Author: RadicalDiscipleship

Resurrection: The Hope That Vindicates God’s Justice

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romeroBy Wes Howard-Brook & Sue Ferguson Johnson, a commentary on this weekend’s Gospel text, re-posted from November 2016

There is nothing more radical than resurrection.

From the time Daniel 12 apocalyptically announced that God raises the dead, the intellectual elite in Judea rejected it. Sophisticated skeptics have always scoffed at the notion that life extends beyond the bounds of death, because such a belief threatens to undermine the status quo from which they benefit. Consider, for example, this from Ecclesiastes, a text likely written before Daniel:

The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost. Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished; never again will they have any share in all that happens under the sun. (Eccles 9.5-6)

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The Recovery Room

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation2 Comments

By Tommy Airey

After a thirty-month delay, I finally went in for hernia surgery last week. Lindsay hauled me over to the hospital in Grosse Pointe, Michigan – Detroit’s eastern adjacent suburb. As soon as we crossed Alter Road, everything changed. The mourning turned into mansions. Dr. King gave a speech in the high school gym in Grosse Pointe three weeks before he was assassinated. He talked about the two Americas. Those who grow up in the sunlight of opportunity – and those barely surviving in the fatigue of despair. During the speech, he was shouted down – several times – by white people who did not appreciate some outsider telling them that racism was still a real thing.

The day before my surgery, I drove to the lab in Grosse Pointe to get my pre-surgery blood screening. A Black woman was working the front desk. While I was waiting, an unmasked white man in his seventies walked in asking where to sign in. She pointed to the table and told him he needed to put on a face covering. He looked at me and shook his head, muttering that he had one in his bag. I stared him down. He didn’t sign in. When he found his seat across the room, he looked at me again. I just stared back. We both grew up in the sunlight of opportunity, but I wanted him to know that I would not be signing off on his supremacy story.

Across Jefferson Boulevard from the hospital, the yards of the mansions are lined with election signs promoting the GOP candidate for Secretary of State who got her masters degree in Christian Apologetics from BIOLA and is adamant the 2020 election was stolen. Many signs say, “Vote No on Prop 3,” the reproductive justice measure that got more signatures than any initiative in Michigan history. When we arrived at the hospital on the morning of my surgery, everything was quick and convenient. Parking spaces were abundant and free-of-charge. It was a close walk to the lobby. The surgery wing was a well-oiled machine. I did not wait long to get in.

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Taking Sides

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An excerpt from Jonny Rashid’s new book JESUS TAKES A SIDE (2022). See below for details of an online event Jonny is hosting with The Alternative Seminary this Saturday!

Our church’s first love feast after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president of the United States changed me.

Our church celebrates something called the love feast, also known as an agape feast in some traditions. It is a worship meeting where we fellowship and reconcile among one another, letting our love and unity prevail. You can find references to love feasts in Jude and 1 Corinthians 1. At them, we eat together, welcome new members, and take communion. At our love feast in January 2017, our team had assigned me to offer the words of institution and the elements of communion to the assembly.

Admittedly, my mind was elsewhere. Donald Trump’s first executive action as the new president was in effect. We know it colloquially as the Muslim ban, but formally it is Executive Order 13769: Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States. It was a travel ban against people from a list of Middle Eastern countries and it had gone into effect that Saturday. It barred entry for anyone (with some exceptions) from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. I got a notice on my phone that there were Arab immigrants in airports and they could not enter into the country because the ban was in effect.

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Salvation as Wealth Redistribution

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation1 Comment

zaccheusBy Ched Myers, on Luke 19:1-10, re-posted from October 2016

First, as always, let’s put this Sunday’s gospel reading in its broader narrative context. The story of Zacchaeus represents the culmination of one of Luke’s important subplots: Jesus’ challenge to rich men (Gk plousios) to “turn their lives (and assets) around.” As pointed out in previous posts, this narrative strand forms the backbone of Luke’s “Special Section” (Lk 11-19), a pattern worth reiterating here (with links to my comments earlier this year):

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The Universe’s Hubs of Unspeakable Creativity

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation1 Comment

By Bayo Akomolafe, re-posted from social media (October 18, 2022)

An obstacle is the richest, thickest, densest place in the universe. This is so because it is where things stop and often die, failing to continue on their way. It is where carcasses of hope rot into the ground, inadvertently fertilizing it. It is a place of desperation and longing and roaming ghosts.

