SCROLL DOWN FOR JULY 1 AND JULY 8
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!
July 1, 2012 (Fifth Sunday after Pentecost)
Lamentations 3:22-23
The book of Lamentations was composed during the fall of Israel and the subsequent exile in Babylon. Lamentations employs powerful words of lament and despair. It also offers quiet but confident words of hope.
Some ideas to ponder:
- This text will not offer an explanation for the world’s trials. It does however invite readers to think about how they and others can respond to difficulty, suffering, and God’s seeming absence. Lamentations will not tell us why children suffer and millions die of starvation in a world of plenty. It will encourage us to reflect on how we will respond to suffering and starvation.
- During the days of exile in Babylon, many, many people wondered why God seemed silent. Certainly some stopped wondering, and simply assimilated themselves to life in Babylon. Others maintained the hope that God would continue to be faithful. In time their hope was vindicated when Israel was rescued and returned to her homeland. Maintaining hope is often a very difficult task. Despair is certainly an attractive, easy option. How do we maintain hope that hunger can end even when all evidence seems to the contrary? Where do we find support for the conviction that the “Lord will have compassion” (verse 32)? How do we respond to the Lord’s compassion? How do we become a vehicle for the Lord’s compassion?
Psalm 30
2 Corinthians 8:7-15
Mark 5:21-43
In Mark 5:21-43 the evangelist very skillfully weaves together two narratives into one: the story of the hemorrhaging woman and the account of the raising of Jairus’ daughter. These two stories are not put together by happenstance, but because each one of them informs the other. On the one hand there is the story of a frantic father, desperate for Jesus to heal his daughter. Jairus sought Jesus out and boldly requested his help. The father’s direct approach in the first story is in contrast to the second story in which a nameless woman timidly approaches Jesus, intent on only touching his clothing. In the balance of the narrative we hear two accounts of Jesus’ healing. This is a wonderful text, full of possibility for preachers to engage congregations in an exploration of the nature of healing.
Some ideas to ponder:
- Mark tells us that when Jesus felt the woman’s touch, he immediately wanted to know who she was. This suggests that Jesus’ concern was for individual people. He was not only generically concerned about those in need. Jesus sought out the faces of those in need. He wanted to know them and attend to them as individuals. Are we content to know about the poor and the hunger, the vulnerable and those with great need, or do we seek them out to meet them and get to know them as individuals? Statistics are one thing, putting faces to need is quite another. One of the great benefits of working at a homeless shelter, or serving at a soup kitchen, or visiting developing communities is to meet the people. It is important to know that people pushed to the margins of society have hopes and dreams, fears and anxieties that are a remarkable match for our own.
- The Markan text pushes us to explore the nature of miracles. Marcus Borg’s work is helpful for such a study. It is important for people of faith to be open to mystery. There simply are things that happen in our world that go beyond our common, usual expectations and explanations. Perhaps we cannot imagine that hungry people can be fed and escape poverty because we understand how complicated that would be. Perhaps our unwillingness to see beyond what already is to what could be prevents us from seeing God’s miraculous work. Then of course, if we fail to see, we fail to lend our hands to furthering what God’s is doing in the world.
- A careful preacher will address the issue of what precipitated the healings. Were the woman’s faith or Jairus’ faith responsible for the miracles? It is important for people to realize that healing comes about because of nothing more and nothing less than God’s grace and power.
- A sermon exploring miracles could challenge our usual notion that miracles are much like magic. Perhaps miracles are more rooted to daily life than we often expect. How can clean water be a miracle for a struggling community? How can a place to sleep be a miracle for a homeless family? How can a community’s escape from diseases of poverty bring miraculous possibility for life? What if we agreed that ending hunger were an obtainable goal and the human family pooled its efforts toward that goal? What miracle could God work within such a reality?
Stacy Johnson
Author of ELCA World Hunger’s curriculum, Taking Root: Hunger Causes, Hunger Hopes
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July 8, 2012 (Sixth 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 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!
Ezekiel 2:1-5
Psalm 123 (2)
2 Corinthians 12:2-10
Mark 6:1-13
We often don’t expect much from the common or lowly. Jesus is rejected in his hometown. He is that guy down the street, son of Mary and brother of many (four brothers AND an unknown number of sisters?!). Paul in the letter to Corinthians wants to boast in his many great experiences. But God reminds him that power (or God’s power, depending on your read of the variants) is “made perfect in weakness.” In the same way, we see how God chose to be revealed in the world: as that guy down the street with all these siblings, to a single mom, in the backwoods of the Roman Empire. Is this still how God is revealed today? Is power really revealed in weakness? What would it look like to truly believe this? Would it change how we engage those who are poor and marginalized?
David Creech
Program Director, Hunger Education, ELCA World Hunger
