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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!
 
October 7, 2007
Time after Pentecost – Lectionary 27
 
First Reading: Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4
Psalm 37:1-9
Second Reading: 2 Timothy 1:1-14
Gospel: Luke 17:5-10
 
 
STARTER ONE: PREACHING THEMES
 
Today’s lessons all circle around a theme familiar to any of us who work against the evils of injustice and oppression: This is hard work, often without apparent success. In the themes I’ve started here, you’ll see that basic idea approached from several different angles. 
 
Watching for the future
·         A long-standing hermeneutical principle is that “truth comes from the future;” the interpretation of a matter gets retrofitted onto its antecedent contexts. 
·         Another way to say that: Looking back is one good way we can understand then, now and the future.
·         Part of the struggle of hunger- and justice-related work is to keep our eyes on a future that is not yet apparent, a dawn not yet lit, a horizon just past the edges of our sight lines.
·         Watchers – like Habakkuk moonlighting as a night watchman – understand the value of a higher perspective, literally getting above the limits of our present physical position to see farther and understand more. The forest can be seen – instead of only the trees – when you are looking at it from an elevation.
·         So, too, the unfolding future can be seen in its portents -- in its undeniable signs that can’t be seen – when we’re looking for them from a vantage point that’s “higher” or “beyond normal.”
·         For example: If evil systems perpetuate themselves everywhere in the world, where can you see God dissolving, cracking open or defanging of those systems, in places and ways that even the evildoers can’t notice?
·         Another: Evil people are trying way, way too hard to keep their position, hold their power, grab their gusto or step on the poor. They are meeting resistance, having to buy what they used to get for free, finding the detritus of their actions or thoughts -- like roadkill brought in by the cat -- laying on their doorsteps as a mess that is embarrassing and is hard to clean up. (I am being delicate here.)
·         Still another: You and I notice that the oppressors and unjust ones increasingly fear not only their own deaths, but the future of any kind. They grab for a semi-certain NOW, frightened beyond words about what a dawningly certain THEN will hold for them. Hounded by stresses and fears of their own invention, they are stultified into big mistakes and a descending spiral of pleasure or reward. 
·         Yes, those evildoers may live in our neighborhood, our government, our businesses, our own souls. 
·         So, too, do the prophetic watchmen and watchwomen, who stand above the fray – and the complaining – and announce that God’s answers to our fervent moanings and groanings are about to become apparent to everyone. “A new day is dawning,” they say. “Wake up and get ready to claim God’s justice!”
·         Good news comes soon, friends. Keep watching.
 
 
Regarding evil people
·         The lessons for this day give us a chance to look in on the evil people – and yes, we may be our own best examples of quiet evil – and see how it is with them.
·         “Doing okay,” comes one answer. The folks that create economies or powerful relationships that shut out the poor – these folks seem to be doing okay. Like the rich man last week, these malefactors seem to somehow float on the currents of change without being consumed or subsumed.
·         “Not good,” comes another answer from these lessons. Their day is coming, their punishments being sharpened and burnished to deathly efficiency by a just and judging God, the batteries on their toys and clocks running out of juice.
·         The question for God’s people that is always hard to answer: How do we regard evil people? Or do we even pay attention to them? (If attention is the primal commodity for all human enterprise, we get to choose where and where not to place it.) Do we scream about the materialism of marketing, choose to match its messages with our own, or just disregard it? (A personal aside: At last glance, I noticed that most televisions have OFF switches.)
·         In the advocacy work of our church body, we choose to confront people, systems, philosophies, practices and legislation that could easily get co-opted by evil folks for their sole benefit. We choose NOT to ignore the places and ways in which evil might ooze into what’s good and godly, evil people might gain power without our knowing it, evil intentions might try to stay hidden.
·         In our church’s many venues and practices of advocacy, we rouse the attention of God’s people so that it pierces evil like a laser beam burns holes in steel. 
·         How do your hearers regard evil and evil people? How do they purge or transform the evil intents of their own souls? How do they listen to the voices of those who, like prophets or Christ Jesus himself, raise their hands and say, “This metaphorical emperor is not only naked but wrong.” How do they rob evil of the attention it needs – see “fad” in your local dictionary – in order to prosper?
·         The good news of God in Christ Jesus? The end of evil is always hatched inside its perfidy; and like a justice-bringing worm, God knows how to eat away the insides of evil until it dies, an empty hulk and a feckless force among the people who it has previously oppressed. God is doing a good thing, and you are part of it when you join those who advocate for justice wherever you live.
 
