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The lessons for each Sunday in the church year proclaim God’s grace in Jesus Christ. Also derived from a Sunday’s text 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 22, 2009 (Seventh Sunday after Epiphany)

This Sunday is the last Sunday in Epiphany, and the healing stories of the season conclude with passages that show us that the most powerful form of healing is forgiveness. A refashioning of St. Francis’ prayer forms a wonderful Prayer of the Day for today:

O Lord Jesus, make us instruments of your peace, that where there is hatred, we may sow love, where there is injury, pardon, and where there is despair, hope. Grant, O divine master, that we may seek to console, to understand, and to love in your name, for you reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen

The Hebrew Bible reading from Isaiah prefigures the Gospel reading in two ways. It shows how access can be created in surprising ways, “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” (v. 19). The paralytic in the Gospel story gains access to Jesus in a creative way.

Then, in the reading God proclaims God’s self as the forgiver of sins, “I, I am He who blots out your transgression for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” (v. 25) In the Gospel, more powerful than the physical healing is Jesus’ forgiving of sins.

The psalm contains rich examples for preaching on issues of justice and healing. “Happy are those who consider the poor; the Lord delivers them in the day of trouble. The Lord protects them and keeps them alive; they are called happy in the land….The Lord sustains them on their sickbed; and in their illness you heal all their infirmities.” (vv. 1-3).

The Psalm is understood to close Book 1 of the psalms, and so closes with the phrases, “Amen and Amen.” (v. 13). The epistle reading following the psalm interestingly picks up a discussion of the word “Amen.”

“As surely as God is faithful, our word to you has not been ‘yes and no.’…For the Son of God Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you, Silvanus, Timothy and I, was not “yes and no”; but in him it is always ‘yes.’ For in him every one of God’s promises is a ‘Yes.” For this reason it is though him that we say the ‘Amen,” to the glory of God.” (vv. 18-20)

That I should be certain that these petitions are acceptable to our Father in heaven and heard; for he himself has commanded us so to pray, and has promised to hear us. “Amen, amen” means, “Yes, yes, it is going to come about just like this.”

The Gospel reading for this Sunday tells the familiar story of the healing of the paralytic. A notable detail of this story is how the paralytic gained access to Jesus. “Then some people came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. And when they could not bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him; and having dug through it, they let down the mat on which the paralyzed man lay.” (vv. 3-4).

The powerful twist in the story is how the healing demonstrates that Jesus’ greatest power lies in his power to forgive sins. Jesus began by forgiving the man his sins, to which the scribes present had called it blasphemy. Jesus responds, “Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘your sins are forgiven’, or to say ‘Stand up and take your mat and walk?’ (v. 9). Jesus then heals the man of his paralysis and he stands up and takes his mat and goes out.

A challenging question a preacher could ask a congregation is whether the sanctuaries and facilities of the churches today are any more accessible to those living with disabilities. Surely a form of healing the church can improve is how we make our services and activities accessible to all people.

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!

Lent is a time of penitence and confession. This Sunday’s readings, especially the texts from Genesis and 1 Peter, are oriented around the theme of baptism (even the passage from Mark is very much connected to Jesus’ baptism).

As I noted in an earlier Hunger Sermon Starter, in the Baptismal covenant and the Affirmation of Baptism outlined in ELW we make commitments to “care for others and the world that God made” and to “work for justice and peace” (pp. 228; 236). The profession of faith (p. 235) includes a renunciation of the “forces that defy God” and the “powers of the world that rebel against God.” We can reasonably include greed, strife, and self-interest in those forces and powers that defy God and leave God’s people impoverished, hungry, and ill. In our baptism we commit ourselves to work with God in the bringing of God’s kingdom. This may be a good Sunday to renew our baptismal covenant, repenting of the ways in which we have failed to live out our commitments and seeking God’s grace to live as God’s people in the world.

Another theme in the readings is that of violence and danger—in the flood waters, in the passion, with the wild animals, and so on. We live in uncertain times. The economy is faltering, we feel less and less secure. Those who are poorest and most vulnerable have already been dealing with these insecurities. Indeed, for many of them it is all they have ever known. Noah, the people of God (represented by the audience of 1 Peter), and Jesus, all empowered by the Spirit of God, resisted those forces. It was not an easy calling, but they rose to the challenge. How will we respond?

This passage recounts God’s covenant with all of creation, not just human beings (see esp. v. 10), never to destroy the earth again by flood. As a reminder of the promise, God sets a bow in the clouds. This is good opportunity to speak about stewardship and care of creation. We face environmental degradation of all forms—emission of hazardous gases such as CO2 and methane, deforestation, solid waste, and so on. These pose serious threats to the health of our planet and those who are the poorest and most vulnerable are impacted most severely. Environmental degradation is thus also a justice issue.

In the early Christian movement, the flood in Gen 6-9 was often read typologically as a reference to baptism. While the ark later came to be associated with the church, it appears as though the author of 1 Peter sees the flood waters themselves as salvific (Noah and his family were saved through water). The chaotic, destructive waters prefigure life-giving waters.

The way in which the waters become life-giving is not through the removal of dirt from the body (literally, “putting off the filth of the flesh,” perhaps making a distinction between baptism and circumcision). Rather, it is by the “appeal to God for a good conscience.” This rather difficult phrase (and the Greek is horribly complex) might be better translated as “a plea to God for right consciousness.” The gist of the idea, then, is that baptism is life-giving and transformative inasmuch as in the act we ask God to make us fully aware of God’s intentions. Not only to be made aware, but also to be empowered by the grace of God to live out that awareness. What that will look like is described in 1 Pet 4:8-11.

As is typical for Mark, this is a vivid, visceral scene (Matt apparently felt it was too vivid—see his version in Matt 4:1-2). The Spirit “drives” Jesus into the wilderness for forty days, where he is tempted by Satan. Jesus is with the “wild beasts”, and angels attend to him.

I see two connections to hunger in this brief initial scene. First, God’s kingdom is coming in a very real, tangible way. Jesus is confronting nature itself (untamed wilderness and wild animals), and the angels aid him. What are the real and tangible wildernesses in which God would call us to proclaim the kingdom? Of course, my thinking is drawn to the structures and systems that keep people poor and hungry. Empowered by the Holy Spirit, we must endeavor to confront these wildernesses through both individual and corporate decisions. Second, the task at hand is not easy (and without the grace of God, it may not even be humanly possible). The untamed wilderness and wild beasts in our day take the form of more than 1 billion people living in poverty, an imminent environmental crisis, and a global economic downturn, to name a few. In this wilderness, how will we be the people of God?

Jesus returns from the wilderness calling people to repentance. What do we need to repent of? The “good news of God” and the announcement that the kingdom of God “has come near” are both political statements that challenged the status quo. How does the status quo need to be challenged today? What does the Church have to say about the many pressing issues? How will the Church look different than the world around it? What risks do we need to take?