Hunger

The movie, Barbie (2023), is a fantasy/comedy about a group of dolls who live in the perfect world of "Barbieland." One night, the dolls are having a dance party when Barbie starts thinking about the uncomfortable reality of death.

All the barbies are dancing to pop music in the barbie dream house saying, “Oh, isn’t this the most beautiful day! Aren’t we the most beautiful people? Doesn’t it feel like this is just going to go on like this forever?” And then the main Barbie, Margot Robbie’s character says, “Do you guys ever think about dying?” and the record scratches and the music stops. The other Barbies stare at her aghast and angry, as if to say, that topic doesn’t belong in Barbieland. And Barbie kind of covers it up and says, “I’m just dying... to keep dancing!” and the music plays and the Barbies go back to their fantasy world.

The next morning, Barbie wakes up with bad breath, cellulite, and flat feet. The rest of the movie is about her quest to discover what it means to be alive outside of perfect Barbieland.

Preaching Angle: Just like in Barbieland, it can be uncomfortable to bring up the topic of death. But we need to face the reality of death to grow spiritually and emotionally.

Clip available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImFQpKImJqQ

More Americans believe their home is inhabited by someone or something that isn’t a living being. A study from the company Vivint found that nearly half of the thousand surveyed homeowners believed that their house was haunted. Another survey of 1,000 people found similar results, with 44 percent of respondents saying that they’ve lived in a haunted house.

One researcher offers the following explanations for this phenomenon. Haunted houses can be “a way to connect to the past or a sense of enchantment in the everyday world. [Younger generations in particular] might be searching for meaning in new places. If the modern world they live in isn’t providing food for the soul … it’s not hard to figure out that younger people will search elsewhere for that and find the idea of an alternate world — of ghosts, aliens, et cetera — to be enticing to explore.”

Another researcher claims that the pandemic also played a role in society’s relationship with houses and ghosts. The presence of death in our culture increased, igniting a desire for evidence of an afterlife for some people. “Think of all the sudden, and often not-sufficiently-ritually-mourned deaths during COVID. Many times, people lost loved ones with no last contact, no funeral.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

When people stop attending church or believing in Christianity they don’t stop seeking “spiritual experiences.” The spiritual hunger is still there.

Death abounded in America in 2020 and 2021. According to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 570,000 more people died in 2020 than in 2019, with about 350,000 of those attributable to COVID-19. Another 350,000 people died from the coronavirus by the fall of 2021, bringing the death total to 700,000 and counting (as of March 18, 2022 over 969k deaths are attributable to COVID).

When roughly that same number died over the four years of the Civil War, it had a widespread impact on American culture. Historians say changes included increased attention to cemeteries, the rise in the importance of family photographs, and rapid growth in the popularity of practices of spiritualism, a new religious movement that claimed to help people communicate with the dead.

What impact today’s pandemic deaths will have on American culture remains to be seen. But one shift is notable now: The percentage of people age 40 and older who say that religion is “very important” in the funeral of a loved one has gone up for the first time in a decade.

The importance of religion at funerals jumped 10 percentage points in 2020. It went up another 2 points in 2021. Most Americans still don’t think religion is important at funerals, but a growing number are feeling a new need for it.

Sarah Jones, an atheist raised in a strict evangelical home, wrote about this experience:

I could plant a flag for my grandfather . . . but the gesture feels thin. I don’t know what exactly I would want from a memorial—whether it’s catharsis or meaning or something else altogether. I thought several hundred times this year, Maybe I should go to church.

Physicist Alan Lightman is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for specializing in the intersection between science, philosophy, religion, and spirituality. He writes about a profound, transcendent experience in his life:

It was a moonless night, and quiet. The only sound I could hear was the soft churning of the engine of my boat. Far from the distracting lights of the mainland, the sky vibrated with stars. I turned off my running lights, and it got even darker. Then I turned off my engine. I lay down in the boat and looked up. A very dark night sky seen from the ocean is a mystical experience.

