Trinity Sunday, 2025
HARP Zoom Forum: In case you missed this announcement last week, as we begin Ordinary Time with its unbroken string of Sunday Lukan gospel readings, it’s a good time for a summer and/or fall study group or preaching series! To help resource such, I will convene a twice-monthly zoom forum, beginning on Wed July 2, and run through Wed, Oct 29, from 4:30-6 pm PDT. This will be for those using HARP and preaching, teaching, or personally studying Luke in Year C. These gatherings will focus on upcoming lectionary texts during each 2-3 week span, and we will discuss issues and strategies for pedagogy, proclamation and practice. Next week’s blog will give details about cost, schedule, and how to sign up, so you can check your calendars. Meantime, let me know your interest, as numbers will be limited. There will be one price for the series no matter how many sessions you can attend.
Remember, you only have until the end of July to order HARP at 20% off using discount code SOJO20 at my page on Bookshop.org.
This Sunday features John’s gospel and a focus on the mystery of the Trinity. So today’s blog offers a “trinity” of voices that have come across my desk over the last week from Movement theologian friends:
1. We start with Stan Dotson, Associate Pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Marianao, Cuba, who sent his short review of HARP;
2. Underneath that, beloved elder/mentor Bill Wylie Kellerman offers a brief reflection on the passing of the “Biblical theologian’s biblical theologian” Walter Brueggemann;
3. And finally, on Sunday’s theme, Ragan Sutterfield’s thoughtful musings on “The Forest and the Trees: The Trinity and a Wholeness found in Difference.”
1. Dotson (right) writes:
With so many books to read, it is a rarity for me to finish a book and then say, “I want to read that again.” But that was my exact feeling after finishing Ched Myers’ commentary on Luke’s gospel Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy.
The last time I had that urge to re-read a work of non-fiction was Myers’ commentary on Mark’s gospel, Binding the Strong Man. For 20 years that has been my go-to commentary for preparing sermons and Bible studies on Mark. I now have a similar go-to reference for Luke.
Having grown up in a baptist church in the South, I could resonate easily with Myers’ critique of the way U.S. culture has domesticated Luke’s gospel. From the use of his Nativity story in children’s Christmas pageants, to the transformation of the Good Samaritan and Prodigal Son stories into harmless cultural memes and morality tales, to turning the Zacchaeus story into a wee little man nursery rhyme, the culture has found ways to de-fang this gospel and remove its threat to imperialist economies like ours.
Myers, with a thoroughgoing command of literary and textual criticism as well as keen prophetic analysis of our context, reclaims Luke as a potent medicine for healing the disease of affluenza that is pandemic in our culture. And as the title suggests, he understands Luke’s gospel as a strategic organizing tool for communities—especially vulnerable communities victimized by predatory capitalism—to resist the growing plutocracy that is ruling our modern world.
Living and working as I do in Cuba, I sincerely hope that the book will soon be translated into Spanish. I can envision the rich conversations that the commentary will provoke with faith-based activists, biblical scholars, and theologians across Latin America. I also trust that leaders here, like Leonardo Boff, Ofelia Ortega, Frei Betto, and others could offer examples of communities in various Latin American contexts that have generated alternatives to the predatory capitalist and neo-liberal approaches that create so much suffering here and around the world. The church world in the North American context often limits itself to the possibilities of transformation, generally working to reform the capitalist system and humanize it. It’s helpful to be in dialogue with people outside that system, to see further possibilities for living out the dream of the Great Economy as envisioned by Luke’s gospel.
I highly recommend this book. It is both skilled exegesis and insightful commentary, and includes helpful suggestions for transformative praxis at both the household and wider systemic levels. I look forward to my second reading!
2. Kellermann writes: “Walter Brueggemann (3/11/33 – 6/5/25): A Remembrance”
When I was a student at Union Seminary in New York, Abraham Heschel taught at Jewish Theological Seminary across the street. Though he died within my first year, the author of The Prophets was notorious for being the professor “who actually believed in God.” This might also be said about Walter Brueggemann, who crossed over to the ancestors and saints June 5.
Brueggemann was an eminent scholar, among those like Norman Gottwald who altered the landscape of biblical studies by bringing sociological analysis to interpretation, and for such reason presided for years in the biblical guild. Yet Brueggemann was eminently readable and accessible to movement and church for whom the work was ultimately intended.
In the early days of Kirkridge Retreat Center, when the motto of “Picket and Pray” was being envisioned, Walter joined a student work camp to build the project. He’s in a group photo among the histories in one of our buildings here.
Once in a footnote to Israel’s Praise, Brueggemann cited a 1985 order of the Pretoria regime prohibiting Blacks from singing Christmas carols in the townships because they generated such revolutionary energy. The newspaper report quoted a South African police agent: “Carols are too emotional to be sung in a time of unrest…Candles have become
revolutionary symbols.” Which is to say, he could write an analysis of the world-shaking and world-making power of Israel’s liturgy and Psalms, then put out a book of prayers for our own moment. He prayed. He imagined a new world with all his heart. He invited us likewise.
For many of us, The Prophetic Imagination was the way into his whole body of some hundred- volume works. It invoked the radical power of the poetic, indeed very living Word, to subvert and critique imperial and kingly power. In likewise making the prophetic vocation accessible, he summoned us to transformation. And then would turn around and publish his sermons on surviving and flourishing in exile.
I confess to neglecting his book, Chosen? Reading the Bible amid the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, including the criticism it provoked, but am glad to see it lifted now, as the State of Israel assaults the moral legacy of Judaism with Palestinian genocide. It’s a grief otherwise tended by raw lamentation, the wailing cry of Hebrew scripture. And marks a conversation for which I’d still yearn.
Walter was indeed generous beyond words with his time and encouragement. In the years since our Methodist Annual Conference moved to Traverse City, I’ve had yearly coffee or lunch with him. A last hand-scrawled note said he’d begun palliative care, clearly a synonym for hospice. I missed conference this year intending a visit later in the month. So, my grief is compounded.
A few years ago he wrote of my late wife Jeanie:
Of course, all of us are precious in God’s sight. But some of “all of us” stand out because of their freedom, their courage, and their tenacity. We call them “saints.” Jeanie Wylie-Kellermann was one such! She embodied gospel passion that led her beyond herself to a rich network of justice and restoration…Jeanie’s life was a mighty and joyous contradiction of the pitiful “normal” that now assaults us. She knew, deep in her bones, about otherwise.”
I report this only to add that he too was one such. Thanks be to God.
3. And here is a link to Sutterfield’s Substack eco-reflection on the Trinity; check it out.
-Ched
