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!

In today’s Gospel, the demands of the Law are heightened. Jesus takes the original commands (and traditional interpretations of them) and makes them more stringent (more on this below). The reading from 1 Corinthians is a helpful reminder that it is God who works in us and empowers us to live into what God calls us to be and do. When we look at the world, and our call to be Christ’s hands and feet, it can feel overwhelming. There is so much to do, so many still needing to be fed (925 million is the most recent estimate). This is God’s work, though. Will we have the courage to partner with God?

Matthew 5:20 (read in last week’s Gospel) is the thesis statement for this week’s reading: unless our piety exceeds those who are most pious we shall not enter the Kingdom. This passage should be read in light of the reading from 1 Corinthians and our Lutheran understanding of God’s empowering grace. Reading this passage from a hunger perspective, two themes emerge. One is the absolute seriousness of the call placed on God’s people. Living a just and moral life is not simply a good idea for Christians, it is central to their identity. Caring for those who are poor and living peaceably are essential. The second theme is that of the type of piety exhibited by the scribes and Pharisees was not the piety that God desires (here one may recall Amos 5 and Isaiah 58). The piety God calls us to is true love of neighbor, not theological hairsplitting (a message that seems as relevant today as ever).

Leviticus opens with the command to be holy because God is holy. In the modern context, we can often equate holiness with piety or inner virtue. Many of the Old Testament purity laws address ritual impurity, those exterior things that are a threat to holiness. This week’s lesson adds some (perhaps surprisingly) concrete moral practices to the holiness codes.

Holiness in this text is not simply an inward disposition or avoidance of certain impure things. God’s people are holy when they leave parts of their fields unharvested for those who are poor and marginalized to glean. There are many amazing gleaning programs that are feeding many people (see, for example, Feeding America, www.feedingamerica.org; the Society of Saint Andrew, www.endhunger.org; and Foods Resource Bank, www.foodsresourcebank.org). How else might we leave portions of our “fields” unharvested for those who are hungry?

God’s people are holy by paying just wages. God’s people are holy when they look out for the interests of those who are vulnerable. God’s people are holy when they do not profit from the blood of their neighbor (on what this might mean, check out “The Story of Stuff,” www.storyofstuff.org). By loving one’s neighbor as one’s self—this is not an appeal to how one feels about their neighbor, but a call to action—we bear witness to the Lord.

The history of interpretation on this weeks Gospel is quite divided. The earliest Christians (pre-Constantine) thought it a threat to one’s salvation to join the military, or in the case of converted soldiers, to remain in the military. Later Christians, following the lead of Augustine, saw military as essential to maintaining peace. War and poverty are closely intertwined, and the principle that seems to be operative in Jesus’ teaching is that love for neighbor is what matters most. In the reading from Leviticus, we see that love for neighbor must be worked out in concrete ways. In any conflict we may encounter, the question is how do we make sure that those who are poorest and most vulnerable are protected? What might love of neighbor look like in the current unrest in Egypt and Tunisia and the rest of the Arab world? How can we more fully live into the vision Jesus sets before us?