 
Suffering unashamedly
·         Sometimes when we do good, we suffer for the sake of that work. (Sometimes Christ’s followers suffer just for carrying his name, but most of the time the persecution or other costs come because Christ’s followers do what he did.)
·         In the face of the evil injustices that we might face, how are we to regard those sufferings? That’s the question Paul wrestled with, night and day, from the vantage point of a prison cell far removed from those whom he loved.
·         The answers seem to come from Paul’s understanding of the gifts – read “character traits” or “persona” or “capabilities” -- that came to him, from the Holy Spirit as well as from the context in which he found himself. 
·         What balanced the suffering for Paul: Courage, love, unashamedness, memories of good work being done, good people being mentored, the fact that he was never truly alone in his work, Christ’s work, Christ’s personality, God’s promises and God’s actions in history.
·         In the sufferings we face – let’s be honest: when we do Christ’s work, we can expect some resistance or worse – we can also count on the same Spirit-filled viewpoint of our place in God’s scheme of things.
·         God the Steward – the planner of plans and the architect of grand edifices of good – counts the costs of hunger-related work and equips us with gifts that sustain us when we’re down, lift us when we want to fly, compel and propel us when we’re stuck, armor us when we’re attacked, and toughen our skins when evil insists on its right to sting, stink or stick us.
·         Power, love, and self-control come our way, too. So does courage.
·         Above all, God-given faith in a God-given purpose blessed by a grace-giving God. That’s the reason why we can sustain our efforts towards eliminating hunger. Faith – itself a gift from God – gives us reason for hope, fuels our actions, separates us from the cowardly and once-only good deed doers. 
·         Faith fills and surrounds us at the same moment, transforming us from whining victims – evil CAN do that to almost anyone – or complacent finger-waggers into powerful stewards of God’s purposes. 
·         Faith is always good news.
 
 
Filling duty with faith
·         One way to think of our work in fighting hunger – from our contributions to our voice-raising to our accompaniment of people who are poor – is as sacred duty.
·         Yes, duty.
·         We are servants – whether slaves or stewards – and so we do what we are supposed to do.
·         Not always a pleasant message, even for Scouts, duty can be something sacred and cherished among those who first understand that THEY are not the center of any universe or the truly deserving.
·         Duty is never just understood or described or analyzed. Its character is bound up in its doing. 
·         And so hunger-related work is not just picking apart of macro-economic theory – although we always work to understand the economic realities that comprise poverty, hunger’s ugly parent. 
·         And so justice-related work is never just applying democratic principles to the population of other societies -- although we always work to see where political values vector with God’s values. 
·         And so our contributions to the ELCA Hunger Appeal are never just one-time responses to gut-wrenching conditions among those who are poor -- although our guts should tighten and our fists clench when we consider the monumental wrong that underlies hunger.
·         What dutiful people do is keep that these things, precisely because they are dutiful people who know their duty and the One to whom they owe allegiance and obedience.
·         We are obedient people who keep being obedient long after our Master stops looking at us, our preachers and prophets stop reminding us, our emotions of pity or disgust subside. We keep at this “hunger” thing week after week, dollar after dollar, congressional letter after congressional letter, conversation after conversation – until we are relieved of duty with a
”Well done, good and faithful servant.”
·         “Faith?” See above, where faith is described as a surrounding mantle as well as a fueling energy. 
·         “Faith?” See above, where faith stands as the starting line, the dawning moment and the arbiter of attention.
·         “Faith?” See above, where this gift of the Spirit is described as a basic piece of graced good news, a mothering presence in our lives.
·         Back to work with you!
 
 
STARTER TWO: CHILDREN’STHOUGHTS AND ACTIVITIES
 
1.       How could you approach “obedience” or “duty” with children? Mothering or fathering relationships? The stuff of friendships? A part of being a good kid? Perhaps one form of “doing what’s right”? Any stories come to mind, any examples from your own childhood or the lives of the kids you serve?
 
2.       Here’s one story about suffering for doing what’s right – perhaps you have one like it: When I was a first grader, a playground bully was harassing girls on the jungle gym, and so gathered my attention and my indignation. Being a righteous – and slightly naïve – little fellow, I stood up for the girls and told him to stop bothering them. Moments later, after I had now accompanied the girls to the merry-go-round, the bully retaliated with a rock-throwing tirade. One of them struck me full force on the forehead – perhaps he thought me a Goliath to his perverse David? – and a gashing wound bled precious blood over my T-shirt and pants. To this day, my forehead holds that scar – now fully visible in a place where hair used to grow – and it reminds me every morning at face-shaving time that once-upon-a-time I stood against one form of evil. And your story, friend?
 
