Nov | 02 | Of Peasants & Pancakes

Key Word:- BECOME

Title:- Of Peasants & Pancakes

Matthew 25:34-35 Then the King will say to those on His right hand, 'Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink;

The waitress said that in her country of origin she was held in awe for the simple fact that she knew how to make pancakes! As she had made them often, and consumed many; the youngsters thought she was the bomb.

Poverty and the opportunity of work had drawn her, like so many, to the bright lights of America. Her only child stayed with her mother, while she lived in a long stay hotel-motel somewhere, saving, whilst she juggled two jobs or possibly three, getting more money together to slowly ascend the long and high, socio-economic ladder. I tell you, it’s a story that’s repeated hundreds of thousands of times all around the world. Her one gripe in all of this, and I was surprised at there being only one, was for her to witness the daily waste of precious pancakes. “One place I work,” she says, in a you–won’t-believe-what–I-am-going-to-tell-you kind of way, “One place I work, throws away more pancakes than it serves! Just throws them away! I know children, hungry children, who dream of eating pancakes and they throw them away!”
At the ‘all you can eat’ buffet we sit down to our fourth helping, surrounded by our fellow obese beasts, chowing down and troughing up, being sure of course, to sip on our DIET drinks, while in the glazed daze of overeating, we dream of surgery-sucking fat machines and the precision placements of plastic surgeons, slipping shapely silicon implants that will turn us from sows into swans overnight! Then, in the moonlight, for fun and for a little exercise, we the enormous, will waddle down to our wine lakes in the long shadows of towering ‘butter mountains’, just to flip a few pancakes and skim them across the surface of the shimmering Sangria, while we wait for our long luxurious limousine to take us just two blocks home to bed. On the way to our king size alters, resting for some of us, on concrete blocks, we remember the refrigerator and in the late and hungry midnight hours call our partners in food crime and sing into our cell phones, “Eclair de la lune mon ami Pierrot,” which roughly translated means: “My good friend Pierrot, I am mad with hunger, so be sure to save me an éclair tonight. And don’t you dare lick the chocolate off the top‘cause it’s mine all mine!!”

It isn’t hard for us to feel guilty amidst this overwhelming abundance and so, speaking for myself, I am not surprised at my capacity to willingly forget the poor and hungry. After all I don’t know these pitiful, pancake desiring peasants do I? Guilt is so bothersome and so demanding and oh so tiring! After all, I am not into general waste management, just my own waist management, and good grief that’s hard enough. No! These flat unfilled pancake peasants are not my problem. After all, my government does not hold me to account for them and so neither should my God.

Tonight, vast amounts of yet unconsumed sweets and savouries will be thrown away. Economics, will not allow us to feed the poor. Imagine that! Economics, will not allow us to feed the poor and the hungry. The mournful mantra of the mad politic is “If it cannot earn, then let it burn; if we cannot store it then let us pour it.” And beneath the ledger lines of this silly song, little children with large worm filled bellies, will die tonight. Tens of thousands of them, will die this very night as we throw food away. We can do something about this you know? If we want to. We need to really because it’s not just members of the human race that are racked with hunger but members of our own Kingdom family.

We in ‘the body’, should not kid ourselves that none of the starving hungry will be our fellow Christians, for friends, unlike David of old, we the blessed, have the opportunity in glorious ‘techni-colour,’ to see the righteous, begging bread. See the righteous, begging bread. Imagine that. Look and be astonished! See the righteous, begging bread.

Listen:- “Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink? When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You? Or when did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?’ And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.’

Pray: - Prince of peace, let us remember the poor when we eat our pancakes; when we pull our large pants over our growing girth, and when we are invited to super size the already oversized. O God, let us remember Your words of frightening accountability, before we die, before we sleep tonight. Amen.