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!

Exodus 17:1-7
Psalm 95 (1)
Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-42
Today, in the Global South, women and girls spend hours fetching water from wells. Like the women and girls who travel for miles for clean, drinkable water, the Samaritan woman who meets Jesus at the well is on the margins of society. Her vulnerability is particularly acute—not only is she a woman, but she is a foreigner who is divorced and without husband. Ostracized, Jesus offers her living water and then sends her to bear witness in her hometown. Her faithful proclamation brings belief and salvation to her townspeople.

Likewise, today, women are great multipliers in the struggle against hunger and poverty. In the Global South, they produce as much as 60-80 percent of food crops and they are more likely than men to invest their income on their families by purchasing healthy foods, paying school fees, and so on. Learn more about the amazing impact of women at www.girleffect.org. Support an ELCA World Hunger water project today and see women use life giving water to bring healing to their communities.

This week’s Gospel lesson has two important hunger connections. Again we see that Jesus’ earthly ministry was marked by physically healing people. Too often Christianity has bifurcated spiritual and physical wholeness. Jesus came to bring healing to both. Following Jesus means giving attention to both. The second hunger connection is the way that Jesus disconnects moral failings from physical ailments. Today when some think of hunger they think of the moral failings that might lead someone to be hungry. They assume that if one is poor or hungry, it must be their fault. There are many things that lead to hunger and poverty, several of may have nothing to do with a person’s morality. Our call is to follow Jesus and bring healing where we can.