3.       Use a globe and a small hand mirror to illustrate the principle of “looking over the horizon”. Ask the children to imagine being small little people living on the big globe – okay, use a tiny doll – and trying to figure out what might be happening farther away. Not possible, given the curve of globes and straight lines of sight. Enter the mirror – held slightly above the globe – and voila! What was unseeable and unknown now becomes part of one’s vision. The people of God have that kind of reflector, that kind of farther vision because of the word of God. They know what’s true, what’s right, what’s good, and perhaps even what’s going to happen because of God’s wisdom in Jesus, God’s revelation in the Scriptures. That’s a good thing, especially when kids wonder what might happen to all the bad people who seem to keep getting what they want. And perhaps the mirror-and-globe image might be helpful to some of the adults who just happen to be listening.
 
4.       Want to hit the idea of perseverance in doing good? Talk about insects or animals who keep at their jobs, day and night, working toward a goal little by little, never being deterred. Ants come to mind, as do bees and inchworms. Make up a story about Iggy the Inchworm or Amy the Ant. (Benito the Bee is already taken.) Make sure the tale includes some obstacles, some detractors, some temptations to stop doing good. Perhaps the little insects are carrying something – a hurt friend, a contribution or food? – and perhaps they have a friend along with them – the vaunted protagonist or sidekick. One variation: Ask one of the kids to draw pieces of the story as you talk about this tale. The moral or lesson or example: Keep at this doing-good thing, children, especially when it involves the good of others, the plight of the poor, or the rescue of those who are oppressed.
 
 
STARTER THREE: BIBLE CONVERSATIONS
 
1.       The generic subject of today’s lessons – persevering and prospering in the face of evil – is one that attracts thoughts and emotions like peanut butter attracts squirrels. (Note From Bob Sitze’s Legal Advisor: Do NOT bring squirrels to church.) Keep that in mind as you engage participants in Bible conversations around the following matters.
 
2.       Take apart the 2 Timothy text with this scenario in mind: Each participant is talking to one younger person about this matter of doing good in the face of difficult circumstances. After reading the text together, ask participants to think – and write? – what they might say to a younger someone who respects their advice or follows their example. Make the sharing time a respectful appreciation of the witness of these participants about their own struggles, their own faith, their own sense of life mission.
 
3.       Without getting into a muttering match – seeing who can complain the most about “the young people today” or “those who don’t step up to the plate” – talk together about the difficult Lucan text, about participants’ sense of duty, and the joys of being slaves/stewards in a world where pleasure wants to be god. What do participants think about their own duty, the temptations to avoid it, the strength they get to keep at their work? Where in hunger-related ministries does “duty” offer insight? What would happen if this congregation considered the Hunger Appeal or advocacy not just a one-time event, but a daily duty of faithful followers? What’s good – or Good News – about duty (or being dutiful)? What are the traps in dutifulness? How do dutiful people help others to find joy in that frame of mind?
 
4.       If you want to dig deep into “evil people”, this would be a good Sunday for that subject and that introspective work. Where does evil come from, what does it do, and where does it go when it’s done? How do any of us know when we’re actually part of an evil enterprise or even evil ourselves? What are the rewards of evil? When will it end? What are the hopeful signs participants hold in their sights when it comes to evil’s dissolving, evil’s defeat, evil’s demise? What’s the difference between evil and things that look or act like it? Is it okay to name someone or something or some action as “truly evil?” How do you know?
 
 
THE SENDOFF
I’m in a plane high over a browned Western landscape. Little pieces of circular hope – alfafa fields? – dot this landscape like little reminder buttons of God’s blessed and blessing Earth. Food grows down there, and people work hard down there to make the world the kind of place God intends. As I pass over these folks – Hello, Nevada; Hello, Utah; Hello, southern Colorado; Hello, Western Nebraska! – I send my blessing and my thanks! Let’s keep at this, all of us hunger-eradicators – and let’s rejoice in this work we do together! God keep you on the ground.
 
Bob Sitze, Director
Hunger Education
 
__________________
 
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!
 
