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!

“both men and women and all who could hear with understanding.” This chance to hear the Word of God after so many years in exile was so important that everyone felt compelled to hear it, to stand in awe and tears as God’s Word was read, and then to respond, “Amen. Amen.” No one was turned away, or was too insignificant, incompetent or unworthy. Each finds a new Identity in God’s Word. From Israel’s new perspective, “No other population on earth has such a God as this One who provides written instruction for life.”

The way to celebrate such a holy day, a day sanctified by the Lord, is to “Go and feast, eat and drink in celebration, and invite those who have nothing to prepare to join you in the festivity.” “For your strength finds its source in the Lord’s joy.”

Walter Brueggemann writes, “Creation is celebrated as a well-ordered world that depends solely upon God’s power, faithfulness, and graciousness (vv 1-6). Torah is Israel’s way to respond to and fully honor God’s well-oriented world (vv 7-14).” To those who feel like the world is crushing them or is conspiring against them, here is God’s declaration of vision and purpose that states the world is not supposed to be that way, and an invitation to those more blessed to re-orient the world through acts of justice to take part in the coming restoration of God’s order that will be complete one day. How do the refugees in Sudan or Syria experience the world? What does God’s teaching ask of us?

We are ALL integrated into One, into Christ’s Body. Each part is different, yet similar, each significant. Each one of us has dignity and honor because we are together the Body of Christ, each part dependent on the others. Can you walk past someone sitting on the side of the street and not have compassion? As one part of Christ’s Body, won’t you do all you can to change a system that suppresses any other?

Of all Jesus’ words recorded by the Gospel-writers, these most clearly characterize his ministry and reason to be with us. This promise of God verbalized by Isaiah describes God’s most fervent desire for our world, a desire to restore hope and wholeness to all in need. The most revolutionary statement Jesus makes is to declare himself to be the embodiment of God’s promise. “Today this is fulfilled.” To be followed later with, “It is finished.” Our most subversive act in the face of the power of evil and injustice in our world is to pray, “Thy Kingdom Come. Today would be good.”