September 2025 lectionary reflections from Willow
These messages are from this month's Offbeat Expedition (OEx).
Week of September 28, 2025
Reflections from the lectionary text
By Willow.
At that time the army of the king of Babylon was besieging Jerusalem, and the prophet Jeremiah was confined in the court of the guard that was in the palace of the king of Judah, where King Zedekiah of Judah had confined him. Jeremiah said, “The word of the LORD came to me: Hanamel son of your uncle Shallum is going to come to you and say, ‘Buy my field that is at Anathoth, for the right of redemption by purchase is yours.’” Then my cousin Hanamel came to me in the court of the guard, in accordance with the word of the LORD, and said to me, “Buy my field that is at Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, for the right of possession and redemption is yours; buy it for yourself.” Then I knew that this was the word of the LORD… In their presence I charged Baruch, saying, “Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Take these deeds, both this sealed deed of purchase and this open deed, and put them in an earthenware jar, in order that they may last for a long time.
– Jeremiah 32:1-15 (NRSV).
Human minds are complex. Yet, when they face a crisis, they default back to a “fight or flight” mode. To some, it’s a siege mentality. I’ve noticed something interesting in U.S. culture: When a Democrat becomes president, Republicans buy lots of guns and go to “prepper” stores to stock up. When a Republican enters the Oval Office, Democrats begin searching for “how to move to Canada.” In this very polarized society, it has become a sort of national pastime to call politicians of “the other party” a “fascist” or a “Nazi,” instead of seeking unity as a nation.
When President Barack Obama took office, the Tea Party movement began, and the “Teabaggers” were often seen with signs equating Obama with Hitler or Osama Bin Laden.
About eight years later, President Donald Trump was a “Hitler” to many people.
It is important to note here that one automatically loses any and every argument the very moment they call someone Hitler or a Nazi. We don’t need this, and we can have meaningful political discourse without dehumanizing or impugning anyone – while also not minimizing or normalizing what is happening.
Either way, we as a society live in a constant crisis mode. Political media outlets and social media companies exploit our chronic freakout and endless outrage to maximize their profits, while our social fabric continues to deteriorate.
There are many people who are out in the streets protesting. “Resistance” is important to them. Then there are those who really don’t know what to do. They have become despondent and lethargic. They are simply trying to survive for another day, amidst the constant stream of bad, depressing news. Maybe most people are some mixture of the two.
Only five and a half years ago, we faced another “unprecedented” crisis: COVID-19. Mental health deteriorated during the so-called “lockdown” months among children, youth, and adults alike. It was really difficult to get myself motivated.
This week’s lectionary text includes the 32nd chapter of Jeremiah. The Babylonian military had invaded Jerusalem, and the city was under siege. Prophet Jeremiah was detained in the king’s palace when that took place. The king was not very pleased when the prophet told the king of the impending and inevitable defeat (verses 3-5). The king, perhaps, expected some pep talk filled with “hopium” despite the city being completely surrounded by the invading army. The king may have even thought Jeremiah was being unpatriotic.
But the prophet did not stop there.
In verse 6, Jeremiah relays God’s message to King Zedekiah: The king’s first cousin will sell him a piece of land. So Zedekiah buys the land from the cousin, signs the deed, and places the document in a sealed ceramic jar for safekeeping.
This sounds weird. Why would anyone buy a piece of real estate when their country is about to be conquered by another nation? The lands would be ravaged and burned down, and the incoming ruler would almost never honor their rights to the land. It would probably be commandeered or settled by the conquering people.
Often, it is very hard for us humans to make new commitments and start something when the world around us feels like it’s falling apart. But it is exactly the right time to start building for a better future. It takes faith and courage to make that kind of commitment when tomorrow feels so uncertain and our lives so precarious.
Did you know that some of the best-known companies were founded in the depths of the Great Depression? Maybe you know the Publix supermarket chain if you are from the South. It was founded in 1930. Not from Florida or Alabama? How about Columbia Sportswear? It started in 1937. Ocean Spray was also started as an agricultural cooperative in 1930 by three cranberry farmers to help them sell more cranberries.
Prophet Jeremiah spoke this truth: God’s faithfulness transcends present difficulties. Like Jeremiah, we are called to act on faith, even when understanding seems distant.
The challenge is this: Keep your eyes on the infinite goodness and wisdom of God, and live a life of spiritual courage and resilience. That is the greatest act of resistance, which also builds for a better and greater world on the other side of all this.
Week of September 21, 2025
Reflections on the lectionary text
By Willow
Listen to this, you who devour the needy, annihilating the poor of the land, saying, “If only the new moon were over, so that we could sell grain; the sabbath, so that we could offer wheat for sale, using an ephah that is too small, and a shekel that is too big, tilting a dishonest scale, and selling grain refuse as grain! We will buy the poor for silver, the needy for a pair of sandals.” GOD swears by the Pride of Jacob: “I will never forget any of their doings.”
– Amos 8:4-7 (Revised JPS 2023).
