Hunger for the Word: Lectionary Reflections on Food and Justice-Year B

Book Overview

We have all experienced hunger, whether it's a need for spiritual guidance or physical nutrition. Our hunger for God's Word can benefit those needing material sustenance. God's Word calls us to nourish the hungry and poor, just as it nourishes our faith and sustains us in our struggle for justice.

Hunger for the Word explores the Lectionary with a focus on anti-hunger advocacy, social activism, and political issues affecting marginalized people. Using insights, images, and stories from pastors, professors, and laity active in anti-hunger campaigns, this ecumenical book offers devotional connections to inequality issues, as well as themes to help in our struggle to understand and eliminate injustice. Hunger for the Word, edited by Larry Hollar of Bread for the World, brings concern for hunger and fairness into our daily religious life.

With weekly sermon/homily reflections, Hunger for the Word is an invaluable resource for pastors, liturgical ministers, and those interested in justice-oriented Bible study and spiritual growth. Also includes suggestions for musical worship, and ideas for children's sermons to help spread God's Word of activism, compassion, and integrity throughout the congregation.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814630081
• ISBN13: 9780814630082
• Release Date: May 2005
• Publisher: Liturgical Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Sunday Readings through Lens of Justice

This volume is the third in a series edited by Hollar, a Presbyterian elder and senior regional organizer with Bread for the World (BFW). The series was developed to help BFW members and others address hunger and justice from the pulpit, make these issues understandable to children during worship, stimulate dialogue about God's concern for the hungry, and establish a solid groundwork for advocacy. The 21 authors took to heart Hollar's suggestions to "write in a way that stimulates and evokes rather than instructs and defines." Authors were encouraged to find links to justice and hunger in whatever readings they were assigned, "consistent with the demand never to twist Scripture's word to fit their own agendas." They met the challenge, even in passages with no obvious tie-in. As for the readings that lend directly to reflection on justice, the insights can go beyond the commonplace. For example, an outside-the-box view is applied to the Good Samaritan story (Luke 10:25-37). Instead of asking whether he resembles the Samaritan, the Levite, or the priest, Hollar takes the role of the innkeeper. That perspective raises some modern questions related to public safety, rising crime rates, and the underlying reasons for some criminal acts. "Maybe they rob others because, heartbroken at their poverty, they can't stand to deny their children the food of life. Suddenly we see the complexity in a seemingly straightforward story." Each of the entries, which usually address more than one of the assigned readings, has a power of its own, and the accompanying "children's time" and musical suggestions are an extra bonus.