Every week, we’ll provide a curated number of weblog posts that talk to the upcoming lectionary texts to assist spark your creativeness and function a thought associate for you. We hope these musings meet you proper the place you might be with a contemporary, daring, and devoted witness.
August 24, 2025
Paired Psalm: Psalm 103:1-8
Walter Brueggemann, “Therapeutic…with out Cash, with out Value (Evil Geniuses Sequence)”
After all the church … is aware of that God’s transformative work is on the similar time human transformative work. It’s devoted human duty to be in regards to the activity, because the Psalm says, of forgiveness, therapeutic, redemption, crowning, and satisfying.
Epistle: Hebrews 12:18-29
Walter Brueggemann, “Written Down, Written Up”
The verb is utilized in these three very completely different genres of literature; all provide an “enrollment” that’s various to being “registered” by Caesar. All three usages attraction to the verb apographo, an invite to a radical selection. One could be “written down” in both e-book, however not in each. … Belatedly, in our present sociopolitical atmosphere of violence, the both/or of those various “writing down” is far clearer to me and extra typically. The group of the devoted may certainly be on discover about being “written down” or being “written up.”
Gospel: Luke 13:10-17
Dr. Mothy Varkey, “Break the Rituals, Break the Chain”
For Jesus, opposite to that of the non secular leaders who noticed the girl’s ‘crippled status-quo’ as ‘regular’, it isn’t ‘regular’ to be (or to stay) ‘bent-over’ on the sabbath.
[Editor’s note: Dr. Varkey’s essay was published in 2020, which is reflected in his final paragraph regarding World Health Organization protocols around COVID-19. While many of the mitigation practices observed in 2020 have been left behind as COVID has become endemic, both the care for the neighbor reflected in those practices as well as the general invitation to liberate ourselves and others from normalized practices remains pertinent.]
August 31, 2025
Paired Psalm: Psalm 112
Walter Brueggemann, “Not Numbed Inside”
Compassion is a defining mark of God’s folks on the planet, a group totally dedicated to the follow of empathy, able to being “moved” in response to the ache and want of the world. This folks isn’t not like this God!
Epistle: Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Nadia Bolz-Weber, “The Sacred Act of Having No Concept What We Are Doing”
Possibly the entertaining of disguised angels is a non secular dialectic during which we too do know once we are bringing another person’s angel. I believe we’re maybe at our most angelic, not once we are satisfied of our goodness, however once we are fully unaware of it.
