The lessons for each Sunday in the church year proclaim God’s grace in Jesus Christ. Also derived from a Sunday’s texts are lessons for the Christ-inspired and Christ-like life of God’s people. The comments here will help you find hunger-related threads – sermon starters – among the themes of this day’s texts. (We're presuming you have already done your exegetical work on the texts.) God bless your proclamation (and teaching) of what is most certainly true!

· In the great economy of God – God’s enfolding and unfolding will for the world – the choice between sustaining and destroying seems to be held in eternal tension.

· In another sense, only the vineyard owner gets to choose whether supposed performance makes any difference. Manure or the printer’s axe – not the choice of the plant or people.

· In the great economy of God – to be efficient and effective – none of us stands a chance of earning our rewards for productive or useful lives. And yet, our deeds either match God’s plan for the world -- food available for all -- or our own sense of productivity, leaves and branches available for none.

· If fruit is to be shared or have utility for all the world, and if branches and leaves benefit only the plant itself, it may then be true that our lives are measured by our capability to feed others, not only ourselves.

· Whether we are fed in order to feed, or pruned in order to be fuel – these are our choices. God’s will remains constant: That the world will be fed by God’s fig tree people.

· God’s wishes and God’s actions predispose God’s people toward equitable – fair/just – availability of life’s basic resources. Partiality is not God’s way.

· We can easily live in perpetually clueless existences – chasing what’s not important – if we remain bound by the evil and self-destructive ways of living that are not “higher” – commanded or invited by God.

· Repentance – turning – is an option, a possibility, a redemptive act to which God invites our inner beings. We are not the perpetual victims of biological addictions – to shameless acts, to evil, to selfishness, to willful ignorance of others’ rights.

· Inevitably, idol worshipers bring on themselves their own fates, if only the abject failures of dependence on themselves to be their own gods.

· Yielding to temptations presupposes that we are the victims of our own idolatry, governed by the pleasure-seeking – and addiction-prone – parts of our brains.

· The temptations to become self-made gods – and therefore supremely deserving of everything we get and everything we want – are as old as time itself. So are the possibilities of strong avoidance and resistance of those temptations.

· We are, as always, what we eat, what we see, what we do. The more we engage in behaviors that are not of God’s own will, the more we become ungodly.

· The first step to solving the world’s increasing problems – hunger, disease, war, rapacious consumption of the world’s resources – is to throw off our idolatry. (Luther’s notion: The first commandment is, in some ways, the only commandment – or at least the primary one.)

· Destruction or life – God’s invitation is to the latter. So God’s gifts equip us for selfless acts of service to those who God loves as surely as us.

1. I don’t know if it’s possible, but could you “feed and water everyone” attending your worship services for this day? Could there be a potluck associated with the worship service, or a free meal for everyone in the community? Perhaps the possibility becomes a “what if?” story that you tell. Perhaps you note your congregation’s service to your community’s deepest needs.

2. Tell stories to children about how the ELCA World Hunger Appeal feeds the world – through partner agencies and ongoing relief and development programs – so that the “everyone” in the Isaiah 55 text becomes a literal reality. Use a world map or large globe as you tell stories. (Check your most recent packet of hunger resources or the ELCA Hunger Program Web site for details – www.elca.org/hunger.

3. A mirror makes a good idol-finder. Could you tell a story or find a fable/myth from earlier tmes or other cultures, in which someone thought themselves to be a kind of minor God? (The wicked stepmother of Snow White comes to mind.) If nothing else, use the mirror – and a puppet? – to portray someone so enmeshed in his or her self-care or self-appreciation that he or she neglects the feeding of the poor.

4. This might be a good set of texts to help children their responsibilities – and privileges – to be productive people of God. (NOT to earn or deserve God’s favor, but as response to God’s invitation and God’s blessing!) Fig trees don’t tell the Owner how to behave!

