Those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are well into the season of Autumn, and along with the beautiful leaves and the crisp weather comes the harvest. In much of North America, we are blessed with a bountiful harvest each Fall which feeds most of our people and some people in other lands as well. Our Canadian brothers and sisters have already celebrated their Thanksgiving and here in the States, ours is still more than a month away. But all of us have much to be grateful for, not the least of which is the fact that we rarely, if ever, have to worry about having enough food on our tables.

So it seems to me that our first response to this fact should be gratefulness to the God of all Creation. That is one of the reasons I like Thanksgiving so much. Whenever it is that we celebrate the actual holiday, a humble "thank you God" seems absolutely essential. And a good meal is a nice way to celebrate such an event.

But we all know that not everyone gets to have a good meal--not on Thanksgiving Day, and, very often, not on any other day either. In fact, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization stated this past July that currently there are 1.02 billion (you read that right--billion with a "b") hungry people in our world today. That is one in every six people going hungry. A bit of this is strictly due to weather and agriculture issues, but the vast majority of it is due to economic, political and/or military issues that are completely preventable. And so the question that was asked in Matthew 25 must be asked by us: "Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food?" Not very often it would seem.

In various parts of Africa, Asia and South America, we have witnessed food riots at an increasing and alarming rate over these last few years. In North America and Europe, food pantries and soup kitchens are packed with people, in some cases tripling the number of those served in the last year alone. But these facts can seem like a million miles away for so many of us who have enough food. Yet hunger is a very real problem in both the developed and developing nations of the world.

But, as ever, Jesus teaches us to be present to his Body all around us. Each and every day we encounter the Body of Christ in the people we live with, those we work with, play with, pray with, are neighbors with, strangers we pass on the street, even those we see or read about in news reports. How is this? Well, just two days before Jesus' final Passover, his last meal, he told his disciples that:

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say those at his right hand, "Come you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food...Then the righteous will answer him, "Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food...?" And the king will answer them, "Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me" (Matthew 25:31-35, 37, 40, NRSV).