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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 23, 2007
Time after Pentecost – Lectionary 25
First Reading: Amos 8:4-7
Psalm 113
Second Reading: 1 Timothy 2:1-7
Gospel: Luke 16:1-13
STARTER ONE: PREACHING THEMES
(Today’s lessons are full of “poor and needy” themes which you can easily extract on your own – e.g., God preferential love for people who are poor. Forgive me for leaving those themes alone, and pursuing others which might not be as obvious, or perhaps not as important. It’s an occupational hazard . . . .)
The ancestry of Jacob
• It is easy to overlook “business as usual” – c.f. the Amos lesson – is we stay mired in the presumptions of our cultural legacies.
• They may show up as misogynous statements about a way of life, a flag, a preferred economic system or even as a list of rights or privileges named as “liberty.”
• The religious/spiritual landscape of the Old Testament can be seen – from the perspective of the intertestamental period – as a battle between those who rested on the heritage of Israel – for Jesus and others, the Temple cult – and those who tried to stick to the purity of Yaweh’s Law – the Pharisees and others like them.
• Amos, Jesus, Paul – these prophets and teachers come down on the side of the radicals, those NOT enveloped by the maze of principles and behaviors centered on the Temple. For them, the glories of their ancestry could be masks, costumes, shrouds or worse – hiding the ugliness of sinful exploitation, oppression, injustice and mindless charity.
• For them, the purity of Yaweh’s intent – justice for the poor – needed to be proclaimed and lived in a Torah that was not seen as a collection of cleaniness codes, but as justice, codified into behaviors that benefited people who were poor.
• For the Savior that we serve, “business as usual” as always a problem.
• Good News? Probably in the relieved sighing that comes when we cough up the hairballs of sin that we’ve licked off our furry selves and hidden in places where we hope no one can see them. Expunged sin – confession does that for us – is exposed, chopped up into little pieces, and through God’s forgiveness, consumed by Christ himself. Our sins are no more.
We do advocacy well
• Quietly pillowed in a small office outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, an Office for Corporate Social Responsibility is supported by the ELCA Hunger Program. Like similar efforts in other denominations – and in concert with ecumenical partners throughout the country, this office is staffed by gentle-and-firm souls who take Amos’ and Jesus’ ministries to heart.
• These are not brow-beaters or fiery sermonizers, these wise and observant folk. What they do instead is to remind the leaders of commerce in this country and elsewhere of their corporate responsibilities, not only as good citizens but as carriers of the best and broadest intentions that corporate leaders already carry inside their souls.
• “Conscience” might be a good word, but there’s more operating here. “Speaking on behalf of” is also another good phrase, but there’s more going on here.
• To see how we do this kind of advocacy – on top of legislative advocacy in Washington, DC, at the United Nations, in state houses around this country and in selected venues around the world – you’d have to imagine the work of the prophet Isaiah complementing the necessary fuming of the prophet Amos. Isaiah was both prince and prophet, working inside of the power structures of Jerusalem as one of them. An insider with an alternative message.
• Naming and condemning sin is a good thing to do, but what are the changes that can be made in corporate behavior – the positive directions business leaders can move toward – when they are gently/firmly reminded of their responsibilities, short- and long-term? What happens when persuasion moves past preaching, where observable change occurs? Ways of doing business change, corporate policies are reversed, leaders see themselves following the example of Jesus, profit and responsibility don’t fight with each other. Good and godly work.
• Through your participation in the ELCA Hunger Program and your gifts to the ELCA Hunger Appeal, you make possible the ministry of this part of the broad advocacy efforts of this church. (You can find more about this good work by visiting www.elca.org/corporate)
• Gospel? On a local scale – using your own relationships -- you can do this kind of gentle/insistent work in your own congregation, and in your own lives. Which “Isaiah”s” will be hearing your sermon? Which Amos’s will inspire you to action? Which gifts of God’s Spirit will equip you?
The honest dishonest manager
• The Luke 16 text is one of the easiest to mis-interpret and therefore under-preach. For an intelligent, scholarly and insightful (and justice-related) treatment of this parable, see William Herzog Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed.
• According to Herzog, the import of the text is Jesus’ commentary on the economic system that was squashing the poor, and the improbable place of a dishonest steward – for Jesus the “steward” was probably not a good word – in doing something even half-righteous in a difficult situation.
• Thus the text is more of a morality play than what the later redactors – writing to interpret Luke’s words about Jesus – added at the end of the parable. Perhaps the original moral: Be careful of this system and those who manipulate it for their own good.
