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Welcome to Hunger Sermon Starters!

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!

September 9, 2007

Time after Pentecost – Lectionary 23

First Reading: Deuteronomy 30:15-20

Psalm 1

Second Reading: Philemon 1-21

Gospel: Luke 14:25-33

STARTER ONE: PREACHING THEMES

A good labor: Choosing life

· Quoth Moses at the end of his life: Life comes from God alone; we don’t make ourselves.

· The obvious choice in the First Reading is to choose life. Nice slogan – many church programs and posters and spiffy albums use this memorable phrase.

· But what constitutes the chosen life in this text? Obeying the precepts that our covenanting God lays out. Obedience to God alone.

· No other gods, including one’s self.

· One of the precepts: You aren’t God, nor can you make your own gods.

· Another: Love your neighbor as yourself.

· You can make the hunger connections from there, yes?

· BTW, the text can easily morph into works righteousness, as though by our obedience – “See how we love people who are poor?” – we somehow save ourselves. That’s not the way it works with God’s working.

· Another way to see this: The ways of idolatry – including self-idolatry – lead to death and destruction.

A good Labor Day?

· How does it feel to get “back to work” after a summer that might have more leisurely?

· In Psalm 1, the wicked do their work and they get a bad rap. Deservedly.

· The righteous do their work and they get a good deal here. Undeservedly.

· What makes evil people stand out: taking bad advice from other evil people and sneering at God.

· What does it mean to “sneer at God?” Can this happen quietly, like overlooking the people God loves, the people God has saved? Could it be poking God in the ribs and taunting God into retaliating?

· Could “sneering” be taking God for granted, or God’s invitation or advice-through-righteous people?

· Could “sneering at God” be the same as NOT getting God’s work done, as in “I have other stuff to do first, MY work and MY priorities.”

· Could “sneering at God” be ignoring God’s pretty-clear commands and promises and laws and invitations like God was Old Uncle Ned Who Drools?

· What work made this Labor Day a good one? Maybe it was the work you do, alongside those who are poor, to change the world’s work to godly work.

· Maybe your participation in ELCA World Hunger is a good work to recall.

Redefining relationships

· Onesimus – “useful guy” in the Greek? – is a slave, property of Philemon. Fairly straightforward relationship. Superior/inferior; owner/owned; powerful/powerless.

· Paul intervenes in this relationship with some zinger-words: Love, friend, dear, friend, kindness, son. The point is obvious: When Christ fills relationships, old words go out the window.

· So what do we do with “illegal alien”, “needy, “them”, “the poor” or “my starving children”? Demeaning words that keep up the old relationships, even while claiming love and care for people who are poor. The power equations stay the same, even though we may claim great pity or concern.

· Paul appeals for something more radical: An emergent equality between Onesimus and Philemon. “Your slave is now your brother,” Paul seems to say. Almost like “That person who is poor is now your teacher” or “the person who you are helping wants to help you.” Or even, “The people who you think you have power over are ready to share power with you.”

· This Sunday follows the day when “labor” of all kinds was recognized. Not just “work” but also organized labor, people banded together to exercise power in the face of previous powerlessness. Miners aggrieved by lack of mine safety, “the working poor” trying to make it on wages that are not livable, ordinary people being ground down by their supposed superiors, women and young workers having hope sucked out of them by disappearing benefits, stagnant wages, phantom pension funds or unhealthy working conditions.

· Labor Day wasn’t a religious holiday – justice doesn’t wait for one day a year.

· Neither do the joys of new relationships born by the Spirit’s blessings.

· You don’t have to look too far behind the curtains of ELCA World Hunger to see this church pounding quietly at these radical redefinitions. In some places, “accompaniment” theology and practice are the onstage actors; in other places, development workers in villages where those who receive aid are involved in the decisions about it use.

· This church’s program of hunger work is useful, an Onesimus kind of thing. . . .

Give it all away

· A squirmy text, the “Gospel” for today. (Where’s the “good” in this “good news”, hmmm?

· Give it all away, love Jesus more than family, keep counting the costs for this kind of lifestyle – not anywhere close to “good” in most of our minds.

· And yet . . . .

· And yet there is something good about just giving up on the notions of piling stuff higher and higher, running faster and faster, trying to keep up with tower building and army recruiting.

· And yet, don’t you ever get tired of counting the costs for things in life that aren’t really all that important – a tower, for goodness sake! – or going to battle with too few soldiers and no exit strategy.

· No, not the national tiredness. Yours, the people you serve. Is it not possible that “giving away everything” is an ultimate kind of good news. Like nuns and priests and simple living folks, missionaries and relief and development workers, Young Adults in Global Mission, Lutheran Volunteer Corps folks --- any of us could find certain joy in just chucking all the frenetic presumptions about “the good life” and trying this “following Jesus” at its most basic level.

· This is not just metaphor, this way of thinking. Google “new monastics” and see the kind of young folks who are trying to figure out to take this passage literally, and right into their ways of living.

