SCROLL DOWN FOR MAY 31 AND JUNE 7, 2009
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!
May 31, 2009 (Day of Pentecost)
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 104:24-34, 35b (30)
Acts 2:1-21
John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15
I hope that every congregation in the ELCA will read Ezekiel 37 on this Sunday. We are so quick to jump to the exciting events detailed in the Pentecost story of Acts 2 that we risk missing the powerful story of dry bones coming back to life.
This story is literally inspiring. A valley full of bones would suggest a battlefield. Many people have died violently and have not been given a proper burial. Like the Killing Fields of Cambodia, it is a place of horror where the reality of human cruelty is evident. God asks the prophet a challenging question, “Son of Man, can these bones live?”
Can the dead come back to life? Can the systems that oppress and kill be undone? Can hope return to hopeless places made desolate by the thirst for conquest and power? Ezekiel takes the easy (and best) answer, “O Lord, you know.”
God does indeed know. In this vision, the process of decay works backwards. Bone connects to bone. Flesh and sinew return. The corpses, now apparently recently deceased, lie on the field. Then God breathes on them with breath from the four winds. These dead are “inspired” and they rise again to new life.
I see this as a wonderful metaphor for the church. We are too often lying dormant, victims of our own brokenness. We are scattered like bleached bones due to our attempts to create a world in our own image instead of the image of God. We have been called irrelevant because too often we have been exactly that. Now God stands before the church and asks us, “Can these bones live?”
May God “inspire” us again. May we rise to new life and act as the early disciples did in Acts, chapter two. May we proclaim mercy and grace. May we heal those who suffer. May we share all things in common so that there is no lack of anything for anyone.
David Nagler
Pastor, Nativity Lutheran Church
Bend, Oregon
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June 7, 2009 (Trinity Sunday, First Sunday after Pentecost)
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 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 assuming you have already done your exegetical work on the texts). God bless your proclamation (and teaching) of what is most certainly true!
Isaiah 6:1-8
The last line of the final verse of this lection (verse 8) is quite familiar to us: “Here am I; send me!” The preceding and following verses are considerably more obscure. Indeed, when it becomes known that the rest of sixth chapter of Isaiah asks the prophet to speak in ways that people will not understand, the God’s call becomes quite sobering and confusing. No wonder Isaiah asks, “How long, O Lord?” How long indeed? How long will it be before people realize that following the way of God will not necessarily be easy. In fact, true discipleship takes God’s people directly into the broken, dark places of the world.
Some ideas to consider:
- What does it mean to answer “Here am I; send me!” This is easy to say and very hard to do. How do we discern what it is that God calls us to do? How do we persevere?
- If we have heard the call to attend to the poor and the hungry, how do we know how best to give aid? What is the difference between emergency relief and long term development aid? How are these two kinds of aid related?
- How can the answer “Here am I; send me!” extend to the way we understand and engage the world? How do economic, political, and social realities come together to perpetuate hunger? How can economic, political and social realities bring and end to hunger?
- Scripture tells us all kinds of ideas that we do not understand. What does it mean that the last are first and the first are last? What does it mean that the greatest of all must be a servant? What difference does it make to hear that the poorest among us are to be held up and blessed?
Psalm 29 (2)
Romans 8:12-17
John 3:1- 17
The story of Nicodemus is sophisticated, just as John’s theology is sophisticated. Imbedded in this story are central themes in Johannine theology: the son of man is sent as evidence of God’s love; the son of man will be “lifted up”; and the implications of those actions for the human family.
Some ideas to ponder:
- John 3:16, part of this lection, is quite well-known and quite well-used. It is doubtful whether the majority of those who know and use it are able to articulate why it is an important text. That task could be an important job for a preacher. What does it mean to say that “God loves the world…”? What does that suggest about how we are to interact with and function within the world?
- Verse 16 is an all-encompassing statement. It does not say that “God loves part of the world…” or that “God loves the prosperous in the world…” or that “God loves the vibrant, life-giving part of the world.” God loves the world. If God loves the places where childhood disease claim the lives of too many; and the places where the environment is parched, stripped of its vitality; and the places where the people close their eyes to the plight of the poor, what does that mean for us and how we live?
- What does “eternal life” mean? John’s gospel makes it clear that eternal life is not a statement of quantity but of character. What is the character of eternal life? How does the promise of eternal life exist in the present and become a statement about the future? How can we proclaim eternal life without perpetuating the notion that the present is only temporary and outside the realm of God’s concern? Preachers need to be cautious not to suggest that we just need to wait for some time off in the future when God will make all things right. A notion such as this will define poverty and hunger as inevitable and acceptable since it is only temporary. It is difficult to imagine that God who loves the world would find any measure of hunger and poverty acceptable.
- This Gospel text makes a deliberate connection between salvation and judgment. Even though the human family lives within the promise of salvation, that does not exclude the reality of judgment. The promise of eternal life and the reality of judgment coexist. The reality is that there are choices to make regarding how we will live within God’s beloved world.
Stacy Johnson
Author of the new World Hunger curriculum, Taking Root: Hunger Causes, Hunger Hopes
