The Joke Is All We Have Left

On March 10, 2018March 7, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Watershed DiscipleshipLeave a comment

By Jim Perkinson (right), an excerpt from “Jesters, tricksters, taggers and haints: Hipping the church to the Afro-hop, pop-‘n-lock mock-up currently rocking apocalyptic Detroit,” a November 2017 article in Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies (HTS):

In many places today, the joke is all we have left to pry open the prison gate – a jest and a belly laugh rooted in the deep past and the abandoned margins. But its truth remains absolute, despite corporate pretention otherwise. We all finally will come apart at the seams and decay into streams of composting liquid and molecules – even US drones and bankers’ computer screens, blinking with algorithms. The only question is when and for what.

In recognition of such an eventuality of equality, may we choose well where to expend our breath and exercise our push back and dreaming otherwise. May we become soldiers of the unrepentant joke, militant laughers learning our hope from the least. May we keep our jest visceral and its spear-point like a razor, ready for whatever crack of freedom the Mystery of Wild Hilarity that created this planet may open. May we do so, even if that possibility is ephemeral and uphill as a spray-painted st and a stenciled demand on a tower and the political struggle to ‘free the ow’ that follows! Indeed, may we finally be strong like water and as insurgent as a tower growing from concrete!

The Subject of a Carceral State

On March 7, 2018March 9, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Subverting Empire1 Comment

Sonia From the conclusion of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in Utah, Petitioner v. Edward Joseph Strieff, Jr. (June 20, 2016):

This case involves a suspicionless stop, one in which the officer initiated this chain of events without justification. As the Justice Department notes, supra, at 8, many innocent people are subjected to the humiliations of these unconstitutional searches. The white defendant in this case shows that anyone’s dignity can be violated in this manner. But it is no secret that people of color are disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny. For generations, black and brown parents have given their children “the talk”–instructing them never to run down the street; always keep your hands where they can be seen; do not even think of talking back to a stranger–all out of fear of how an officer with a gun will react to them. Continue reading “The Subject of a Carceral State” →

BONHOEFFER: A LEGACY OF FAITH AND RESISTANCE FOR OUR WORLD TODAY

On February 14, 2018February 11, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Cloud of Witnesses, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

If you are in the Philly area this weekend, check out this adventure in radical discipleship:

Saturday morning, February 17
9:30 – 11:30 a.m.
Project HOME, 1515 Fairmount Avenue

Bonhoeffer is a 93-minute documentary film that tells the dramatic story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the young German theologian who offered one of the first clear voices of resistance to the Nazi regime. Bonhoeffer openly challenged the church to stand with the Jews, and eventually joined his family in a plot to kill Hitler. His books, Cost of Discipleship, Letters and Papers from Prison, and Ethics, have had an enormous influence on people of faith and conscience seeking to live with integrity in a world of evil and oppression. We will view the film together and discuss its relevance to our life of faith and witness, with very particular emphasis on the current political realities under the Trump Administration and a world endangered by climate change, increasing wealth inequities, and violence. Join us for this important time of reflection and discernment. A light breakfast will be served. A $10 donation is requested to cover costs (though if you can’t pay, please feel free to come anyway!).

See the Facebook posting here.

If you are interested in participating, please contact Will O’Brien
at 215-842-1790 or willobrien59@gmail.com by February 13.
For more information on The Alternative Seminary,
see www.alternativeseminary.net.

For Ash Wednesday: Let Us Join With Creation

On February 14, 2018February 14, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Watershed Discipleship1 Comment

A litany of repentance from the Salal + Cedar community, seeking transformative encounters with the species and geography of the Fraser River to Salish Sea basin and the wider Cascadia bioregion:

May all I say and all I think
be in harmony with thee,
God within me,
God beyond me,
maker of the trees.
Chinook prayer, Pacific Northwest

We stand in this place, this watershed, this holy ground, remembering its creatures and asking them respectfully to stand with us. Stand to remember together our stories. Stand to be in conscious, respectful relationship. Stand to resist commercial interests at creation’s expense. Let’s join with creation in pledging ourselves to live to praise God’s holy name. Continue reading “For Ash Wednesday: Let Us Join With Creation” →

Just Trying to Survive

On February 10, 2018February 7, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

From Winona LaDuke, the executive director of Honor the Earth, responding to an interview question from Amy Goodman about PTSD in the Native American community:

You say “Enbridge,” and I get this little like quirk because the Indian wars are far from over out here. But what you get is intergenerational trauma, is what it is known as, historic trauma. And other people have it. But you have a genetic memory, and every day you wake up, and you see that your land was flooded. And that big power line that runs through this land, that doesn’t benefit you. Everything that is out here was done at your expense, but you still have to pay for it. And every day you go out there, and you got a roadblock, that the white people put up, coming into your reservation. And every day you go out there, and you look at your houses, and you see that you’ve got crumbling infrastructure, and nobody cares about it. And you’ve got a meth epidemic, and you’ve got the highest suicide rates in the country, but nobody pays attention. So you just try to survive. That’s what you’re trying to do. Like 90 percent of my community, generally, I would say, is just trying to survive. Continue reading “Just Trying to Survive” →

Re-membering the Asistencia Santa Gertrudis

On February 4, 2018February 3, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, Subverting Empire1 Comment

By Ched Myers

Note: This reflection was given at a Farm Church gathering at the Asistencia memorial site in California’s Ventura River Watershed on Sunday, Jan 14, 2018 (right; young Wesley Lehman waters a newly planted sycamore seedling; all photos of the gathering by Chris Wight). You can also find it on Ched’s blog.

