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!

Psalm 22 contains an interesting couplet of verses. Verse 26 declares the promise that “the poor will eat and be satisfied.” Verse 29 states, “the rich of the earth will feast and worship”. Given the prophetic witness of Isaiah 58 in which the worship that God desires includes the feeding of the poor, could it be that the true worship of the rich in verse 29 will lead to the poor eating and being satisfied?

1 John 4 picks up this theme when it claims that love of God should look a lot like love of neighbor. I am not suggesting any kind of pietistic love here but real sacrificial relationship. One in which I can love my neighbor in deed and in truth because I know my neighbor and she knows me. We mutually care for one another by providing from what we have for what the other lacks.

One way of understanding the incarnation of Jesus is summed up in this simple statement: God got involved. God became mixed up in the beauty and the mess of being human. God joined our lot. The implication is that if God got involved and thereby demonstrated love, so should we. We can’t afford a 30,000 foot view of human suffering while we pad our own nests. That would be the opposite of what God did and what we are called to do as well.

Which leads us to the pruning of John 15. Maybe what needs to be cut away is our attachment to our way of life. Maybe we prefer whatever creature comforts we have a little too much. All the while our sisters and brothers are calling for us to get involved. If that is true, then the most loving, graceful thing that our Lord could do is to take the pruning shears to our unhealthy attachments and cut us loose. It will allow us to live again.

Is this a lens that we can use to interpret our current economic crisis? Can we lovingly imagine that God wants us to pay attention to our unhealthy attachments and to get involved with the immediate suffering of our neighbors? Our suffering neighbors include the people in the pews next to us who have just lost their jobs. They also include the mother in Nicaragua who does not have enough corn for tortillas to feed her family.

When life becomes oppressive or stagnant, God steps in and does something new. In the story from Acts 10, a wisdom seeker from Ethiopia (who knows a thing or two about being excluded by the religious elite) is taught by Phillip about the good news of God’s love in Jesus Christ. When Phillip gets to the part about being baptized and included in this new community, the Eunuch asks a bold and simple question, “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” In other words, “Don’t we have everything we need? (Water, the Word, each other) Can God transcend our barriers to do something powerful and new?

The answer is a definite “yes”. So when facing global injustice and poverty in which over a billion people live on less than $1 a day; in a country that can find 1 trillion for financial bailout of our banks but can’t find the 10 billion it would take to provide every man woman and child with clean drinking water, can we hope that God would do something new? Can it be that we already have everything that we need to accomplish great things for those in need?

On one of those crystal clear days in Central Oregon a person can actually see the rivers sing and the mountains clap their hands. It happens when the creation appears in all its glory, just as God intended. The waters are clean and life giving. The bugs are hatching. The trees and flowers bud and flower. Things are as they should be.

Yet, Psalm 98’s wondrous imagery is startling because of how often the world is not as it should be. Injustice and pollution keep the creation groaning for deliverance. Species become extinct. Humanity suffers as many hunger and few have too much. We can even forget that rivers and mountains can sing and dance. We no longer claim a vision in which all God’s children are cared for and fed.

For Lutheran Christians, justice works always flows from God’s grace. We are accepted, loved, included, empowered by God. It is from a grateful heart that we accept, love, include and empower others in Jesus’ name. Sometimes those we are called to serve ask impertinent questions like, “You have spoken of Jesus as the Bread of Life, what is to prevent you from feeding me in his name?”