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!

The Gospel of Mark gradually reveals who Jesus is and what Jesus is about. In the Gospel there are three scenes that openly state that Jesus is God’s son. (The demons throughout the Gospel know this, but Jesus repeatedly commands them not to speak.) The first scene is Jesus’ baptism (Mark 1:9-11), wherein God apparently speaks to Jesus alone: “You are my son, the beloved, with you I am well pleased.” The last scene is at Jesus’ crucifixion, and it is a Roman soldier who recognizes in Jesus’ death that Jesus is God’s son and announces for all to hear, “Truly this man was God’s son!” (Mark 15:33-39). In this week’s text, Jesus is partially revealed to his closest followers as God’s son. The present revelation takes place in the central teaching portion of Mark’s Gospel, where Jesus describes what it means to be the messiah (he will be rejected and ultimately killed). The disciples consistently fail to understand (note in the present passage their awkward response to the transfiguration).

In the context of hunger, the way in which Jesus is revealed to be God’s son has two important tie-ins. First, Jesus is seen as God’s son not in glory but in humility (the early Christian hymn found in Philippians 2:1-10 describes this well). How often is Jesus in our midst in humble ways? Do we fail to see him because we are seeking a glorious and powerful king? How might God be revealed in those who are poor and marginalized? Second, Jesus models for us how we are to be in the world. Jesus’ relationship to God is most clearly visible (according to Mark) when Jesus self sacrifices for the good of others. How might God be calling us today to give of ourselves?

We begin our journey through Lent with a reminder of Jesus’ baptism. As 1 Peter tells us, the waters of baptism are prefigured by the story of Noah in the ark. In antiquity, the waters were a symbol of chaos and death. God saved Noah from chaos, and in our symbolic dying in the chaos we are raised to new life. This Sunday (as in previous Sundays through Epiphany) invites reflection on our baptism.

X Luther saw baptism as a daily practice of dying to the old ways of being and rising up “to live before God in righteousness and purity forever.” The term “righteousness” carries for many of us a pietistic connotation—to be “righteous” is a personal state or condition of purity. In both Hebrew (tsadekah) and Greek (dikaiosunê), however, the term also carries a relational sense—to be in right relationship. In fact, the words and their cognates in both languages can be just as comfortably translated as “justice” (and they often are in our Bibles, depending on the context). If we reclaim this biblical sense “righteousness,” in the context of baptism, we die to unjust, wrong relationships and are raised “to live before God in justice and right relationships.” What might this look like in our day to day interactions with neighbors near and far?

X In the Baptismal covenant and the Affirmation of Baptism outlined in ELW we make commitments to “care for others and the world that God made” and to “work for justice and peace” (pp. 228; 236). The profession of faith (p. 235) includes a renunciation of the “forces that defy God” and the “powers of the world that rebel against God.” We can reasonably include greed, strife, and self-interest in those forces and powers that defy God and leave God’s people impoverished, hungry, and ill. In our baptism we commit ourselves to work with God in the bringing of God’s kingdom.

The texts this Sunday also invite reflection on the incredible value of water. Helpful stories, facts, and exercises on water are available at www.elca.org/hunger/water. The new Water Toolkit contains other facts and educational opportunities. It is available at www.elca.org/hunger/toolkits or by request to [log in to unmask].