Every week, we’ll supply 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’re with a contemporary, daring, and trustworthy witness.
September 28, 2025
Paired: Amos 6:1a, 4-7
Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann, “Due Trigger For ‘Alas’”
This mix of things is an expression of “US imperial energy” that’s characteristically on the aspect of the predators and detached to the wants and necessities of the peasant inhabitants. The unchecked greed, furthermore, offers rise to unsustainable luxurious and self-indulgence that’s in all places on exhibit among the many possession class as an echo of the previous phrasing “ease in Zion” (Amos 6:1-6).
Paired: Psalm 146
Rev. Dr. Brent Strawn, “‘Faith’ and ‘Politics’ in Psalm 146”
The psalmist says it’s God who does this stuff and no different. Definitely not leaders. Don’t belief them. They execute justice for the oppressed, at finest, solely often. Meals for the hungry? Possibly. Pardon for prisoners? Effectively, often solely whether it is politically expedient. Look after immigrants and the destitute? Right here, as in the entire different classes, their observe document is decidedly blended. And that’s true of each side of the aisle and of all human leaders, elected or in any other case. It’s higher to not belief in them. It’s higher to not reward them. It’s higher to not purchase into their plans, that are as finite as they’re, nor belief of their speeches, that are as fragile as their lungs. Each are only one heartbeat from ending. Eternally.
Narrative Lectionary: Exodus 2:23-25; 3:1-15; 4:10-17
Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann, “Who Is aware of?”
The epistemological revolution carried out within the Bible is rooted in nothing lower than the character of YHWH, an lively agent absolutely “on prime,” however keen, ready, and able to stay life “from under” together with those that obtain from YHWH particular consideration and advocacy. That revolution from “an epistemology of privilege” to “an epistemology of struggling” is dramatically articulated on the outset of the Exodus narrative.
Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann, “Two Sorts of Fact”
On the very outset, we get these “two sorts of fact” within the Exodus narrative. … Ultimately they needed to run the chance of departure from Pharaoh as a way to honor the insufferable fact of their our bodies. It’s recurringly the case that Pharaoh and his firm— politicians, charlatans, corrupt legal professionals—didn’t and couldn’t know that the ache of slave our bodies was a fact with which they needed to reckon. The competition of “two sorts of fact,” furthermore, is kicked upstairs, in order that the Egyptian gods are patrons of amount, whereas YHWH, the covenantal God summoned to the slave camp by bodily ache, is attentive to a different fact: “God heard, God remembered, God regarded, God took discover” (Exodus 2:24-25). That is the God who won’t avert eyes away from bodily fact.
October 5, 2025
Semicontinuous: Lamentations 1:1-6, 3:19-26
Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann, “The Sluggish Pace of Consolation?”
My studying … received me to fascinated by a society that has given up its capability for empathy and compassion as a result of it has opted for scale and velocity. Thus is occurred to me that historic Israel, in its painful harmful displacement within the sixth century BCE exile discovered itself in simply such a world, one devoid of empathy and compassion. That world didn’t have the Web, nevertheless it had its personal practices of velocity and scale that served a like function.
Semicontinuous: Psalm 147
Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann, “The Discomforting Present of Newness”
In his exceptional, necessary guide, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Current Historical past (2020), Kurt Andersen has traced the planning of a political occasion to take over the federal government. Close to the top of his guide, Andersen lists eight claims within the playbook that he believes generate their motion. … The second declare is perception in our excellent legendary yesteryear. This declare is the want or hope to flee a gift social actuality into an imagined previous that was discovered to be extra congenial and fewer demanding. Such an train in nostalgia is very selective concerning the previous, with a capability to neglect or deny the various liabilities of that previous for the sake of a faux world. On the earth of historic Israel, the act of escapist nostalgia is on exhibit in Psalm 137.
Gospel: Luke 17:5-10
