Tuesday, June 1, 2021

A Semi-Self Designed Course In Jeremiah And Hints On How To Approach Scripture

"Jeremiah Wright's sermon about goddamn America, what he was talking about was plucking-up and tearing down, and of course, that got on the air-waves and quoted out of context and all that happened but that's what a poet does. So the language that Jeremiah Wright used is very offensive.  But no more offensive than [the prophet] Jeremiah" 

IN RECOMMENDING THE podcast by some Lutheran preachers going over the weekly lectionary readings and the interview two of the did with the UCC-Episcopalian (I guess you can be those "plus" too) Water Brueggemann, I came across the four lecture-sermons Brueggemann gave on Jeremiah in 2013.  I decided to post all four of them over a month or, maybe more,  with a few other resources than the ones he recommends in his lecture.  That is with the encouragement for you to do the same thing, find things to read and think about and write about.   It's one of the most rewarding things I've done to read different interpretations of the prophetic books and the other Scriptures.   Here is the first of his presentations in that series.

You can find innumerable old commentaries and some newer ones on all of the books of the Bible online, some of them are excellent, some, in my opinion, not worth much,some of them potentially dangerous, some downright dishonest.   One that I don't always agree with, one which is certainly not a Brueggemann level, deep historical-scholarly reading of the text is the Christian Community Bible, which often gets condemned for being too much a product of Catholic liberation theology.   But I think the intended audience of that translation and commentary might more closely match the original audience that Jeremiah was talking to, peasants oppressed by both rulers and the hierarchy that supported their oppressors.  And their oppressors.   My plan is to post occasional other commentary as this, hopefully, goes on. 

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