When you’re broke for long enough, you develop skills to stretch every dollar to the max. Twenty or thirty years ago, there were famous “coupon ladies”: they would clip every coupon imaginable from newspapers, weekly supermarket ads, and even mail-in offers from manufacturers. The coupon ladies had all sorts of tricks up their sleeves to pay as little as possible for their groceries. Some of them wrote books or appeared on TV shows, which, I am sure, made them even more money.
Perhaps, if you’re born after 2000, what I just said sounds like all Greek to you. What’s a weekly circular? What’s a double-coupon day? But maybe you use a browser extension or an app that does something quite similar.
CVS keeps sending me a “$4 off your total purchase” coupon by email, week after week. So I go to CVS, get something that costs $4.29, and I walk out of the store with some snacks and an abnormally long receipt (which almost always contains another “$3 off your total purchase” coupon!), having paid just 29 cents. The other day, I was out of coffee, and as you know, the tariffs are causing coffee prices to skyrocket. I looked up the CVS website and I found that a 12-ounce pack of Seattle’s Best Coffee was only $5.99 that week. It was my lucky day, $5.99 minus $4 is only $1.99.
Constantly looking for coupons and discount codes can make shopping a gamified experience. Some businesses know this. For example, the Starbucks app often has “Star dashes” and random “Double-Star days” to drum up business, while customers can combine discounts or vary their routines to accumulate lots of “Stars” quickly.
It is one thing for consumers to be smart and get the most out of every dollar. But what if businesses game the system and cheat the consumers, especially the low-income customers and immigrant customers with limited language proficiency?
Dollar stores are often criticized for many reasons. But one of the things I’ve noticed is that, too often, dollar stores appear to sell things at very low prices, but in reality, they come in such small packaging that they are actually a lot more expensive per unit than if similar items were purchased at Walmart or Target. Then there is “shrinkflation.” Businesses don’t want their customers to think that prices have gone up, so instead of changing the price stickers, they just make everything smaller.
One of this week’s lectionary texts comes from Amos, the “minor” prophet. Amos preached in the Northern Kingdom of Israel when it was in a state of relative stability. Before Amos, famous prophets such as Elijah and Elisha came to warn the people of Israel, but to no avail. Amos’ message from God was one of an ultimatum. If you read the verses immediately following this passage, you’ll know what I mean.
It is notable that, before the prophet unleashes upon Israel a warning of total destruction, he brings up this topic of economic injustice and deceptive consumer practices – that the rich are exploiting the poor and profiting from cheating them.
The prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures is deeply concerned with ethical business practices and economic equity. This is a topic that is very much relevant to what is happening in our world today. In a recent Infinitus newsletter, as a response to the U.S. government’s “America 250 Civic Education” initiative, I made a list of Christians in U.S. history who fought for justice, inclusion, and human dignity. Many of them focused on economic justice, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and in our times, William J. Barber of the “Moral Mondays” and the Poor People’s Campaign.
On a more personal level, however, I also would like to ponder a question: Are we prioritizing getting a “good deal” or “getting the most bang for the buck” over the well-being of our fellow human beings and the community at large? This can be a very tough question, especially if we are chronically broke and having a hard time making ends meet. And the billionaires know this when they pit their minimum-wage, non-union workers against low-income consumers in search of the prices they can afford. I wish the world weren’t like this. Maybe that’s part of our prophetic vision, to work towards a “beloved” economy that works for everyone.
Week of September 14, 2025
Reflections on the lectionary text
By Willow
The LORD says, “My people are foolish [stupid]. They do not know me. They are stupid children; they don’t understand. They are skillful [wise] at doing evil, but they don’t know how to do good.”
— Jeremiah 4:22 (The Expanded Bible, based on the New Century Version.)
Many churches use a predetermined list of Bible texts for a given week. It is called a “lectionary.” Today, the Revised Common Lectionary is perhaps the most widely used lectionary across denominational lines. This tradition did not start in Christianity. The Jewish synagogues also have an annual cycle of scriptural readings called parashat ha-shavuah that guides them through the entire Torah from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Deuteronomy in one year.
The positive of having a lectionary is that we would have a “balanced Bible diet,” without which we might as well just read and preach from our favorite part of the Bible while ignoring the rest. The difficult part of this is that every so often, we encounter a week with a collection of challenging and not-so-uplifting scripture verses. Today is one of such occasions. The passages provided for this week are all about sins and judgment. It’s not exactly easy for pastors who are looking to preach an uplifting and positive message!
Last week, I was at a certain community event, and I saw a Unitarian Universalist church booth. I chatted with an elderly gentleman who said he was a long-time member of that congregation. He thought it was a good idea to invite me to their service (disclosure: I was a member of UU congregations in the past), and said, “We have no sin!”
There was a time when I might have agreed with this UU gentleman that denying the reality of sins is a good, and even enlightened, idea. But now I am increasingly convinced that the progressive theology needs its own theology of sins and evil. If there is no such thing as sin, then how would we explain the devastations in Ukraine, Haiti, Darfur, and the Middle East? Even the most atheistic and “woke” people find it outrageous when they witness the masked federal agents effectively kidnapping mothers from their children, hear of the appalling conditions at the “counter-terrorist” concentration camp in El Salvador, or the elected politicians gleefully defund the basic social safety net programs to give a massive tax break to the billionaires. Even those who say that they don’t believe in a God or in morality, instinctively, understand and viscerally know what is right and what is wrong. Paul writes in Romans 2:15, “They show the proof of the Law written on their hearts, and their consciences affirm it.” (Common English Bible.)