After a few minutes, my world had dissolved into that star-littered sky. The boat disappeared. My body disappeared. And I found myself falling into infinity. A feeling came over me I’d not experienced before. ... And the vast expanse of time — extending from the far distant past long before I was born and then into the far distant future long after I will die — seemed compressed to a dot. I felt connected not only to the stars but to all of nature, and to the entire cosmos. I felt a merging with something far larger than myself, a grand and eternal unity, a hint of something absolute.

Lightman is in awe of nature but is unsure where that should lead him:

It is almost as if Nature in her glory wants us to believe in a heaven, something divine and immaterial beyond nature itself. In other words, Nature tempts us to believe in the supernatural. But then again, Nature has also given us big brains, allowing us to build microscopes and telescopes and ultimately, for some of us, to conclude that it’s all just atoms and molecules. It’s a paradox.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God offers unbelievers opportunities to consider the meaning of life, eternity, and their place in it. Some, like this professor will taste and then turn away (Heb. 6:4-10), while others will recognize the hand of Almighty God and bow before him (Ps. 8, Ps. 19).

In a recent issue of CT Magazine, Astronomer David Block tells how he learned that the same God who numbered the stars knew and loved him personally:

I grew up a Jewish boy in a South African gold-mining town known as Krugersdorp. I remember sitting in (synagogue), enthralled as our learned rabbi expounded how God was a personal God—he would speak to Moses, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and to many others. Growing up, I often pondered how I fit into all this.

By the time I entered the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, I was deeply concerned that I had no assurance that God was indeed a personal God. I was confident that he was a historical God who had delivered our people from the hands of Pharaoh. But he seemed so far removed from the particulars of my life. Where was the personality and the vibrancy of a God who truly could speak to me?

I became friendly with Professor Lewis Hurst. He had a great interest in astronomy, and we would discuss the complexities of the cosmos for hours at a time. I remember attending a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society graced by Stephen Hawking. The atmosphere there was intellectually stimulating, but inwardly I could tell that something, or someone, was missing. To be brutally honest, I did not know God.

Back in South Africa, my friendship with Professor Hurst grew, and I started sharing with him my thoughts and feelings about the cosmos. I said, “The universe is so beautiful, both visually and mathematically.” The idea of the universe being designed by a Master Artist continued to resonate with me, but I struggled to find evidence that this artist had any interest in knowing me personally.

I shared further doubts: “Are we,” as Shakespeare said in Macbeth, “just a fleeting shadow that appears and then disappears? What is our reason for living? What is the purpose of life? Is it possible to have a personal encounter with the creator of the cosmos?”

Hurst listened intently. He said, “There is an answer to all the questions you are asking. I am well aware that you come from an Orthodox Jewish family, but would you be willing to meet with a dear friend of mine, the Reverend John Spyker?”

My Jewish parents had taught me to seek answers wherever they might be found, so I consented to meet with this Christian minister. Taking the Bible in his hands, Spyker turned to Romans 9:33 where Paul affirms that Y’shua (Jesus) is a stumbling stone to the Jewish people but that those who freely choose to believe in him will never be ashamed.

By divine grace, suddenly everything became perfectly clear. Y’shua was the stumbling stone—my stumbling stone! Jesus had fulfilled all the messianic prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures (where the Messiah would be born, how he was to die, and much else besides). While most Jewish people today are still awaiting the Messiah’s coming, I knew I had found him and that all I had to do was respond to his free offer of grace.

Immediately, I asked Spyker to pray for me, which he did. And on that day, at the age of 22, I surrendered my heart and my reason to Christ Jesus. His Spirit spread through every cell of my being.

(Reflecting on my early days), I realize they had been infused by God’s grace. He had been planting spiritual seeds every time I gazed up into the heavens. And I still marvel that a God so majestic and powerful would know my name—and love me as intimately as his own begotten Son.

Did you know that Emperor penguins spend about 4 months fasting as they watch over, care for, and incubate their eggs? This is a 100 to a 115 day fast! If a penguin can spend 100 days not eating because it instinctually loves and is waiting for its baby penguin, we can spend a meal or a day or a week fasting out of our love for Jesus. Don’t let the penguins beat us!

Possible Preaching Angle:

This can be used as creative tip to engage people in the topic of fasting.

