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!

What if we were to consider what the Kingdom of God could be? Wouldn’t all in the kingdom be fed, clothed, receive medical care, have access to sustainable employment? What if we were able to see the ministry of ELCA World Hunger as a sign of the fulfillment of the prophecy? Could we then substitute the words ELCA WORLD HUNGER for THE KINGDOM OF GOD? The five parables might look like this…

· ELCA World Hunger is like a mustard seed. It started small in 1988 but soon, just 19 years later, became a great work of God to be celebrated. Over $20 million was given by the faithful of the ELCA last year. As God’s people continue to support the appeal, we will be able to have a positive effect on more in the world.

· ELCA World Hunger is like yeast. When it is needed in the core ministries of a congregation, it brings about organic change and smells good.

· ELCA World Hunger is like a hidden treasure. If it were better understood, talked about from the pulpit and over the kitchen table, more might see its true worth.

· ELCA World Hunger is like a fine pearl—an irritant that becomes a beautiful gem when allowed to grow. However, those who seek this pearl will sell everything they have and give it to the poor.

· ELCA World Hunger is like a net abundantly full of fish. However, only some will be able to eat of the catch. Due to distribution challenges and systemic causes, access to food does not begin to approach parity.

I would encourage you to look at these five, or the original five, as facets of a diamond. As we turn the gem, it reflects light in different ways and into different places.

The Rev. Rodger Prois
Associate Director for Mission Advancement, ELCA World Hunger Appeal

Imagine you are in Sudan, and you hear the story of the feeding of the 5,000. What does this Gospel text say to a congregation wasting away, knowing that many will die before the next sermon is preached? Perhaps it will be the preacher’s last sermon as well. What word of hope would it bring?

Or let us imagine you are a missionary sent to a refugee camp on the Sudan/Kenya border. Your Bible-study group is made up of people who have fled the Holocaust in Sudan. The people are barely surviving on United Nations food rations. An angry young man says that God no longer does such miracles, so he is going to join the rebels and fight back so his people can eat from their own land again. What good news will this text bring?

Jesus tells his disciples, "They need not go away; you give them something to eat." The original Greek text emphasizes the word you! So, what does Jesus want his disciples to do? What does Jesus want us to do?

When Jesus sees the sick, he heals. When he sees the ignorant, he teaches. When he sees the demon-possessed, he exorcises. When he sees the hungry, he provides food. When he sees disciples, he challenges them to go to work: "You do something." Or, more specifically in our Gospel text, "feed the hungry."

“You give them something to eat.” The source of the feeding is God, but the resources are human. Jesus is pushing his disciples to rely in faith on the one who can turn water into wine. You can feed the crowd if you look to Jesus.

“They need not go away.” It doesn't seem to me that the crowd of people would go following Jesus without taking any food along for the trip. While the Gospels note widespread poverty, they do not speak of a widespread famine that would leave people starving to death. The disciples’ first response is that they don't have enough money to buy food, not that there is no food to be had.

So here we have a crowd of people, probably from different villages. Some might even be Gentiles. And according to their law Jews and Gentiles were not allowed to eat together. Jesus is breaking people into smaller groups (Lk 9:14) and having them sit down together, and thus he is turning a crowd into a community. He holds up a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish and shows that his disciples are willing to share. Sharing can be contagious. Perhaps people had enough all along if the fear could be overcome.

One explanation for the miracle might be to bring the people together. Making strangers to sit together and share everything they have is a miracle in itself. When it comes to feeding hungry people, having enough food is seldom the problem. The real problem is getting access to food through having money. Jesus saw hungry people and brought them together. He asked the disciples what they had on hand.

What do we have on hand? At first we look in our pockets and feel powerless to feed the masses of hungry people. It seems like an overwhelming problem.

It is important that we feed the hungry in our own community and work through worldwide partners like the ELCA World Hunger Appeal, Lutheran World Relief, Bread for the World, and others, but it is also imperative that we have an economic vision of the common good so that people don't starve in a world of plenty.

Get some Swedish (or toy) fish at the grocery store and give children different amounts of fish; e.g. one child gets only one, another gets a complete handful. Let them discuss how they feel about that, and then lead them to the economic differences between families in your community, in the U.S., and then nationwide. Let the children discuss how they would like to deal with this situation of “unfairness.”