5. Retell the Gospel from the viewpoint of the fig tree, who comes to understand that figs are for others, while “nice leaves” are just for the fig tree’s benefit. So, too, our own lives. (In the end, the fig tree learns the lesson and so understands God’s desires.)

1. The texts for this day are rooted in a deeper understanding of the idolatries of God’s people as they moved toward the Promised Land. A gradual and painful experience of maturity from selfish and self-aggrandizing attitudes and behaviors towards their eventual understand that their covenant with a loving God required them to understand their responsibility to the worlds around them.

2. The “everyone” in the Isaiah 55 text can be unpacked carefully with questions about equitable distribution of food and water in the world, or the opposite. (How can such a small minority of the world’s population justify using so much of the planet’s resources?)

3. The matter of “wasteful living” is more than details of re-use and recycling. In the Isaiah the text, strong hints are included about the “higher ways” of God, as well as the dissatisfaction of pursuing empty-shell lifestyles. Talk together about your own answers to the Isaiah 55 questions. (See Isaiah 55:2.)

4. Paul warns the Corinthians about “shameful acts” (Contemporary English Version). Look at the Greek derivatives for this term as you ask participants to describe what might be shameful about any idolatry, including self-idolatry.

5. The premises of idolatry are that the gifts given to the idol – usually tangible elements of life like food and wine and crops and artifacts – put the giver in the enviable position of being rewarded. When it comes to eating and drinking and consuming the Earth’s resources, how do we feed the idols that are ourselves?

6. (Remember that for the Old and New Testament writers, idolatry was made tangible by the major enterprises of their cultures. Thus the punishments for idolatry accrue to whole societies, not just individuals.)

7. Consider this possibility: As we feed, clothe, heal, protect, visit or walk alongside the people of the world, we increase our capability to become our own idols. Thus the Hunger Program of this church body provides a way out of self-destructive behaviors that invite God’s eventual punishment. We give away our lives to gain them – or we gain our lives as we give them away.

I’m writing this while airplane-speeding back to my home in Illinois – from a visit with my frail parents, who will always exemplify generosity. High above the snowy plains of this fair land I can see how easily this gifted country can continue to be part of God’s will that the whole world be fed. I imagine in the thousands of towns below me the faithful people of God – among them the saints who occupy your congregation’s pews – who make possible what God promises: A world where everyone can be fed. What a premise and what a promise!

· God’s take on our sins – God’s grace-filled mindfulness of our condition – is the basic cause of God’s taking on our sins.

· God takes on our sins, too, in not accepting them as our permanent or preferred condition. “Let’s work together on this ‘being sinful’ thing,” God says and show us.

· The wastrel and the hard-working brothers both overlook essential elements of a Christ-like lifestyle, best described as a “social brain,” or care of others.

· By many objective standards – e.g., a healthy daily caloric intake – most aspects of our present (or desired) lifestyle are more similar to the rakish son than the work-too-hard son.

· Most people in the world can’t “simply life” because we don’t “live simply.” Our gluttony and waste dominate the world’s economic framework.

· In the First Reading, the Israelites go from dependence on God’s manna-laden providence to a kind of semi-marauding raping the fields of others. (Barley doesn’t grow uncultivated, at least in the quantities that this large nomadic people would have required.)

· How do we forgive people --- ourselves? – when they/we don’t repent? Forgiveness before repentance may be something else.

· How do we come to repentance, about our wasted and wasteful lives, in a way that’s helpful? And what if we don’t know how to do that?

· It may be possible that our largesse regarding the feeding of people who are hungry becomes a substitute for repentance, or that seeming generosity is actually self-redemption in the clothing of kindness.

· If the pigs in the story are the lowest of the low, the most unclean among us, how easily the parable of the two sons could overlook our treatment of the lowliest and imagined most-unclean among us – the poor? (In this story, the pigs remain pigs and their lot is never improved.)

· How might those of us who work to alleviate world hunger take on the righteous persona of the older brother? How could we receive or forgive the wastrels among us – the Me Generations – or at least work with the pigs to bring them to repentance?

