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.

Acts 17:22-31
Psalm 66:8-20 (8)
1 Peter 3:13-22

This week’s lesson from 1 Peter makes a rather straightforward point: it is better to suffer for doing good things than for doing wrong. We can apply that same logic to the church’s response to the great social problems facing the world. The church can be known for many things, why not for bringing life and hope to a hurting world? As this week’s Gospel tells us, we have been given a helper, one who will empower us to be God’s hands and feet.

In this high priestly prayer, Jesus prays that his followers may all be one. This of course has a particular value to the current context of the ELCA. A question worth asking is towards what we will be unified. As has been asserted many times in the these sermon starters, the aim in Jesus’ prayer is that our unity will direct others to God. How often do we unify in ways that do not point others to God? What would it look like for God’s people to be unified in their voice with and on behalf of those who are hungry? Would not that witness be a clear pointer to God?

The good news, as is spelled out in this week’s lesson from Acts (and underscored many times through the readings in this Easter season), is that God is working to empower us to be effective witnesses. Are we open to God’s working?