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!

When we left Eli, Samuel and Samuel’s parents a few weeks ago (Nov. 15), Hannah had given her son back to the Lord after the Lord answered her prayer. “Samu-el” marks, with his name, that “God has heard” Hannah’s pleas for a child and has gifted her with Samuel. She knew, even as she gave this great and painful gift, that Samuel was the Lord’s, even more than Samuel was hers. In this week’s parents’ day scene, Samuel’s parents check up on him and bring him a gift—a robe. The text says he grew in stature, as children do, so Hannah made him a new robe each year to grow into. Hopefully she kept up with the latest style… What gifts are now sitting open in your living room as of this Sunday? How about the ones you’ve given—do your gifts have a “vision”? Will they grow in stature?

What a great thought here that Jesus himself is a gift and that he can be “re-gifted,” even as Samuel was a gift and was re-given. What does this say to your congregation as a metaphor about the difference between returning gifts from dissatisfaction and “re-gifting” (to others). “Merciful God, we offer with joy and thanksgiving what you have first given us…” We should give knowing the origin of our gifts; knowing that our time and our money and our skills and abilities, used for others, are really the Lord’s, even more than they are ours.

This is one of my favorite psalms. It reminds me of an opening chapter of one of Augustine’s Books in The City of God,is great work. Augustine, too, praises God for these items in their greatness and color and variety—they are gifts to us from a loving creator.

We are part of creation, too. There is a long debate about the human species and our commissioned role as stewards, users, etc. of this creation and our place among other species and forces of nature. God has “fixed their bounds” (v. 6) but yet what we do has an increasing impact on these great forces of weather and wind and land and sea. One way in which all of the creatures, including human beings and our leaders are equal, says the psalmist, is that we all need to praise God, our creator. One way we can praise the creator is to conserve and protect what is around us—one created thing to another. We might find this good ethic also helps improve practical situations around us—agriculture and food production, public health, mass migration, and more. Praise the Lord!

Colossians 3:12-17
Back to gifts: Paul pre-supposes unity in Christ as a gift from God—it is not a choice, it is a created and granted reality. Within that unity in Christ, we are unified even if we are not uniform. Indeed, Paul anticipates that we will teach and admonish each other out of differences. However, he instructs us to worship and sing together, to forgive one another, and to bear with one another. The “word of Christ” dwelling in us is not a static word but a dynamic and living word, a logos spoken to us at Christmas as the center of a new community unlike other communities.

Some people try to get “unity” right—before singing and worshipping together can happen. Maybe it goes the other way—worshipping, singing together, speaking and acting together for our neighbors—these faith practices together might help us live back into the unity which was ours in Christ all along and to which we come at Christmas: jaded, tired, and then recognizing again the essential truth of unity in Christ. It lies under and supports our other claims on truth as Christians. What people might God be calling us to worship with?

Yes, Jesus was smart—I think we get that. His transcendent radar was up—he was cosmically plugged in; he had the drop on trivia (“I’ll take obscure minor prophets for $500, Alex”). He could employ casuistry, sophistry, rhetoric and other forms of argument and cut through legal knots with stories. But what surprises me here isn’t brilliance. It is the wisdom. I’d almost say the intuition—about where he belonged. The end of this passage seems a little contrived—like Luke had to tell us Jesus was “obedient” and glad to be “home”. But I imagine him as a little restless with that multi-directional energy of the teen. In short, he knew he belonged everywhere and to everyone—“his father’s house,” after all, “has many rooms.”

We who are “responsible” for Jesus today—Where do we look for him and how do we even know he is missing? Would you look first among friends and relatives? Would you backtrack three days to search for him? If you found him trading wisdom, what would you actually say to him?

Jesus tells us later that he is with us everywhere and that he can be found especially in certain places—where two or three are gathered; in bread, wine, baptism, prayer; and when we look for him in his favorite places—among people who are hungry, people who live in abject poverty, people who don’t have clothes and shoes, people who are alone, sick, and go unheard.

As valued by the powerful, argument and rhetoric are one thing. True wisdom is another, and Jesus links it essentially to compassion—the compassion of a God sending a baby to a peasant in a shack to save the world.

This week’s texts have a strong focus on God’s activity with and for God’s people throughout history. The Old Testament texts focus on God’s promises and fidelity to Israel, the New Testament texts emphasize God’s activity and grace in Jesus. How appropriate that at the new year, as we look forward, we also remember God’s gracious activity. May the memory of this empowering grace encourage us as we strive to do God’s work with our hands.

This passage from Jeremiah looks forward to the future restoration of Israel. Our world is still in need of restoration—the global economy is still struggling to recover (with hunger and poverty on the rise), we are embroiled in a seemingly interminable conflict in Afghanistan, with other pockets of fighting scattered throughout the globe, to name just a couple of examples. How should we as the church respond? How should we pray and act? How might God be inviting us to participate in the work of restoration?

Ephesians 1:3-14
The passage from Ephesians, like that of Jeremiah 31 and Psalm 147, recounts the story of God’s work, and in this passage, in and through Christ. Grace informs and pervades the text. It is God’s grace that empowers us to “live for the praise of God’s glory” (v.12). As happens so often in Paul’s writings, Ephesians begins with God’s activity (chapters 1-3) and concludes with the Christian imperative (chapters 4-6). It is because of God’s grace that we live differently. What might God’s love and grace be calling us to in this new year?

This passage from John, read every year on the second Sunday of Christmas, is often read through a theological lens, with an emphasis on the divinity of Christ. Indeed, it was John’s Gospel that was so central to the Council of Nicea as it struggled to articulate its Christology. The Word becoming flesh is much more than a lofty idea though. How profound is it that God enters into the realities of life and makes a dwelling here? What does that dwelling look like?

In terms of hunger and poverty, it can mean seeing Christ in those who are poor and vulnerable. (In the Baptismal covenant of the Episcopal Church, the sponsors are asked, “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?” Their response is, “I will with God’s help.”)

That God came into the messiness of life—living in it, transforming it—calls us to do likewise (I think here of Philippians 2:5-10, where the hymn of Christ’s humility is used to define the ethic of the Philippian church). In what ways do we resist living fully into the realities of life? In what ways can we make our dwelling in the complexity (and sometimes downright ugliness) of life?

This may sound like a difficult call (and it is!). This is why verse 16 is so key—from Christ’s fullness we have received grace upon grace. It is an empowering grace that transforms us, that gives us the strength and courage to live into our call as Christians. As we think about a new year, and perhaps the things we’d like to be and do, what might God be saying? How can we, empowered by God’s grace, be agents of change?