· The Second Reading can be overlaid onto the propositions of eliminating world hunger, with some surprising conclusions or questions, among them those that follow.

· Christ’s work is to teach us peace. How might we include peace-making as a feature of our congregation’s hunger program?

· “Belonging to Christ” – a better term than discipleship, perhaps – makes us new creatures. Not just repentant and forgiven creatures, but renewed people. Perhaps the work of combating hunger and injustice is both a cause and an effect of that new-creatureliness.

· Jesus took our sins on himself, undeservedly, allowing us to take on forgiveness undeservedly. Perhaps we feed the world undeservedly.

· It seems that the “economy of God” – God’s plan for the world – always requires that someone suffers for the sake of others. Jesus may have been the prime and eternal examples of that self-giving, but we stand in those same footsteps during our life journey.

1. You’ve done this Gospel before, yes? The bad kid who gets forgiven in spite of his mistakes? The value of admitting you’re wrong. All good things. But let’s make the Prodigal Son even worse than a wastrel – his inheritance (more than money) was not available for other good things or for other people. In other words, it wasn’t money that was wasted.

2. Retell the story from the viewpoint of the pigs. (They may be the heroes in this story, because they shared their food with the wastrel son!) The pigs didn’t have much to give – it wasn’t theirs in the first place – but the prodigal still got some of their food, enough to sustain him for awhile. Pig puppets would help here.

3. Another angle for retelling the story from the pigs’ point of view: They get together and help this guy (force him?) to come to his senses. These despised and unclean creatures are God’s agents for a spark of repentance. NOTE: Among barnyard animals that we may take for granted, pigs are among the most intelligent.

4. If you work on the “learning to repent” angle with children, help teach them specific language – words, phrases, questions or body language – that engenders or fosters repentance. In the places where the imagined well-being of middle and upper class children compels parents into consumptive lifestyles, it’s possible that children are not only primed for narcissistic self-images and behaviors, but also that they never learn how to confess their sins. (Could you translate the liturgy’s confessions into kid-talk?)

1. Buried in the First Reading is the note that the Israelites celebrated the Passover there are Gilgal – a name that sounds like “take away” in Hebrew. Think together about the core of repentance around which the Passover is formed. What are the rituals of repentance in participants’ lives? About what do they sorrow in a repeating, worshipful way?

2. The First Reading is part of the Scriptural narrative of the Israelites’ transition to a warring and fighting nation, who will slowly take away the land from its occupants. Read elsewhere in Joshua to get a broader perspective on this matter. Then, with some care and accuracy, think together about the current Middle East situation, especially as injustices are piled on injustices and peace remains elusive. Listen to and learn from each other carefully. Consult the ELCA Web site – www.elca.org – for current statements, news releases and learning materials. (The Global Mission Web page is a good place to start.)

3. The story of the Two Brothers can be approached from a variety of viewpoints. It might be eye-opening to hear this story told from the perspective of someone who is poor. Or someone who has suffered from the wastrel ways of others. For a hard look at this subject, one that focuses on the lives of participants, use the day’s news – or a newspaper or newsmagazine – to take a snapshot of a world in which “wanton pleasure” is the rule of thumb or at least the desired outcome or definition of “happiness.”

4. Talk about “happiness” and its meanings. (All the lessons for the day could be framed by that word.) For some background, Google the word or see the most recent edition of Scientific American Mind.) The questions from today’s texts might include the matter of individual vs. shared happiness, or the ways in which our pursuit of pleasure or joy or happiness directly affect the wellbeing of others, or of the planet itself.

As you examine the texts for this coming Sunday, I hope that you enjoy wrestling with the deeper questions of each of them, and that you find joy in your own life of service. You, too, are forgiven. Bu more than that, as a called and ordained ”forgiveness person”, you have the great privilege of announcing and mediating the means of God’s grace for the people God surely loves. You are to be admired, dear friend!