October 14, 2007
Time after Pentecost – Lectionary 28
 
First Reading: 2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c
Psalm 111
Second Reading: 2 Timothy 2:8-15
Gospel: Luke 17:11-19
 
 
STARTER ONE: PREACHING THEMES
 
God’s laws are just
·         In thousands of ways, and in thousands of places, this church body engages in legislative advocacy. Good work, hard work, effective work. We are a nation of laws – yes, and regulations stemming from those laws – and so the wellbeing of this nation’s citizens, immigrants and watchers in other lands is attached to the outcome of our laws.
·         Behind the seeming plethora of shifting political minutia --- sometimes difficult to understand or keep track of – stands a insistently just God. The One we believe that this nation is “under”. The God whose love for his people shows in the Law that he gives and holds us accountable to.
·         This “justice” thing is always about how the laws of this land match the laws of this God.
·         And that’s where this church’s advocacy folks – yes, you’re one of them any time you connect your voice to legislation – step up to call forth our attention. Not only to pending legislation but to the God whose love for the poor compels us to engage in advocacy.
·         Today’s psalm is fairly direct: God does praise-worthy justice in a lawful way. Unlike the garden-variety gods of the Old Testament (or today?), this is not a capricious God or a demagogue God. The consistent, deep love of God is framed in the Law of God, carefully proscribed and laid out over centuries.
·         We who engage in legislative advocacy are blessed by this God’s law-giving and this God’s insistence on justice. We are not playing around any more than this God is dabbling in human affairs. We expect God’s justice to prevail.
·         And so, we bring and exemplify God’s love through advocacy. So we fund its necessary work – in our national and state legislatures. And so we participate with the force of our words.
·         God is just, and so we must.
 
 
Keeping Christ in our minds
I keep harping on this “imitate Jesus” thing, for a lot of reasons. Today’s Second Reading is one of them. Try these thoughts:
·         “Mindfulness” is something hard for brains scattered in fifty directions or focused only on their own safety or pleasure.
·         Like the Christ whose mindfulness was set on God’s singular mission, we shush noisy distractions, set our faces toward that mission and get about the work of God wherever our hands find opportunity to engage it.
·         Like the Christ, whose mindfulness was not deterred by the prospect of his own death, we take risks in being about God’s work. 
·         Like the Christ who loved especially the downtrodden and invisible poor of his day, we set our minds inside their and his, trying to find the emotions and courage to do what he did.
·         Like the Christ who was not ashamed of his attachment to God’s mission, we stay at this “ending hunger” thing, day-after-day, dollar-after-dollar, persuasive word after persuasive word. 
·         “Keeping our minds on Christ” is not only getting to know his mind as well as our own, but perhaps shifting from our own selfishness or scatteredness to a focused sense of why we are alive, why we do what we do.
·         That’s true of us as individuals, and as congregations. How might we avoid “majoring in the minors” or getting distracted by what’s perhaps not important in life? How do we drill down to what really works, what’s really necessary, what’s really good? 
·         In some ways, “the mind of Christ” is unfathomable, and so we might excuse our mere mortal minds from even approaching the exquisite complexity and deep love that Jesus had for poor people.
·         In other ways – as this lesson suggests – it’s not all that hard: Stop worrying about death and all its ugly children. Resurrection and eternal life are more than escapes from an evil world or a reward for something-or-the-other. They can also be ways for us to shed wrong-headedness, scatter-brained “finding ourselves” and mind-numbing pursuits of addictive, empty pleasure.
·         Good news, right there in Christ’s mind. Always there.
 
 
The geography of thanks
·         It’s important in this story to realize the directions of the journeys involved: Jesus on his way south, and the lepers probably aimlessly wandering. Jesus heading for certain death at the hands of the political and religious establishment and the lepers circling around the inevitability of their corroding decay at the hands of this disease. 
·         Along the road to nowhere these men are cured by a man going somewhere.
·         After their healing, they move from fruitlessly circular lives, now pointed in the same direction as Jesus: toward Jerusalem. Their Jerusalem-bound trips for purposes of verifying their health, Jesus to give away his own wellbeing. Both heading in the same direction, but in Jesus’ case, for the sake of others.
·         The lepers were in the no-man’s land of “foreign” Samaria, a spiritual desert for Jews and probably a good place to warehouse lepers and other castaways.
·         Thankful Guy should have stayed home, but he didn’t.
·         His thankfulness changed the literal direction of his life. One can imagine what he might have done after his knees-on-ground gratitude. Where he might have gone, who he might have told, what work he would have resumed. 
·         Take that imagination and apply it your own life of gratitude. What’s the “geography of thanks” in which you find yourself?
·         Think about this question together: How does our gratitude – for God’s abundance showering almost every moment of our lives – compel a different journey than aimless circling?
·         Another: How does God in Christ provide us with an alternative to the mindless wandering that occurs because of the corrosive destructions that afflict our souls? (Examples? Let’s try things like over-eating, accumulation of possessions, fear of people who are poor, distrust of people who are different from us.)
·         Yep, I’m making the passage into a near-allegory here – bad hermeneutics, I’m sure – but let your imagination soar a little bit toward the Gospelly-good side of the question: What would happen if we admitted our own leprosies – curable skin diseases that we let go on too long – and even admitted that we’d been healed long ago by Christ. (See “the mind of Christ above.) What would happen if we headed toward the winters of our lives with an ultimate retirement trip in mind: Giving our lives away for the sake of the poor. What would happen if we rejoiced every day that we don’t have to live inside the insidious diseases of fear, self-loathing, purposeless existences, hopeless lives. What would it feel like to step out of our Samarias and head toward our Jerusalems?
·         Enough trampling on the rules of exegesis to find some Good News. . . ..
 