• In some ways, Luke 16 approximates the modern fables of robber barons or pseudo-philanthropists or other misanthropes. “Love of the poor” is more than first meets the eye, as is “justice for the poor.”
• This man is looking at saving his own skin, and so is willing to shortchange both his boss’s debtors and his boss. The man still makes a tidy profit, the boss gains valuable social capital – for ostensibly “forgiving” debt – and everyone seems to win. Except the debtors locked into the usurious prisons of overwhelming debt in a system skewed to favor the rich.
• The hard lesson for these times: These economic realities persist in today’s world, not only for the poor who have nothing, but increasingly for the middle class as well.
• Good news? I think it might lie in the moment of comeuppance for the manager. He comes to the bottom of his barrel of tricks, is faced with some hard choices and at least offers some justice to the poor debtors. Good news might also consist in the whistle blowers who (falsely?) accuse the manager of malfeasance. Good news, that God’s economy – God’s stewardship – always favors those who are poor.
• To connect this to the ELCA Hunger Program – all of us still have callings to move our compassion into bringing justice to big systems of which we are a part, or in which we are complicit. Together we challenge social and economic systems – not just in our advocacy work but in the ways in which we distribute relief and development funds, the ways in which we seek wisdom from among those who are poor, the ways in which we help each other learn about hunger’s root causes. This, too, is good work.
STARTER TWO: CHILDREN’STHOUGHTS AND ACTIVITIES
1. Analogues of the dishonest manager story can be found in children’s literature or in stories you make up. Think of the guy as a cheater trying to finally do something/anything right. Perhaps you pray with the children for those who cheat, in big and small ways, and therefore harm others.
2. Does Robin Hood come to mind for you in any of this? (Just checking.)
3. The Amos text might be a good to take apart and retell with some demonstrations of what Amos decries. To learn about the basic idea of injustice, use a scale, add dust to a cup of flour, “rob” a child by charging too high a price for a piece of bread, illustrate crushing debt using play money. Think together with the children how these unfair behaviors can be exposed, changed or punished.
4. Reframe a story – in children’s vocabulary and with sensitivity to their developmental levels – about an injustice that’s closer to home. Think of matters of housing costs, environmental degradation, price gouging, unfair labor practices, places/ways in which “money talks” in your town or locale. Be specific and be fair. Ask children what they think is unjust in the situation and how they – the children – might affect some change. (Remember that shaming mechanisms are operating to good effect in both the Amos and Luke texts.)
STARTER THREE: BIBLE CONVERSATIONS
1. No, I don’t see how the 1 Timothy text fits in here, but I’m sure it does. Perhaps that question is worth time in your Bible study group. Perhaps the connection is “praying for the king”?
2. Work at Amos’ idea of “crushed poor.” Use a simulation or news article or hunger-related story from the ELCA Hunger Packet or stories at www.elca.org/hunger. Of what does “crushing” consist? If you were poor, how would it feel to be crushed? What behaviors characterize crushed people? What does it take to restore or uncrush people already smushed down? What would keep crushing from ever happening again?
3. Spend some time together – using the newspaper and the Bible – finding current examples of the kind of injustices that Amos names. How did things get to be that way? Who are the people today who correspond to Amos’ protagonists? What does this congregation do – what do any of you do individually – to keep these things from happening? What’s the function of government or other social systems in limiting the excesses of greed?
4. Take a single story from today’s worlds of governance or commerce and drill down into it, from the viewpoint of people who are poor. For example, keeping property taxes low, or limiting immigration, hiring practices, environmental law or regulations.
THE SENDOFF
Few Sunday lectionaries have the wallop of today’s texts, but perhaps that makes the preaching even harder. “Where’s the goodness of God’s mercy in all this? you ask. And rightly so, because hunger-and-justice preaching is not just Amos-ish haranguing of evil people somewhere other than here. That kind of preaching sets up barriers and keeps us from God’s mercy, from God’s son, from God’s Spirit. Today’s texts would be easy if you didn’t also love the people you serve . . . .
Bob Sitze, Director
Hunger Education
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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 30, 2007
Time after Pentecost – Lectionary 26
First Reading: Amos 6:1a, 4-7
Psalm 146
Second Reading: 1 Timothy 6;6-19
Gospel: Luke 16:19-31
STARTER ONE: PREACHING THEMES
Let the good times end
• The texts for this day line up warning signs on a country road: BRIDGE OUT AHEAD!
• The bucolic ride of our civilization – a trip especially enjoyable for those of us who are rich – must surely end, and today’s texts circle around that idea like soccer parents surround their children’s playing field on a fall morning.
