Sermon — We are all hungry

(I preached this sermon at Derry Presbyterian Church on Sunday June 14, 2026 as part of an opportunity to share an update on the Christ Lutheran Health Ministries with Derry)

I want to tell you about a man who came into our free dental clinic not long ago.

He came in because he was in pain. When the dentist took x-rays and looked at his mouth, the news wasn’t good. The man needed seven teeth extracted. Seven. Not one, not two. Seven teeth that had deteriorated past the point of saving.

They helped him that day. They cared for him. And that is a genuine blessing. It is also a genuine loss.

And I keep sitting with a question that doesn’t have a clean answer: how does a person get to that point?

Part of the answer has to do with individual choices. At some point along the way, this man made decisions — or didn’t make decisions — that contributed to where he ended up. That is real. The choices we make matter.

But here is what I also know: not everyone knows the same things. Someone who grew up with regular dental care, with parents who took them to checkups, who had insurance, who had a dentist who explained what would happen if you didn’t stay on top of things — that person has information and access and margin in their life that not everyone has. There are choices this man may never have known were available to him. Choices that someone in a different situation would have made without a second thought.

So part of the question is about him. And part of the question is about us. What does it say about us as a society that we have people who go that long without being able to get the care they need? What do we owe each other? Where does personal responsibility end and communal responsibility begin?

I don’t have tidy answers. Anyone who tells you they do is probably selling you a tweet or a bumper sticker or a twenty-second sound bite that makes a complicated problem feel resolved. Real answers are harder than that. They require holding more than one thing at once.

I think Jesus knew that. And I think that is part of what he is getting at in Matthew 25.

When we read Matthew 25 and Jesus gathers all the nations for judgment, most of us immediately start sorting ourselves. Am I a sheep or a goat? Did I feed the hungry? Did I visit the prisoner? We turn it into a spiritual audit.

But I want to slow down before we get there. Because the text says something specific. It says all the nations will be gathered. Not all the individuals. The nations.

Nations are made up of individuals. You can’t have one without the other. So this isn’t a passage that lets us off the hook personally. But we cheapen what Jesus is saying when we strip it down to personal virtue alone. Jesus is talking about how we organize ourselves together. What we build collectively. What we allow. What we call worth protecting and what we call expendable.

That is a question about nations. It is a question about us.

There are ways of organizing society that say: we are in this together. When one person suffers, we all suffer. When one person thrives, we all benefit. And there are ways that say: look out for yourself. Those who can’t keep up will fall behind, and that is simply how it is.

These are not abstract philosophies. They are beliefs about what human beings are worth. About who matters. About what we owe each other. And Jesus, in Matthew 25, does not leave us guessing about which vision he endorses.

We carry in our national memory both extraordinary aspirations and chapters that should make us grieve. That tension is not unique to us. It runs through the history of every nation, every people, every century. Whenever human beings have been afraid or uncertain, there has been a temptation to find a group to blame. The arguments follow the same shape across the ages. The groups being targeted change. The arguments do not.

The question that history keeps asking us — that Jesus keeps asking us — is whether we will see the stranger as a threat or as a neighbor. Whether we will see the person in pain as a burden or as someone whose suffering is connected to our own.

Those are not easy questions. But I do not think we are allowed to stop asking them.

Here is the thing that I think we can miss if we read Matthew 25 too quickly. Jesus does not say: when you feed the hungry person, it is as if you are feeding me. He does not say: when you welcome the stranger, it counts as welcoming me.

He says: it is me. Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.

That is a staggering claim. Jesus is not keeping a ledger from a distance. Jesus is present in the suffering person. He is there in the man in pain in the dental chair. He is there in the woman shaking on the clinic floor. He is there in the stranger who is afraid. He is there in the person who is sick and the one who is imprisoned. He is not watching from somewhere else. He is right there, in the middle of the suffering, saying: this is where you will find me.

And if that is true, then the way we treat other people is never just about them. It is about who we understand Jesus to be, and where we understand Jesus to be found. When we look away from someone who is suffering, we are not just walking past a stranger. We are walking past Jesus.

Now turn it around. If Jesus is present in the suffering of others, is he not also present in our own? When we are the ones who are hungry or afraid or sick or lost, is Jesus somewhere else? Or is he right there, in the middle of our suffering too?

We are not separate from each other, and we are not separate from Jesus. What happens to the person on the street corner touches us, even if we drive past and never know their name. What happens to us touches others. And Jesus is woven through all of it, present in ways we barely have the imagination to take in.

We tend to think of ourselves as individuals, moving through the world independently, our lives largely our own. But that is not the picture Matthew 25 paints. It paints a picture of radical connection. A world where the suffering of the least among us reaches all the way to the throne of God. Where what we do with our resources and our attention and our care is never just a private matter.

Have we really let ourselves sit with that? The idea that we are that connected to each other? That the distance between us and the person in pain is smaller than we have convinced ourselves it is?

I want to tell you about two women who came into our medical outreach clinic on the same day.

Both were going through withdrawal. Their bodies were shaking. They were cold even though it wasn’t cold outside. One was on the floor in a fetal position from the pain. The other could barely form words.

One of them said she wanted to go to recovery. She was ready.

When someone says that, you have minutes. Maybe less. The window is that small, and it closes fast. Our nurses knew it. They moved immediately. They called ahead to check her insurance, confirmed she had coverage, arranged a ride, and made sure she was in that vehicle before anything changed.

The other woman made excuses. She couldn’t go today. There were reasons. And underneath all of them was fear. Fear of what recovery would ask of her. Fear, maybe, that she wasn’t worth saving.

