Lectionary Musings from the Church Anew Blog: August 31 and September 7
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.
August 31, 2025
Paired Psalm: Psalm 112
Walter Brueggemann, “Not Numbed Inside”
Compassion is a defining mark of God’s people in the world, a community fully committed to the practice of empathy, capable of being “moved” in response to the pain and need of the world. This people is not unlike this God!
Epistle: Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Nadia Bolz-Weber, “The Sacred Act of Having No Idea What We Are Doing”
Maybe the entertaining of disguised angels is a spiritual dialectic in which we too do know when we are bringing someone else’s angel. I think we are perhaps at our most angelic, not when we are convinced of our goodness, but when we are entirely ignorant of it.
Walter Brueggemann, “The Strangeness of the Stranger”
Most important is the admonition of Hebrews 13: Let mutual love (philadelphia; “love of brother”) continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers (philoxenias), for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it (vv.1-2). Of most interest is the fact that “mutual love” (philadelphia) and “hospitality to strangers” (philoxenias) occur together, exactly an antithesis to xenophobia!
Narrative Lectionary: Revelation 21:1-6; 22:1-5
Walter Brueggemann, “On the Unrest In Our Cities”
The new city that will displace the old failed city is a gift from God. It will come “out of heaven from God” (Revelation 21:2). But the new city is not only a gift. It is also a task assigned by God. We have to do the work.
September 7, 2025
Semicontinuous: Jeremiah 18:1-11
Walter Brueggemann, “A Preacher’s Dilemma: Verse 12?”
But of course, the hard part of all of this is the extent to which Christian preaching should sound “judgment” upon a society that is willfully arraigned against God’s will for mercy, justice, and peace. Such declaration of divine judgment needs to be done reluctantly and soberly, so that it is not simply the anger of the preacher. But such truth-telling is essential to our honest rendering of our world before God. Without such an utterance the church may become “the happiest place in town” that simply colludes in the denial that permeates society. Soon or late the congregation must face the reality that our socio-political economic life is a contradiction of the purposes of God.
Walter Brueggemann, “Unshakeable Systems?!?”
Our pastor, on that Sunday, let this tormented reasoning of Jeremiah make contact with the systemic racism in our society. One might indeed judge that systemic racism is an “unshakeable system” among us that evokes divine judgment. But the prophet allows that such divine judgment might not pertain if the community “turns” from its racism. Conversely, if God does good to a society, but it persists in racism, then that positive divine resolve will 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, “Destiny Not Fate”
In the covenantal-prophetic-apostolic tradition, ministry is the process of permitting members of the body to accept agency for themselves and for their neighbors. In that world, there is no cause — and no excuse! — for abdication or resignation. In the world of the gospel, we are not fated like “Medes and Persians.” We are, rather, as the beloved of God, destined toward wellbeing. We need only choose that wellbeing in active, daring, wise ways. That is how we may live and prosper in our present “land of promise” (see Deuteronomy 30:20).
Walter Brueggemann, “Two Farmers… Two Ways”
The term “Canaanite” in this usage is not at all an ethnic term, but refers to socioeconomic practices in which all of life is reduced to commodity that can be used to exhaustion, accumulated without end, and that readily turns neighbors into greedy, fearful competitors. … The reason that this declaration is so urgent is that the “Canaanite” alternative appears to offer a life of ease, comfort, and security, when in fact it is a way of the destruction of self, neighbor, community, and eventually of creation.
