By Joel Shuman

• Captivities by Joel Shuman (9/28/2016)
  ...lament over the destruction of Jerusalem and the hard life of servitude facing those exiled to Babylon, to the exiled Psalmist’s wondering about the very possibility of faithfulness for the remnant of God’s people living in a pagan land, to Paul’s words of encouragement to his young friend Timothy even as he (Paul) sits in prison awaiting execution, to Jesus (even Jesus!) reminding us that even wh...
• The Last Word by Joel Shuman (7/20/2016)
  ...ife that the Cross of Jesus makes it possible to abandon. Again this week we are offered a word of prophetic judgment (from Hosea) and a reiteration of the author of Colossians’ account of what transpires in the cross. However, in both texts we discover a delightful comedic turn that opens to us the possibility of seeing ourselves and our world in surprising new ways. The passage from Hosea is...
• Resurrection and the Way by Joel Shuman (3/22/2016)
  ...s and other church leaders must attempt a precarious balancing act, looking to incentivize attendance among non-churchgoers with perquisites and simplify the liturgy and sermon to make them more “relevant,” or at least friendlier to the uninitiated, while simultaneously offering the faithful just enough of the tradition via readings and hymns to make them feel like they’d been to church. Such ...
• The Kingdom Unleashed on the World by Joel Shuman (1/6/2016)
  ...mong a people long since accustomed to injustice and subjugation at the hands of series of imperial oppressors and collaborators from among their own leaders. The topic of conversation was not new in any absolute sense. Its roots were a thousand years old, and exchanges like it had emerged and reemerged over the years whenever things became grim and the people wondered whether the God of their anc...
• All Will Be Thrown Down by Joel Shuman (11/10/2015)
  ...iestly class and leaders of the Temple who were deeply suspicious of the king (Herod had slaughtered a number of priests when he took power not that many years earlier), and on the other hand a narcissistic monument to Herod’s ambition to be regarded among the day’s great rulers, all of whom taxed their citizens mercilessly to fund extensive, self-aggrandizing building programs. Herod’s recons...
• Keep Reading by Joel Shuman (10/20/2015)
  ...o whoever hopes to preach them is to <em>keep reading</em> (I’m sure there’s a proverb about this somewhere, but darned if I can come up with one). The lectionary I consulted began with the text from Job, followed by excerpts from the 34th Psalm, and the combination left me, quite honestly, flabbergasted. I know it’s just a story, and one with parallels in ancient Near Eastern pagan myths at t...
• The LORD Will Make You (into) a House by Joel Shuman (7/15/2015)
  ...rk of the Covenant, the most conspicuous and immediate symbol of God’s presence with Israel, remains in a tent. The subtext here is pretty obvious; David has in mind the construction of a temple that will be a proper dwelling place for God, and Nathan assures him – at least initially – that he should proceed. Nathan’s assurance, however, is short-lived. That evening God speaks to him, telling ...
• The Economy of God's Redemption by Joel Shuman (5/27/2015)
  ...g us a lot about the former. What God is up to, I suggest, is some variation of the same thing he’s been up to since he approached Abram somewhere around 4,000 years ago: a work of healing, cosmic in its scope, in which (as some of the Ekklesia Project’s own literature points out), God’s called and gathered people are both recipients and partners. This is the fundamental economy of God’s ongoin...
• It Can't Come Soon Enough by Joel Shuman (3/18/2015)
  ...ny strands of Christian tradition; sin is self-destructive, in that it separates us from our true ultimate end and therefore from the possibility of genuine flourishing as women and men made in the image and likeness of the Triune God. Insofar as it is self-destructive, moreover, sin is by and large its own punishment, for it entails forever restlessly seeking happiness in places it doesn’t exist,...
• What is Power For? by Joel Shuman (1/29/2015)
  ...all from my relatively scant reading in those fields is that power is an ineliminable aspect of all human associations, from the most intimate interpersonal relationships to the most impersonal institutional arrangements. Those who possess power are reluctant to surrender it, for it confers upon them the kinds of advantages that come from the capacity to control others in the service of more or (o...
• Looking for the Redemption of Jerusalem by Joel Shuman (12/23/2014)
  ...e credit card induced hangover that invariably follows our annual orgy of consumerism; and our habitual rush always to look ahead to whatever’s next (there’s New Year’s Eve revelry to be planned, after all) – this week’s texts invite us to linger for a moment, and maybe take seriously the character and magnitude of what God has done and (believe it or not) continues to do through the Word made fle...
