LISTSERV 16.0 - HUNGERSERMONSTARTERS Archives

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!

There is something rotten Denmark when the healing of a person in pain is cause for an inquisition, but that is exactly what is taking place in Acts 4. The representatives of the religious system of the day are concerned about order and authority. They are the ones in charge of godstuff. Now, outside of the traditional lines, healing happens.

This text is about the wild and loving Spirit of God that shows up most tangibly in the place of human suffering and need. Our work on behalf of those who suffer hunger in the world is done in light of this great theological revelation. God will heal. God will bless. God cares because in the final analysis, God is love.

The most challenging verse of scripture is part of the second lesson for today. 1 John 3:17 states, “If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?” This is the true litmus test of our ministries. Do we talk about care for the poor or do we actually give ourselves, our time and our money? Can it be that the authority to preach about the love of God is contingent on our actions of love towards people in need? This verse would indicate that the renewal of the church must go through the door of social justice.

Couple these amazing passages with Psalm 23 (usually read only at funerals) and John 10 and it should be a fun Sunday to preach. The good news is plain. God is love. God heals the brokenness of the world. God does this in partnership with God’s gospel people. We find our hope, our call and our mission in these images.

Psalm 22 contains an interesting couplet of verses. Verse 26 declares the promise that “the poor will eat and be satisfied.” Verse 29 states, “the rich of the earth will feast and worship”. Given the prophetic witness of Isaiah 58 in which the worship that God desires includes the feeding of the poor, could it be that the true worship of the rich in verse 29 will lead to the poor eating and being satisfied?

1 John 4 picks up this theme when it claims that love of God should look a lot like love of neighbor. I am not suggesting any kind of pietistic love here but real sacrificial relationship. One in which I can love my neighbor in deed and in truth because I know my neighbor and she knows me. We mutually care for one another by providing from what we have for what the other lacks.

One way of understanding the incarnation of Jesus is summed up in this simple statement: God got involved. God became mixed up in the beauty and the mess of being human. God joined our lot. The implication is that if God got involved and thereby demonstrated love, so should we. We can’t afford a 30,000 foot view of human suffering while we pad our own nests. That would be the opposite of what God did and what we are called to do as well.

Which leads us to the pruning of John 15. Maybe what needs to be cut away is our attachment to our way of life. Maybe we prefer whatever creature comforts we have a little too much. All the while our sisters and brothers are calling for us to get involved. If that is true, then the most loving, graceful thing that our Lord could do is to take the pruning shears to our unhealthy attachments and cut us loose. It will allow us to live again.

Is this a lens that we can use to interpret our current economic crisis? Can we lovingly imagine that God wants us to pay attention to our unhealthy attachments and to get involved with the immediate suffering of our neighbors? Our suffering neighbors include the people in the pews next to us who have just lost their jobs. They also include the mother in Nicaragua who does not have enough corn for tortillas to feed her family.