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!

· Earth to Moses: Hurry back down! We have some big problems here. God’s people run amuck, fried by their travels to who-knows-where and grasping at the kind of “spiritual straws” that lead inevitably to god-making.

· We also have some big problems up where you are: An angry law-giving Jehovah, ready to fry the travelers in their sandals, for basic apostasy.

· When it comes to the apostasy of world hunger – our self-idolatries the possible cause – we may have the same conditions: people running amuck, worn out from their life travels and grasping for meaning and purpose.

· So we – pastors, God’s people in your congregation – hurry back down to the ground floors of daily life, on the way repenting on behalf of those who could darn-well repent on their own.

· And God relents, backs off, sees the reasons to remain gracious and merciful, full of compassion and abounding in steadfast love.

· What’s sobering about the First Reading is that the whole interaction – Moses repentance and God’s relenting – doesn’t seem to work. Just a few verses later, three thousand men from among the idolatrous multitudes are slaughtered by the Levites, in a religious battle of large proportion because they got into the idol-worship thing in a big way. Dancing, even!. (We’ll leave that alone here, for now.)

· Good News? I think it’s found in the character of Moses, willing to get down with God, get down on the ground with God and with God’s supposed people and to intercede on their behalf.

· And you? Your congregation? When it comes to global poverty, for whom do you intercede? For whom are you the one who persuades punishers to back off for awhile?

· Today’s lessons are very tightly focused on that theme, and they are hard to ignore as they wave the Repent! sign in our face.

· The lessons give us good and holy words by which to frame our attitudes and actions. Think of David, think of Paul, think of Moses. No stammering, no aw-shucksing, no adroit shifting of the blame to others.

· The lessons also suggest that Luther’s “terrors of conscience” might not be a bad idea. We’re not talking about garden-variety confessions in these lessons. Important stuff needs to be admitted, soul-baring words are required, amending and redirecting of our lives absolutely necessary. An about-face is NOT the same as a sideways glance.

· By the time you read and preach these thoughts, our nation – not just its soldiers or leaders or disaster officials – may need to do a Ninevah – cf. Jonah story – and repent wholesale. Bad debt based on pervasive greed, a national economy shaken to its core, ineffectual leaders heading toward the noose of public shaming, individual families coming to grips with the effects of their mindless spending, an environment warmed by our pollution coming back to haunt us.

· “Repent” may no longer be a ritual filled with words, a convenient substitute for gut-wrenching fear about the very real possibility of paying for our own sins with our own bodies and lives.

· “Repent” may also be good news – a reality check in a world of unbridled self-idolatry and a humiliation that forces us to turn back to what God has in mind for the world.

· The people of the world who are poor may have been waiting for us to come out of our over-mortgaged starter castles, to put aside our toys and diversions and to see them not just as over-needy objects of pity, but as brothers and sisters in Christ. Maybe even teachers.

· Good News: God relents, and in our repentance we find the Holy Spirit standing there next to Jesus’ example of love. The Spirit with a few ideas and a few gifts to get past our terrorized selves to our sanctified selves. A smiling, fresh-breeze kind of Spirit.

· We have this work to do – this justice and hunger work – and perhaps that’s the best news of all: After repentance there is forgiveness and after repentance there is shared work.

1. Work with the children to make REPENT buttons or signs. Hint: Spelling and punctuation are important here! (E.g., REPEAT is only one letter different than REPENT.) Talk about deep sorrow, deep regret, deep fear of punishment (or facing the results of one’s sinfulness). Yes, “repent” is different than “I’m sorry,” and kids know the difference as well as you and I.

2. Don’t leave them hanging emotionally. Forgiveness is available; so is a way out of sinfulness. (We never really PAY for our sins or “make it up” to God or anyone else, so don’t even go there.) Salvation may be as simple as “you get to try again.”

3. The interchange between God and Moses begs an interpretive dialogue between a puppet and a sermon-giver. Make the story interesting by inserting some examples of current apostasies, idolatries-about-to-happen, people run amuck.

4. This can all be framed by stories of the ELCA World Hunger Program, in itself a sign of redemption and holy living for people around the world. Guilty people aren’t as generous as forgiven repenters. We raise millions of dollars for alleviating hunger not because we can buy off God’s wrath – another apostasy to steer clear of – but because we have been given full reprieves from God’s anger and there’s godly work to do through the Hunger Program. A good motivation for giving, I’d think.

