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.
Sunday, November 1, 2026 – All Saints’ Day
All Saints’ Day
Pastor Peter Wallace, “Unlikely Saints”
Who are your saints? Who comes to your heart and mind on All Saints Sunday? All Saints Sunday gives us a very personal way to talk about the present and future by talking about the past. Who are we? Who do we want to be? Those saints from our past give us a way to talk about where we are and where we are headed.
Old Testament (replaced with New Testament reading for this feast day): Revelation 7:9-17
Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann, “A Music-Making Counter-Community”
The phrase “peoples, languages and nations” recognizes the significant variations in humanity in all its differentiations, while at the same time its elemental commonality. All have in common the dread rule of Rome. All have in common the hope for something better than the rule of Rome. All belong inescapably to the rule of the Holy One who will, soon or late, ever again, override the humanity-suffocating rule of Rome. We can thus imagine a great company of vulnerable humanity coming to terms with the cosmic combat between Rome and the God bodied in the Lamb.
Gospel: Matthew 5:1-12
Dr. Ulysses Burley III, “Law and Morals”
The Beatitudes suggest that whatever brings wholeness, transformation, and healing to communities is in-and-of-itself a form of resistance against that which seeks to rob us of our livelihood.
Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann, “Speaking Alternatively”
We have two renderings that serve two different purposes in two different interpretations. Whereas Luke is preoccupied with economic matters, Matthew is focused on Judaism that had become no more than pro forma exercise of religious obligation. We must simply permit the two readings to have their say, and not give either one priority over the other.
Dr. Raj Nadella, “The Sower and the Seed and Black Lives Matter”
The blessed in Matthew are not those who are fortunate enough to fall on good soil, benefit from favorable structures, and flourish. In the Beatitudes (5:3-11), Jesus proclaims blessed are the ones who mourn, the meek, the marginalized, and the persecuted.
The blessed in Matthew are precisely those who fall by the wayside, on rocky soil, and are grasping for life.
In most Beatitudes, the agency in the second half is in the passive voice (they will be comforted, they will be fed, they will be shown mercy, etc). The passive voice leaves the agency open-ended and calls for human agency—the church and community—in addition to divine agency.
Narrative Lectionary: 1 Kings 3:4-9 [10-15] 16-28
Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann, “It’s the Economy, Stupid”
It is likely that King Solomon is the connecting link between the memory of Pharaoh and the later oppressive king in Jerusalem (see I Kings 3:1, 7:8, 9:24, 11:1). This sequence from Pharaoh to Solomon to Jehoiakim tells the tale of ruthless exploitative money and power exercised at the expense of vulnerable workers.
Sunday, November 8, 2026 – Proper 27 (32)
Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann, may he rest in peace, gifted us with a post-election reflection in 2020 when the same texts were set for the day:
“Because I write this prior to the election, I do not know the outcome. No doubt some of us will be soaringly elated and some of us will be deeply chagrined. The pastoral task on this Sunday is to call the faithful away from either elation or chagrin back to the more elemental realities of our faith.”
Narrative Lectionary: 2 Kings 5:1-15a
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.
