By Laurel Dykstra, on Luke 10:38-42
*Note: this Radical Discipleship classic was originally posted in July 2016.
I don’t like the story of Mary and Martha.
Most of us already know if we are more like Mary, who sits at Jesus’ feet, or more like Martha, who is distracted by her many tasks. And it seems to me that no matter how nice they try to be about it, most of the sermons and commentaries on this passage seem to say, “Yay Mary and Boo Martha” Continue reading “Mary and Martha”
By Tommy Airey, on the Parable of the Good Samaritan
When the lawyer finally got face-time with Jesus, he poured out what was heaviest on his heart, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He groped for a guarantee. He wanted a divine will and testament. He was begging for a bill of rights.
As usual, Jesus pivoted on freedom. He was never much into being The Bible Answer Man. He asked the lawyer how he interpreted the sacred text. The lawyer’s answer, according to Jesus, was spot-on. Eternity’s most valuable asset has nothing to do with where we go when we die. It is a gut-busting love for both our higher power and our lowly neighbors. Right here. Right now. Continue reading “Bound By Love”
By Ric Hudgens
In this apocalyptic age where if the politics don’t kill you the ecology will, I am pondering a distinction made three decades ago by the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin. Wolin distinguished between a politics of intending and tending. Comparing these two modes of thinking Wolin saw one as prone to control and power and the other as a means of attention and care.*
The politics of intention requires power, as we strain toward a future that is not yet guaranteed. Continue reading “Collapse, Part II”
By Ched Myers, a short commentary on this weekend’s Gospel Story (Luke 10:25-37; right: “The Good Samaritan” by Paula Modersohn-Becker)
Note: This piece was originally posted on Radical Discipleship on July 7, 2016.
The famous Parable of the Good Samaritan is often sentimentalized, but its subversive character and genuine profundity can never be exhausted. It comes on the heels of Jesus’ sending out of the “seventy,” and his long “missionary discourse” (Lk 10:1-24). How different the history of Christianity would have been had disciples in every age followed these relatively simple but incisive instructions to travel with the gospel in a vulnerable and provisional mode, rather than a dominating one! But if the unholy joining of mission and empire has been the first pillar of Christendom’s apostasy, surely the second has been the church’s tendency to define faith through dogma. It is this religious bad habit that Luke addresses in this Sunday’s parable. Continue reading “To Do Is To Know”
By Nichola Torbett (in center of photo, blockading Wells Fargo in San Francisco in solidarity with Line 3 Pipeline fighters/water protectors). Sermon re-posted with permission from The Longing is the Compass blog
I choked my own self up preaching this sermon (Sunday, May 26) at the very hospitable and loving Park Presidio United Methodist Church. The scripture is John 14: 23-31.
Happy Eastertide! Although, if you’re anything like me, Easter feels like a long time ago, we are still in the liturgical season of Easter, which I think maybe we take a little too blithely, honestly. I mean, resurrection is just plain weird. Let’s admit it. The guy was dead, and then he wasn’t.
By Tommy Airey
This book review of Rose Marie Berger’s Bending the Arch originally appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of Geez Magazine.
The day after the brutal massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, there was a blizzard. The snow highlighted the innocence and purity of the victims. However, the whitest of snow could not cover the extent of Indigenous blood.
I recently heard this story told by Rev. Jim Bear Jacobs, and a few days later I found myself stranded under two feet of snow in Northern Paiute land, sitting next to the fire with Rose Marie Berger’s newly released book of poems, Bending the Arch. Continue reading “Confessions of a Westward Expansionist”
From the Front Porch of Ruby Sales.
*Originally posted to social media on July 1, 2019.
This morning as I hear the press legitimizing Trump’s lies as truth, it occurs to me that it is time for the prayer warriors to offer an intervention. May we pray for the soul healing of White Americans so that they love themselves enough to end the reign of White sociopaths who for centuries have carried out a cocktail of interlocking socio-spiritual abuse to contain White resistance. May we pray that they learn to love their authentic selves and remove years of self-loathing that spills over in anger and transference towards Black and Brown peoples. May we pray that they replace non-redemptive anger with redemptive anger that gives them the will and reason to confront the real abusers. Continue reading “The Guardians of Whiteness”
By Ric Hudgens
A review of The Collapse of Complex Societies , Joseph A Tainter (Cambridge University Press, 1988).
So I’ve been abed for several weeks, and therefore able to reflect upon the bigger picture. I’ve just finished a book that has long been on my reading list. It’s a fascinating, thought provoking work by anthropologist-historian Joseph Tainter, who ponders the meaning of collapse in reference to complex societies. The qualifier is important. Continue reading “Collapse”
By Wes Howard-Brook and Sue Ferguson Johnson, for this weekend’s lectionary Gospel story (Luke 10:1-11, 16-20)
*Originally posted on RadicalDiscipleship.Net on June 30, 2016.
For Jesus followers in the US, this week’s Gospel offers a powerful counter-narrative to the flag-waving patriotism of the 4th of July. Nearly every detail challenges those of us who live and thrive at the heart of empire to reconsider which “sacred story” binds us together as a people. Continue reading “Hospitality and the People of God”
From an interview Alice Walker did with The New York Review of Books in 2018.
Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” had a great impact on me as a very young child. It opens with the lines, “If you can keep your head when all about you/ Are losing theirs and blaming it on you” and the last line is, “you’ll be a Man, my son!” Well, I don’t care about the man part, but I did know at that age whenever I heard it, it gave me permission to understand that I can go my own way. I can keep my head and not care what everyone else is doing with their heads, but I need to keep mine. That’s the kind of power that poetry has.
Radical Discipleship 