· The fall program of your congregation – whatever that might mean – is starting up, and you’re probably looking at the frenzied questions every church leaders faces right now. But what if you gave this all up, too? What would your congregation look like? What would you do together? Who would benefit? And how good would that be?

STARTER TWO: CHILDREN’STHOUGHTS AND ACTIVITIES

1. Look through hunger-related stories – try www.lwr.org or www.lutheranworld.org or www.elca.org/hunger -- to find the places where tree-planting or water-related projects are cited. Retell one of these stories from the viewpoint of a child who benefits from the project.

2. This past Monday was Labor Day. Talk with children about their understanding of “work” with some starter question like:

Why do people work?
What’s “good work”? What’s not?
What kind of work do you like to do?
What would happen if your parents didn’t work?

You can move from the quick, preliminary discussion toward items such as:

The work that relief and development workers are engaged in, at this moment, in tough places around the world;
Taking apart the adage, “Teach a man to fish, etc.” (These days this maxim goes toward, “Give the man the pond and his descendants will fish for their lifetimes, too!”)
Being grateful for parents who have work, who like their work and who are good at their work.
Thinking of the work we do together in this congregation to help people who are poor.

3. Think with children about what would happen if they gave away everything they had. What would that feel like and what would happen next? Be careful NOT to pre-determine how the answers should be capped or finished by your comments.

STARTER THREE: BIBLE CONVERSATIONS

1. Take apart the “Choose life” text from a deeper-than-slogan viewpoint. Think together about matters such as these:

How much life-choice do people who are poor really have?
The choice Moses throws out here is not an individual one! It’s directed at a whole nation. How does our nation choose (or not choose) life?
What kind of life comes to people from the money you contribute to the ELCA World Hunger Appeal? (Lots of good leveraging here, where $1.00 buys more than food in many places!)

2. Although formal slavery does not exist in civilized countries today, virtual slavery remains. The Philemon text – with all its historical baggage – is relevant to millions of people who are poor at this very moment. Talk together with participants about matters such as:

Who are the virtual slaves in today’s economic universes? (Think about child labor, forced labor, people with no choices about where and how to work, folks mortgaged to the hilt or buried in credit card debt.
What would it take for any of us to stop thinking of the people who receive our care – in the ELCA world hunger efforts – as merely needy recipients? How could we think of them as equals, or even greatly gifted? How would we behave if we truly practiced that belief?
What gets in the way of power shifts – big or little picture – that might benefit people who are ground into the dust by poverty?
What’s “accompaniment” and how could it be helpful in this discussion? (HINT: Visit the ELCA Global Mission Website and play around with buttons until you get some material on this subject.)

THE SENDOFF

Today’s themes come out of my personal experience with these matters in today’s texts, Jacob-with-the-angel wrestlings that have preceded career changes, moved me from one place to another, stood up as lifework markers. Nothing in today’s texts is theoretical for me at this moment of writing, because of floods and fires and a continuing war and my turning over another calendar page to celebrate my natal feast day. That’s the way it is with sermon preparation, right? Wrestlings and sweatings and thrashing about in the night time. A blessed task, this sermon-writing, and not one iota of it is “theoretical.” Enjoy your wrestling and sweating. I’ll be cleaning out the muck from my basement and pulling downed trees from my yard. And thinking of you, of course . . . .

Bob Sitze, Director

Hunger Education

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Welcome to Hunger Sermon Starters!

September 16, 2007

Time after Pentecost – Lectionary 24

First Reading: Exodus 32:7-14

Psalm 51:1-10

Second Reading: I Timothy 1:12-17

Gospel: Luke 15:1-10

STARTER ONE: PREACHING THEMES

Hurry back down!

· Earth to Moses: Hurry back down! We have some big problems here. God’s people run amuck, fried by their travels to who-knows-where and grasping at the kind of “spiritual straws” that lead inevitably to god-making.

· We also have some big problems up where you are: An angry law-giving Jehovah, ready to fry the travelers in their sandals, for basic apostasy.

· Who repents here: Moses, on behalf of the soon-to-be-discovered idolaters.

· When it comes to the apostasy of world hunger – our self-idolatries the possible cause – we may have the same conditions: people running amuck, worn out from their life travels and grasping for meaning and purpose.

· Oh, and possibly God, too, justifiably angry about our ways of living.

· So we – pastors, God’s people in your congregation – hurry back down to the ground floors of daily life, on the way repenting on behalf of those who could darn-well repent on their own.

· And God relents, backs off, sees the reasons to remain gracious and merciful, full of compassion and abounding in steadfast love.

· What’s sobering about the First Reading is that the whole interaction – Moses repentance and God’s relenting – doesn’t seem to work. Just a few verses later, three thousand men from among the idolatrous multitudes are slaughtered by the Levites, in a religious battle of large proportion because they got into the idol-worship thing in a big way. Dancing, even!. (We’ll leave that alone here, for now.)

· Good News? I think it’s found in the character of Moses, willing to get down with God, get down on the ground with God and with God’s supposed people and to intercede on their behalf.

· And you? Your congregation? When it comes to global poverty, for whom do you intercede? For whom are you the one who persuades punishers to back off for awhile?

