Christmas

In our Western World, around this time of year most people are getting ready to celebrate Christmas. Houses are decorated, Christmas baking is abundantly prepared, a carton of eggnog sits in the fridge and friends and family gathered together to celebrate. To them Christmas is considered a special occasion to give gifts to those they love, showing a temporal benevolence over the holiday season. For most it’s a time to go out of the way for family and friends and a time for celebration. It’s a festive season to relax with time off work or school and a time to visit warmly with loved ones.


In its commercial sense, Christmas is just a time for fun and play, rest and relaxation, rather than a time to honour God and celebrate Christ and a time to truly give to those who need, by going the distance to help others. Christmas is anything but a time of fidelity or a time for benevolence for most. It is a time to lavish ones self in the carnal pleasures of ignorant bliss; a time to forget your worries and the problems of the World to just indulge and enjoy. But is this what Christmas is really about?


To the Messianic follower of Christ, Christmas is considered a season no different than any other, for we are meant to be worshiping God and celebrating Christ through living in Messiahship in all our waking hours, all year long. To those who truly follow Christ, the coming of Christmas doesn’t add a fresh spark of vitality to the stagnant heart filled with lukewarm placidity, for you should be already shining at your zenith, as a follower of the Messiah, empowered to live at your best. You don’t wait for a special occasion to worship God and honour Christos; you are already living to seek the glory of God in all of its manifestations.


Since Christmas is the only time of year some people even consider giving in generosity, we need to become radically benevolent and truly bless our neighbours. We need to take this time to give to the needs of the unfortunate and to truly be extra thankful for what we have been blessed with by God’s grace. There are many in the world suffering in what can be considered a pit of hell on Earth and one of the greatest gifts you can give on Christmas is mercy to the innocent suffering in some of the worst conditions imaginable. Give this Christmas to those who are especially in need of humanitarian aid and provide them with some hope in life.


Sadly Christmas is an exploited time of mass consumerism. This highly commercialized season is a time to indulge. Many ignore God over the holidays because they are too caught up in drinking, eating and treating themselves to comfort and luxury. A largely proclaimed time of giving, Christmas however doesn’t even seem to scathe our world’s neediest people’s infliction of poverty. Christmas helps few living in extreme poverty, because our people are too caught up in worldly possessions for themselves and only those they care about, rather than giving a damn about the essential basic necessities of the millions of malnourished people living in poverty all over the world.

According to the United Nations, about 25,000 people all over the world die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes. That’s about one person every three and a half seconds. Unfortunately, it is young children who die most often. Most likely you’ve seen the Make Poverty History commercials, where all the celebrities are snapping their fingers every 3 seconds to symbolize an innocent child dying of preventable causes. Efforts like this raise global awareness, shining a spot light on these important issues, but not enough is being done and the plight of poverty increases every year.

There is plenty of food in the world for everyone to share, but because people on one side of the world horde excess wealth, people on the other side of the world go hungry. Hungry people are trapped in a vicious cycle of severe poverty and death. They lack the money to buy enough food to nourish themselves. Being constantly malnourished, they become weaker and often sick. This makes them increasingly less able to work, which then makes them even poorer and hungrier. This downward spiral often continues until death for them and their families.


Here are some definitions of poverty as defined by the World Bank.


Definitions of Poverty

Extreme (or absolute) poverty: Living in extreme poverty (less than $1 a day) means not being able to afford the most basic necessities to ensure survival. 8 million people a year die from absolute poverty.

Moderate poverty: Moderate poverty, defined as earning about $1 to $2 a day, enables households to just barely meet their basic needs, but they still must forgo many of the things-education, health care-that many of us take for granted. The smallest misfortune (health issue, job loss, etc.) threatens survival.

Relative poverty: Relative poverty means that a household has an income below the national average.

Based on these definitions established by the World Bank, nearly 3 billion people, half of the world's population, are considered poor. That is immense scores of men, women and children, enduring unimaginable obstacles that prevent them from fulfilling their most basic human rights, preventing them from living a quality life and often leading to death.


