“Send Them Away” Or… (Mark Moore)

Mark Moore is the CEO and Founder of MANA Nutrition. MANA makes Ready to Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) for UNICEF and USAID. RUTF is a vitamin enriched peanut butter product that is the frontline defense in treating severe acute malnutrition

Though it may test our American sensibilities to admit it, the truth is the group of Christians who founded America’s first colony in 1607 in Jamestown did so under communist principles. Those of us who are not fans of communism hopefully take no glee in noting that the initial communist experiment on our turf unfortunately ended in starvation. The desperate times prompted their leader, Capt. John Smith (the one of Pocahontas fame) to post a sign in the middle of the public square that said, “He who does not work shall not eat”. This epiphany of right-headedness was not original with him, it was a quotation pulled directly from Paul’s writings in the Bible from First Thessalonians 3:10.

Captain Smith’s sign said: “Countrymen, the long experience of our late miseries I hope is sufficient to persuade everyone to a present correction of himself, And think not that either my pains nor the adventurers’ purses will ever maintain you in idleness and sloth…the greater part must be more industrious, or starve…You must obey this now for a law, that he that will not work shall not eat …”

Captain Smith set forth what would become a fundamental American premise and political philosophy. “If you don’t work, you won’t eat.” It may strike us as common sense today, but in their case it was a pragmatic rule. The starvation that resulted from the previous efforts at organizing themselves made it evident that working and eating were inextricably tied.

Speaking of communist experiments, Vladimir Lenin also quoted this verse from Paul and referred to it as a founding principle of his ideology, Lenin’s vision was that in socialist states, only productive individuals could be allowed access to the “articles of consumption.”

They make for strange bedfellows, Lenin and Smith, and though their experiments in community ended up on the wildly divergent paths, it appears they started in the same place in regards to how to best fight off hunger. Namely, “If you’re going to eat you better work for it.”

Maybe it is this Lenin-Friedman-Smithian-Pauline influence on our world-view explains in part why American Christians seem so untroubled by hunger in our world today? No one could claim by looking at either our church budgets or the sermons we preach that addressing hunger on our globe is very high on our agenda. I tend to think this not because we don’t care, but because we suspend our sympathy partly due to assumptions about how industrious these people are. We may not actually say it, but either consciously or subconsciously we tend to think that being hungry and laziness are always connected. In short we think like good Americans, not good Christians.

While Paul, Smith, Lenin and Friedman were right that we all need to work for our food, the facts show that the vast majority of the hungry people in our world are not lazy at all. They are caught in circumstances, trapped, if you will, by a host of largely unrelated happenstance: bad governments, bad weather, bad neighbors, and bad luck dealt to them by the geographical birth lottery. In most places where hunger abounds, people work their tails off and still don’t have enough food to go around.

Those of us who claim to look to Jesus for advice as to how to react to situations in the modern world are often left to extrapolate how he might have reacted to circumstances we face that did not exist when he walked the earth. WWJD with a computer, medical advancements, a rifle? Different people draw different conclusions.

Hunger is one issue that poses us no such ambiguity. Jesus seemed to always be feeding people, going to dinners, and talking about food and the hungry. His stance on hunger and food insecurity was simple and clear…. he was against it. His track record for how he reacted was clear as well…he fed people.

“These people are hungry”, his disciples said, “send them away so that they might buy for themselves something to eat in the nearby towns.” The “buy for themselves” phrase included there might have made Paul, Captain Smith, Lenin and Friedmen happy. It’s as if the disciples are saying to Jesus, “These people need to realize that if they don’t work they don’t eat!”

Jesus simply says, “You feed them.”

I’m afraid those of us who are Jesus disciples today have not changed much from the original crew. “Send them away” fits much more nicely into our schedules and plans and ministries than “feed them”. We would rather if Jesus had said, “Hey, we are fishermen! Let’s teach them all to fish so they can buy for themselves!” He didn’t say that, he said, “What do you have?” If he were to ask us this today, our reply would have to be, “ a lot!” In fact, that is what Thanksgiving is all about. It is the blessed looking at what we have been granted by God and seeing that it is indeed a lot.

Most of us learned the basics of the Thanksgiving story when we were in grade school and many of us have fading pictures in a shoebox somewhere of ourselves dressed like happy pilgrims, friendly Indians, or (fatal casting) turkeys. The original Thanksgiving, at least the one historians date to the Plymouth Plantation in 1621, followed a long year of awful suffering not too different from the one experienced more than a decade earlier by the failed Jamestown settlers in Virginia. Historians tell us that before that first successful harvest, before the turkey and the corn and the bonhomie with the natives, the colonists had lost about half their numbers to starvation, disease and exposure to the elements.

But for the generosity of the natives, the entire colony might have perished. The Wikipedia entry says, “While initially, the Plymouth colony did not have enough food to feed half of the 102 colonists, the Wampanoag Native Americans helped the Pilgrims by providing seeds and teaching them to fish.” The Wampanoags had plenty, their new uninvited neighbors had little. They shared. We know that relations between settlers and Native Americans did not end well, but we forget that that first mutually beneficial peace treaty lasted more than 50 years. The treaty established trade and set up the mutual protection of both sides. They enjoyed half a century of peace because one clan in the great human family was willing to reach out and help another. They realized, at least one generation of their leaders anyway, that their fates were mutually connected. They may have been different tribes with different languages, but like it or not their two world’s had collided and shrunk to make them one community, dependent on one another for their survival.

As we celebrate Thanksgiving this year there are a billion hungry people on our globe. It’s one thing to feel bad about that and quite another to actually do something about it. It’s just as true today as it was in 30 AD and in 1621 that one neighbor who has plenty should do the right thing and do what it takes to help a neighbor in need. This was apparently common sense to the Wampanoags and Jesus made sure it was clearly understood by his followers as well. We are fortunate that it is much easier and cost effective to purchase, transport, trade and share our food than ever before in human history. So when we find ourselves saying “These people are hungry Lord”, we already know what the answer is. “Take what you have and feed them.”

“Send them away” or… (Mark Moore)