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!

The prophet sees the dire condition of the people, under threat from a foreign power, and cries out to God for intervention. The first chapter focuses on both the absence of God’s help and the questionable fate of the righteous. The cause of the lament is political instability but it also fits contemporary contexts where hunger, poverty or disease threatens.

The prophet takes watch— attentively expecting God will answer. Similarly, our faith communities are called to take watch, naming threats that besiege and bringing these complaints before God. Habakkuk receives a bit of hope, not in terms of immediate relief, but one that shows God has not forgotten the afflicted—“the righteous live by their faith.” This is living with a sense of trust that God has acted on our behalf. If we are called to take watch, we are also called to cultivate a sense of trust in God in our communities.

As this psalm reminds us, some aspect of trust involves waiting. The first verse reassures those who would be troubled by the wicked. Their temporariness, as the psalmist argues, is like fading grass. This imagery may find some resonance for those who envision active oppressors, but it also assures us that oppressive situations will not last. Hunger and poverty also are like fading grass. This trust calls us to commit our ways to the Lord and wait patiently for God (37:5-6). It is a living trust, which enables us to anticipate God’s action and deliverance, working as though it is a promised future meeting us in the present.

If the imagery Jesus uses to explain the power of faith invokes a sense of hopefulness, the analogy of the slave seems to muddle the message. The question about inviting the slave to dinner is posed rhetorically, with the answer seemingly obvious— no one would do that. But, is it not equally absurd that someone would host a dinner and invite the poor, blind, and outcast (Luke 14:21-24) or that a father would have a party for a wasteful son (Luke 15:22-23)? In his parables Luke consistently portrays Jesus as one who regularly subverts conventional thinking and social norms of the day, not merely to encourage non-conformity, but to announce God’s kingdom.

By posing these questions, Jesus could be confronting our social conventions directly. It is common sense for a slave to serve the master first, and common sense that something which should be done anyway does not merit a word of thanks. To suggest otherwise is as absurd as asking a tree to jump in the sea. But to such absurdity the life of faith calls us. So we are free to invite the poor and outcast to dinner. We are free to invite the slave to the table with us and we are free to offer thanks to others for doing what otherwise seems like duty.

Maybe this is too much to assume from these rhetorical questions. And maybe it’s just a coincidence that in the story following we find a man, recently healed, thanking Jesus. Instead of telling the man that he was just doing his duty Jesus tells him his faith has made him well. We can imagine that Jesus’ response to the disciples who say “increase our faith” is something like “put your faith to work.”