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09/29/2017

Textweek/ATLA Proper 24a, Ordinary 29a, Pentecost+20, Oct 22, 2017

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/yeara/propera24.htm

Proper 24A / Ordinary 29A / Pentecost +20
October 22, 2017

Abstract: “'Reading the Seams' investigates the ways in which particular critics respond to the interplay in the Torah between independent materials and the final form of the text. After tracing different positions on the question, three examples from the Torah illustrate startling shifts in topic, contradictions and/or fragments of tradition. By paying attention both to the peculiarities of the compositional history and the redaction of the Torah, one not only becomes accustomed to these aspects of the text but grows to recognize the ways in which they invite the reader to make sense of them. Reading Torah in parts and as a whole is not only a literarily rewarding and satisfying approach but also a fruitful and necessary one.”

“Although Exod 33:12-23 emphasizes the limits of human knowledge, it also demonstrates God's remarkable self-revelation.”

“A biblical understanding of God's relationship with Israel and the world helps us interpret passages in the prophetic literature that link God and violence. With tears, lament, and regret, God takes into the divine self the violent effects of sinful human activities and thereby makes possible a non-violent future for God's people.”

“Conflicting claims lead to temptation – or temptations. And temptations often come in subtle fashion. One temptation is to avoid responsibility by asking someone else to decide for us, as the Pharisees did in this story. Another is to give a simple, definitive yes or no; that is to recognize one claim but deny the other…”

“Jesus allowed that one should render to Caesar what is Caesar's, but what can be said to belong to Caesar when one's entire life belongs to God? While emphasizing the supremacy of religious duties, the passage does not specify the precise nature of a Christian's duty regarding civil taxes, or regarding civil obligations in general. The passage does suggest, however, that Christians ought not to respond to civil issues without considering, first and foremost, their religious duty in the matter.”

09/29/2017 at 04:38 PM | | Comments (0)

Textweek/ATLAS- Oct 15, 2017, Proper 23a, Ordinary 28a, Pentecost +19

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/yeara/propera23.htm

Proper 23A / Ordinary 28A / Pentecost +19
October 15, 2017

“Matthew's parable of the Great Feast is a complex composition. In Matthew's hands, exegetical readings of Zephaniah and 1 Enoch were combined with a traditional parable of Jesus to create a new form of this parable, a king-mashal functioning as a midrash on Zephaniah/7 Enoch. The fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. apparently struck Matthew and his community as fulfillment of Zepha-niah's oracle, and a midrashic pattern strikingly similar to Matthew's was already available in the Parables of Enoch, likewise composed with an attack on Jerusalem close at hand.” 

Story, J Lyle, "All Is Now Ready," American Theological Inquiry, 2009.
  EBSCO ATLASerials, Religion Collection
  EBSCO ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials

“In Matthew's parable, the invited guests were not content to merely refuse the invitation, but they seized the King's messengers, treated them shamefully and killed them. This underscores the radical nature of Jesus and the Christian life where people cannot be neutral to Jesus' message. A nondecision is a negative refusal.”

“God's parabolic word always comes in cultural garb. Although employing the rhetoric and values of the imperial hegemony, the parables—and Matthew's gospel in general—render a trenchant critique.”

“God does what the people cannot or will not do; God remembers and is faithful to the point of bearing human sinfulness. Israel's disobedience in Exodus 32:1-14 was not the end of the story. Peter's denial and the disciple's unfaithfulness were not the end of the story. The church's history of disobedience has not ended the story of God's dealing with a chosen people. The church is saved by grace!”

Abstract: “Unlike other postmodern reading practices, deconstruction suppresses the figure of the reader: the text is viewed as both engendering and undermining its meaning, while the reader's role is only to discover these processes. Yet, when one deconstructs biblical texts, 'anarchic' and 'lacking logic' according to traditional Western criteria, the illusion vanishes, and it is hard to get along without the reader as an active figure. The reader's role is actively to construct the meaning of the text, before it gets deconstructed. This is the reason why in some recent works the deconstructive reading of the text is preceded by a 'constructive' one. In this article the Golden Calf story (Exod. 32) is read both constructively and deconstructively. The constructive reading focuses on the opposition 'normative cult-deviant cult' which is viewed as central to the story. Normative cult and deviant cult are represented by the Tablets of the Law and the Golden Calf respectively. The deconstruction of this opposition is based on the fact that the tablets and the calf receive the same treatment: Moses destroys both of them.”

“…another factor that makes this letter a favorite of most of us is its sense of joy in the midst of difficulty. Paul has been disappointed. He wanted to preach the gospel in other places, but now he is imprisoned. How does a person handle such disappointment? Many of us would spend our time whining and complaining. It is not easy to have dreams dashed or expectations shattered. Nor is it easy to move from independence to dependence on what others decide for you as Paul found in prison and as some folks find in aging.”

