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!

This week’s passage from Isaiah invites reflection on hunger and poverty. The critique the author offers in many ways can be applied today. The prophet critiques worship that does not translate into just being and doing. In this season of Epiphany, when we celebrate the revealing of God’s light to the world, we are told that our light as God’s people will shine when we loose bonds of injustice. This text then provides a lens through which to read this week’s Gospel. The light we shine for all to see is feeding the hungry, inviting those who are homeless into our homes, and clothing the naked. May we have the courage to let our lights shine in this way!

In today’s Gospel, the demands of the Law are heightened. Jesus takes the original commands (and traditional interpretations of them) and makes them more stringent (more on this below). The reading from 1 Corinthians is a helpful reminder that it is God who works in us and empowers us to live into what God calls us to be and do. When we look at the world, and our call to be Christ’s hands and feet, it can feel overwhelming. There is so much to do, so many still needing to be fed (925 million is the most recent estimate). This is God’s work, though. Will we have the courage to partner with God?

Matthew 5:20 (read in last week’s Gospel) is the thesis statement for this week’s reading: unless our piety exceeds those who are most pious we shall not enter the Kingdom. This passage should be read in light of the reading from 1 Corinthians and our Lutheran understanding of God’s empowering grace. Reading this passage from a hunger perspective, two themes emerge. One is the absolute seriousness of the call placed on God’s people. Living a just and moral life is not simply a good idea for Christians, it is central to their identity. Caring for those who are poor and living peaceably are essential. The second theme is that of the type of piety exhibited by the scribes and Pharisees was not the piety that God desires (here one may recall Amos 5 and Isaiah 58). The piety God calls us to is true love of neighbor, not theological hairsplitting (a message that seems as relevant today as ever).