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!

During the Easter season the lessons all revolve around the Resurrection and new life! The texts celebrate the new and just things God is doing on behalf of all that God cherishes, in the creative order as well as in human society. Sometimes we place the highest emphasis on what Easter means in terms of our own eternal destinies as believers. Yet it’s also important, since we’re still living, to consider what Easter means for this earthly life and those with whom we live it in the present age.

Lord Jesus, you passed through doors locked by fear and breathed your Spirit upon those gathered, embracing them with the gift of peace and sending them as you had first been sent. As you transformed their fear and sent them onward, so send us to reconcile and bring God’s peace; that violence steal your children’s bread no longer, but unity might do away with war. In your holy name we pray, Amen.

This passage has much to say about hunger. Just as God sent Jesus, so too Jesus sends us into the world to be his agents. Jesus now commissions us to do the things that he was about in his public ministry (healing to sick, welcoming the stranger, feeding the hungry, and so on). But we are not sent out without any help. In verse 22, Jesus breathes on the disciples and gives them the Holy Spirit. It is by God’s grace and power that we can do God’s work of looking after those who are poor and vulnerable.

As noted at the beginning of this sermon starter, the Easter season is not just about some future salvation. The physicality of Jesus resurrection (emphasized in this passage by the disciples’—and Thomas’!—seeing and touching, and in next week’s Gospel by Jesus sharing a meal) is an affirmation of the physical today. God’s redemptive work includes the physical. The Easter event calls us to work with and on behalf of those who are hungry. This is living into the resurrection.

A final connection to hunger is to be made in Thomas’ response to disciples’ report about Jesus. Thomas often gets vilified in this passage—he becomes “doubting Thomas”—for not believing on the basis of the reports from other the disciples. Given their track record, I’m not sure I would have believed either! More importantly, Thomas is held to a higher standard than that of the disciples. They see and believe, why would he not have that privilege as well? The real hunger connection, though, is in the value of experience. Jesus is right to point out how difficult it is to believe without seeing. In the context of hunger and poverty, how engaged are we in the lives of those who are vulnerable? How often do we speak with people who live in poverty and hear their stories, their concerns? When do we see their scars and touch those deep wounds? It is indeed hard to believe without seeing. What can we do this week to better see and understand those who are marginalized and vulnerable?

Mahatma Gandhi famously said, “There are people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” When celebrate the Eucharist we remember God’s gracious and abundant provision. We gather around the table and our eyes are opened to recognize God’s way as revealed in Jesus. We take the bread and see God and understand that we when are fed we are also sent forth to feed.