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!

Futility. In perhaps the most accessible book of the Bible, “the Teacher” makes the argument that there is no self-evident meaning in human experience. All the deeds done under the sun don’t coalesce into some discernible grand plan or vision. So how do we sort out this “unhappy business” that God has left us with? First of all, it is interesting that this conclusion doesn’t lead the author to abandon a faith conviction (though post-Enlightenment probably makes such a thing a more likely option). Secondly, this passage seems far removed from the season-appointing activity that God provides (Ecclesiastes 3). However, seeing the Creator at work in our contexts is one of the ways this unhappy business gets sorted out. Injustices, poverty and hunger are not conclusive of a meaningless existence, but offer the opportunity to claim the time as God’s- and in that time there is new opportunity.

This psalm takes a page from the Wisdom tradition of Hebrew literature and cautions against the trust in wealth. It may be easy to think that only the wealthy are on the receiving end of this address, but it does invite us to reflect on how we understand wealth and whether there are any ways we might be considered wealthy. How do such conversations influence how we think of stewardship?

The second verse of this passage sounds like an affirmation of dualism where the “things above” are pure, spiritual and good and the “things that are on the earth” are corrupt and merely material. And it is to the latter that we have “died.” But the passage goes on to identify what is “earthly,” and it is not the physical life, but instead certain behaviors which would be destructive to community life. Greed is singled out among these as “idolatry.” It is interesting that greed is identified as being destructive to community life and called out, but in our contexts we would probably consider it an individual’s choice and problem. If greed is to be put to death, generosity, kindness, or something of the like must take its place and should be considered part of this life from above that we have been given in Christ.

It is easy to imagine (albeit ahistorical) that something like the story Jesus tells of the rich man with the abundant harvest that he will not enjoy is what “the teacher” had in mind in Ecclesiastes when he thought of the vanities of life. Jesus cautions against accumulating an abundance of possessions and challenges his audience to think about how they view wealth. Considering the initial request that comes to Jesus, he chooses to address the motivation for the brothers’ argument. He isn’t saying the possessions are bad, but that the desire to accumulate them reveals more about us and how we see God. How do we think about giving toward God? Often giving to God has been taken to mean giving tithes and offerings at church, but how else might we think about “being rich toward God” in a way that counters our desire to accumulate things for ourselves?