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11/16/2014

Textweek ATLAS links December 14, 2014 Advent 3B

Studying lectionary texts? Here are some starting places for study at ATLA this week. If you are the graduate of an accredited U.S. theological school, you may have free access to these articles through your school. Check ATLAS access options. You can find full lists of ATLAS recommended articles for this week at The Text This Week's page for this week's texts:

http://www.textweek.com/yearb/adventb3.htm

Advent 3B
December 14, 2014

 Barnes, M. Craig, "The Spirit of the Lord Is Upon Me: A Meditation on Isaiah 61," Calvin Theological Journal, 2004.
  EBSCO ATLASerials, Religion Collection
  EBSCO ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials

“Jesus Christ removes the judgment of exile from us. That is what Jesus' mission was all about. As the incarnation of God, Christ restores us to communion with our Creator. Exiles are brought home to God. Humanity is restored to those who had become less than human. All creation can know recreation because the Spirit of the Lord has anointed this.”

“This essay considers the way in which Jewish readers of scripture and Christian readers of scripture may move some distance together in the reading of scripture, in an acknowledgement of much that is shared in scripture…Several biblical texts are cited to indicate that the biblical texts permit no such reading monopoly, because more than one reading is legitimate in distinct faith traditions. While Jews and Christians cannot finally—or cannot yet·—read all the way together, it is agreed that Jews and Christians can read much further together than had been thought or permitted in the longstanding environment of Christian monopolistic reading. The text itself testifies against such monopolistic readings that have been imposed hegemonically on the text.” Section on Isaiah 61:1-4 begins on page 393.

The section on Isaiah 61:1-3, 10-11 begins on page 388. “By skipping over verses 4-9, the lectionary draws attention to the connections between verses 10-11 and verse 3 by which the promise to Israel is given an individual realization.”

“Psalm 126 provides a description of the early Judaic commimit/s response to their catastrophic experiences of life's ebbs and flows. This article will note how Ps 126 depicts the relationship between lament and praise as the psalmist petitions God for a future turn of fortune. The article will close with a description of how the message of this psalm might be applied to the contemporary Christian church.”

“Paul not only commanded the parénesis of 5:12-22 as a form of non-negotiable behavior for the Thessalonians, he also took the commands upon himself as a model for them. Paul, the Christ-haunted apostle, lived his life and urged the Thessalonians to live their lives openly before God, community and society. For Paul knew that in this Age and in the Age to Come, ‘you cannot hide the soul.’”

“Effective witnessing calls for spending time with Jesus. Then the other things—knowing that believers are not the Light, pointing others to the Light, and urging people to believe the Light—these will come naturally.”

“In one sense we are all John the Baptists, trying to point to a gospel and a salvation that we do not adequately understand.”

11/16/2014 at 12:55 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Textweek ATLAS links December 7, 2014 Advent 2B

Studying lectionary texts? Here are some starting places for study at ATLA this week. If you are the graduate of an accredited U.S. theological school, you may have free access to these articles through your school. Check ATLAS access options. You can find full lists of ATLAS recommended articles for this week at The Text This Week's page for this week's texts:

http://www.textweek.com/yearb/adventb2.htm

Advent 2B
December 7, 2014

“In ancient Near Eastern literature the ideal king was the shepherd of his god's people. He promoted justice within the flock while at the same protecting it from predators without. The fact that the shepherd image occurs so widely throughout the ancient world suggests that it reflects innate longing in the human heart.”

“If preaching is going to be relevant, it has to be directed to questions raised by people of our time. We can not afford the luxury of providing answers to questions no one is really asking, even if those answers are correct ones!”

Van Seters, Arthur, "Isaiah 40:1-11," Interpretation, 1981.
  EBSCO ATLASerials, Religion Collection
  EBSCO ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials

“This was indeed a surprising message for a suppressed people. It was also profoundly comforting. According to this Advent theology, the way through the desert of human existence does not focus on the people as those who journey, but on their God who commands, enables, and becomes present once again to them. Their humanity is apparent, their sinfulness alluded to. Their faith or struggle is not even mentioned. Their position is covenantal by the grace of God who continues to choose them and speaks of himself in relation to them.”

