By Wes Howard-Brook and Sue Ferguson Johnson
“When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.”
This week’s Gospel offers some of the most challenging, urgently needed by us today messages found in Luke’s Gospel. It is a companion with next week’s Gospel, which directly follows this week’s passage. We will address them as a two-part unit in this and our next commentary. Continue reading “All In”
By Eduard Loring, from the April 2016 issue of Hospitality, the newsletter of Atlanta’s Open Door Community
“I will never pray again. I have prayed and prayed and nothing ever happens. I am finished.” So said the 90-year-old grandmother last week when her grandson Mark overdosed on heroin. Mark’s father died 6 years ago from esophageal cancer. Face, mouth, throat deranged. Spoken word distorted. Unintelligible if more than one syllable. Tobacco kills. God forgives a repentant addict; God does not stop the side effects of the sin, though the power of Love’s prayer, and medicine, exercise and nutrition can mitigate the fury of the Evil One and her daughters Tobacco and Heroin. Often heal. Continue reading “What is Prayer?”
An excerpt from Matt Taibbi’s recent Rolling Stone piece “Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie:”
The maddening thing about the Democrats is that they refuse to see how easy they could have it. If the party threw its weight behind a truly populist platform, if it stood behind unions and prosecuted Wall Street criminals and stopped taking giant gobs of cash from every crooked transnational bank and job-exporting manufacturer in the world, they would win every election season in a landslide. Continue reading “The Maddening Thing”
By Ched Myers, Fifth Sunday of Pentecost, Luke 8:26-39
Note: This is part of a series of weekly comments on the Lukan gospel readings from the Revised Common Lectionary during year C, 2016.
This Sunday’s text is Luke’s version of the infamous Markan “political cartoon” of the Gerasene Demoniac (Mk 5:1-20). Here Luke follows Mark relatively closely (whereas Matthew changes and shortens it significantly, Mt 28-34), including placing it on the heels of Jesus’ crossing and storm-stilling on the Sea of Galilee (which Luke insists on calling a “lake”). Continue reading “Confronting Legion”
By Tommy Airey
When I see an act of evil, I’m not accommodated. I don’t accommodate myself to the violence that goes on everywhere; I’m still surprised. That’s why I’m against it, why I can hope against it. We must learn how to be surprised. Not to adjust ourselves. I am the most maladjusted person in society.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
Detroit, Michigan
Last month, water shut-offs were ramped up for residents of this city two months behind on their bills. Tens of thousands already live in homes that do not have running water. Leaders of the city make claims that both payment plans and cash assistance are available for those who cannot afford water. Unfortunately, a vast majority of people take them at their word. Continue reading “The Price of Political Ambivalence”
From former U.S. Army Reserve Chaplain Captain Chris Antal, who spent time based in Afghanistan. In April, he wrote an open letter to President Obama detailing his reasons for leaving the U.S. Army Reserves, citing his opposition to the administration’s use of drone strikes, its policy on nuclear proliferation, and what he calls the executive branch’s claim of “extraconstitutional authority and impunity for international law.” Continue reading “I Will Not Serve As An Empire Chaplain”
From Rev.Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou in an interview with sankofa.org:
The question I ask myself is ‘what does social justice as a spiritual discipline look like?’ Part of it looks like the way in which we do not become our oppressors. We do not take on their attributes. That we ‘envy not their ways.’ So I don’t want to tear gas children. I don’t want to lock up a generation. I don’t want to be part of an institution that has close to a thousand bases around the world, extracting natural resources, disciplining and punishing bodies and policing knowledge. I don’t want to do that. So for me, non-violence is part of that practice. It is not becoming them. Then we can sustain this movement… Continue reading “Bodies in the Street”
From Muhammad Ali (1942-2016), at a fair housing rally in his hometown Louisville, KY:
Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality…. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.
By Tommy Airey
The Gospel is the proclamation and conviction that there is a Force of good that governs the universe, a Power of Love imminently saturating everything, yet bigger than that too: beyond space and time, deep into a future, animated with hope. It woos, beckons and compels people to join in on a mission that bends everything towards justice, that prefigures that hopeful future into the now. Continue reading “Some Much Needed Good News”
An excerpt from George Monbiot’s recent piece “Neoliberalism–The Ideology at the Root of All our Problems” in The Guardian:
So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power. Continue reading “Confronting Neoliberalism”
Radical Discipleship 