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!

· Convicting scriptures! The time and cultural distance between Old and New Testament times and our time seem to disappear in a parable that speaks directly to the commercial and economic realities in which we live.

· Scriptures that speak directly to our everyday struggle to hear and live out God's commandments to love and worship God, to live in gratitude for what has been given to us, and to love our neighbor with the culture's commandments demanding self-sufficiency, self-responsibility, self-realization.

· The prophets cry out against the people as Isaiah does to Israel and Judah: “…He expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry!”

· The outcry continues in line eight to warn that those who join house to house and add field to field until there is room for no one else will be left to live alone.

· What is God speaking into the realities of our day in these scriptures? One thinks of “McMansions” gained and lost, loneliness in our modern Western culture and the breakdown of community, our continued inability to live in right relation with one another and the gift of creation.

· How can we be the people that “produces the fruits of the kingdom?” God's gifts that feed and nourish all of us physically and spiritually?

· October 5 is Lutheran World Federation Sunday, recognizing 68 million Lutherans worldwide, including you and me. Our contributions to the ELCA World Hunger Appeal are effectively, efficiently, and ethically put to work by the international Lutheran World Federation (and other partners) to meet the needs of our hungry, poor, and displaced neighbors, from over 90,000 refugees from Sudan and neighboring countries that make Kakuma Refugee camp in Kenya a home to the people of Haiti, the poorest country in our hemisphere, where over 500 women have been trained in veterinary care for pigs and other farm animals in a successful sustainable hunger relief-and-development project.

KRISTIE NEKLASON serves the NW Washington Synod on the synod hunger committee and is a member of Gift of Grace Lutheran Church, Seattle, WA

· The Kingdom of Heaven, a Celebration Banquet—Have we turned down and ignored our invitation? When we do not act out our faith, and when we do not act out of our faith, we refuse God's invitation, his commandments. While our faith is a gift, we are invited and commanded to actively respond out of that faith and participate in the creation of God's Kingdom, God's future, the banquet.

· There is a glimpse in this Gospel scripture and in the passage from Isaiah of how God would have our world be–a feast of rich food, a wedding banquet with invitations for all to come to the celebration where “everything is ready.” There is only the need to accept and come properly attired, to put on our new clothes, our celebration garments.

· A banquet or feast conjures up an image of abundance, enough for all. Economic and food experts tell us there is the ability to produce enough food for all in our world, but we fail in many ways to act on this possibility. We turn our backs on this ability and invitation to act to create the feast for all. We fail to use both our intelligence and compassion in living out God's invitation to love our neighbor as ourselves. Instead we fail to challenge agricultural, corporate, and governmental policies that benefit the few versus the many.

· ELCA Advocacy staff worked hard this past year on proposed reforms to the Farm Bill that would include more people at God's banquet table through increased funding for and access to Food Stamps and more nutritional foods. The bill also would include reductions of unfair commodities subsidies and trade policies that benefit large U.S. corporate farms over smaller family and cooperative farms in the U.S. and around the world. Bread for the World’s president, David Beckman, described the outcome of the struggle as winning “half the loaf” when increases in Food Stamps and nutritional access was approved by the legislature but unfair subsidies and trade practices left intact.

· We find in both Philippians and Isaiah guidance and encouragement to turn back to God's invitation to persevere in bringing about God's future, working together, focusing on the best and the possible.

KRISTIE NEKLASON serves the NW Washington Synod on the synod hunger committee and is a member of Gift of Grace Lutheran Church, Seattle, WA