• Do As They Say, Not As They Do by Joel Shuman (10/28/2014)
  ...me mostly flat and uninspired. And then, as sometimes happens, things became just a bit clearer. I was first awakened to the possibilities offered by the texts when I read Kyle Childress’s bLogos post from last week, which focused on that week’s epistle (1 Thessalonians 2:1-8, the verses immediately preceding today’s epistle lesson). Serendipitously for Kyle, and by extension, for me, this pass...
• Minding Our Own Business by Joel Shuman (9/3/2014)
  ...saying or doing anything that might hurt another’s feelings or create an unhappy tension between us. I am far too captive to and dependent upon the esteem of others. I want not just to be respected, but liked – by just about everyone. My past is strewn with occasions where I allowed another’s offense against me or someone else to slide simply because I didn’t care to suffer the discomfort of c...
• Risen Indeed by Joel Shuman (4/4/2012)
  ...cyclopedia article on death and dying, and I wonder if I am up to the task. In particular, I wonder if I have it in me to tell the truth about death. The fact is death intrigues me even as it scares me. I think about it all the time. I read books and essays about it. I have my students read and talk about it. And yet, I find that I rarely tell them or myself the truth about death. That truth, ...
• Just a Kid. Just a Seed. Just a Church. by Joel Shuman (6/11/2009)
  ...m worthy even to attend the sacrifice offered by the traveling prophet Samuel. Sure, he was good looking, and he was tough, and he had some talent, but by and large everyone who knew him assumed he’d spend his days as an adult the same way he’d spent those of his adolescence: tending sheep, playing with his sling, writing poetry, and playing music. He was hardly a suitable replacement for a great ...
• Spoilin’ for a Fight by Joel Shuman (4/2/2009)
  ...merican Childhood</span>, Annie Dillard fondly recalls her Sunday School days in her parents’ mainline Protestant church. She notes of her introduction to the Bible, “The Bible’s was an unlikely, movie-set world alongside our world. Light-shot and translucent in the pallid Sunday-school watercolors on the walls, stormy and opaque in the dense and staggering texts they read us placidly, week after ...
• Wild Grace Abounding by Joel Shuman (1/2/2009)
  ...use he is there at all;<!--more--> not only did Cato die a pagan a generation before the birth of Jesus, he took his own life in protest of the emerging power of the then nascent Roman Empire. Surely he belongs in Hell, in the awful forest of suicide, where the souls of those who took their own lives are trapped for all eternity in thorny shrubs, able to speak only when their limbs are painfully s...
• Revolution Now! by Joel Shuman (12/16/2008)
  ...>Fourth Sunday of Advent: <em>2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16; Psalm 89 (Luke 1:46-55); Romans 16:25-27; Luke 1:26-38</em> The excitement, celebration, and anticipatory hope for change attending the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States has in recent weeks been replaced in the public eye by another image – that of bankers, brokers, and corporate executives sitting before members o...
• Give it All by Joel Shuman (11/12/2008)
  ...y to how much of modern life is controlled, or at least infected, by fear. One reason for my attentiveness is because I am something of an expert where fear is concerned. It’s no secret to my friends and family that I am by nature given to sometimes obsessive worry, and over the years I have learned mostly to accept that it’s just something I have to live with. Mostly, I do pretty well in that...
• Useless by Joel Shuman (8/28/2008)
  ...w classes with the pronouncement that “God is useless.” As you might expect, this assertion is usually not well received by the pious young women and men on the other side of the lectern, who find it shocking, offensive, and even blasphemous. My friend anticipates these reactions, of course, and I suspect he enjoys his students’ outrage (All of us professors have a bit of the ham-provocateur in us...
• Nice Guys and Crucifixion by Joel Shuman (8/1/2008)
  ...fully ignorant of where our Lenten journey has been taking us, or with whom we are traveling, the traditional Gospel text for Palm Sunday—and indeed, all of Matthew’s Gospel from Chapter 21 on—serves as a rather abrupt aide memoire. For some time I couldn’t really get my mind around the significance of Jesus’ “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem. Why a colt; why the palms; why the coats in the road; w...