Some significant statistics on poverty and inequality:

Each year, more than 8 million people around the world die because they are too poor to stay alive.
Over 1 billion people—1 in 6 people around the world—live in extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $1 a day.
Currently over one billion people lack access to a basic supply of clean water and 2.6 billion people do not have access to basic sanitation.
Unsafe drinking water and poor sanitation play a major role in the transmission of diseases including Malaria, Cholera, Diarrhea, and Typhoid. More than 1.8 million children die each year, roughly one child every 15 seconds, from water and sanitation-related Diarrhoeal diseases.
More than 800 million go hungry each day.
Over 100 million primary school-age children cannot go to school.
The world's 225 richest people now have a combined wealth of $1 trillion. That's equal to the combined annual income of the world's 2.5 billion poorest people.
UNDP calculates an annual 4 percent levy on the world's 225 most well-to-do people (average 1998 wealth: $4.5 billion) would suffice to provide the following essentials for all those in developing countries: adequate food, safe water and sanitation, basic education, basic health care and reproductive health care.
The wealth of the three richest individuals now exceeds the combined GDP of the 48 least developed countries.
In 1998, the 20 percent of the world's people living in the highest-income countries accounted for 86 percent of total private consumption expenditures while the poorest 20 percent accounted for only 1.3 percent.
At present, 3 billion people live on less than $2 per day while 1.3 billion get by on less than $1 per day. Seventy percent of those living on less than $1 per day are women.
In 1948, the United Nations created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaiming that all people have the right to education, work, health and well-being. Yet today, millions around the world are too crippled by poverty to fulfill these basic rights. Millions continue to go hungry. Scores of children never step inside a classroom. Families watch their loved ones die from largely preventable causes because they do not have access to adequate medical care. In essence, poverty is a denial of human rights.

Hunger in America

November 23, 2007





Related Links:

Bread for the World: "Hunger 2008: Working Harder for Working Families"

"Hunger, Poverty and Biblical Religion" by Bruce C. Birch

"A Biblical Perspective on the Problem of Hunger" by Walter Brueggemann

Reuters: "Senate snarl imperils farm bill" by Charles Abbott, November 6, 2007

Bread for the World: Farm Bill Facts for the United States

NPR: "Why you should care about the farm bill," October 24, 2007

Duke University Divinity School: Our Daily Bread, October 2007

DallasNews Religion: "Religious leaders seek to shape farm bill" by Bob Allen (EthicsDaily.com), July 18, 2007

Roundtable on Religion & Social Welfare Policy: "Religious groups push farm policy reforms to combat poverty" by Anne Farris, July 17, 2007

Boston Globe: "A pro-food farm bill" by Hugh Joseph, July 9, 2007

National Council of Churches: "Reform farm bill to reflect American values," April 23, 2007

Related Reading:

SUSTAINABILITY AND SPIRITUALITY by John E. Carroll



DEBORAH POTTER, guest anchor: Last week, the US government said more than 35 million Americans went without food at some point during 2006. This week, the non-profit group Bread for the World issued its own report recommending strategies for the US to combat hunger. Bob Abernethy sat down with David Beckmann, Bread for the World president and a Lutheran pastor, to discuss hunger in this country and what can be done about it.

BOB ABERNETHY: David, welcome.

Reverend DAVID BECKMANNN (President, Bread for the World): Thank you.

ABERNETHY: Put some flesh and blood, if you would on the statistics: 35-and-a-half million people in this country who -- what happens?

Rev. BECKMANN: Well, in our country it's not hunger like Ethiopia. The typical pattern of hunger in our country is that the family runs out of food. They may have food assistance from the government, but food assistance runs out by the end of the third week of the month. It's not enough. So the moms go without food. The kids go without food maybe the last few days of the month. So then the whole month they don't buy good-for-you food. They don't have quite enough food.

ABERNETHY: Is this all over? All kinds of people?

Rev. BECKMANN: It is all over the country. It's especially children, especially little children. In our country, one in four children under the age of six lives in a household that runs out of food, and even moderate under-nutrition does real damage, because the nutrition goes to the vital organs and the brain half shuts down. So kids aren't alert. They're naughty. By the time they go to kindergarten they're acting up. Letting so many kids go hungry does real damage to our whole nation.

ABERNETHY: You at Bread for the World, you've been fighting this, fighting hunger for a long time. But your emphasis has shifted or is shifting from emergency measures to trying to fight poverty itself?

