Mundane Wickedness Interrupted!
Some of the most beloved words of Scripture – “Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God” – are surrounded by some decidedly less beautiful words, to put it mildly. We know the gift of the beautiful and familiar nugget contained in Micah 6.8, but is there also gift in the tough stuff that comes before and after? Pastor Megan notices in the surrounding chapters a PROBLEM: the mundanity of everyday wickedness. An ANTIDOTE: sabbath interruption of the steady progression and accumulation of mundane wickedness. And a FRUIT, borne of the antidote: kinship, mutual aid, and an actively anti-predatory neighborly economy. Why the kohlrabi? You’ll just have to listen to find out…
Audio
Resources
Resources
- “Faith seeking economic justice” by Walter Brueggemann, a eulogy for Biblical scholar Norman Gottwald [1926-2022], The Christian Century, June 1, 2022 (p. 14-15).
- BibleWorm podcast: Episode 348 – What Does the Lord Require of You?, Amy Robertson and Robert Williamson, Jr.
- Image: “Green Kohlrabi” by Jonathunder, GFDL 1.2 http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/fdl-1.2.html, via Wikimedia Commons
- Voices Together [link to purchase through Menno Media]
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“The covenantal vision of a neighborly economy, so clearly and often voiced in the Torah, requires advocacy for both polity and practice that are pro-neighbor, anti-predation, and anti-accumulation… As our society grows more frightened and more repressive, the church is faced with an urgent call for truth telling—concerning both the exposure of our predatory economic system, which produces and sustains poverty through cheap labor, and the articulation of an alternative way that will yield neighborly abundance. But as long as the church is in unthinking collusion with dominant economic assumptions, this hard and transformative truth is unlikely to be spoken aloud.” —Walter Brueggemann
Hymn: VT 207 What Does the Lord Require of You? Words based on Micah 6:8, Jim Strathdee; music Jim Strathdee