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!

· The Kingdom of Heaven, a Celebration Banquet—Have we turned down and ignored our invitation? When we do not act out our faith, and when we do not act out of our faith, we refuse God's invitation, his commandments. While our faith is a gift, we are invited and commanded to actively respond out of that faith and participate in the creation of God's Kingdom, God's future, the banquet.

· There is a glimpse in this Gospel scripture and in the passage from Isaiah of how God would have our world be–a feast of rich food, a wedding banquet with invitations for all to come to the celebration where “everything is ready.” There is only the need to accept and come properly attired, to put on our new clothes, our celebration garments.

· A banquet or feast conjures up an image of abundance, enough for all. Economic and food experts tell us there is the ability to produce enough food for all in our world, but we fail in many ways to act on this possibility. We turn our backs on this ability and invitation to act to create the feast for all. We fail to use both our intelligence and compassion in living out God's invitation to love our neighbor as ourselves. Instead we fail to challenge agricultural, corporate, and governmental policies that benefit the few versus the many.

· ELCA Advocacy staff worked hard this past year on proposed reforms to the Farm Bill that would include more people at God's banquet table through increased funding for and access to Food Stamps and more nutritional foods. The bill also would include reductions of unfair commodities subsidies and trade policies that benefit large U.S. corporate farms over smaller family and cooperative farms in the U.S. and around the world. Bread for the World’s president, David Beckman, described the outcome of the struggle as winning “half the loaf” when increases in Food Stamps and nutritional access was approved by the legislature but unfair subsidies and trade practices left intact.

· We find in both Philippians and Isaiah guidance and encouragement to turn back to God's invitation to persevere in bringing about God's future, working together, focusing on the best and the possible.

KRISTIE NEKLASON serves the NW Washington Synod on the synod hunger committee and is a member of Gift of Grace Lutheran Church, Seattle, WA

· “Render unto Caesar…” is a well-known line. How often have we given deeper thought into what Jesus is saying to us in these passages in Matthew where the Pharisees try to “trick” Jesus into making a “mistake” in terms of interpretations of “the law” or orthodoxy?

· Jesus answers in such a way that he amazes and surprises them. He not only sidesteps their “trap” but transcends the pettiness of the argument.

· When we are amazed our mind is in the state of what we could call “divine confusion,” where we are forced to struggle with what we assumed or took for granted. To surrender our safety zone of the familiar, “the way it is,” and to come to a larger, greater, brand new grasp of reality. It is as if we are surfacing from the depths, sparkling and streaming with crystal clear water, gasping for breath.

· How can we welcome this gift of the Gospel in 2008? How can we surrender our safety zones, our stuckness, with the “way it is” that allows us to continue to accept the injustice of the poverty of billions of people and allows us to remain blind to how we participate in that injustice?

· When we are blind, however unintentionally, in economic or other types of injustice, we are powerless to act against the injustice. The painful plunge and breathless resurfacing of clear sight frees us to participate in the Gospel call.

· What might we see anew in that painful plunge? The poorest of the poor—those whose reality we would rather not grasp? Those to whom we are called in our common ministry through the World Hunger and Disaster Appeal to minister in Jesus' name?

· For me it is the mental picture of a story in a Mennonite cookbook of a mother holding the child who has been “chosen” to be sacrificed to starvation in a family that cannot afford to minimally feed all of their children.

· But if I refuse to see this horrifying image, to be a witness to this mother's awful choice, I cannot be transformed and I cannot respond.

· Who is most vulnerable in the paths of Hurricanes like Katrina, Ike, and Gustav? The poorest of the poor who lack resources to do for themselves. Who must rely on the present or absent kindness of strangers or neighbors? Those whose homes are already in disrepair, not built to code, cobbled together like those homes in the slums on the outskirts of Cairo that flattened when the hillside collapsed. Those whose income allows only for hand-to-mouth living, which doesn't include a savings account or insurance policy premiums, or an emergency supply of food and water laid in for hard times. Those who have no car to evacuate in or money for gas to fuel their car.

· This month we have seen their sad, distressed, agonized faces on the U.S. Gulf Coast and in Texas. There are many in the U.S. in need of our assistance. Less often seen on our TV screens are the faces of the people of Haiti and neighboring countries, unbelievably, even more vulnerable.

KRISTIE NEKLASON serves the NW Washington Synod on the synod hunger committee and is a member of Gift of Grace Lutheran Church, Seattle, WA