All of this is my way of saying that I think it is not empty. This place – an obstacle – is bursting with activity, with microbial adventures, with dancing generativity, with experiments into continuity, with playful meanings and alchemical shifts, with eloquent invocations and stuttered words.

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The Cross in the Midst of Creation

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How do activism and scholarship contribute to our understanding of Scripture in the world today?

October 20, 2022, 7:30pmEDT on Zoom

CLBSJ and the Alternative Seminary warmly invite you to join us for a dialogue emerging from Rev. Sharon Delgado’s new book, The Cross in the Midst of Creation: Following Jesus, Engaging the Powers, Transforming the World. Joining Delgado in conversation will be Daryl Grigsby, author, community organizer and lay theologian. Both Delgado’s and Grigsby’s theological reflections are rooted in their decades of work for economic equality, climate justice, racial healing, and peace. Today’s society is increasingly difficult to navigate, burdened as it is with violent political discourse, widening racial division and lies accepted as truth. This difficulty is compounded with increasingly virulent public manifestations of white Christian nationalism that convey exclusion and violence. Delgado and Grigsby will explore how their understanding of scriptures, spiritual practices, and lifetimes of struggle inform their mutual conviction that despite all the bad news, the message contained in Jesus’ life, ministry, crucifixion and resurrection — which Paul called “the word of the cross” in 1 Corinthians 1:18 — offers good news that is deeply relevant today.

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Daniel Erlander: Child of God

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Cloud of WitnessesLeave a comment

A special thank you to Marcia Dunigan for passing along the news that Rev. Daniel Erlander passed away in late August. His memorial service was this last weekend and you can access a video recording of it here. His books were clear and clever and were beloved by children and adults. If you haven’t, please order Manna and Mercy now. What a beautiful scripting of the biblical narrative! This is Dan’s obituary from the memorial bulletin.

Daniel Winfred Erlander
Child of God

December 10, 1938 – August 28, 2022 Daniel Erlander’s story is one of art and theology: theology as an embodied art and art as visible theology. Dan was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming in 1938, the second of Ruth and Emory’s three sons, and baptized on February 6, 1939. He was nurtured in faith and life in Lutheran parsonages in Cheyenne, Moline, and La Crescenta, CA. His childhood memories include drawing, especially airplanes, trains and cars.

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Hersistence

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Cloud of Witnesses, Feminist/Womanist/Queer Liberation and TheologyLeave a comment

By Ched Myers and Elaine Enns

 Note: The gospel reading for this Sunday, October 16, the 19th Sunday after Pentecost in the Revised Common Lectionary, is a poignant and amazing text focusing on the agency of women. We shared these reflections last month with pastors in the Greater Minneapolis Synod of the ELCA, and invite you to delight in this story of persistence that pertains both to our prayers and our politics. 

The story is introduced as a parable. Jesus tended to tackle tough issue by speaking in this particular rhetorical form, as did the Hebrew prophets before him. Unfortunately, most of our congregations still spiritualize this kind of grassroots pedagogy, typically understanding them as—see if you’ve heard this one before—”earthly stories with heavenly meanings.” Thus tales about landless peasants and rich land-owners, or lords and slaves, or lepers and lawyers—or persistent women—are lifted out of their social and historical context and reshaped into theological allegories or moralistic fables that are bereft of any political or economic edge—or consequence.  This functions to thoroughly domesticate the parable under our status quo, such that stories meant to challenge our preconceptions about the world are instead deployed by us to legitimate them. In this way, we effectively disarm one of the Bible’s most powerful rhetorical weapons, whose purpose is to rescue us from our domestication and dehumanization under that very status quo.  But what if parables were actually “earthy stories with heavy meanings” as Ched’s teacher Bill Herzog argued in his wonderful book, now a quarter century old, about Jesus as a pedagogue of poor communities?

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The History of Love

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as ResistanceLeave a comment

It’s National Coming Out Day! To celebrate, we are delighted to post this poem by Adella Barrett, read at the wedding ceremony of Jeannette Ban and Lola West (October 1, 2022)

I do not know exactly where we stand in the history of love,
but that so many came before us,
some who bore our faces, some who carried our genes and our names,
some who labored a labor I cannot understand.

The history of love, inscrutable and longer than time,
is not rose colored, I must say, it is laden with sacrifice.
We are born of this history, and we inherit this story,
the same as we inherit in our flesh the banquet of desire, the soft need to be seen,
for our bones to be held and read as holy.

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