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Ordinary Time

Resistance

All Years

Forming Communities of Resistance: A 4-week series

“Working Preacher,” a preaching resource from Luther  Seminary, outlines a series on Christian Communities and resistance. It  provides readings and weekly reflections. You may adapt any of that  material to fit your congregation’s needs. Click herefor the resource.

Resistance

In electronics, resistance refers to the degree to  which a substance opposes the flow of electrical current. However, the  most common definition of resistance (according to the Oxford English  Dictionary) is “the refusal to accept or comply with something.”


Differing ways of refusing to accept or comply with  something have laden this word with political significance – think of  the French Resistance to the Vichy government. However, we currently  live in a world rife with patterns which have nourished greed, abuse,  and alienation; as followers of Jesus, we are called to put up some  resistance of our own – to stand against these patterns and create ways  of life which honor our calling to see Christ in the other. If we are to  take seriously this call to action, we look to honor and serve God  through the material world – the world we live in now.


Walter Brueggemann describes resistance to these  alienating ways of the world as ‘materiality.’ He goes on tell us “Jesus  practiced materiality when he healed the bodies of the sick, proclaimed  Jubilee to the poor, and fed the five thousand.” Our core hope in the  church rests upon the fact that Jesus came to us ‘in the flesh’ and  joined us in the material world. Brueggemann contrasts the materiality  of Jesus with materialism: the former being in rooted in a “hope-filled  obedience” which extends into our material existence, while the latter  subjugates all aspects of life to the material comforts in the places  where our lives unfold.


This series looks at how the material world meets the  spiritual and we will look at those currents we are called to resist as  we go about the circuits of our daily lives.




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