My daily uniform – work clothes – is a kind of contemporary hair shirt. I think of what I wear to work as repenting raiment. Like a touchstone or poster, the threads on my skinny frame remind me that I’m a worm and no man, a forgiveness beggar and one who’s joyful because I get what I need to do God’s will WITHOUT DESERVING IT. So what do you wear, hmmm?

(Today’s lessons are full of “poor and needy” themes which you can easily extract on your own – e.g., God preferential love for people who are poor. Forgive me for leaving those themes alone, and pursuing others which might not be as obvious, or perhaps not as important. It’s an occupational hazard . . . .)

· It is easy to overlook “business as usual” – c.f. the Amos lesson – is we stay mired in the presumptions of our cultural legacies.

· They may show up as misogynous statements about a way of life, a flag, a preferred economic system or even as a list of rights or privileges named as “liberty.”

· The religious/spiritual landscape of the Old Testament can be seen – from the perspective of the intertestamental period – as a battle between those who rested on the heritage of Israel – for Jesus and others, the Temple cult – and those who tried to stick to the purity of Yaweh’s Law – the Pharisees and others like them.

· Amos, Jesus, Paul – these prophets and teachers come down on the side of the radicals, those NOT enveloped by the maze of principles and behaviors centered on the Temple. For them, the glories of their ancestry could be masks, costumes, shrouds or worse – hiding the ugliness of sinful exploitation, oppression, injustice and mindless charity.

· For them, the purity of Yaweh’s intent – justice for the poor – needed to be proclaimed and lived in a Torah that was not seen as a collection of cleaniness codes, but as justice, codified into behaviors that benefited people who were poor.

· Good News? Probably in the relieved sighing that comes when we cough up the hairballs of sin that we’ve licked off our furry selves and hidden in places where we hope no one can see them. Expunged sin – confession does that for us – is exposed, chopped up into little pieces, and through God’s forgiveness, consumed by Christ himself. Our sins are no more.

· Quietly pillowed in a small office outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, an Office for Corporate Social Responsibility is supported by the ELCA Hunger Program. Like similar efforts in other denominations – and in concert with ecumenical partners throughout the country, this office is staffed by gentle-and-firm souls who take Amos’ and Jesus’ ministries to heart.

· These are not brow-beaters or fiery sermonizers, these wise and observant folk. What they do instead is to remind the leaders of commerce in this country and elsewhere of their corporate responsibilities, not only as good citizens but as carriers of the best and broadest intentions that corporate leaders already carry inside their souls.

· “Conscience” might be a good word, but there’s more operating here. “Speaking on behalf of” is also another good phrase, but there’s more going on here.

· To see how we do this kind of advocacy – on top of legislative advocacy in Washington, DC, at the United Nations, in state houses around this country and in selected venues around the world – you’d have to imagine the work of the prophet Isaiah complementing the necessary fuming of the prophet Amos. Isaiah was both prince and prophet, working inside of the power structures of Jerusalem as one of them. An insider with an alternative message.

· Naming and condemning sin is a good thing to do, but what are the changes that can be made in corporate behavior – the positive directions business leaders can move toward – when they are gently/firmly reminded of their responsibilities, short- and long-term? What happens when persuasion moves past preaching, where observable change occurs? Ways of doing business change, corporate policies are reversed, leaders see themselves following the example of Jesus, profit and responsibility don’t fight with each other. Good and godly work.

· Through your participation in the ELCA Hunger Program and your gifts to the ELCA Hunger Appeal, you make possible the ministry of this part of the broad advocacy efforts of this church. (You can find more about this good work by visiting www.elca.org/corporate)

· Gospel? On a local scale – using your own relationships -- you can do this kind of gentle/insistent work in your own congregation, and in your own lives. Which “Isaiah”s” will be hearing your sermon? Which Amos’s will inspire you to action? Which gifts of God’s Spirit will equip you?

· The Luke 16 text is one of the easiest to mis-interpret and therefore under-preach. For an intelligent, scholarly and insightful (and justice-related) treatments of this parable, see William Herzog Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed.

