If ever there was an unambiguous prophetic signpost for the people of Israel that would show them the way to a restored relationship with Yahweh, Isaiah's message in Chapter 58:10 was it: "If you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday..."

While so many of the Old Testament prophets' messages are filled with jeremiads of doom and gloom, this positive passage is exceptional in that it holds out the conditional promise of personal and community restoration and reconciliation, expressed poetically as a "watered garden" (v.11). The condition was clear: first the Israelites had to feed the hungry, comfort the afflicted, and treat their neighbors as they would themselves like to be treated. The power of this poetic passage speaks volumes for the spirit of love, compassion, and neighborliness which God expects God’s people to demonstrate as they go about feeding the hungry in their communities. The hungry were not to be subject to a “means” test, speak only one official language, or show documents to prove they were not "illegal" before they were to be fed. They were to be fed simply because they were hungry.

God does not say here, "The poor you have with you always, so relax, take your time, pay your bills, balance your budget, play the lottery, fill up the SUV, take a vacation, and, if there are any crumbs left on the table, offer pennies to the hungry." Rather, God clearly gives feeding the hungry top priority on the daily agenda of God’s people rather than fighting terrorism and protecting one’s job security, life insurance, college savings program, or retirement investment.

The bottom line in this text from Isaiah is not maximization of profits, but feeding the hungry and comforting the afflicted.  This has both individual and national implications in that it is also a mandate not to add to the growing number of the hungry, the indebted, and the afflicted by supporting policies which widen the gap between the rich and the poor. In present day terms, it is an invitation for individuals and institutions to embrace the values and priorities of Rabbi Michael Lerner's Tikkun community and Jim Wallis' ecumenical Sojourner movement, both of which advocate for a paradigm shift in the bottom line of American culture, as well as in church budgets.

What if we refocus from “making a killing” to "making a living"? What if we think about global solutions to hunger that are not dependent on gigantic institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and corporation-enriching NAFTA globalization treaties? To create a level playing field for rich and poor alike, why not support an alternative network of proven smaller nonprofits like the Grameen bank or small relief and self-help development agencies like Church World Service, Habitat for Humanity, and Heifer Project International to better empower the poor and end world hunger? This measure alone would dramatically improve life for low income communities worldwide and eliminate the huge, crippling debts resulting from World Bank and other large commercial bank loans. Instead of staying dependent on humiliating handouts or remaining hopelessly burdened by draconian World Bank loan repayment terms, poor communities worldwide would be given a hand-up and a chance to be in control of their own destiny.

Ending world hunger is clearly a matter of political will, not technological know-how. Delegates to the 1996 World Food Summit pledged to decrease world hunger by half by the year 2015. They further stated that since humankind has the means and the know-how to end hunger, its persistence in the world is a scandal of global proportions. USAID said in 1998 that the cost to the United States to end both world and U.S. hunger by 2015 would be only $35 billion per year. U.S. consumers spend $50 billion a year just going to the movies. This means that Americans would not even have to sacrifice anything vital in their standard of living to end hunger worldwide. However, they would have to vote for political candidates with a heightened hunger consciousness and the political will to get the job done. Above all, war-spending and large military budgets would have to decrease. With the $1 trillion we have spent thus far on the wars in the Middle East we could have ended world hunger many times over, plus saved our reputation for compassion, justice, and peaceful resolution of conflict, a reputation now lost in the international community.

Hunger statistics are fickle instruments when it comes to understanding the traumatic reality of what it truly feels like to be hungry every day. Large numbers tend to numb our minds and blunt our resolve to stay focused on the mission of ending world hunger. Arthur Simon, founder of Bread for the World, says that another way of looking at the situation is to realize that one child dies of hunger somewhere in the world with every breath we take. Except in places like Darfur and Calcutta and Mozambique, you won't find "starvation" written on the death certificates as the cause of these children's deaths. Nevertheless, it is clearly daily chronic undernutrition that has weakened their bodies so much that death comes like a thief in the night from diarrhea or disease.

If one had to come up with the single most all-encompassing cause of hunger throughout the world, the answer would surely not be climate change or insufficient global food production. There is enough global grain production alone for every man, woman, and child to have 2,720 calories a day, five hundred calories more than the recommended daily minimum requirement for normal nutrition. But either that food is not available where hungry people live, or hungry people can't afford to buy it at the free market price. Poverty and powerlessness are the chief causes of world hunger.

Therefore, the best opportunity for ending world hunger is to reassert political will and abolish the systems which cause chronic maldistribution of food and income. Jim Lehrer’s “News Hour” probably won’t analyze the situation in this way, but it is truly a values priority problem. The free market system values profit maximization more than ending world hunger. This means that profits for some take priority over everyone having enough. If hungry people worldwide just had enough cash or credit, they could buy food in their local markets and not have to sit around helplessly watching as their children slowly die from poor nutrition. Why don't the world's hungry have cash or credit or a living wage so they can buy food, if available, in local marketplaces? A long list of self-evident and not-so-obvious obstacles would include unemployment or underemployment, loss of land or water rights, or other natural resources preventing the hungry from growing their own food, violence and war, famine and drought, disease, and many other factors.

What the world's hungry do not lack is the willingness to work hard and sacrifice for their families. Most students of world hunger now agree that hunger actually causes population explosions rather than fewer people. Only when poor parents are confident that their firstborn children will survive to adulthood and that they will be protected by those same surviving children in their old age will they stop having more children. In an agricultural economy without access to more land, water, tractors, and other labor-saving implements, the only way hungry parents can expect to harvest enough food to feed their families is to have more hands working in the fields. Children are also the only sign of God's grace left to these parents. Helping these children to survive may be the last best opportunity for rich folks living in the affluence of the suburban West to escape our empty lives of mindless consumption and entertainment. It may be the hope for own spiritual rediscovery of what truly matters.

By Ed King, Member, Chapel Hill Friends Meeting; Former Regional Director, Carolinas Church World Service/CROP Program (1979-1995)