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!

February 4, 2007

5th Sunday after Epiphany

First Reading: Isaiah 6:1-8 (9-13)

Psalm 138

Second Reading: 1 Corinthians 15:1-11

Gospel: Luke 5:1-11

STARTER ONE: PREACHING THEMES

The texts for this day can move toward hunger and justice ideas such as the following:

Doom awaits those with no understanding

· Being in God’s presence with no understanding also includes the presence of God in those who are poor.

· Sometimes the prophet’s message is too hard to see or hear.

· Sometimes the message is unfathomable.

· A lack of understanding – purposeful or otherwise – ends with the destruction of the world.

· We may be living in a time when this is already happening.

· Our work may be to become prophets like Isaiah.

Jesus is food provider

· Perhaps Jesus provides food miraculously.

· Or perhaps Jesus provides the insight or vision necessary to know where/how to find (grow, produce, distribute) the food.

· Jesus’ teaching precedes Jesus’ providing food.

· (In parallel Gospels) Jesus walks to the place where food providers work; Jesus in solidarity with those who produce, gather or find the food. (Could this become “Meat Workers’ Sunday”?)

God’s presence and actions are overwhelming

· God’s presence requires and invites reaction.

· Awe – a kind of fear – might not be a bad place to start.

· God has no illusions about what people will do, yet God does not give up on people who miss the point, or are totally clueless about God’s requirements.

· Those who are humble – in God’s presence or service – have a different relationships with God than those who are proud. In the first case, God cares; in the second case, God is keeping a wary eye.

Jesus’ presence and actions are overwhelming

· The miracle of abundant food inspires a feeing of unworthiness.

· The death and resurrection of Jesus – when coupled with Jesus’ invitation to leadership – also compel a sense of humility.

How might we gather people into Jesus’ net?

· This is not about bringing people to church, but into partnership with Jesus’ work.

· The work of “fishing people” was for Jesus’ disciples not about preaching to lost souls about being saved by Jesus, but partnering with Jesus’ preaching about the coming Kingdom. (See the Gospel lessons for the past two Sundays.)

· Until it’s out of the water, a net merely holds a group of people together closely. How do we “net people to be net people? (This is how Jesus’ disciples knew the task of fishing? How do we find these people in the first place? How are we kept in the water of God’s work, gathered for mutual work? (After this, the analogy breaks down, I think.)

STARTER TWO: CHILDREN’STHOUGHTS AND ACTIVITIES

1. Find and use a string bag – a kind of net with handles on it – to illustrate how children and adult are held together in common purpose, and in a way kept safe for good work within the confines of the bag. The bag itself also serves as a carrying case – a visible one – for someone wanting to do work. You could have fun comparing the string bag to your congregation, unpacking its contents – good people, good gifts, good food, Hunger Appeal coin banks, small books – to illustrate some broad-based concept connected with the “net” theme immediately preceding this section. And play around with “net-work” (as in “What work does a net[bag] do?”)

2. The First Lesson takes us into Isaiah’s vision – part awe-inspiring and part terrifying – of flaming flying angels somehow still able to praise God. Large sounds and panoramic sights that could easily impress kids into silence. (They could also sing or listen to the Sanctus in some arrangement that’s bigger-than-simple) shelter every week.) If children are still imagining this scene, could they extend their imagination to being in God’s presence, to hearing God’s invitation to do something important with their lives, to obey God’s commands? (Or is the whole thing too scary, even for adults?)

3. Re-enact the fishing story in the Gospel, only as a fish-farming story from Africa. The connection? The miracle of Jesus plays out in a modern-day miracle because of the ELCA Hunger Program’s work. Check out these links for more information about the ways in which fish farming not only provides fish, not only teaches people how to fish but also gives them the pond in which to fish! Links: www.elca.org/openaworld/Tanzania/guide2.html www.elca.org/countrypackets/tanzania/hunger.pdf

STARTER THREE: BIBLE CONVERSATIONS

Use any of the following items to engender discussion, sharing or action that connects today’s lessons with matters of social justice:

1. The gospel for this day may easily be mistaken as an evangelism text. It might be more exegetically correct to note that Jesus’ invitations to the original inner core of disciples was to join him in a ministry that included teaching, preaching AND ministry to people who were poor – the majority of Jesus’ hearers. If you’re willing to explore the context of this story, you might also:

Look at the parallel texts in Mark and Matthew.
Examine the narratives and the actions recorded in the chapters around this story, noting especially Jesus’ behaviors and words.
Compare and contrast the stories of the Sending of the 70 – a commissioning to follow Jesus’ work – and the Lucan version of the Great Commission. What specific activities did Jesus ask his followers to commit to, in addition to the presumed teaching and preaching.
Consider the content of Jesus’ teaching. He was probably not teaching about himself, and certainly not talking about his death and resurrection as salvific acts. Some current New Testatment scholarship suggests that Jesus – and the followers he recruited in today’s Gospel – was actually trying to instruct people who were oppressed about the nature of injustice and their opportunity to see God’s justice. (See William Herzog’s Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed, or Jesus, Justice and the Reign of God.

2. Talk with participants about God’s puzzling commissioning of Isaiah to a ministry of helping people become stubbornly clueless. Think together about matters such as these:

For what reasons would God want Isaiah to help people not understand God’s will?
The seeming inevitability of vast and utter destruction, with only a stubby remnant remaining.
How might complete destruction – of the world, kingdoms, societies, the environment? – serve God’s will?

3. The psalmist praises God for being “famous” (CEV translation) among the kings of the earth. How does the ELCA Hunger Program – and global mission efforts – make God “famous” throughout the world today? (HINT: You might want to use materials from the ELCA Hunger Web site – www.elca.org/hunger -- to find current facts and/or stories.)

4. A theme stream that flows through several of the texts: Being cowed, awed, terrified or quieted in the presence of God and Jesus. Here’s a question related to hunger and justice, with that theme in mind: How necessary is it to be “awed by God” (or “odd, by God”) in order to take on the evils of hunger and poverty?

THE SENDOFF

I’m awed that you’re out there, friend, plugging away at your ministry of Word and Sacrament! This Sunday’s texts forced a little deeper thinking on my part, and some hunger/justice dots still have not connected for me, particularly the marvelous declarations of Paul in 1 Corinthians 15. Sometimes, I think, it’s best to not tease texts past their exegetical limits, and to just let the words ring out their own tune. Here’s one I don’t want to ever stop singing: “Christ has died for us, and he lives still!”

You keep singing, too!

Bob Sitze, Director

Hunger Education