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SCROLL TO SEE STARTERS FOR APRIL 6 and 13
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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!
April 6, 2008
2nd Sunday of Easter
First
Psalm 116:1-4,12-19
Second
Gospel: Luke 24:13-35
Of all the resurrection appearances, this one is my favorite. Jesus meets two despondent disciples on the road as they trudge home on that first Easter day. They are grieving and confused. They have lost their hope in any kind of bright future.
Jesus walks along with them incognito. Why they don’t recognize him is unclear. Is he intentionally keeping himself hidden? Are they so lost in their own dark worlds that they just can’t see? Regardless, Jesus talks with them and unpacks the scriptures in a new way that allows them to see recent events in a new light. That only leads to the great “eye-popping” discovery that will happen in their home.
They get to their house in Emmaus, and Jesus walks on ahead as if he is going on. That kills me! Jesus, the newly resurrected Lord of the Universe who is not bound by time and space anymore, pretends to have somewhere else to walk to. It is a test. Thanks be to God these two disciples pass with flying colors.
They invite him to come into their house and stay with them. They offer him the chance to share their evening meal. As they open their doors to a wandering stranger, they practice the radical hospitality that was at the heart of Jesus’ teaching. They see that his well-being is tied to their own. They treat him like family.
He takes bread, blesses and breaks it, and suddenly they recognize him for who he really is….then he vanishes. Whoa! They decide to hightail it back to
We live in a time in which our church is being asked to rethink how it interacts with an increasing secular society. Our culture demands relevance from us. That is a good thing. This text points us in the exact right direction. We are called to the following actions:
This story can motivate us to seek out the places of great pain in our world as a search for the Risen Lord himself. In a country that hides its poor, this is counter-cultural. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, we saw a segment of American society that shocked our collective conscience. We woke up a bit. Our eyes were opened. The scriptures sounded differently.
This text invites us to rethink our understanding of scriptures, how we do “church,” and how we transform our communities. It invites us into radical hospitality as a means for finding God.
Pastor David Nagler
April 13, 2008
3rd Sunday of Easter
First
Psalm 23
Second
Gospel: John 10:1-10
Once again this Sunday we are blessed with a rich assortment of texts from which to preach. They all carry the theme of care, responsibility, and compassion. There is a vertical dimension as we consider Jesus, our Good Shepherd, and a horizontal dimension as we read of the manner in which the early church cared for or shepherded each other. In these texts, we find a great model for the shape and purpose of the church.
Let’s first consider the Gospel text. It tells of Jesus’ intention for his followers and, by extension, all of humanity. Jesus’ reason for being is to bring abundant life to the world. Too often we confuse abundant life with affluent life. We consider our bank account to be a valid measure of how abundantly we have been blessed by God. That reflects more of a value of our culture than a value of the scriptures. The highest value, according to the text, is to have a relationship with the Good Shepherd. To “know his voice” and reflect his teachings in our lives is to be praised higher than silver and gold. To understand that we are loved beyond measure is the greatest treasure of all. It liberates us to become a shepherding community for one another and the needs of the world.
Caring for the needs of the world are not the means by which we convince God to love us. God already has named us as God’s very own. We are set free by this love to exhibit radical gratitude. The best way to offer our thanks and praise to God is to follow the example of Jesus and act on behalf of those in need.
I have often thought about the strangers Jesus refers to in this text. These are the ones who call out to the sheep, but the sheep run from them because they do not know their voice. Perhaps this is the call to be part of a religious system that offers cheap grace or easy answers to life’s difficult questions. Maybe there is a part of our soul that inherently knows that “prosperity preaching” is false and that suffering love sounds honest and true. I think that the world is listening for those who will offer love and presence and real assistance with a discerning ear.
This leads us to the church and the lesson from Acts. When I read the description of the church in this passage, I yearn to be a part of it: people devoted to learning, being together, breaking bread, and lifting up community needs in prayer. A community that understands that all of our life is bound up in this good news, so that it holds all finances in common sharing with each as they have need. This is a vision that is both compelling and challenging. Clearly the early church understood that their finances were part of the gig. They saw that the sharing of the meal was to be extended beyond their ritual observances.
We are part of a global church. If we were to take that claim seriously, then the needs of our brothers and sisters in poverty would be our responsibility. Imagine the earth as a house church. We could not dine on a sumptuous feast in one room while our loved ones died from hunger in another room. That would reveal our commitment to the global church and to our Lord to be shallow at best. Our Good Shepherd calls us to a different, more abundant way of life. It means that we give sacrificially to meet the very real needs of God’s other children. As Isaiah put it, “the spoils of the poor are in your cupboards.” We have both freedom and responsibility, two sides of the same coin, through the gift of God’s grace.
When we act on that gift, we will know what it means to live abundantly.
Pastor David Nagler