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[static] Let us continue in worship by giving attention to the reading of God's Word, as it is recorded in the letter of James, the second chapter of the Gemini's "Trovertium of the Faith." [reading from the letter]

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[reading from the letter] What is a prophet, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not worked? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is worth fire and in lack of daily food,

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and one of you says to them, "Go in peace, be warmed and filled," without giving them the things needed for the body, what is a prophet? If they say by self that it has no work, it is dead.

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And may God bless and grant this reading and this prayer. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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[static] I often wondered why on great airliners they place the curtain between first class and tourists. So on one occasion I asked the stewardess, now they call them flight service attendants, why this is done.

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And their answer was immediate. We draw the curtain between first class and tourists so that the people in first who are eating cold sandwiches and drinking Coke will not be the people in first class who are eating sizzling steaks and drinking champagne.

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That seems to me very plausible. Now today we come to Christ's table. And it is, in the most literal sense, 25,000 miles long, with hurdles to go. And Christians of all nations are coming to it.

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Some from the first world, some from the second world, some from the third world. Both first class and tourists are coming to the table. But there are no curtains at this table. Because our Lord Jesus Christ has told us that we are to be one body in Him.

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And that we are to love, not to steal ourselves from one another, but love one another. That means that as we come to this table today, we see another here a little child with orange hair. Now orange hair in a child is one of the signs of advanced stages of quasi-orchor,

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which is a disease caused by protein deficiency. When a child is desperately ill, and in fact hopelessly ill, with quasi-orchor, the hair turns orange. I've held many times in my arms children with orange hair.

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I'd tell you more about them, but I cannot do it without Jesus. They're here at this table. A friend of mine was living in a starving area in South America. And when it came time for him to leave, he was walking across the airship

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toward a missionary aviation fellowship airplane, which was to take him back to the States. And as he was walking across, a mother came running up to him with her child in her arms and begged him to take the child. "Why," he said, "if the child remains here, it will starve to death.

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If you take it, it will live. Please take my child." My friend explained to her that it was against the law of that land, that it was children's allowable land, and how much he would miss her child later. And he did everything he could to explain the situation to her without suspect.

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I never got to the plane. He climbed into the plane and closed the door. She fell on her knees in the mud beside the plane, lifting up the body of her little child and crying out to him,

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pleading to him, "Please take my child. Give us my child, my boy." They took off. And he told me later that as they took off,

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he left all of his heart on the ground to sleep. Those kinds of mothers, which God and David are awful children to know, can't have a heart as well, really. But it would be all a lot better if we didn't know this was true.

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And we reach under the table and we're all dressed up. The linen is white. The silver has been polished. The rice in the oven is already cooking at home,

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or we're going to go to some Sunday buffet, whatever it is. We'll get what we want to eat today. It would be much easier, as we come here, not to know about some of the people who are gathering at this table,

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people with orange hair and people trying to give away their children. But they're all making a mistake. Nothing separates first class and first. Last year in Calcutta, a sister who worked with Mother Teresa there

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was walking down an alley and heard dogs coming from the garbage can. She went over to the garbage can and put the bags of linen and the flies and the dirt and the debris. And there was an old woman, a barbary guy, here. He took the woman out of the garbage can and took her back to the hospital.

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The woman died two days later. But not before she said this, "I'm not crying because I was in the garbage can. I'm crying because it was my time to be put in there."

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She had to do it. There was not enough food for the family. Now please, don't close your eyes. Don't turn away from some of these people,

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like Grandmother's, climbing out of the garbage can that are coming to this table today. There are people who know. She rejects the very features that I should be bringing as subjects like world hunger and the disturbance. They say that the purpose of the intercity meeting is purely to go to Canada, not physically.

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The point of the portrait is not to deal with the face of problems, and clearly world hunger is the face of problems. Very lovingly and very tenderly, I would like to say to these people, these people who want to turn away,

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that I think there is a confusion in their thinking. A psychological confusion, a theological confusion, and an informational confusion. Look at the psychological one first.

