by jim perkinson, on hab 3:1-6, 17-19; mt 5:13-20
note: this spoken word is featured in perkinson’s new publication a secret gift outside the door: poems of resistance and wonder
the gospel says be salt
but i would rather drop
like pepper in this hour
assuring all who taste
do not forget!
By Rev. Margaret Anne Ernst
October 2020
I started writing this letter to you four years ago on the kitchen table, the winter after a man had been elected to the highest office in our land who represents such meanness, such smallness of imagination, and such hostility towards humanity that I had to start writing to someone. Best, I thought, to someone not fully grown, or even here yet. If I write to you, I must believe in you. I must believe in something past this moment, this nightmare, as many people behind me have imagined past the terrifying circumstances of their times.
Your world is, to me, barely glimpsed, like the moon showing itself from behind the clouds. And yet I will hang on to that moonbeam like I would clutch a breadcrumb after having not eaten for days. I choose to believe in the future.
Note: This is part of a series of short posts, in the lead-up to the election, from leaders reflecting on hope and/or resistance.
By Rev. Nick Peterson
Hope, for me, owes nothing to politics. The extent to which we think hope alongside and within the American political apparatus is discouraging at best and soul-killing at worst. At present, the religious right imagines American politics as the right site to enact a near-theocratic rule of law. Holding fast to an American exceptionalism established by the puritans, the right’s religious imagination appeals to a moral yesteryear that never was. Meanwhile, the left opts for a liberal humanism that, on the one hand, narrates inclusion and acceptance as an American God-given birthright. While on the other, liberals insist that the unceasing acts of anti-black violence are not reflections of who we are. On both sides, hope is a means to America.
Continue reading “Hope as an Intervention upon America’s Antiblackness”Note: This is part of a series of short posts, in the lead-up to the election, from leaders reflecting on hope and/or resistance.
By Johari Jabir (right)
Hope is a verb, a form of action not based on feelings or what is seen in ordinary time. To hope is to advance a stubborn, aggressive optimism.
On January 1, 1863, a large gathering of Black and white people assembled beneath a sprawling oak tree in Beaufort, South Carolina, to hear the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. Standing on a platform behind military officers, dignitaries, and abolitionists was the nation’s first Black regiment, the 1st South Carolina Volunteers. After the proclamation was read, the regiment was presented with an American flag donated by a New York congregation. All of the ceremony and pageantry had gone along as planned, until one speaker’s comments were interrupted by an elderly Black man who stood to sing,
Continue reading “Hope is a Verb, a Song Called “Anyhow””Note: This is part of a series of short posts, in the lead-up to the election, from leaders reflecting on hope and/or resistance.
By Rev. Tiffany Ashworth
A few months ago, I preached a sermon on Psalm 1. During my preparation, I kept stumbling over the phrase their delight is in the law. Delight and law? From where I’m standing, those are contradictory. Images of law conjure drudgery, burden, and weight. Law all too often represses rather than restores, closes in rather than opens up, belittles rather than inspires. It can be anxiety-making, self-preserving, and power-seeking rather than peace-imparting, generous, and life-giving. How can anyone delight in a law? Law, to me, often belongs on the path of dried up chaff not well-watered trees.
Continue reading “Anchored in a Reality Different from Our Own”Note: In the lead-up to the election, RD.net is prodding leaders to submit creative and concise pieces (500 words or less) on both hope and resistance.
By Ric Hudgens
In the early 1980s, not long after the death of Steven Biko, I registered for an independent study on the nonviolent struggle in South Africa. I knew little of nonviolence or South Africa and wanted to learn more. Based on my semester-long research, I concluded that there wasn’t much chance without bloodshed for a peaceful outcome in South Africa. Of course, I was wrong. Academic research is linear, but real life isn’t. There were things below the surface and things about to surface in South Africa that I couldn’t predict.
Continue reading “Possibly Even Magic”By Jim Perkinson, for the St. Peter’s Episcopal community in Detroit, MI on October 4, 2020 (Romans 8:18-27; Matthew 3:1-4:11)
So we are up against the wall now, facing the logic of the country, as our settler colonial and white supremacist history rises up incarnate in an orange-headed inciter. We have lived without yet fully facing what we have visited on others—on Natives, genocidally eliminated to the tune of 95% (somewhere between 60-90 million killed over 500 years), African folk enslaved (behind the 12 million carried across the Atlantic and sold on the auction block, 30-40 million killed before getting here), 553 other places invaded over the course of 244 years, resources pirated, garbage and pollution outsourced to the rest of the globe, an ocean heating and full of plastic, 200 species pushed into extinction per day, Water and Fire as Great Living Beings, now shouting back, and a tiny microbe whispering warning: full halt, stop your self-absorption as a species, recognize the rest of the biosphere as well as the all the displaced marginalized people, as Creatures of Beauty and Worth and Mystery. Do we—who have been the beneficiaries—think we should continue to be exempted from what we have visited on so many others? We are on the Titanic, the iceberg is in full view, there is probably not time to turn the rudder, what now?!
Continue reading “On Getting Stoned: A Sermon on Outback/Wilderness”By Tommy Airey
Note: In the lead-up to the election, RD.net is prodding leaders to submit creative and concise pieces (500 words or less) on both hope and resistance.
“Hope rises, She always does, did we fail to notice this in all the stories they’ve tried to suppress?”—Alice Walker
With only 29 days left ‘til the election, truth, beauty and goodness are being crucified in press conferences, social media posts and prayer meetings. I must confess: I’m struggling to rein in my resentment. However, I am actively resisting by seizing the hope set before us.
I find hope hiding under tents on my trips to the farmer’s market. Especially when there’s arugula.
Hope tarries during my trail runs on the banks of Towarnehiooks—as the scent of hops from the Deschutes Brewery wafts in the wind.
Continue reading “Hope Vibrates Too”By Jim Perkinson, a sermon for Land Sunday, St. Peter’s Episcopal Church (Detroit, MI)
The word for today is “woe.” Woe, woe, woe, woe, woe, woe! The potency of a cry! It is the season of the sob—the wail of grief, the howl of anger, the warning of danger! But we live in a society that is illiterate in the language of lamentation. Neither the tears of mourning nor the rage of wounding is acceptable in the halls of power or the decorum of wealth. Lose a spouse or child to disease? We give three days off from work. Then you better be fully functional and productive again, not talk of the agony, not exhibit the melancholy. Go private with the pain; pretend in public. Lose a spouse or child to violence—it is the same. Lose entire families and communities to violence—like generation after generation of black folk up against the nooses and walls, choke-holds and policies, traffic stops and bullet barrages of white folk? Swallow hard and invisibly, smile politely and submissively, and re-assume “the position.” Dare arch an eyebrow? Your funeral is next. March in the streets? Now we really uncover the history and reality of the country. Out come the labels, the AKs, the white-sheet posses (now dressed Hawaiian or khaki), the full metal jacket riot squads hot-to-trot, itching-to-swat, backed by bellicosities Fox and Hannity, Carlson profanity, Barr absurdity and the sheer inanity of an Orange-headed contempt for fact and truth and reasonable conversation.
Continue reading “Holy Ghost”
On Fridays, we are posing questions to Dr. Bruce Rogers-Vaughn (right), an ordained Baptist minister, pastoral psychotherapist and Associate Professor of the Practice of Pastoral Theology and Counseling at Vanderbilt Divinity School, and the author of Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age (Palgrave, 2019).
*This is our fifth Friday with Bruce. See this for Part I, this for Part II, this for Part III and this for Part IV.
Continue reading “Soul Talk in a Neoliberal Age, Part V”
Radical Discipleship 