John Piper writes: “My own serious consideration of fasting as a spiritual discipline began as a result of visiting Dr. Joon Gon Kim in Seoul, Korea. ‘Is it true,’ I asked him, ‘that you spent 40 days in fasting prior to the evangelism crusade in 1980?’ ‘Yes,’ he responded, ‘it is true.’”

Dr. Kim was chairman of the crusade expected to bring a million people to Yoido Plaza. But six months before the meeting the police informed him they were revoking their permission for the crusade. Korea at that time was in political turmoil and Seoul was under martial law. The officers decided they could not take the risk of having so many people together in one place. So Dr. Kim and some associates went to a prayer mountain and there spent 40 days before God in prayer and fasting for the crusade. Then they returned and made their way to the police station. “Oh,” said the officer when he saw Dr. Kim, “we have changed our mind and you can have your meeting!”

In an interview with NPR, musician/singer Paul Simon was asked about the great mysteries of life:

We don't have the capacity to understand the great mysteries of life and God or no God or infinity, we just can't get it. It's beyond us, but that's fine. We're not meant to get that. But the pursuit is so interesting. That, I think, is life sustaining and I think when you lose the interest in that pursuit you're finished.

In the 1960s Mary Ellen Rothrock was a grad student in English literature at the University of Wisconsin. In 1998 she wrote in Christian Reader magazine:

Despair seemed to permeate the student body, especially those in the humanities. A fellow graduate student summed it up cynically, "Playwright Samuel Becket is right. Man is just a piece of trash in a universe that's running down."

In college, atheism became my religion. Yet when I got into grad school, I found myself seeking to fill a spiritual void in my life. I began practicing Transcendental Meditation (TM). I met periodically with a TM supervisor. After a year or so of meditating, I mentioned that I had a recurring thought when I was trying to concentrate on my mantra. ‘It's a line from Handel's Messiah. Something in my mind keeps repeating “And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.”

To my young mind, not only was the music thrilling, but the words seemed to come from beyond this world. I loved the joyful language: ‘Hallelujah! for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth. ... For unto us a Child is born … And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.;”

Her TM supervisor told her to ignore the words that kept coming to her but “I told myself, ‘These aren't just random thoughts.’ It suddenly hit me. The phrase And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed was an invitation from a personal God of glory to seek him! Why couldn't he be ‘Wonderful, Counselor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace?’

Within months, she met a woman who explained how she could have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. She said, “As I heard the words from the Bible, the words from the musical score made sense. The Holy Spirit convinced me of the truth: the God I'd hungered for, the personal God, loved me. ‘Hallelujah! For the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth.’”

A 2012 Pew study tracked the rise of a new religious group: the “nones,” or the religiously unaffiliated. One-fifth of Americans—and a full third of adults under 30—say they belong to no religion at all.

Yet, argues Casper ter Kuile, a researcher at Harvard Divinity School, this group is still looking for elements of religious experience. His later study explores ways modern millennials seek out meaning, community, and ritual in the absence of organized religion.

The study started by profiling organizations they deemed particularly formative in the lives of their students. One of the most striking spaces? Fitness classes. Institutions like CrossFit and SoulCycle are offering their students more than just a chance to lose weight or tone up. They function, ter Kuile argues, like religions.

“People come because they want to lose weight or gain muscle strength, but they stay for the community,” he said. “It’s really the relationships that keep them coming back.” We heard people say, “Well, Crossfit is my church,” or, “Soulcycle is like my cult,” in a good way.

“Once that religious perspective had been opened in our eyes, so many things came out. Whether it’s the flag [on display] in every CrossFit [gym]; the way that the space is set up; or how you could follow a kind of liturgy in a SoulCycle class, especially through their use of light and sound. So it’s really an emotional and spiritual experience as well as a physical one.”

Possible Preaching Angles: Church; Body of Christ; Meaning of life; Relationship - Young people are searching for self-actualization, fulfillment and a ‘spiritual’ connection. The role of the church is to show them that what they are searching for comes through a deep relationship with the living God and His people. If you want a workout, find a gym. If you want meaning, come to Jesus.

An enterprising soccer fan made heads turn when he found a way to circumvent the rules preventing him from enjoying his favorite team.