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We know from our studies of psychology that we all have certain needs, and we know also that we seek to strive to fulfill our most basic needs first. Take for example a man who is starving to death, and we offer him a hundred dollar bill,

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and there's no place for him to spend it to buy food. He won't be interested in the hundred dollar bill. He wants food. The desire to stay alive is much more strong in him

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than the desire to have a hundred dollars in his backpack. If a person, for example, feels insecure, unsafe, that person is very unlikely to join a group, because when you join a group,

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you most often have to expose yourself and become vulnerable to a certain degree in becoming part of that group. And they're not ready to belong, and that's another reason for that, belonging,

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until a first message to cure the need is in place. We meet our most paramount needs first, and that's what we need first. You can't talk to a hungry person about the gospel

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until you first share the gospel. It was Mohamed Esfandi who said, "Not even God dares to appear before starving people in any other form than God is worthy." We cannot preach the gospel to a starving person

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until that person has been fed and committed to it. But there's also a theological confusion here. Jesus came into the world at the lowest level, born in a stable in a backwater town.

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He spent his whole life in his journey to the tomb. He had some constant atonement and suffered by the cross. He taught his disciples to go out and meet the needs of people, not only their physical needs, but their spiritual needs also.

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In his one terrible objection, he describes those who go to heaven as what? Those who hold the correct theology? No. Those who worship God in a certain way, or do not worship him in a certain way? No.

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Those go to the kingdom of heaven who have fed the hungry, and clothed the naked, and visited those who were empty. By his Holy Spirit, the Lord Jesus has spread across the pages of both the Old and the New Testament all of his gospel to how we are to be concerned for those who are suffering bodily needs,

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as well as spiritual needs. Take the word that is our text for this morning. The brother of Jesus, James, writing under the influence of the Holy Spirit, says, "If a brother or sister is in lack of daily food,

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and one of you says to them, 'Go and eat, and be warmed and filled,' without giving them the things which they need for the body, what is the problem?" That's how the faith without worth is built.

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And again, Jesus Christ does not approve of the charity. He does not approve of poverty. He does not approve of hunger and disease. Wherever he met holy people, he ministered to them,

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whether their hope was a physical hope or a spiritual one. And his disciples did the same. But there's another confusion in this particular instance, which I think we have to address this morning in Bethlehem. When a lot of people, when they think about world hunger,

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think of it in terms of misinformation. There are people, for example, who would say, "The reason that people are starving to death in the world is because the world cannot produce enough food to feed them. That's because there is not food.

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There is not an expert on world food in terms of hunger today who would defend that food source. That's a broad mouse that's been made a long time ago, and it's no longer given serious attention. The world can produce more than enough food to feed all of us." Some people, in equal error, say, "It's a problem of overpopulation.

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It's the place where we have too many people living in too small an area. That's where hunger comes." That's what it means. Most of the nations which suffer most severely from striking hunger are very sparsely populated states.

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The Netherlands, for example, has a population four times as dense, four times greater, four times as compressed as the population of Indonesia. In Indonesia, they have desperate hunger problems, while there are none in the Netherlands. Overpopulation is not the reason for world hunger. And some people say that world hunger comes because of natural disasters.

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Earthquakes, floods, famines, typhoons, that kind of thing. And they do, many times, cause some aspects of the problem. But there are no more earthquakes, and there are no more famines, and there are no more floods than there have been in all the history of the world. And yet, world hunger is much greater today than it has ever been before.

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You see, these natural calamities are not that which promotes world hunger. And friends, the fact is, and all experts on the study of world hunger agree with this, world hunger is not a problem of production, it's not a problem of population, it's not a problem of economic ecology, it's not a problem of natural disasters, it's a moral problem.

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The problem is that there are many who have too little, because there are few who have too much. A lot of people are riding in tourists, because a few people insist on going first class. I don't really see what that means. We here in the United States like to have winter and spring vegetables.

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We buy most of our winter and spring vegetables from Mexico. Yet there are thousands who are starving to death in Mexico. And they would not starve if they had those spring, winter and spring vegetables which we buy and import. And why are they sold to us?

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In the face of the hunger of that many, because the people who produce those vegetables and those fruits can get a higher price in selling them to us than they can in selling them to the poor. First class, if you will, in value. In South America, 17% of the population owns 90% of the land.

