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!

A strong theme in this week’s texts is the abundant goodness and provision of God. Each of the texts recounts God’s gracious nurturing of God’s people. As a result, God’s people are sent to feed and nurture the world. We give out of our abundance.

In this text Joshua and the Israelites conclude their wondering in the desert with a final Passover feast (of manna?). The next day, the manna ceases to appear and the people of God feast on the bounty of the land. This is a fulfillment of God’s promise, to bring them to a land flowing with milk and honey. We see then provision both in the desert wandering (which then became a basis for welcoming the stranger) and the gift of fertile land.

In this passage from 2 Corinthians (one that is arguably one of the clearest distillations of Pauline theology) Paul tells his audience that as a result of God’s reconciling us in Christ, we are now sent out as ambassadors of that reconciliation. The basic message is one Lutherans are very familiar with—God has given us grace, we live and act out of that grace. So, what might reconciliation look like? How can we live fully into that ministry? What role does advocating for justice and food play in reconciliation?

This familiar parable again reiterates God’s lavish (and prodigal!) love for human beings. It is a message of acceptance and love that Jesus uses to defend his open table to the sinner and the outcast (to eat with someone in antiquity communicated a certain level of respect and acceptance). This is a challenging message to us and our Eucharistic celebrations that too often exclude.

The story Jesus tells includes a lot of food imagery as well. One could take several elements from the story and draw connections to world food issues. The already mentioned table fellowship—with whom do we eat? Who is welcome at our table? A famine thrusts the boy into poverty, he is paid an unsustainable wage, he longs to eat food he knows he should not, he returns home to feast, and so on. All of these have modern corollaries that are worthy of reflection.

In this passage, God promises through the prophet that God is about to do a new thing. God’s people are encouraged to look forward to the redemptive activity of God. God promises to make a way through the barren desert, just as God had previously made a way through the chaotic waters. What new path might God be forging through the chaotic waters of hunger? What new way through barren desert of poverty might God be paving? How can we join God in that work?

Psalm 126 (5)
The second half of the Psalm relates closely to the message from Isaiah. Again, as in Isaiah, new streams of redemption are promised. The end result is that those who go out with seed for sowing will reap with joy. (A great story about seeds and the work of ELCA World Hunger is found at http://www.elca.org/Our-Faith-In-Action/Responding-to-the-World/ELCA-World-Hunger/Stories/By-Region/Africa/Zimbabwe-s09.aspx).

Philippians 3:4b-14
In this passage Paul, like Isaiah, speaks of forgetting the old ways of being and doing. He regards them as rubbish (quite the statement!). Paul saw his old way of thinking as inadequate and now places his hope in one thing—the redemptive activity of God in Christ. What old ways of being and doing do we need to forget? How can we better live into our call to work with and on behalf of those who are poor and vulnerable? How can we join God in God’s redemptive activity?

In the current economic climate, where half of the gains in the struggle made in the last ten years against hunger and poverty have been lost, Jesus’ rather callous statement, “You always have the poor with you,” rings particularly true. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus immediately follows up this assertion with an admonition to show kindness to them whenever we can (see Mark 14:7). In so doing, Jesus makes a clear reference to Deuteronomy 15:11, where God commands the Israelites “Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.”

The text can also be read through the lens of the rest of the lectionary texts for this week. God is promising to do a new thing. In Isaiah we are encouraged not to think about the former things, or the way things have always been. God is doing a new thing. What if the conventional thinking that we will “always have the poor” is wrong? What if God is doing a new thing and we get to participate with God in that activity? What might streams in the desert of hunger and poverty look like? And what will be our role in doing that divine work?

And there is still yet another way to read this text, courtesy of our brothers and sisters in Latin America. When Jesus says, “You always have the poor with you,” he is not simply offering some dark forecast of poverty until the end of time. Rather, Jesus is giving a command, telling his followers to be sure that they always have those who are poor and oppressed beside them and, likewise, to always be on their side. How can we this week have those who are poor “with us”?