“The Least of These”, March 9, 2025

 

“The Least of These”
A Sermon By Rev. Jamie Green Klopotoski
Based on Matthew 25:31–46
Preached on March 9, 2025
At First Baptist Church, Gloucester

 

When I sit down to write a sermon, the first thing I do is determine what I want the one major takeaway to be. Sometimes I want you to be reminded of God’s love, comforted by God’s grace, or encouraged to have hope. Sometimes I want you to gain a new perspective, see things a different way, or learn something new. Often I want you to be inspired to change and committed to take action.

 

Today is different. Today I want your hearts to break, as mine has been broken, as I am sure God’s has been broken, by what is happening in the world. This is not usually the goal of my preaching. I don’t usually want to break people’s hearts. But I need to tell you some difficult things this morning, and I need your hearts to break with mine.

 

There has been a LOT going on in the world, so much that it’s hard to keep track of it all. But the moment my heart finally broke was overt this one very specific thing that I heard on the news.

 

Because of recent funding cuts, 1.1 billion pounds of food is stuck rotting at U.S. ports because its distribution to food-insecure people in Haiti, Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and elsewhere in the world, has been halted. This food was enough to feed more than 36 million people. Instead, it sat and spoiled. Nearly 500 million dollars worth of corn, cornmeal, rice, soybeans, lentils, wheat. Moldy. Rotten. Destroyed.  36 million people left hungry.  I cannot get the image of containers full of food spoiling while people sit starving out of my mind. My heart broke. I want your hearts to break with mine.

 

What caused this? On February 26th, 5800 projects financed by U.S A.I.D that do lifesaving work around the world, like distributing this food to the hungry, received an email that the U.S. grant money they rely upon to operate “is being terminated for convenience and the interest of the U.S. government.”

 

Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi, executive director of the African Population and Health Research Center, was blunt in her response to these cuts: “People will die, but we will never know, because even the programs to count the dead are cut.”

 

As I speak there is an Ebola outbreak in Uganda that is getting worse every day. The country’s ability to contain the spread has been severely weakened by not having funding for sufficient laboratory supplies, diagnostic equipment, and protective gear for medical workers, or enough public health workers to trace contacts and conduct surveillance for new cases. Since the outbreak began on January 30, Ebola has already claimed four lives: a 32-year-old nurse, a 4-year-old boy, his newborn sibling, and their mother. 

 

Dr. Herbert Luswata, president of the Uganda Medical Association, said: “With no U.S A.I.D. money or C.D.C. expertise, it was like Uganda was left to die.”

 

 ‘Lord, when did we ever see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and not help you?’

 

When? When we left people to starve to death.

When? When we let people die of Ebola.

When? When we cut programs that risk death for millions of the most marginalized around the world.

 

 

“I was hungry, and you didn’t feed me.” When Lord, did we see you hungry and not feed you?

 

·         When we cut a project in Yemen that supported community health workers’ efforts to go door-to-door seeking malnourished children who are critically underweight because of the country’s civil war.

• When we cut a project in Nigeria providing 5.6 million children and 1.7 million women with treatment for malnutrition. 77 health facilities have now completely stopped treating children with severe acute malnutrition, putting 60,000 children under the age of 5 at an immediate risk of death.
• When we cut a project serving more than 144,000 people in Bangladesh that provided food for malnourished pregnant women and vitamin A to children.

 

“I was thirsty, and you didn’t give me a drink.” When Lord, did we see you thirsty and not give you a drink?

 

·        When we cut a project in the Democratic Republic of Congo that operates the only source of water for 250,000 people in camps for displaced people.

• When we cut a project run by Plan International that provided water and sanitation for 115,000 people displaced or affected by the conflict in northern Ethiopia.

 

“I was sick and you didn’t care for me.” When Lord, did we see you sick and not care for you?

 

·        When we cut UNICEF’s polio immunization program that provided polio vaccines to millions of children worldwide.

• When we cut programs across Africa that provided bed nets, mosquito control, tests, and treatments to protect 85 million people from malaria including providing malaria drugs to children at the start of the rainy season when the disease is at its worst
• When we cut a project by the Global Drug Facility that provided Tuberculosis medications for nearly three million people, including 300,000 children, and a project called Smart4TB, the main research consortium working on prevention, diagnostics, and treatment for tuberculosis.
• When we cut H.I.V. care and treatment projects run by the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation that provided lifesaving medication to 350,000 people in Africa, including 10,000 pregnant women who were receiving care so that they would not transmit the virus to their babies at birth.
• When we cut a project in Uganda to trace contacts of people with Ebola, conduct surveillance and bury those who died from the virus.
• When we cut a project in West Africa that last year provided more than 35 million people with medicine to prevent and treat neglected tropical diseases.
• When we cut a project in Sudan that runs the only operational health clinics in the area.
• When we cut pre- and postnatal health services for 3.9 million children and 5.7 million women in Nepal.

 

“I tell you the truth, when you refused to help the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were refusing to help me.”

 

Because we have refused to help, it is estimated that there will be:

• Hundreds of millions of infections of polio resulting in 200,000 children being paralyzed
• 18 million more cases of Malaria resulting in almost 200,000 more deaths
• a 32% increase in drug-resistant tuberculosis
• 28,000 more cases of Ebola
• 775 million more cases of bird flu
• 127,000 more cases of Mpox
• an 89% increase in vaccine preventable diseases including measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis, pertussis, and tetanus resulting in 3 million more deaths
• 16.8 million pregnant people not be given lifesaving services during childbirth
• 11.2 million babies not be given critical postnatal care
• 14.7 million children not treated for pneumonia and diarrhea, the top causes of preventable deaths among children
• 1 million children not be treated for malnutrition

 

My heart is broken. God’s heart must be broken. I need your hearts to break.  I need your hearts to break for the least of these. Please know that these are not just numbers and statistics. These are real, living, breathing, human beings; adults and children; of all ages and backgrounds; people with hopes and dreams and favorite colors and bad hair days. People like you and me. Being deprived of food and water and medicine. Suffering and dying, because even though it’s been 2,000 years since Jesus walked this earth, we are still lying to ourselves about the least of these.

 

For all of human history, there have been people who are walked over, pushed past, neglected, ignored, discriminated, and left to die. Every one of these injustices rests on a lie: “This person isn’t made in God’s image,” or, “This person doesn’t deserve the same rights I do.” Every injustice broadcasts this biggest lie: “God won’t judge me for this.”

 

We must confront these lies. Jesus tells us the truth that each and every single one of the least of these are children of our almighty loving God. Jesus tells us the truth that God will judge us for not caring for the least of these. It is a tragedy that millions of lives are now at risk. We must grieve for these lives, as God grieves. We must feel pain, as God feels pain when witnessing acts of cruelty, oppression, and unfair treatment towards others. These injustices are a direct affront to God’s love and desire for righteousness in the world.

 

God’s heart is broken over this, I just know it, and our hearts must be broken too. Because only when our hearts are broken, can we then pick up the pieces and do what’s right. Be a sheep among a world full of powerful goats. You will be blessed by God, and inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world, when you feed the hungry, give a drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, visit the imprisoned, and care for the sick, or when you protest and call your elected officials, and write letters and speak up against cuts in lifesaving humanitarian programs that your very own tax dollars used to fund instead of allowing your tax dollars to line the pockets of the richest men in the world. ‘I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!’ Amen.