This weekend we as a nation rightly commemorate the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. So a good place to start our circle this Sunday morning before the national holiday is with this passage from King’s 1963 book Why We Can’t Wait:

Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles of racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its Indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it.

Mattie — PC: *Bill Wingell/National Museum of African American History and Culture/Smithsonian.*

Dr. King summarizes why we are gathered as Farm Church at this unusual venue and time, for a special commemoration of a history that lingers in this very spot. [Right: Mattie Grinnell, a 101-year-old Mandan tribeswoman, speaks to the press outside the Supreme Court during the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C.]

Mohecan activist Jim Bear Jacobs taught us that westerners tend to steward our narratives through texts, while indigenous cultures understand their sacred history to be embedded in the land. The land holds the stories. And this Asistencia Santa Gertrudis memorial site is just one small, indeed hidden, chapter in the long and sordid history of Settler displacement of indigenous peoples that marks every single square mile of Turtle Island. Continue reading “Re-membering the Asistencia Santa Gertrudis” →

No Additional Comments

On February 2, 2018February 2, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation, Watershed Discipleship1 Comment

By Tommy Airey

Lansing, Michigan

Decades ago, Alice Walker suggested that the White House should be run by twelve grandmothers. I spent my Wednesday at the state capital bearing witness to the obvious brilliance of her proposal.

It was almost two years since my first visit to Lansing, days after the Flint water poisoning scandal broke out like an upper respiratory infection. The brutal part: both viruses still linger.

Back then, business brought my friend Mike to Michigan. But his heart and his camera prodded him all the way to Capitol with me to brave a single-digit-wind-chilled protest during the Governor’s annual State of the State address. A year later, the state’s Civil Rights Commission issued a scathing 135-page report naming “systemic racism” as a major factor in Flint’s water contamination. Redlining, white flight to the suburbs, intergenerational poverty and “implicit bias” were all chronicled as contributing to the unnatural disaster. Fifty years after the Kerner Commission report, history came full circle. Continue reading “No Additional Comments” →

A Gateway to My Indigenous Soul

On January 31, 2018January 28, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

By S. Lily Mendoza (right), from Paula Miranda’s Pinay Protrait Project

I am a native of San Fernando, Pampanga in Central Luzon, Philippines. I grew up in the small barrio of Teopaco next door to calesa drivers with their handsome horses and their backyard stables. I shared with my five siblings duties feeding pigs and raising chickens and collecting horse manure for fertilizing our small family garden. Although I grew up colonized (tutored by American missionaries and Peace Corps Volunteers and Filipino teachers who taught strictly in English), I retain memories of sitting at my Apu Sinang’s feet listening to her tell stories as I strung fragrant sampaguita leis or as I watched with fascination as she prepared her betel nut chew, breaking open the nut and sprinkling shell lime on the meat, then rolling the concoction in betel pepper leaf before putting the bite-size pouch into her mouth for chewing. Then there were the home deliveries of fresh milk in unbranded glass bottles that you handed back when the milkman came back around, and the early morning toot-toot announcing the arrival of Apay Tinapay on his bike, the hot pandesal vendor, who magically kept the fresh-baked buns steaming hot in his big newspaper-insulated basket hanging by the side of his bike. Continue reading “A Gateway to My Indigenous Soul” →

Sermon: As One Who Was There

On January 30, 2018January 30, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation, Uncategorized1 Comment

By Rev. Denise Griebler
1^st UCC Richmond, Michigan
January 28, 2018

Mark 1:21-28
Psalm 111

Well, I will tell you this: I went to worship that evening with the usual expectations – which is to say, I wasn’t expecting anything unusual. It was just after sunset – which is when we worship. By our way of thinking, sundown is the beginning of the new day – a time to rest in God’s presence – a time to rest in the company of family and friends and neighbors. Continue reading “Sermon: As One Who Was There” →

The Sunday Long Read: Dove Songs and Fish Offerings

On January 28, 2018January 28, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation1 Comment

By Jim Perkinson, a sermon on Jonah 3:1-5, 10 and Mk 1:14-20, January 21, 2018, St. Peter’s Episcopal Church (Detroit, MI)

I am not a fish person—which is why I volunteered to preach this Sunday, where the lessons focus on fish, in the stories of Jonah and the whale and of the disciples on the Sea of Galilee called to become “fishers of humans.” To “catch” the significance of the latter, we need to reel in the former carefully. Though not included in the lectionary, the heart of the Jonah story turns on the following verse:

And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights (Jon 1:17).

The text is clear. Jonah was saved by a fish. But we need to go slow, since we often read it the other way around—that Jonah was saved from a fish. So in the interests of getting us hooked on the story-line, I want to string out three pieces of bait. Continue reading “The Sunday Long Read: Dove Songs and Fish Offerings” →

Radical Discipleship

Category: Subverting Empire