Lectionary Musings from the Church Anew Blog: September 28 and October 5
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.
September 28, 2025
Paired: Amos 6:1a, 4-7
Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann, “Due Cause For ‘Alas’”
This combination of factors is an expression of “US imperial power” that is characteristically on the side of the predators and indifferent to the needs and requirements of the peasant population. The unchecked greed, moreover, gives rise to unsustainable luxury and self-indulgence that is everywhere on exhibit among the ownership class as an echo of the old phrasing “ease in Zion” (Amos 6:1-6).
Paired: Psalm 146
Rev. Dr. Brent Strawn, “‘Religion’ and ‘Politics’ in Psalm 146”
The psalmist says it is God who does these things and no other. Certainly not leaders. Don’t trust them. They execute justice for the oppressed, at best, only occasionally. Food for the hungry? Maybe. Pardon for prisoners? Well, usually only if it is politically expedient. Care for immigrants and the destitute? Here, as in all of the other categories, their track record is decidedly mixed. And that is true of both sides of the aisle and of all human leaders, elected or otherwise. It’s better not to trust in them. It’s better not to praise them. It’s better not to buy into their plans, which are as finite as they are, nor trust in their speeches, which are as fragile as their lungs. Both are just one heartbeat from ending. Forever.
Narrative Lectionary: Exodus 2:23-25; 3:1-15; 4:10-17
Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann, “Who Knows?”
The epistemological revolution performed in the Bible is rooted in nothing less than the character of YHWH, an active agent surely “on top,” but willing, able, and ready to live life “from below” along with those who receive from YHWH special attention and advocacy. That revolution from “an epistemology of privilege” to “an epistemology of suffering” is dramatically articulated at the outset of the Exodus narrative.
Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann, “Two Kinds of Truth”
At the very outset, we get these “two kinds of truth” in the Exodus narrative. … Eventually they had to run the risk of departure from Pharaoh in order to honor the unbearable truth of their bodies. It is recurringly the case that Pharaoh and his company— politicians, charlatans, corrupt lawyers—did not and could not know that the pain of slave bodies was a truth with which they had to reckon. The contest of “two kinds of truth,” moreover, is kicked upstairs, so that the Egyptian gods are patrons of quantity, whereas YHWH, the covenantal God summoned to the slave camp by bodily pain, is attentive to another truth: “God heard, God remembered, God looked, God took notice” (Exodus 2:24-25). This is the God who will not avert eyes away from bodily truth.
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.