• Punishment is one cause of the coming-to-an-end, but so is “the natural order of things” implied in the Lazarus story. Fortunes are reversed, almost implicitly, as the way that God works.
• The texts for today are also eerie in their direct application to the circumstances in which Western society finds itself today. Rich people and poor people live in economic tension with each other; justice creeps into conversations and motivations; injustice sneaks from attention like a shoplifter in a sweatsuit.
• Could it be true that these difficult matters – rich folks like us NOT getting it – are universals, across time and culture? Are the basic sins that cause poverty so engrained in the human condition that they stain humanness like copier ink?
• At the heart of these difficult questions seem to be the choices of those who are rich – did I mention the part about us being the rich folks in these texts? – that tend toward themselves and away from others.
• Individualism and self-indulgence plague the human spirit like an addiction that we tut-tut into obscurity or forgive. (Uncle George is the family idiot, but none of us would be so impolite as to mention this fact or try to correct it.)
• The “end” envisioned by Amos is NOT the end we envision in these times – environmental collapse or our burials in the trash heaps of our own making. Instead, he proposes that unnamed conquerors will certainly choose their targets first from among the rich.
• In our time, so-called terrorists seem to have the same mindset: Punish the rich first Countries and ideologies and passionate causes for whom we are the problem – because of our riches – are not unlike the A kings and generals of Babylon and Assyria who plundered Israel and Judah for tribute, possessions, land and leaders..
• Scary, hmm?.(Especially if you observed St. Michael and All Angels Day on the 29th and felt the tensions and portents in those texts.)
• These things don’t need to be so.
• By God’s grace, and with some intelligent altruism thrown in, people who are rich can heed Paul’s advice to Timothy, and turn their riches into something good for the sake of the world. Not only to escape “the end of the world as we know it,” but also to bring to fulfillment what God has in mind for the world.
• The Good News is that we are rich enough in other matters – grace, knowledge of our place in the world, experience with confession and forgiveness, purposed lives, giving generously to enterprises that help people who are poor – that we have choices other than to die with the most toys, eat bon-bons in bed or “sit in our counting houses counting out our money.”
• And for heaven’s sake, we have the example of Jesus and those who followed him.
• Perhaps there might be another way for this story to end?
“Good News” redux
• “What’s so good about the Good News?” I often ask participants in workshops and conversational partners. I want them to wrestle with this qualia question down to the tips of their toes, way past automatic utterances of God’s salvific intent toward humankind.
• The psalm provides the strong answer that would be given to this question by people who are poor: Deliverance from what drags us down. Add in “oppressive economies”, crushing epidemics, racial prejudice and a few other garden-variety evils, mix in God’s certain love for the poor and “what’s good” is easily framed by “what saves us.”
• With no false modesty, any of us who participates in the hunger work of this church body is part of that goodness. From the wells of our gratitude to God, our love for others as Christ has commanded and our tangible gifts of sweat, time and money – all these add up as “the goodness of God” in thousands of places throughout the world.
• The psalmist sings praise to God because God takes care of the poor – yes, we’re part of that godly work – and because God keeps his word. (We’ve been at this “hunger eradication” as Lutherans for over 30 years now. We keep God’s promises because we are compelled by God’s grace and invited by God’s Spirit.)
• Good news extends to today’s widows and orphans – HIV/AIDS adds its ugly causality to the vulnerability of contemporary widows and orphans, especially in Africa.
• “Strangers” are in God’s line of sight – today’s growing number of refugees and immigrants. Yes, some of them “illegal.”
• Psalm 146 voices the same themes from Isaiah that Jesus quoted when he began his ministry (Luke 4). As we engage in hunger-related work, we lay claim to working alongside of Jesus.
The good life redux
• Perhaps the godly good that nestles inside of God’s loving grace extends into the kinds of good lives we are able to live, by virtue of that same grace.
• The people in your congregation are seeking “the good life” every day they’re awake. Or trying to hold onto it in spite of problems or indications to the contrary.
• Today’s lessons offer some indications of what a good life might be. In no special order, these quick thoughts:
1. Being rich isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Its goodness can lead in the wrong direction or be a punishable offense in some places.
2. Being rich and generous may be a key description of a good life. Don’t think only Bill Gates here, but those who have a strong sense of “enough” that helps them vector on giving away their lives instead of trying to save them.
3. Generosity makes life good, too, because it joins people to each other in common purpose and mutual admiration.
4. Generosity sidesteps the kind of individualistic self-indulgence that attracts detractors, thieves, false friends and even enemies.