Ali Demirkaya, nicknamed "Yamuk Ali" (or "Crazy Ali") is well known in his area for his passionate fandom of the local football club, Denizlispor. So ardent was his fandom that Ali had been banned from the stadium for a year, due to a misdemeanor from a previous fan-related incident. So on the day of an important match against a rival team, Ali found a solution—he rented a crane, then lifted it high enough to see over the stadium wall.

"That match was very important for our team," he explained to local news source Yeni Asir. "I had to go to the police station to sign a paper to show that I am not watching the match in the stadium. Then I quickly went to rent the crane." Social media in the area was full of pictures of a jubilant Ali cheering from his perch.

Ultimately, police were summoned and Ali was forced to lower the crane. Nevertheless, he still ended the day on a high note. The stunt only cost him the equivalent of $86, he wasn't cited or fined by the authorities, and his team won 5-0.

Potential Preaching Angles: If it means something to you, you'll get creative to make sure you don't miss out. Sometimes God's blessing comes to those willing to go to extremes.

A little boy only identified as Mason was focused on a new toy in a claw vending machine at a local Beef O'Brady's restaurant. But it was out of reach, behind the glass of the vending machine. So when he saw an opening, he went for it. Unlike most children, little Mason's hastily-devised plan was eventually successful.

In this case, the opening was literal. Undeterred by the glass panels of the claw vending machine where his parents were enjoying dinner, Mason climbed inside, and quickly got stuck.

It just so happened that off-duty firefighter Jeremy House and several colleagues from the Titusville Fire and Emergency Services were also enjoying dinner at the restaurant. While telling patrons nearby to call 911, House and company sprung into action, and within about five minutes, they rescued the boy unharmed, and the claw machine suffered only minimal damage.

A post on the Titusville Fire Facebook page summarized the situation: "Thankfully he was never in any distress as one of our own Lt.'s happen to be there off duty and … made short work of the situation. [Our firefighters] were able to get Mason out in short order with minimal damage to the game. We love a happy ending and are glad everything worked out."

Potential Preaching Angles: 1) Like the Titusville Fire and Emergency Services, the church and her members must be ready to spring into action when people are in peril. 2) Blessings; Rewards - How badly do you want God's blessings on your life? What are you willing to do to obtain wisdom? 3) Sin; Temptation- Sin is attractive and can lure us into embarrassing or dangerous situations if we yield to it.

Conventional wisdom surrounding the function of taste buds focuses on five essential types of flavor sensations: sweet, salty, savory, sour and bitter. To that list, scientists have added a sixth taste—starchy.

Professor Joyun Lim from Oregon State University, explains the justification for the recent addition. Lim's team of researchers found volunteers who could identify starch-like tastes in various carb solutions, even after being administered a solution that blocked the taste of sweetness. Lim said, "Asians would say it was rice-like, while Caucasians described it as bread-like or pasta-like. It's like eating flour."

Of course, starch has yet to be completely enshrined in the proverbial Hall of Taste. Food scientists insist that primary tastes be recognizable, have identifiable taste receptors on the tongue, and trigger a useful physiological response.

Lim and other scientists are working on finding those taste receptors, but for useful physiology, one need look no further than elite athletes. There's a reason why bodybuilders, distance runners, and basketball players all use terms like "carbing up" or "carb loading" to describe their culinary habits. The cliché is true—the body knows what it wants.

Potential preaching angles: To hunger and thirst after righteousness, we must recognize its taste, God's wisdom is evident in creation through cravings that track our bodily needs

According to CNN, ranchers of the prized breed of cattle known as Wagyu go to great lengths to enhance the already legendary flavor of their beef. They use typical fattening agents in their feed to achieve a certain amount of marbling, which enhances its appearance and keeps it moist. But an Australian ranch called Mayura Station produces Wagyu beef with a distinctive, sweet taste to it. The secret is in a special blend of cattle feed, which includes copious amounts of sweetening agents—or as most of us would call it—candy.

The envy of ten-year-olds worldwide, cattle at Mayura Station bred as Wagyu subsist on a diet of chocolate, cookies and candy, often sold as irregular or expired stock from brand-name factories like Cadbury. Their regular feed is more of a pedestrian blend (or is it equestrian? Bovestrian?) of wheat, hay, rye grass, and maize. But the candy mix is a special addition that the cattle eat for the last few months of their lives before they're slaughtered and processed.

