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!

Over the next few weeks in the lectionary, the Gospel will highlight Jesus’ healing and teaching. Jesus’ ministry healed the whole person. Jesus brought both spiritual and physical health. Sometimes we focus on one at the expense of the other (you know where your congregation’s leading edges may be, but in my experience, the spiritual is often emphasized over the physical). Health and hunger are interrelated—someone who is hungry is more susceptible to disease and someone who is sick needs more calories to be healthy. As we strive to emulate Jesus, empowered by his grace, may we too be agents of healing for the whole person.

Throughout Jesus' life and ministry he brought health and healing to the whole person. In 2011 the ELCA Churchwide Assembly voted to join the global community in a concerted effort to contain malaria by 2015. In this exciting moment we are our working with and on behalf of our companions to continue in Jesus' way of bringing health and wholeness. Just as Jesus took Peter's mother-in-law by the hand and healed her of her fever (which is also the main symptom of malaria) we too can walk hand in hand with our brothers and sisters in Africa and see God's healing power at work again.

When this Gospel is read in light of the text from Isaiah, we are reminded that the healing work is God’s. Empowered by the Holy Spirit, we have the privilege participating with God in healing and redemptive acts.