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!

The reading from Isaiah continues in the theme of repentance, though it offers a clear picture of hope. We look forward to God’s advent, when he will feed and care for his flock. As seen in the Gospel reading, Christians read this as a prophecy about Jesus, and see Isaiah’s promise as already having been fulfilled. We need to live faithfully into the way of Jesus, feeding and caring for those who are poor and vulnerable.

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11
The first verses of this passage are well known to us—they are the words Jesus reads when he begins his ministry in Luke’s Gospel. This text reminds us that God has long been about bringing justice to those who are oppressed. The tone of this passage, and throughout much of the final third of Isaiah, is one of hope and promise. The author uses imagery of a fertile field to describe God’s last act of causing justice and praise to spring up for all the nations. In the meantime, while we wait for God’s decisive act, we too are called to work for justice.