 
STARTER TWO: CHILDREN’STHOUGHTS AND ACTIVITIES
 
1.       Leprosy might be a fun thing to explore with children. (I am not a squeamish person, and so trod in places where others turn their heads.) “Fun” because it’s probably in most of their minds, when they say things like “Ooooh!” or “Gross!” when they discover the physical descriptions of leprous limbs, rotting faces, crippling deterioration of capacities.  As you know, these reactions also provide a teachable moment. Perhaps you can explore leprosy in a different way with some of these different thoughts:
 
2.       Kids can understand legislative advocacy if you portray it in simple terms. While acknowledging differences of opinion on these matters, give as examples some of the laws that already exist in this country, ones that help poor people. The recent Farm Bill is one example, as are matters connected with children’s health, affordable health care and affordable housing. Also laws that keep greed under leash, laws that punish those who want to ignore the greater societal good just to enhance their own wellbeing. Be general, for the sake of kids and other listeners, but use lots of examples to show how God’s will shows up in the laws of this land. For current information, visit www.elca.org/advocacy. The simplest way to keep it simple: Describe the effects of the law in verbs and their direct objects – words that tell what happens and who benefits.
 
3.       “Saying thanks” is a slam-dunk theme for kids on this day. The example of the Samaritan is pretty deep, too, when it comes to an attitude of gratitude. What would happen in your congregation if you used this Sunday to bring to your church a person who was directly or indirectly helped by your congregation’s work to combat hunger? A homeless person, someone who has HIV/AIDS, a single mother living in affordable housing, a person who volunteers at your food pantry, a teenager who’s benefited from a service-learning trip. How would they express and how would you receive their thanks? And how would children be involved in the process?
 
 
STARTER THREE: BIBLE CONVERSATIONS
 
Today’s lessons could spark any number of kinds of conversations, and draw people into these texts like curious onlookers become part of the drama of an event. Try any of the following starters for intimate and heartfelt conversations.
 
1.       I think the connections between leprosy and HIV/AIDS is fairly strong, both as metaphor and analogous situation. With some brief research – or just polling conversants’ knowledge -- you should be able to see parallels between the Old Testament and Gospel lessons. For starters, think about the emotions and actions of the people involved in both health-related matters. In the texts: The little girl, the prophet, the healed leper, Jesus, etc. With regards to HIV/AIDS: health-care workers, those who raise the funds for the healings, those suffering from HIV/AIDS, etc.
 
2.       Chart “the mind of Christ” from a practical, “we could be this way, too” viewpoint. Push past platitudes and soft-lob ideas to some gritty, realistic probings of Jesus’ identity, purpose, attitudes, etc. Unpack the Gospel as well as the Second Reading. Ask yourselves how you get to that kind of mind, what happens because of “the mind of Christ,” what other mindfulnesses get in the way, what it means to be “mindful” in the first place.
 
3.       If you choose to frame your conversation around the Psalm for the Day, do some research about “just laws”, if only to think about the concept. Try hard matters like “How do you know when a law promotes justice and when it doesn’t?” or “Why worry about laws and regulations at all?” Mine the Psalm for God’s viewpoint and ask what the alternative/opposite might be – e.g., if God was capricious, hard-to-please, didn’t give a moldy fig for fairness, was known for being unpredictable, angry and unloving except to the people who offered him just enough of the right stuff. Why would we praise a God of justice in these times? 
 
 
THE SENDOFF
 
Autumn is upon us, the equinox giving way to the return of “standard time” – later this year than ever before. This is a favorite time for hunger-folks like you and me, if only because the change in the season invites us to think important thoughts. Maybe it’s the leaves, or the crisp air, but in this time of year I think about this kind of year, what’s important, how I mark my entire life. Perhaps you can preach those thoughts yourself? God keep you!
 
Bob Sitze, Director
Hunger Education