Lectionary Notes: Jan 26, 2025

tl;dr: This week includes themes of communal reflection and unity.

I've been invited to join a group spanning a few churches (a Unitarian, a United, and my Mennonite) to share reactions to the lectionary text for the week. Here are my notes going into the first week, January 26, 2025, the third Sunday after Epiphany.

The Texts

Here are the texts.

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10

The Law needed interpretation. It is not something that is immediately obvious. It takes some community coming together to interpret it together and figure out what it means in a new context. That's an appropriate idea for this first week coming together with this new group.

And this communal interpretation of the Law was perhaps especially necessary as they started to rebuild their society after Exile. They didn't have a lot of momentum of tradition to fall back on. That's interesting to think about as our culture has less of a default shared understanding of many of the biblical stories or other aspects of tradition. We had a Christian History university prof at our church recently, and one of the things he said is that he can no longer assume students know even general ideas like "who was Jesus".

Psalm 19

The Law is good and beneficial, bringing joy and wisdom. This reminds me of the 1 Timothy 3:16 text. That comes up fairly often in evangelical circles, but I think they're largely missing the point. The author there concludes that Scripture is useful. Before we can get into any big theological labels like inerrancy or infallibility, sometimes we need the simpler starting point: it is useful, it has value. It's not the only thing that has value. The psalm notably starts with how nature itself also proclaims God. But it does have value.

"Hidden faults" also jumped out at me. Sometimes we can't see how we are hurting ourselves or others, and we need some outside source to help us see. Maybe that's Scripture, or another source of written wisdom. Maybe that's the church, or some other person. Maybe it's a nudging of the Holy Spirit in prayer.

1 Corinthians 12:12-31a

This is certainly another appropriate text for the first week doing a group with multiple churches, as it reminds us of the need for many parts of the body.

One question: how much does this mean that each local community needs a lot of diversity within itself, vs those communities needing to keep connected to other communities and those connections needing to be diverse?

The big question, though: where is the balance for those who claim to be part of the Christian tradition but are explicitly rejecting any teaching of Jesus? I'm thinking of white nationalists who will say they are acting for Christianity and then directly say that Jesus was wrong or too woke or whatever other buzzword they're using now to dismiss it. I'm not talking about people who try and fail sometimes, but those who are actively opposed while still claiming the label as a weapon against others. I had a couple sermons on that recently, so I'm not going to go too deep down that rabbit hole again, but I think it's the single most defining tension for the church at this moment.

Another question that you need to be able to ask more within your own specific communities: if one member suffers, we all suffer? Really? How often do we feel like that in our churches, in our very individualistic society? It can be easy for one member to suffer in silence while everyone else goes on their way.

Luke 4:14-21

That big question from Corinthians leads into the Luke text. Jesus chose to start his public ministry by declaring liberation to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and declaring a Jubilee year which is when all debts are wiped out and economic equality is restored. He notably stops the Isaiah reading, from chapter 61, right before it promises "the day of vengeance of our God," which might be why in the next part of the story people got mad at him and tried to kill him. As people under the boot of the Roman Empire, they were probably pretty happy with the liberation parts, but then Jesus stops before promising vengeance on those Romans. Maybe more on that next week.