Some years ago, I shared with you that Douglas and I have a personal prayer before we eat at home, our own take on saying grace before our meals. It goes something like this: “Gracious God, we thank you for all things, for each other and for others, and we thank you for this life that gives us life. Amen.” I shared that prayer of grace with you during a sermon where I was speaking of how we need to pay attention to the way our food is produced, that the way we nurture the land and treat the animals we consume, and that such attention is a matter of justice. And when Douglas and I thank God for “this life that gives us life,” we acknowledge that an animal, or even a plant, if you assume that plants live and die, we acknowledge that something had to die for us to be able to live. There is a rhythm to life there that is obvious, though it does not come without its own ethical quandaries, even if Genesis tells us that that God has given us these animals and plants as our food (Genesis 1:29). That topic is for another sermon, but this morning I wanted to tease something else out related to the issue of food and our ethical relationship to it, and that is whether or not we have an obligation to worry about other’s people food or lack of it. Now, you might think that the answer is an obvious “yes” for us Christians, that your lack of food is something I should care about. And it’s obvious that is the case in both the Hebrew and Christian portions of the Bible – caring for our neighbors and helping them is just right there, all over the place. But, there are forces in our culture, even among Christians, who want us divest the church of this notion that we owe each other something, including food, all in an attempt to make the case for a kind of libertarian, you’re on your own, late-stage corporate capitalism. I’ll get to that in a few minutes, but I want us to get a sense of what is happening in our text and how this relates to a larger call for food justice we find in the Bible and especially in the Hebrew Bible, what we often call the Old Testament.
 
Let’s look at the context of this text for a few minutes. The people of Israel have spent 40 years wandering in the desert and finally have reached the edge of the Promise Land. Moses has died on a mountain overlooking the land he will never enter because of a sin he has committed, sin being the overall reason it took the people of Israel so long to get to this promise land after being freed from Egypt. A generation has died and a new generation has risen, but the men of this new generation have not been circumcised, the male foreskin of these men have remained intact, circumcision was believed to be a sign of the covenant between God and Abraham in Genesis 17 (14-19). But there is historical evidence that circumcision was practiced by the Egyptians and the Bible itself says that other surrounding nations also practiced circumcision, in Jeremiah 9:25. Joshua, the new leader of Israel, calls for this new generation of men to become circumcised and they are, leaving a painful mess for the men that had to take a take a long, long month to heal up. The whole ordeal ends with the first verse in our text today, where God says to Joshua: “Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt.” Honestly, we don’t quite know the obvious meaning of this sentence – what disgrace, other than perhaps the older generation having circumcised their male offspring after they left Egypt, forgetting the sign of the covenant God once made with Abraham.
 
Whatever that disgrace was, it has been rolled away and the people celebrate a Passover meal, a meal which commemorates the moment when the angel of death passed over every household whose door was marked with lamb’s blood, during the time when God sent the plagues to try to convince the Egyptian Pharaoh to let the Hebrew slaves go free. We don’t how they got this Passover food, but the very next day, the manna from heaven that God had provided the pe