“It is ironic that two of the most striking statements about the meaning of joy came to us during that period when Europe was traumatized by Nazi ideology. Writing in 1937 in a country under the spell of Adolf Hitler and beset by the idolatries of barbarous nationalism and blind patriotism, Karl Rahner insisted that true joy in the world must spring, not from what appeals with phoney lustre to the naive, acquisitive imagination, but from ‘conformity with him whom we have joined in the flight from the world contained in the foolishness of the cross.’”

09/29/2017 at 04:33 PM | | Comments (0)

Textweek ATLAS/Oct 8, 2017, Proper 22a, Ordinary 27a, Pentecost +18

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/yeara/propera22.htm

Proper 22A / Ordinary 27A / Pentecost +18
October 8, 2017

“For people who are trying to eke out a living on the land, too poor to buy land of their own, dependent upon wealthy landowners, and a system of tenant farming, life is not so good.”

In depth analysis, parallels with gospel of Thomas, etc. “The tradition's earliest stage is neither synoptic allegory nor gnostic example-story (either against materialism or preparing for persecution), but it is a "parable"; and this functional form, distinctive of Jesus' teaching activity over against that of late Judaism and the early church, drives towards participation rather than information. It seeks so to articulate the speaker's experience as to draw the hearer into a like encounter.”

“One problem that is still unresolved concerns the nature of God. Is there a time at which God's graciousness is exhausted? Does God at the end-time set aside compassion and engage in vindictive violence?”

“These verses of Paul's letter to the Philippians thus remind us that we belong to Christ because of who Christ is for us. Because of Christ's claim upon us, we are freed to undertake the difficult and adventurous enterprise of knowing and becoming like Christ so that together we may be made the body of Christ for the life of the world.”

“God's saving work in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the disruptive grace that called Paul, his co-workers, and their churches to an unexpected new freedom and service. They must all learn how to walk the way of the cross and live in the newness of resurrection. The church's grave danger is that, expecting too little from God, it will settle for less than the gospel.”

“The Christian practice of keeping sabbath embodies a theology of creation, liberation, and resurrection. Keeping Sabbath forms persons and communities in faith and fosters resistance to distorted ways of living and inadequate views of human identity that implicit in the culturally dominant experience of time.”

“The preacher and the congregation can celebrate that we do not have to guess about God's main intention for us. That has been disclosed. But such faith still seeks understanding. Such commands still await specific implementation. Such liberated bonding still awaits the concreteness of covenant community toward brother and sister, toward land and property.” 

“To see the Ten Commandments as declarations of freedom is far more satisfying than hauling around tons of dreary obligation and worrying about whether the springs and shocks are going to hold up on the flatbed truck.”

“The second commandment is about limiting God, "You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I YHWH your God am a jealous God" (w. 4-5). Making an image of God defines what God can or cannot be. If God is male and white, then God cannot be female and Asian. Any representation, then, is sin, because it narrows the range of possible ways God can act. Human beings, in all their complexity, are the only legitimate image of God.”

09/29/2017 at 04:31 PM | | Comments (0)

Textweek ATLAS Proper21a Ordinary 26a Pentecost +17, Oct 1, 2017

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/yeara/propera21.htm

Proper 21A / Ordinary 26A / Pentecost +17
October 1, 2017

Abstract: “In Isaiah 56.1-2 there is identification between 'to keep justice' and 'to keep the Sabbath'. The Sabbath plays an important part in the construction of exilic and post-exilic identity. At the same time, 'to keep the Sabbath' permits the eunuch and foreigner (56.3) to hope that they will enter the house of the Lord (56.4-7). This article explores the relationship between Isa. 56.1-2 and the verses immediately following, as well as Ezekiel 18-20, chapters in which the Sabbath and justice are also associated. The thematic association of the keeping of justice and the keeping of the Sabbath thus seems to highlight an interesting case of identity and universalism going together.”

“God’s first covenantal relationship in the Bible was not with humanity alone but with all of creation.”

This passage from Philippians encapsulates the entirety of the Christian message and what we as a people of faith declare about Jesus and his relationship to God the Creator. The Christ hymn also provides us with the best, indeed the clearest model for character, for servant leadership. The image conveyed here is a contrast between personal fulfillment and self-denial, between accumulating treasures and necessary restraint, between narcissistic tendencies and consciously turning one's life over to God.

“The textual problems involved in the parable of the two sons (Matt. 21:28-32) are well known and extraordinarily complex. The parable has been handed down in the manuscript tradition in three forms.”

 

09/29/2017 at 04:23 PM | | Comments (0)