Unless we can diagnose the problems, we cannot work toward solutions. Prophet Jeremiah, together with his contemporaries Ezekiel, Daniel, Habakkuk, and Obadiah, lived at a time when his ancient nation Israel was in a state of decline. By that time, Jerusalem was destroyed by the invading Babylonian forces. What united the country and upheld its values was gone, and they were just trying to survive under a prolonged crisis and pervasive state of anxiety. Perhaps we are now seeing a little bit of that today, around us and in our news feeds. Sometimes it feels like our world is falling apart. Corruption, political violence, rising hate and divisions, a decline of civic institutions and communities, the widening gap between the rich and the poor, global and regional armed conflicts – we live in a time that is both greatly challenging and immensely transformative, if we seize this moment and work together for solutions that bring about what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., called a “Beloved Community.”
At the beginning of this message, I quoted Jeremiah 4:22. Let me read the same verse in two different translations:
“They are foolish children and have no understanding. They are skillful at doing evil, but they do not know how to do good.” (New American Standard Bible 2020.)
“A company of half-wits, dopes and donkeys all! Experts at evil but klutzes at good.” (The Message.)
We all have creative minds. Most of us have at least some resources and skills. But we sometimes misuse our creative minds to do bad things. We might misuse our writing skills to hurt people. At a much grander scale, corporations and governments use their immense wealth and resources to wage wars, pollute the environment, violate human rights, and generally accumulate more money and power at the expense of the marginalized and vulnerable people at home and abroad. When we look at some politicians, we are appalled by how they use their creativity, intellectual prowess, and influence to come up with bill after bill that harm people rather than help them flourish. Artificial intelligence can be very helpful, for example, chatbots that enable learn and practice a foreign language. But it can also be used to supercharge a repressive police state and even build a killer robot. The sin is to misuse the gift of creativity, which is a reflection of God’s creative nature in each of us. Too often, we become an expert at evil but a klutz at good! What a different world we might live in if we all used our creativity at the service of the Greatest Commandment: You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your mind… You must love your neighbor as yourself. (Matthew 22:37-40; cf. Deuteronomy 6:5, Leviticus 19:18.)
Week of September 7, 2025
Reflections on the text
By Willow
Jeremiah received the LORD’s word: Go down to the potter’s house, and I’ll give you instructions about what to do there. So I went down to the potter’s house; he was working on the potter’s wheel. But the piece he was making was flawed while still in his hands, so the potter started on another, as seemed best to him.
— Jeremiah 18:1-4 (Common English Bible.)
We often try to find God in “sacred” places or things. When I was a 20-year-old Pentecostal on a constant diet of Christian broadcasting media, I traveled to faraway cities to visit well-known megachurches for conferences and “revival crusades” at big stadiums, looking to experience God. While traveling was a fun experience in itself (especially my week-long Alaska trip to Juneau and Anchorage!), spiritually, I would leave disappointed. I watched other attendees, especially women, seemingly having some kinds of ecstatic experiences during emotionally moving worship.
A few years later, I gave up. I began to feel that this type of Christianity was too shallow, too superficial, and too consumeristic. I looked for the sacred in traditions, instead. Yet, as beautiful as centuries-old liturgies and ritual symbolism were, once again, I found myself spiritually empty.
Between these disappointing episodes, I also looked into a variety of spiritual and quasi-spiritual experiences, such as divination, Pagan rituals, and ecstatic dancing. At the end of the day, the harder I tried, the more I found myself frustrated.
Whenever I find God’s voice, I am doing something that is not apparently “religious”: when I am taking a walk on trails or in neighborhoods, when I am on my bike, and when I am creating art.
In this week’s lectionary reading, God tells prophet Jeremiah to go down to a pottery studio, where God will “give you instructions about what to do there.” (CEB) In the original Hebrew sentence, it reads more like “God will make God’s voice be heard by you.”
Jeremiah goes down to the ceramic studio, and hears God in the clay that is being shaped by an artist. He sees that the artist made a mistake and the clay does not look right, so the artist starts over.
The later verses show that this clay is a metaphor for the nation of Israel that has gone astray.
In what unexpected places do you find the Sacred? What activities or places connect you to the Divine inspiration? As neurodivergent people, we may not always experience God the same way neurotypical folks do. Many of us do not fit into conventional religious environments.
Perhaps, art is where you can connect with God. To some of you, it may be physical activities such as walking and dancing. Music and songs can be a powerful way to plug in to the Divine – I must confess, I do miss that aspect of my young adult days as a Pentecostal, with long, immersive praise and worship music that is an integral part of their services.
Moses found God in a burning bush (Exodus 3:2). Prophet Elijah found God in a still small voice (1 Kings 19:11-13). Neither of them expected God there!
As the summer turns into a fall, I encourage each of you to try out a few different activities to see if anything brings closer connection to the Divine. Think outside the box. Explore where the Spirit can lead you.
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