the thoughts of desperation. They are words of the knowledge that God isn't through yet and that He holds victory in His hands. Those are the thoughts of someone whose core is strong in the Lord who has been built up by feeding on the Word of God.

My friends, my brothers and sisters… feed yourself. Don't wait for me and don't just wait for Sundays.

If you just ate a meal once a weak, you would wither away and be weak. No matter how much you ate at last Sunday's lunch after worship or how big Christmas dinner was, there isn't enough nourishment to keep you going for a whole week, even with 2 meals.
You will get hungry. You will get weak. You will give in to temptation. The joy and love will vanish from your life unless you take care of your spiritual hunger and feed on every word that comes from the mouth of God.

And if you find yourself grumpy or whiny, it may be that you have overlooked your true nourishment. You could be feeding on Survivor Samoa or the shopping network, and the equivalent of frozen peas and bread. Make sure that you are filling your time with the right stuff.
Dust off your Bibles. Grab a daily reading tab or grab a journal from the bell tower table. Take a new ESV translation of the Bible, which is what we're using here on Sundays. Find some partners to help keep you on track. And get ready. Feed yourself on the Word of God. Amen? Amen.

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