This unorthodox approach appears to be working; the most choices cuts of Wagyu beef from Mayura Station can retail for as much as $300 per pound.

Potential Preaching Angles: The importance of ingesting truth, beauty and goodness. What goes in, will come out. The fragrance of Christ is most pungent in times of intense suffering and pain.

Is our world becoming overwhelming secular? Not exactly, says researcher Rodney Stark. In his book The Triumph of Faith, Stark argues that our world is still very open to spirituality, including traditional Christianity and other beliefs. Stark writes:

The world is more religious than it has ever been. Around the globe, four out of every five people claim to belong to an organized faith, and many of the rest say they attend worship services. In Latin America, Pentecostal Protestant churches have converted tens of millions, and Catholics are going to Mass in unprecedented numbers. There are more churchgoing Christians in Sub-Saharan Africa than anywhere else on earth, and China may soon become home of the most Christians. Meanwhile, although not growing as rapidly as Christianity, Islam enjoys far higher levels of member commitment than it has for many centuries, and the same is true for Hinduism. In fact, of all the great world religions, only Buddhism may not be growing. Furthermore, in every nook and cranny left by organized faiths, all manner of unconventional and unchurched supernaturalisms are booming: there are more occult healers than medical doctors in Russia; 38 percent of the French believe in astrology; 35 percent of the Swiss agree that "some fortune tellers really can foresee the future," and nearly everyone in Japan is careful to have a new car blessed by a Shinto priest.

Joyce Carol Oates, an American novelist, and her husband, Raymond Smith, also a writer, met while attending graduate school in 1960. They got married and spent 47 years side by side. In 2008 Smith entered a hospital with pneumonia, and it took his life. His death was sudden, before his wife could get to him.

In her memoir, A Widow's Story, Oates describes how she went through her husband's things following his death and discovered an unfinished novel. In the notes for this work, she found when he was in a hospital prior to their marriage and he fell in love with a fellow patient. To Oates' surprise, she also discovered that a psychiatrist had diagnosed her husband's condition by calling him a "love-starved" individual. She was shocked and even disillusioned. She had been close to her husband for years and never knew that he was starved for love. Oates wrote, "It should not fill me with unease to learn this, after Ray's death, and so many years after it happened. But he hadn't told me! It was his secret. He'd been 'love-starved'" (emphasis mine).

Isn't that an accurate description for all of us? Everyone has a need, a hunger and even a craving for love, and when it isn't found, we become "love-starved." As Oates said elsewhere in one of her short stories, "Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat."

Possible Preaching Angles: This illustration shows both our hunger for God's love, the hole in our hearts that only Christ can fill, and our hunger for human connection and community.

Macrina Wiederkehr writes in “A Tree Full of Angels”:

Fasting makes me vulnerable and reminds me of my frailty. It reminds me to remember that if I am not fed I will die … Standing before God hungry, I suddenly know who I am. I am one who is poor, called to be rich in a way that the world does not understand. I am one who is empty, called to be filled with the fullness of God. I am one who is hungry, called to taste all the goodness that can be mine in Christ.

The usually crass comedian Louis C.K. offered some insightful comments about our soul-numbing addiction to technology. On Late Night with Conan O'Brien he said:

You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That's what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That's being a person. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty—forever empty. That knowledge that it's all for nothing and that you're alone. It's down there.

And sometimes when things clear away, you're not watching anything, you're in your car, and you start going, 'Oh no, here it comes. That I'm alone.' It starts to visit on you. Just this sadness. Life is tremendously sad, just by being in it …

C.K. then shared a story about the time he was in his car listening to a Bruce Springsteen song ("Jungleland") that made him really sad:

And I go, "Oh, I'm getting sad, gotta get the phone and write 'hi' to like 50 people." Then I said, "You know what, don't. Just be sad. Just let the sadness, stand in the way of it, and let it hit you like a truck." The thing is, because we don't want that first bit of sad, we push it away with a little phone or [sex] or the food. You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel kinda satisfied with your product, and then you die.