After both women had left, the nurses said something I have carried with me since. They said: we welcome people as they are. No judgment. Because if we judge them, they won’t trust us. And if they don’t trust us, we cannot help them. Our job is to see the person. To see their humanity. To invite them toward something better. But we cannot force anyone through that door.

It breaks our hearts when someone walks out and we know they aren’t ready. But we will be there when they are. We will always be there. And when the moment comes, we will act.

That is the ministry. That is what Matthew 25 looks like on a Tuesday afternoon in Harrisburg.

And I wonder: when those nurses got on the floor with that woman, who were they getting on the floor with? When they moved fast to get the other woman into a car, who were they serving? When they refused to judge and refused to turn away, who were they refusing to turn away from?

Jesus says he knows exactly who.

I think most of us have been trained to read this passage as a test. Sheep or goat? Pass or fail? And when we read it that way, it becomes about winners and losers. About who got it right. That framework mostly just makes us anxious or proud, and neither of those is what Jesus was after.

So try reading it from a different angle. What if we are not only the ones being evaluated for how we responded? What if we are also the ones in the story who are hungry, and thirsty, and naked, and a stranger, and sick, and imprisoned?

Because we are. Every one of us.

We are all hungry for something. For some people that hunger is physical and immediate and real. For others it is a hunger for love, or belonging, or purpose, or for someone to tell them they matter. The particular hunger varies. The hunger itself does not.

We are all thirsty. For water, yes. But also for justice. For dignity. For a fair chance. For a community that will not abandon us when things get hard.

We are all naked in some way. All of us carry vulnerability underneath whatever we have put on. There are things about us — fears and failures and wounds — that we have worked hard to keep covered. We know what it is to be exposed.

We are all strangers somewhere. The immigrant navigating a country that isn’t sure it wants them knows this profoundly. But so does the person who just moved to a new city and doesn’t know anyone. The person whose grief or illness has made them feel invisible in the middle of a crowd. The one who has never quite fit in. We have all been the stranger.

We are all sick in some way. Our bodies fail us. Our minds go to dark places. Our hearts carry wounds that have never fully healed. Our spirits get dry and exhausted and lost. There is no one in this room who has not needed healing.

And we are all imprisoned in some way. Some people are literally behind bars. Some are imprisoned by addiction, caught in a cycle they can see clearly and cannot break alone. Some by fear that has become the shape of their life. Some by an abusive relationship. Some by what other people expect of them, by the story someone else decided about who they are. Some by shame, or debt, or a past they cannot escape no matter how far they walk from it.

When we read it this way, something shifts. The passage stops being a sorting mechanism. It becomes an invitation to recognize ourselves in the people Jesus is naming. And when we do, we can no longer look at the hungry person or the sick person or the imprisoned person as someone entirely unlike us, someone whose situation is their problem alone.

We have been there. Maybe not in exactly that form. But we have been there.

And if Jesus is present in their suffering, then Jesus has been present in ours too. He is not a distant judge watching to see if we pass. He is the one who has been in the middle of our own pain, our own hunger, our own fear. He knows it from the inside.

That is what changes how we respond. Not fear of getting sorted into the wrong group. Not obligation. But the recognition that we are all bound together — bound to each other and bound to Jesus — in ways that are deeper and more real than the distance we have constructed between ourselves and the people we do not know.

I want to close by talking about vision. Because I think that is ultimately what Matthew 25 is. It is not primarily a threat. It is a vision of what the world is meant to be.

A world where no one goes without care because we have decided, together, that everyone matters. Where the hungry are fed, and the thirsty have water, and the stranger is welcomed, and the sick are healed, and the imprisoned are visited and not forgotten. Where we look at the person in front of us and see a human being, made in the image of God, someone Jesus is already present with, someone he already loves.

That vision is what we are trying to build at Christ Lutheran Church in Allison Hill. Every week, in a neighborhood that most people drive past without stopping, that vision is taking shape in a free medical clinic, a free dental clinic. In nurses who get on the floor and do not flinch. In dentists who give people back something they lost. In people who show up to see those who have been made invisible.

But here is what I know: we cannot build it alone. Nobody builds anything worth building alone.

Derry Presbyterian Church is part of this vision. Your partnership with Christ Lutheran is not a line item in a budget. It is a theological statement. It is this congregation saying: we believe the people of Allison Hill matter. We believe they are our neighbors even if we will never meet them. We believe we are connected to them in ways that run deeper than geography or circumstance. And we are going to put our resources and our prayer and our commitment behind that belief.

That is what mission partnership means. It is the body of Christ functioning the way it is supposed to — different parts, different places, different gifts, bound together in one vision.

Every grantor and foundation and individual donor and congregation that has chosen to be part of this work is part of that vision. They are the ones who make it possible for the nurses to move fast when a woman says she is ready. For the dentist to say yes to seven extractions. For the doors to stay open for the next person who walks in, wherever they are on their journey, whatever they are carrying.

The vision is bigger than any of us. But it is built one act of care at a time, one partnership at a time, one person seen and welcomed and helped at a time.

That is what we are doing together. That is what Jesus is describing in Matthew 25. Not a test we pass or fail in isolation, but a way of living in which we finally understand that we are bound to each other, and bound to him, more deeply than we knew.

The man with seven teeth needed care. Someone showed up.

The woman on the floor needed a way out. Someone moved fast.

There will be others. There will always be others.

And because we are connected to one another and to Jesus…because of partnerships like this one, we will be there. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Originally published at https://pastormatthewbest.com on June 15, 2026.