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Now when we go to deal with the South American nation, we deal with that 17%, because they're the people in power. They're the people in government, and they make deals with our country and with great multinational corporations and the like which suit them the best. Now how does that work out? Well it works out like this.

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In Honduras, a person who picks bananas makes about a dollar a day. Well a few years ago they decided to go on strike to increase their wages so that they might have enough money to buy food. And the landowner who owned these great plantations where the bananas were raised didn't want that strike. So they came to the United States and we buy 95% of Honduras' bananas.

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And they said, "Don't buy their bananas, and that'll break the strike." And we didn't. As a nation we stopped buying their bananas. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of tons of bananas rotted on the docks of Honduras, and then were pushed into the ocean. And the strike was broken, and the poor professors went back to wages which were just as high as they were before.

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And the day-donors of the plantations had things their own way. And we can still buy bananas here, which is in shifts all the way from Honduras, and costs less per pound than a pound of apples that we might buy with the shifts in Mercer, Pennsylvania, 60 miles north. That's the way it works.

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They took a survey in this country about eight months ago, and 69% of the people interviewed said that America was the most generous nation on the face of the earth. That's not true. There are so few other nations in the world which give a greater proportion of their gross national product

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to help the poor of the world than we do. And not only that, but most of our assistance given to other nations is in the form of arms and ammunition. And not only that, but we insist when we give money to other nations that all of the money be spent to buy our products. The problem I think is the real thing.

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The people who ride in first class are controlling the world economy, and they're doing it to their own advantage. So the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer, and hungrier. It's a moral problem. As Poebo said in a comic strip a number of years ago, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

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I know that nobody was hearing my voice today, whatever took place to me from the mouth of a starving child. I know that no one hearing what I'm saying today was for a moment thinking of putting their grandmother into a garden stream. They would do anything they could, but that might not come to pass. But you see, we're part of an economic system that does this.

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And we become very sensitive as a target, so sensitive that we resent anybody trying to make changes. And this is costing us very dearly. Let me take a moment to tell you a story. Ten years ago now, there was a young man born in Germany, was born in Kenya, and his name was Carl Henry.

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He grew up in a huge family, but the cost of his family was took over, and they passed certain laws which terminated his entry to the US, so his family converted to product efficiency. He became curious about his paper, and he wrote a paper on the cost of a foreign job, which won a very significant number of jobs. When he was old enough, he went to the University of Bonn, and a few years later graduated from there with a PhD.

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He took a job on a newspaper in a small town in Germany. And what was the science on that paper was the cover of court papers. And in the inside the cover of the paper, a rich landowner with green trousers against some poor peasant, he had picked up some rotten wood from the rich landowner's property, and they used it to repair their cut cover for the wood.

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And mind you, they hadn't cut down any of the landowner's trees, and they hadn't walked off any of the branches. They were only picking up that which had fallen, water, from the trees, and had fallen to the ground. And they did it just to warm their hands, so they would be cool for five years. The clerk in the area, sided with the rich landowner, thou shalt not do this, he said.

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And the court ruled against the peasant, and they went to prison. And this young reporter would say, "It is such a shame, it is an injustice to do this." But he continued to write stinging articles on the subject, and very soon he gathered quite a bit of attention upon himself, and as a result he was fired.

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But when he was fired from the newspaper, he had a goal in life, and his goal, announced from that time until the time of his death, was to bring the upper classes down through war waged upon them by the lower classes. He gave the rest of his life to the advancement of that goal. That's the end of his story.

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I'll leave you with that one word. I told you the name of the young man was Karl Penwick. It was. In fact, his first name was Nittleman. His last name was Mark. Karl Mark.

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The philosopher of communism. The one who dreamed up that system which is today the church of the earth, which dishonors God, which puts no value upon the person, and which supports a morality which says that the end justifies the mean. And how does communism advance?

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It preys on the hungry. When your death burden, when your children's hair is turning orange, and when old people are discovered in garbage cans where you live, then you're ready to do anything.

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And so people buy the communist lie. Communism is a failure. It's an economic failure. It's a political failure. It's a moral failure. But many people are opting for it, indeed it is growing faster than any ideology in the history of the world.

