SCROLL DOWN FOR September 1, 2013
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!
September 1, 2013 Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proverbs 25:6–7
These verses better reflect the gospel message than offer great connection points for hunger and poverty threads.
Psalm 112
The poetic vision of blessing bestowed upon the righteous deserves a look for what it suggests (with the caution that prescriptive behavior is not one of the aims of poetic literature). The psalmist envisions this blessing looks like “wealth and riches” in the houses of the righteous (verse 3). But these are not stockpilers. In verse 9 the psalmist reminds us that the righteous distribute freely and “have given to the poor.” This vision imagines an economy where those who have wealth and riches are the ones who will share it, and they do so because they are upright and fear the Lord. As the final verse reminds us, the wicked are left only with their anger.
Hebrews 13:1–8, 15–16
In these closing words the author of the letter begins with a sort command: let mutual love continue. But it soon looks like this mutual love is not something that happens and we just learn to live into. Instead it actively calls the community of faith to look for the vulnerable (in this case, prisoners) and to remember them in a very personal way. But pursuing mutual love is found in such outward focus.
Luke 14:1, 7–14
In this meal scene Jesus offers two lessons, for both guest and host. The first lesson about not assuming the place of honor is not merely concerned with social etiquette or attention getting self-effacement. But the context of the lesson is God’s kingdom and the great reversal of the last becoming first and the first becoming last.
The second lesson is more surprising. Jesus dispels the system that creates places of honor by leaving out the ones who would typically fill them. When Jesus asks us to extend the invitation to the unlikely (poor, crippled, blind, lame), he is not only changing our idea of who deserves honor, he is also placing our method of assigning status in opposition to God’s. When we invite we should submit both to God’s hospitality and table arranging. These invitations are not just acts of charity, but announce the creation of God’s community.
Henry Martinez
ELCA World Hunger
