From Rev. Lynice Pinkard, in a sermon on the Mary and Martha story in the Gospels (July 21, 2019)

I hear Jesus saying, “Listen, my loves. Inside of you lives Something that the society that seeks to control you can never know or reach. This Something is an inchoate, largely incoherent, and irrepressible energy which has the power to demolish empires. Every state, without exception, co-opts, corrupts and seeks to destroy all those capable of saying, ‘no.’ All those determined to refuse. But no state has been able to foresee or prevent the day  when their most ruined and abject accomplices…will growl, ‘No. This far and no further.’”

What the times demand—these times—and in an unprecedented fashion, is that one be, not seem, outrageous, independent, anarchical, feral, buck wild. That one be thoroughly disciplined. Steeped in readiness to resist, at whatever cost…This world no longer needs explaining or critiquing or denouncing. We live enveloped in a fog of commentaries on commentaries, of critiques of critiques, of revelations that don’t trigger anything other than revelations about the revelations. We are in a time of unparalleled talking, and I might add, that the only reason to talk now at all is to learn to speak treason fluently.