5. Generosity is God’s way of being, and that’s worth emulating.
6. Being satisfied requires more than satiated appetites, stuffed closets and filled calendars.
7. The love of money can be addictive – as can eating – and addicts don’t exactly live happily ever after.
8. Those who provide outlets and opportunities to channel the generosity of others – now THERE’S something good to seek.
1. Does this all sound like a lead-up to the suggestion that this Sunday is a perfect occasion for gathering funds for the ELCA World Hunger Appeal? Good!
Lazarus redux
Yes, we are revisiting many ideas today. In no apparent order and with the connections begging to be made by you, these curious thoughts about the familiar Lazarus story:
2. Who is this story about, really? Think carefully about the story from the viewpoints of Lazarus – strangely silent in the story – and the rich man, certainly. But what about the brothers, Abraham, or even the dogs?
3. What’s the significance of the rich man’s living in a gated community?
4. Why is there no mention of his spouse or his children or anyone else who might have been part of his life?
5. What’s the meaning – or the contemporary analog – to “scraps of food that fall from the table” of the rich man?
6. How did the scraps get from the rich man’s table to the outside of the gate? Who did that work, and why? (Was there some generosity in the rich man’s heart?)
7. How did Lazarus get to be that way? (Some sociological exegeses suggest that he was at the bottom of the economic chain in Jesus’ day, a landless day laborer who failed to find work and/or food. He came to the end of his rope and had to resort to begging. The sores are significant in that analysis.)
8. For what was the rich man punished?
9. What important about the framework of Lazarus’ reward? (e.g., A close personal relationship with Abraham)
10. Why would this suspense-filled tragedy have no end? How is this kind of story never-ending even today?
11. “The law and the Prophets” seem to be enough knowledge (and example) for the rich man’s brothers’ transformation. How might we pay more attention to the words of the Old Testament?
12. Who was the audience for this story? (Usually Jesus is preaching to or teaching those who are poor.)
STARTER TWO: CHILDREN’STHOUGHTS AND ACTIVITIES
1 Find a children’s book with the Lazarus story retold or illustrated. Use the “children’s sermon” time to read and show this book to children. That’s enough, because the illustrations will help their imaginations soar.
2 If you or any other congregation members have experienced truly-extensive begging – anywhere in the world, including your own locale – talk about the experience of begging from a first-person point of view, as well as the question of what to do with/for beggars.
3 “Love of money” suggests the King Midas story, or some demonstrations with money that could illustrate how easy this is. A simple one: While talking about being satisfied, “accidentally” drop (and spill open) a piggy bank or container holding lots of money. Depending on how children react to this sudden opportunity for more money, build on the matter of how easily we chase or seek money as something good, even to the point of grabbing it away from others or forgetting other things that are important.
4 If you’ve decided to make this a Hunger Sunday, accentuate the wonderful things that happen around the world to keep Lazaruses away from gates, widows and orphans cared for, strangers welcomed, the dangers of wealth warned against, the voice of the poor strengthened, promises of love and companionship kept. All these kinds of things happen because of the ELCA World Hunger Program. In fact, use present-tense verbs to tell these stories, because these great and godly tasks are occurring as you speak!
STARTER THREE: BIBLE CONVERSATIONS
This is one of those Sundays when the Bible conversations could take over the sermon time. (Hmmm, an idea might be hidden in there . . . .) As you think together about the import of these texts for your own lives, consider these possible directions for conversation.
1. Use any of the statements in the possible sermon themes above as conversation starters, even if only as prompts for questions or reactions.
2. Talk honestly – and openly, if possible – about the relative wealth of this congregation. Your property, your budget, your programs, your people. To what end are these gifts from God being used? What do you accomplish? How do you avoid being dissatisfied with your life and your lives? How do these texts condemn, comfort or motivate you?
3. Challenge conversation participants to move past shame and guilt, or defensiveness, even. What is comforting and inviting in the texts for today. What is compelling? What reassures them? What makes them want to do something together, beginning right after church? For what can they praise God?
THE SENDOFF
I’m sitting in a Denny’s in Morgan Hill, California, not far from the affluence of one of the richest regions in the world – Silicon Valley. Because California is my homeland, the setting feels familiar, but in these times with a new twist: The wonderful mix of faces and languages that tell me that here is one place where God is doing a new thing. Christianity is challenged to remain vital in this pleasure center of the world, but Christianity is also flourishing here. Perhaps in this place – in your suburb or neighborhood? – people or all kinds will come to know better what it means to be truly rich. I pray that it would be true.
Bob Sitze, Director
Hunger Education
