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 companion for you. We hope these musings meet you proper the place you might be with a recent, daring, and devoted witness.
September 7, 2025
Semicontinuous: Jeremiah 18:1-11
Walter Brueggemann, “A Preacher’s Dilemma: Verse 12?”
However in fact, the exhausting a part of all of that is the extent to which Christian preaching ought to sound “judgment” upon a society that’s willfully arraigned in opposition to God’s will for mercy, justice, and peace. Such declaration of divine judgment must be finished reluctantly and soberly, in order that it isn’t merely the anger of the preacher. However such truth-telling is important to our trustworthy rendering of our world earlier than God. With out such an utterance the church might change into “the happiest place on the town” that merely colludes within the denial that permeates society. Quickly or late the congregation should face the truth that our socio-political financial life is a contradiction of the needs of God.
Walter Brueggemann, “Unshakeable Techniques?!?”
Our pastor, on that Sunday, let this tormented reasoning of Jeremiah make contact with the systemic racism in our society. One may certainly choose that systemic racism is an “unshakeable system” amongst us that evokes divine judgment. However the prophet permits that such divine judgment won’t pertain if the group “turns” from its racism. Conversely, if God does good to a society, nevertheless it persists in racism, then that optimistic divine resolve might be altered into devastating judgment.
[Editor’s note: There were plenty of worries in congregational ministry keeping me up at night, but preaching in front of Walter Brueggemann, Sunday after Sunday, was thankfully never one of them!]
Paired: Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Walter Brueggemann, “Future Not Destiny”
Within the covenantal-prophetic-apostolic custom, ministry is the method of allowing members of the physique to just accept company for themselves and for his or her neighbors. In that world, there isn’t any trigger — and no excuse! — for abdication or resignation. On this planet of the gospel, we aren’t fated like “Medes and Persians.” We’re, relatively, because the beloved of God, destined towards wellbeing. We want solely select that wellbeing in energetic, daring, sensible methods. That’s how we might reside and prosper in our current “land of promise” (see Deuteronomy 30:20).
Walter Brueggemann, “Two Farmers… Two Methods”
The time period “Canaanite” on this utilization is under no circumstances an ethnic time period, however refers to socioeconomic practices during which all of life is lowered to commodity that can be utilized to exhaustion, collected with out finish, and that readily turns neighbors into grasping, fearful opponents. … The explanation that this declaration is so pressing is that the “Canaanite” various seems to supply a lifetime of ease, consolation, and safety, when in reality it’s a method of the destruction of self, neighbor, group, and finally of creation.
