Cultural Encounters: A Journal For The Theology Of Culture Volume 11 Number 2 (Summer 2016) | Page 16
FOOD FIGHT CONFERENCE PLENARY 1
- Finberg & panelists
So, Joseph goes on and tells him. Pharaoh says, “That’s coming. We need
somebody who’s wise to be able to deal with what’s coming. Joseph, you are
the man. Here’s my ring; here are the clothes. You make it work.” So within
just a few chapters from the creation, famine hits. Famine is a theme
throughout human history. The fact is that it’s littered with starved corpses.
Over the thousands of years of history, famine has been more of a state of
being than not. Here’s one of the exposures we have very early on of famine,
the opposite of abundance. We all need food to survive. Pharaoh knew his
kingdom would come crashing down if something wasn’t done and wasn’t
done right. So, for me as a public servant, this is one of the first examples of
a church-state partnership. Here’s the man listening to God who works with
the government to try and make sure people have enough to eat. And he
saves his own family because of it, reconciles with his brothers because of it,
and it was all sparked because of the famine.
Foraging
Jesus broke down the whole array of the 613 commandments that the Jews
had to follow into two. One of them—buried in Leviticus 19—dealt with
foraging or gleaning, as it was called. So in Leviticus 19:9–10: “‘When you
reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or
gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second
time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the
alien [the immigrant]. I am the LORD your God (Lv 19:9–10).
And then, we see that put into practice in Ruth. Ruth, in the second chapter,
leaves the land of her birth, an illegal alien—I don’t think she had her papers
then—and in order to survive and feed her and her mother-in-law—a widow
just as she was—she says, “Let me go to the fields and pick up the leftover
grain behind anyone in whose eyes I find favor” (Ru 2:2). So she does. She
goes behind the harvesters to glean. It turns out that it is Boaz. They end up
getting married. She becomes the great-grandmother of David. Not bad for
an immigrant, all because the biblical safety net was there. God set it up so
you wouldn’t starve, if we his people would listen to him. Well, it’s a little
different now. The treatment of the poor, the widow, and the immigrant
needs to be a little different because we’re not an agricultural society
anymore. If somebody walked through a nice neighborhood in Portland and
went out back to pick some of the peas, there might be a little issue. So, the
folks who’ve fallen through the cracks are standing on the street corners with
cardboard signs, or they’re the moms you don’t hear about, but whom some
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