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!

God provides food relief until the people reach a place where agriculture is developed and the land produces crops. God’s miraculous provision changes when the Israelites find themselves in a place where crops grow and produce food. Relief changes to development when God’s people enter the Promised Land. The Promised Land is a place of abundant, fruitful provision, where the hungry can sustain themselves. There are food deserts, not only in wilderness places, but in cities around the world. There are places where people and land cannot produce sustainable food resources. In such places, relief is necessary. But the hope of all who hunger is more than relief; it is the development of sustainable growing practices that yield enough produce to feed people and grow a food economy. Together with international partners, ELCA World Hunger provides tools and education leading to sustainable development in some of the most challenging environments on earth.

“When he had spent everything, a sever famine took place throughout the country and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating and no one gave him anything.”

At the heart of the Prodigal son story is a hungry young man, who realizes that his failure to honor his father has had unintended consequences. His own selfish greed leaves him hungry and alone. His hunger drives him to a place of humility, to return to his father’s house, to seek forgiveness, and to accept any form of mercy he might receive. Will the father reject his plea or offer him a job on the farm? Instead, a feast is prepared in his honor and his sonship is restored! Despite his sinful disregard for his father’s goodness and provision, the father welcomes him with a banquet! God feeds us with the bread that is the flesh of his own son, who became lost with us that we might be found with God.