Repent

· Today’s lessons are very tightly focused on that theme, and they are hard to ignore as they wave the Repent! sign in our face.

· The lessons give us good and holy words by which to frame our attitudes and actions. Think of David, think of Paul, think of Moses. No stammering, no aw-shucksing, no adroit shifting of the blame to others.

· The lessons also suggest that Luther’s “terrors of conscience” might not be a bad idea. We’re not talking about garden-variety confessions in these lessons. Important stuff needs to be admitted, soul-baring words are required, amending and redirecting of our lives absolutely necessary. An about-face is NOT the same as a sideways glance.

· By the time you read and preach these thoughts, our nation – not just its soldiers or leaders or disaster officials – may need to do a Ninevah – cf. Jonah story – and repent wholesale. Bad debt based on pervasive greed, a national economy shaken to its core, ineffectual leaders heading toward the noose of public shaming, individual families coming to grips with the effects of their mindless spending, an environment warmed by our pollution coming back to haunt us.

· “Repent” may no longer be an option.

· “Repent” may no longer be a ritual filled with words, a convenient substitute for gut-wrenching fear about the very real possibility of paying for our own sins with our own bodies and lives.

· “Repent” may also be good news – a reality check in a world of unbridled self-idolatry and a humiliation that forces us to turn back to what God has in mind for the world.

· The people of the world who are poor may have been waiting for us to come out of our over-mortgaged starter castles, to put aside our toys and diversions and to see them not just as over-needy objects of pity, but as brothers and sisters in Christ. Maybe even teachers.

· When we repent, we need counsel and partnership, perhaps from those against whom we’ve sinned.

· Good News: God relents, and in our repentance we find the Holy Spirit standing there next to Jesus’ example of love. The Spirit with a few ideas and a few gifts to get past our terrorized selves to our sanctified selves. A smiling, fresh-breeze kind of Spirit.

· We have this work to do – this justice and hunger work – and perhaps that’s the best news of all: After repentance there is forgiveness and after repentance there is shared work.

STARTER TWO: CHILDREN’STHOUGHTS AND ACTIVITIES

1. Work with the children to make REPENT buttons or signs. Hint: Spelling and punctuation are important here! (E.g., REPEAT is only one letter different than REPENT.) Talk about deep sorrow, deep regret, deep fear of punishment (or facing the results of one’s sinfulness). Yes, “repent” is different than “I’m sorry,” and kids know the difference as well as you and I.

2. Don’t leave them hanging emotionally. Forgiveness is available; so is a way out of sinfulness. (We never really PAY for our sins or “make it up” to God or anyone else, so don’t even go there.) Salvation may be as simple as “you get to try again.”

3. The interchange between God and Moses begs an interpretive dialogue between a puppet and a sermon-giver. Make the story interesting by inserting some examples of current apostasies, idolatries-about-to-happen, people run amuck.

4. This can all be framed by stories of the ELCA World Hunger Program, in itself a sign of redemption and holy living for people around the world. Guilty people aren’t as generous as forgiven repenters. We raise millions of dollars for alleviating hunger not because we can buy off God’s wrath – another apostasy to steer clear of – but because we have been given full reprieves from God’s anger and there’s godly work to do through the Hunger Program. A good motivation for giving, I’d think.

STARTER THREE: BIBLE CONVERSATIONS

The “repent” theme always works for personal sharing times, IF you keep the questions away from discussing the nature and purpose of repentance as a theological construct. When it comes right down to the nubbin of the matter, repentance is about the most elemental realities of the Christian life: How are we going to get along with this God, how are we going to transcend our own stupid selfishness and how are we going to get this forgiving God’s work done together? (See the connections to a hunger effort?)

Yes, the sins in the lessons are NOT all that connected to hunger-related matters, so the literalists among you can be correct in noting that fact. But those commandments that Moses hefted down the mountain – twice! – include some hefty connections to sinfulness that shuts out the will of God, the coming of God’s kingdom, the convetousness that hides in a consumerist society, the sexual immoralities that distract us from merciful ministries among those who are poor, the death-dealing decisions that enable us to take daily bread from someone else in the world and add it to our overfilled bellies. (Perhaps there is a connection, hmmm?)

A nice subtext today: self-idolatry. Got enough to go on? Good.

Despite my fulminations and frothings about reasons for you to repent, it’s very clear to me that these texts speak to my own complicity, my disregarding people who are poor, my comforts in the face of disaster, my carving myself into a golden bull. How does that work for you, or for the people in this Bible conversation?

Spend some time thinking of repentance – about world hunger’s presence – from God’s viewpoint. Use the texts as a jumping-off place.

THE SENDOFF

My daily uniform – work clothes – is a kind of contemporary hair shirt. I think of what I wear to work as repenting raiment. Like a touchstone or poster, the threads on my skinny frame remind me that I’m a worm and no man, a forgiveness beggar and one who’s joyful because I get what I need to do God’s will WITHOUT DESERVING IT. So what do you wear, hmmm?

Bob Sitze, Director

Hunger Education