LISTSERV 16.0 - HUNGERSERMONSTARTERS Archives

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!

Imagine you are in Sudan, and you hear the story of the feeding of the 5,000. What does this Gospel text say to a congregation wasting away, knowing that many will die before the next sermon is preached? Perhaps it will be the preacher’s last sermon as well. What word of hope would it bring?

Or let us imagine you are a missionary sent to a refugee camp on the Sudan/Kenya border. Your Bible-study group is made up of people who have fled the Holocaust in Sudan. The people are barely surviving on United Nations food rations. An angry young man says that God no longer does such miracles, so he is going to join the rebels and fight back so his people can eat from their own land again. What good news will this text bring?

Jesus tells his disciples, "They need not go away; you give them something to eat." The original Greek text emphasizes the word you! So, what does Jesus want his disciples to do? What does Jesus want us to do?

When Jesus sees the sick, he heals. When he sees the ignorant, he teaches. When he sees the demon-possessed, he exorcises. When he sees the hungry, he provides food. When he sees disciples, he challenges them to go to work: "You do something." Or, more specifically in our Gospel text, "feed the hungry."

“You give them something to eat.” The source of the feeding is God, but the resources are human. Jesus is pushing his disciples to rely in faith on the one who can turn water into wine. You can feed the crowd if you look to Jesus.

“They need not go away.” It doesn't seem to me that the crowd of people would go following Jesus without taking any food along for the trip. While the Gospels note widespread poverty, they do not speak of a widespread famine that would leave people starving to death. The disciples’ first response is that they don't have enough money to buy food, not that there is no food to be had.

So here we have a crowd of people, probably from different villages. Some might even be Gentiles. And according to their law Jews and Gentiles were not allowed to eat together. Jesus is breaking people into smaller groups (Lk 9:14) and having them sit down together, and thus he is turning a crowd into a community. He holds up a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish and shows that his disciples are willing to share. Sharing can be contagious. Perhaps people had enough all along if the fear could be overcome.

One explanation for the miracle might be to bring the people together. Making strangers to sit together and share everything they have is a miracle in itself. When it comes to feeding hungry people, having enough food is seldom the problem. The real problem is getting access to food through having money. Jesus saw hungry people and brought them together. He asked the disciples what they had on hand.

It is important that we feed the hungry in our own community and work through worldwide partners like the ELCA World Hunger Appeal, Lutheran World Relief, Bread for the World, and others, but it is also imperative that we have an economic vision of the common good so that people don't starve in a world of plenty.

Get some Swedish (or toy) fish at the grocery store and give children different amounts of fish; e.g. one child gets only one, another gets a complete handful. Let them discuss how they feel about that, and then lead them to the economic differences between families in your community, in the U.S., and then nationwide. Let the children discuss how they would like to deal with this situation of “unfairness.”

Why did the disciples cross the lake? To get to the other side.[1] What's on the other side of the lake? What's so important on the other side, that Jesus "immediately forces" the disciples to get into the boat and head that direction?

In the Gospel of Matthew, the lake-crossing episodes illustrate the great problems in the early church of including the Gentiles. When they are in a boat crossing the sea from Jewish to Gentile territories, there are storms.

If we take the boat to symbolize the church, then the sea can symbolize chaos. To the biblical mind, being on the sea is itself a threat. The sea is representing all the anxieties and dark powers that threaten the goodness of the created order. To be at sea evokes images of death, the active power that threatens life. The sea is a barrier that separates the disciples from Jesus. In the midst of the chaos of the world, they are left alone in the boat, buffeted by the stormy winds of conflict.

"Can we believe that Jesus is with us always, even when all evidence suggests he is not?" Can disciples in the midst of their own struggles and chaos and storms believe that Jesus, with all his authority, is with us even though unseen? In the Gospels again and again Jesus demonstrates his supreme power over creation: he is the Lord of wind and water. But his disciples don’t get it.

Like Peter, we lose heart from time to time. Peter's problem was not only that he took his eyes off Jesus, but that he wanted proof of the presence of Christ, and so left the boat in the first place. Peter is a typical disciple. I can easily identify with Peter. His faith is a mixture of courage and anxiety, of hearing the word of the Lord and looking at the terror of the storm, a mixture of trust and doubt.

The message is not "If he had enough faith, he could have walked on the water." The message is not "If we had enough faith, we could overcome all our problems in spectacular ways."

To have faith does not mean that we are able to overcome in spectacular ways the struggles of our ordinary days. To have faith does make no exceptions that we are all subject to the laws of nature. When we are shattered by the realities of accident, disease, aging, or circumstance and we begin to sink, the thought of “if I would have enough faith, this would not happen,” is destructive. It makes us feel guilty because of our "lack of faith."

Through faith we are not able to walk on the water, only God can do that. Faith is to believe, that despite of all the evidence God is with us in the boat. God is made real in the community of faith as it makes its way through the storm, beat-up by the waves.

So what is left when the waters have gone down again? The pictures are devastating. Each photograph depicting almost completely submerged houses. Broken coastal cities, snapshots of the despairing refugees, the pictures signify so many stories of so many people whose lives have been utterly swept away by storm and flood.

It is all so terribly familiar. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction, including the loss of life, the shattering of homes and businesses, the homeless; widespread flooding in the Midwest causes our attention.

And where is God in all this? Among all the other places in the world in which there is much suffering, Christ Jesus is right there in the midst of the chaos along the American Gulf Coast and throughout the Midwest. Christ is there in the chaos, the suffering, and the devastation. And we thank God. God is there for people in and through the chaos, we can find the strength to go on building with him a future where such dignity and hope can take root and flourish.

And we will be there, too, in whatever ways that are helpful. We will give. We open up our pocketbooks to donate to the ELCA Domestic Disaster Response. We will open our hearts, our minds, and our wallets to the heartache and the misery not just today while the story is plastered all over the news but in the months to come. Sometimes we open up our veins to give our own blood to the American Red Cross.

So what is left when the waters have gone down again? Continuing and urgent need and pressure to rebuild, yes; continuing pain and, for many people, still anger and bewilderment; but also a landscape where compassion and practical love have grown. That is why we are here today - why we are here in a place of worship. “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” Mt 18:20. The Christian faith has to be lived in community. We need one another for our prayers. We need one another to experience the presence of Jesus in our midst. We need each other to bear our burdens and to share our joys. We need each other in order to live. Whatever our level of faith or doubt, we need a place where we can affirm the fact that love survives, and so renew our hope.

This is a great story to be acted out. Than discuss situation when children have doubts and fear, and what they can do about it. To whom can children turn to overcome doubts and fears.

[1] Brian Stoffregen, Exegetical notes, crossmarks.com, Matthew 14:22-33