Reverend David Beckmann
Rev. BECKMANN: Well, both. We're working this year on farm bill reform, which is a good way to both deal with food assistance for hungry families and helping some families get out of poverty. Much of the money in the farm bill goes to affluent families; some very wealthy landholders have money in the farm bill. So there's an opportunity this year to shift some of those resources, first, to farm and rural families who really need help to make a living; and then also to strengthen food assistance to hungry families in our country.

ABERNETHY: And how does what's going here compare to what's going on around the world?

Rev. BECKMANN: Well, Bread for the World works on both hunger worldwide and in our country, and the irony is that the world is making progress against hunger and poverty. Countries as diverse as China and Uganda and Chile are making progress, while in the USA, at least in this decade, we've been going the other way. We have more hungry and poor people in the country than we did in the year 2000.

ABERNETHY: And working people are hungry?

Rev. BECKMANN: Absolutely. It's increasing numbers of working people. Nowadays, you know, if you go into a McDonald's and there's a lady behind that cash register, if she's got kids at home those kids aren't eating all the time. I'm a preacher, so I believe that if you don't work you shouldn't eat. It's in the Bible. But the corollary is if you do work you ought to be able to eat, and that's not true in our country anymore.

ABERNETHY: David Beckmann of Bread for the World, many thanks.

Rev. BECKMANN: Thank you.

Thanks

O Gracious God, we give you thanks for your overflowing generosity to us. Thank you for the blessings of the food we eat and especially for this feast today. Thank you for our home and family and friends, especially for the presence of those gathered here. Thank you for our health, our work and our play. Please send help me those who are hungry, alone, sick and suffering war and violence. Open my heart to your love. We ask your blessing through Christ your son. Amen. and Amen

Truth of the truth

Gentle Reader,
You need this blog just to keep it real!

"For that they hated knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the Lord. They would none of my counsel: they despised all my reproof." Proverbs 1:29-30 Just about every one of us have heard the old adage that says, "What you don't know can't hurt you." Pausing to consider that statement, we can't help but disagree. If a soldier doesn't know that his enemy is creeping up, the danger still exists. The absence of knowledge (ignorance) is not exactly a safer place than the fullness of knowledge. In fact, quite the opposite. Now imagine, given the opportunity to know something about his enemy, this particular soldier says to his informant, "Don't tell me, I don't want to know." For those of us who thirst for understanding, this type of nonsense goes against everything we stand for. Although we are not among those who "hate knowledge," it is important to recognize that such men have always been around. Instead of saying, "I don't want to know," their modern words include, "Don't tell me, let me guess." Such men live on theories rather than verifiable facts and absolute truth. This can be clearly seen by the absurd integration of evolution into our elementary classrooms. No man of Darwin can prove their theories and yet we find such theories at the heart of public education. Those who live on the heels of every random opinion most certainly have no "fear of the Lord." Given the "counsel" of the Word of God, they would refuse it as nothing of value. And upon being questioned with "reproof" by the very same counsel, they would mock the very questions they are asked. There is a reason why such characters will one day call out to the ear of wisdom and find a cold shoulder. God will not laugh at man's calamity except their be men who once had every opportunity to know the truth and turned away at each moment. If someone you love has a tendency to turn their back on knowledge, take advantage of every door that they leave open. God's desire is that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth (I Timothy 2:4). Yours are the feet that come preaching what they need. Hands may still be raised to hold you off with words like, "Don't tell me" or "I don't want to know." Stand on the solid foundation of God's Word and tell them anyways.

Not another Blog!

Dear Gentle reader,
It is because I speak out that I receive more than 500 hate emails a day. But You have been taken advantage of and as the Bible says.

My people are destroyed for lack of KNOWLEDGE: because thou hast rejected KNOWLEDGE

So here without all the trappings you can read the "Truth of the truth"
Now then since this is a Thanksgiving season in America lets consider those who have no voice to speak of. What I want you to is search deep within yourself and see if you have feelings unexpressed that perhaps you should stand up for Your country, Your family and your neighbor.

Rush Linbaugh says

There Are No More "Hungry" in America (But the Media Will Still Cover Homeless on Thanksgiving to Make Us Feel Guilty)."

But before you stop reading read on just a wee bit more.
You have been taken to the cleaners by your Government right down to the core.