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Many people are opting for it because they see it. They've been riding in tourists, and they keep looking up at first class, and they see the way the first class is living, and they see the way the first class is doing very little to help them in tourism.

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And so, as a result, they buy the red line. And they take up the red flag. And I think none of this has to happen. Capitalism is the most successful economic system that the world has ever known.

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But my friends, capitalism without these extremes can be greed, and arrogance, and indifference, and promote hunger and despair. Atheistic communism feeds on atheistic capitalism. And that's the reason we have the problems we do in Cuba, and Chile, and Nicaragua, and Panama, and Guatemala.

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Because we've become immoral as a nation. Didn't it appall you this week to discover that the Senate of the United States had to pass a law forbidding Americans from buying Iranian oil? Iran has been trying to sell its oil at much lower than the market price.

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Why? Because the money they get from the oil they use to buy weapons. And who do they use those weapons against? The Iraqis and us.

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But some in America, some Americans, have been buying that oil because they can make a bigger profit out of it, and thus putting the money to buy the arms into the hands of the Iranians who then turn those arms against our economy.

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And the Congress of the United States had to pass a law to stop that. As a people, as a nation, we supported Bashar al-Assad, even though we knew much of what he did, and how cruel he was, and how heartless he was,

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in ruling these young people. And we supported him because he did everything the way we wanted him to do it. And eventually his people rose up and threw him down. And when they threw him down, they threw us down with them.

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And there are still Americans who are aiding and abetting Iranians. And that, my friends, is a moral problem. A problem which we must address. The Church of Jesus Christ must stand up and say what needs to be said about this.

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Martin Luther wrote a long time ago, "If you preach the gospel in all aspects, with the exception of the issues which deal specifically with your own time, then you are not preaching the gospel at all."

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It's high time to preach the gospel. And that means we have to police ourselves, and we have to police our own nation. We must be the people of the cross who, like their Lord,

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preach the message to the world, or make no mistake about it, the future history of the world is going to depend upon what happened in one of two upper rooms. The first upper room was a dingy flat over a laundry in London.

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In the middle of the room, a round table on a few junkets. Some ditched material, a child's broken doll, a broken teacup, some man's fist that her dog ate. And there's a man sitting there with a very serious look on his face and a big black bushy beard.

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And he's writing. And he's so earnest about what he's writing that he writes all night through, night after night. His name is Karl Marx, and what he is writing is "Das Papi Karl." And his purpose is to revolutionize the world. The other upper room is in one of the oldest cities in the Pacific, Jerusalem.

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And in the center of that room is a table. And a set of bread and wine and other common food. And the host, who is gentle and loving, leaves his disciples gathered there in a very meaningful manner. And then this host leaves us, speaks about love and sacrifice,

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and the service of those who suffer from that disease. And his purpose, too, is to revolutionize all the world. Now we come to a point in history. The people who are going to decide are the people in school.

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Because there's a lot more people in school than there are in Perth, Ghana. And they're either going to opt for Marx and Schlesinger, or for Crump and Keating. And they're going to make up their minds on the basis of food supplies, give them bread, and love them, and care for them, and are willing to bleed for them.

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And it would be easy to die for them. So if you come to this table this morning, there will be no Perthites. There will be children with orange hair and grandmothers climbing out of garbage cans, and women chasing after airplanes trying to offer their children to people who will take them away.

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And as we come, let us remember the words of James, the brother of Jesus. If a brother or a sister is in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, "Go and eat, be filled," without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it cost? That kind of thing is dead.

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And let's also remember the words of James' brother, Jesus, the host of this table, who said, "In his mouth he hath done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, he hath done it unto me." If we love Jesus, we will obey him, not only for his sake, but for the sake of all the world. Let us pray.

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Lord, take away from us ignorance. Take away from us indifference. Take away from us indecisiveness. Take away from us a foolish sense of independence.

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Take away from us everything that must be taken away from us in order that we might be free of sin. And have a message to change lives. Have a disdain for everything. And so in that regard, we deserve all human and man's salvation.

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And we have to do this exactly. Here is what we pray. Amen. Amen.