· According to Herzog, the import of the text is Jesus’ commentary on the economic system that was squashing the poor, and the improbable place of a dishonest steward – for Jesus the “steward” was probably not a good word – in doing something even half-righteous in a difficult situation.

· Thus the text is more of a morality play than what the later redactors – writing to interpret Luke’s words about Jesus – added at the end of the parable. The moral: Be careful of this system and those who manipulate it for their own good.

· In some ways, Luke 16 approximates the modern fables of robber barons or pseudo-philanthropists or other misanthropes. “Love of the poor” is more than first meets the eye, as is “justice for the poor.”

· This man is looking at saving his own skin, and so is willing to shortchange both his boss’s debtors and his boss. The man still makes a tidy profit, the boss gains valuable social capital – for ostensibly “forgiving” debt – and everyone seems to win. Except the debtors locked into the usurious prisons of overwhelming debt in a system skewed to favor the rich.

· The hard lesson for these times: These economic realities persist in today’s world, not only for the poor who have nothing, but increasingly for the middle class as well.

· Good news? I think it might lie in the moment of comeuppance for the manager. He comes to the bottom of his barrel of tricks, is faced with some hard choices and at least offers some justice to the poor debtors. Good news might also consist in the whistle blowers who (falsely?) accuse the manager of malfeasance. Good news, that God’s economy – God’s stewardship – always favors those who are poor.

· To connect this to the ELCA Hunger Program – all of us still have callings to move our compassion into bringing justice to big systems of which we are a part, or in which we are complicit. Together we challenge social and economic systems – not just in our advocacy work but in the ways in which we distribute relief and development funds, the ways in which we seek wisdom from among those who are poor, the ways in which we help each other learn about hunger’s root causes. This, too, is good work.

1. Analogues of the dishonest manager story can be found in children’s literature or in stories you make up. Think of the guy as a cheater trying to finally do something/anything right. Perhaps you pray with the children for those who cheat, in big and small ways, and therefore harm others.

3. The Amos text might be a good to take apart and retell with some demonstrations of what Amos decries. To learn about the basic idea of injustice, use a scale, add dust to a cup of flour, “rob” a child by charging too high a price for a piece of bread, illustrate crushing debt using play money. Think together with the children how these unfair behaviors can be exposed, changed or punished.

4. Reframe a story – in children’s vocabulary and with sensitivity to their developmental levels – about an injustice that’s closer to home. Think of matters of housing costs, environmental degradation, price gouging, unfair labor practices, places/ways in which “money talks” in your town or locale. Be specific and be fair. Ask children what they think is unjust in the situation and how they – the children – might affect some change. (Remember that shaming mechanisms are operating to good effect in both the Amos and Luke texts.)

1. No, I don’t see how the 1 Timothy text fits in here, but I’m sure it does. Perhaps that question is worth time in your Bible study group. Perhaps the connection is “praying for the king”?

2. Work at Amos’ idea of “crushed poor.” Use a simulation or news article or hunger-related story from the ELCA Hunger Packet or stories at www.elca.org/hunger. Of what does “crushing” consist? If you were poor, how would it feel to be crushed? What behaviors characterize crushed people? What does it take to restore or uncrush people already smushed down? What would keep crushing from ever happening again?

3. Spend some time together – using the newspaper and the Bible – finding current examples of the kind of injustices that Amos names. How did things get to be that way? Who are the people today who correspond to Amos’ protagonists? What does this congregation do – what do any of you do individually – to keep these things from happening? What’s the function of government or other social systems in limiting the excesses of greed?

4. Take a single story from today’s worlds of governance or commerce and drill down into it, from the viewpoint of people who are poor. For example, keeping property taxes low, or limiting immigration, hiring practices, environmental law or regulations.

Few Sunday lectionaries have the wallop of today’s texts, but perhaps that makes the preaching even harder. “Where’s the goodness of God’s mercy in all this? you ask. And rightly so, because hunger-and-justice preaching is not just Amos-ish haranguing of evil people somewhere other than here. That kind of preaching sets up barriers and keeps us from God’s mercy, from God’s son, from God’s Spirit. Today’s texts would be easy if you didn’t also love the people you serve . . . .