“This Advent will find the preacher again looking at the lectionary texts and wondering how to use them without sounding like a Left Behind survivor or trying to preach the text away rather than deal with it. Advent is more than an ecclesiastical way of counting the shopping days to Christmas: it is in its own right the time when we are presented with texts about the Second Coming of Christ and other equally unusual passages.”

Abstract: “The thesis advocated in this paper is that the Gospel of Mark is a narrative structured with some care, divided into a bipartite outline determined by the author's Christology, and provided with a title and introduction carefully composed in a manner appropriate to introduce the narrative as a whole. The variety of textual readings and syntactical options, as well as Mark's purpose, are best understood by construing Mark 1:1 as the title to the whole narrative, with the introduction extending through 1:15. The introduction is itself carefully structured into two sections paralleling John and Jesus, while simultaneously subordinating John to Jesus. The introduction functions to introduce the main characters, introduce the main themes of the narrative as a whole, to focalize the narrative, and to relate the time of the Gospel to that of the readers, i.e. to contemporize the message of the narrative set in another time and place.”

"As both speaker ofthe gospel and its subject, Jesus is the hidden Son ofGod, whose one single encounter with his precursor, at the epicenter of Mark’s introduction, portends both the destiny that the two would share and the daunting standard of success for any mission to be undertaken in Jesus’ name."

“As should be clear by now, it was never Marks intention simply to say a few interesting things about Jesus, what he said and did. Rather Mark's message, centering around the themes of movement, messiah and mission poses a sharp challenge for the church today. But how might we distill that challenge?”

 

11/16/2014 at 12:31 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

11/11/2014

Textweek/ATLAS links November 30, 2014 Advent 1B

Studying lectionary texts? Here are some starting places for study at ATLA this week. If you are the graduate of an accredited U.S. theological school, you may have free access to these articles through your school. Check ATLAS access options. You can find full lists of ATLAS recommended articles for this week at The Text This Week's page for this week's texts:

http://www.textweek.com/yearb/adventb1.htm

Advent 1B
November 30, 2014

Isaiah 64:1-9

Underlying either reading of this text is a larger theological issue that merits reflection. God can hide and still be active [present] in holy judgment (64:7). So, too, God can be silent and be active [present] in severe punishment (64:12).

 

Psalm 80

“In short, we both celebrate and wait. To live in this paradox is to confront God in every circumstance and at every moment of our lives.”

 

1 Corinthians 1:3-9

“Self-promotion. Self-interest. Self-mastery. Self-indulgence. How convenient it is, for readers of Scripture in late 2008, that these traits of first-century Corinth so closely parallel the contours of our own place and time. For just as Corinthian Christians struggled to embody a marginalized message of sacrifice in an era of aggrandizement, so too, today's church searches for an authentic voice amid the clamor of our culture's competing claims.”

 

Mark 13:24-37

Summary: “This article defends the view that Mark's sayings on the coming of the Son of Man (Mark 8:38; 13:24-27; 14:62) refer to Jesus' parousia, against claims made by R. T. France and Ν. Τ Wright. According to France and Wright, these sayings call attention to the vision of Daniel 7:9-14, in which 'one like a son of man' comes into the presence of God for the purpose of enthronement, and point to Jesus' post-mortem vindication, not his second coming. It is argued here that the Markan passages in question link Daniel 7:13 with other Old Testament texts and motifs, in particular, texts (such as Zechariah 14:3) and images about God's future coming to earth; the selective combination of Scriptures and scriptural images and their application to Jesus generates the essential concept of his parousia - his coming as exalted Lord from heaven to earth at the end of history.”

 

“How could this passage actually serve as a starting point for the life and work of the church? As we begin again the cycle of a new liturgical year, what room are we leaving for real transformation (startling, in-breaking change) to take place in the lives of our congregations and in our own lives? From its opening words, the text challenges the predictable and repetitive way we follow the liturgical year. To listen carefully to the text is to let go of the temptation to treat the first Sunday of Advent as the time simply to light a candle on the Advent wreath to help us count the Sundays until Christmas! Taking Mark's Gospel seriously rips a hole in our careful designs and plans.”

"...we cannot avoid apocalyptic topics in the New Testament without gutting either the New Testament itself or our own intellectual and theological integrity."

 

11/11/2014 at 01:23 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)