Lectionary Musings from the Church Anew Blog: October 5 and 12
Each week, we’ll offer a curated selection of blog posts that speak to the upcoming lectionary texts to help spark your imagination and serve as a thought partner for you. We hope these musings meet you right where you are with a fresh, bold, and faithful witness.
October 5, 2025
Semicontinuous: Lamentations 1:1-6, 3:19-26
Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann, “The Slow Speed of Comfort?”
My reading … got me to thinking about a society that has given up its capacity for empathy and compassion because it has opted for scale and speed. Thus is occurred to me that ancient Israel, in its painful destructive displacement in the sixth century BCE exile found itself in just such a world, one devoid of empathy and compassion. That world did not have the Internet, but it had its own practices of speed and scale that served a like purpose.
Semicontinuous: Psalm 147
Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann, “The Discomforting Gift of Newness”
In his remarkable, important book, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History (2020), Kurt Andersen has traced the planning of a political party to take over the government. Near the end of his book, Andersen lists eight claims in the playbook that he believes generate their action. … The second claim is belief in our perfect mythical yesteryear. This claim is the wish or hope to escape a present social reality into an imagined past that was found to be more congenial and less demanding. Such an exercise in nostalgia is highly selective about the past, with a capacity to forget or deny the many liabilities of that past for the sake of a pretend world. In the world of ancient Israel, the act of escapist nostalgia is on exhibit in Psalm 137.
Gospel: Luke 17:5-10
Rev. Erin Raffety, “The $4000 Effect”
But in order to continue to thrive, we know even more fully now that we cannot play small with all that God has given us. How will your church truly trust God with your uncertain future? How will your church choose to invest in not what is known but what is possible? How will your church choose thriving even when you know not what it is or where it will lead?
Narrative Lectionary: Exodus 16:1-18
Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann, “Bread Shared With All The Eaters”
Along with the prospect of bread, they also were promised that they would see “the glory of the Lord” (16:7). What a surprise that fit none of their expectations: God’s glory in the wilderness! They had assumed that God’s glory, along with pomp and circumstance, was all back in the land of Pharaoh. They had seen God’s glory in connection with unequal splendor and wealth. But now they learned a radical new dimension of the God of the Exodus. It turns out that the natural habitat of God is not in Pharaoh’s court, but in the wilderness.
October 12, 2025
Paired: 2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c
Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann, “Healing…without Money, without Price”
While both Gehazi, the servant boy, and Naaman, the Syrian general, assume health care is linked to money, Elisha insists otherwise. He is a champion of free health care! Now I am quick to recognize that it is a very long stretch from this ancient narrative of Elisha to our current health care crisis. The narrative nonetheless is enough to suggest that we can easily trace out two practices of health care, just as we have heretofore seen two practices of bread (food). We have previously seen that there is the “bread of heaven” freely given, bread for all of God’s creatures, and bread wrought through market forces. …We can readily see that there are two notions of health care delivery; one is the free offer of transformative care, the other is a calculating market-driven health care that is propelled by Homo oeconomicus and is designed for profit.
Narrative Lectionary: 1 Samuel 3:1-21
Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann, “I Bet On You!”
Eli bet on Samuel. He did all the prep work with the boy in order that he could be responsive to his vocation. In the end, Eli does not flinch from the hard words given to Samuel concerning his house (3:18). Thus day by day in the sanctuary Eli had nurtured and guided Samuel to be ready for this moment that would ignite his life. It is impossible to imagine the boy coming to his vocation without the good, reliable bet of Eli.
