Wild Lectionary: Where the Mustard Seed Grows

On June 14, 2018June 5, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, Uncategorized, Watershed DiscipleshipLeave a comment

On the Road to Golgotha

Proper 6 (11) B
4^th Sunday after Pentecost

Mark 4:30-32

By Anne Ellis

The day was beautiful, the strangely liminal day that is Holy Saturday. Good Friday had come and gone and we awaited the Good News of the Empty Tomb. Knowing it would come made the day of waiting oddly anticipatory, there was an air of excitement and without realising it we instinctively moved towards joy. We don’t like to feel the pain and suffering of Good Friday any longer than we absolutely have too, so it’s easy to slip and forget that those alive and grieving on that first Holy Saturday so long ago had no idea how the story would continue. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Where the Mustard Seed Grows” →

What Remains

On June 11, 2018June 5, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, UncategorizedLeave a comment

psalm By Dee Dee Risher

For her 40th birthday, my friend, artist Michaelanne Harriman Helms asked a group of artist friends to spend a year reflecting on Psalm 90. We all did work—some of it visual art, some of it written. She asked me to write on the themes that came up for me, sparked by the psalm. For me, that became a three-part poem. But for our broad community at Radical Discipleship, I have adapted that poem into this psalm-prayer. I suggest reading Psalm 90, then this redaction of my poem.

To gain a heart of wisdom, I must
no longer
number my days:
release the clock that haunts
my small self,
lusting after illusions of influence
which will decay, scatter, leave no mark Continue reading “What Remains” →

Binding The Strong Man

On June 10, 2018June 9, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

As we transition into the summer months of Ordinary Time, we are celebrating the 30th anniversary of Binding The Strong Man, Ched Myers’ extraordinary political reading of Mark’s Gospel. Each Sunday, we will post excerpts from Myers’ comments on the lectionary reading of the day. Today’s passage is Mark 3:20-35, the episode in which the book is named after.

But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered. (Mark 3:27)

Mark has come clean: Jesus (a.k.a. “the stronger one” heralded by John, 1:8) intends to overthrow the reign of the strong man (a.k.a. the scribal establishment represented by the demon of 1:24). In this parable the oracle of Second Isaiah lives again: Yahweh is making good on the promise to liberate the “prey of the strong (LXX, ischuontos) and rescue the captives of the tyrants” (Is 49:24f). Imperial hermeneutics, ever on the side of law and order, will of course find this interpretation of the strong man parable strained, offensive, shocking. Yet Mark drew the image of breaking and entering from the most enduring of the primitive Christian eschatological traditions: the Lord’s advent as a thief in the night (Mt 24:43 par; I Thes 5:2; 2 Pt 3:10; Rev 3:3, 16:15). Continue reading “Binding The Strong Man” →

The Ideal Human Being

On June 9, 2018June 3, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological AnimationLeave a comment

Salvadoran theologian Jon Sobrino reflecting on the Good Samaritan in his The Principle of Mercy: Taking the Crucified People From the Cross (1994):

This parable is a presentation of what it is to be a human being. The ideal, total human being is represented as one who has seen someone else lying wounded in the ditch along the road, has re-acted, and has helped the victim in every way possible…The ideal human being, the complete human being, is the one who interiorizes, absorbs in her innards, the suffering of another—in the case of the parable, unjustly afflicted suffering—in such a way that this interiorized suffering becomes a part of her, is transformed into a internal principle, the first and the last, of her activity. Mercy, as re-action, becomes the fundamental action of the total human being.

Wild Lectionary: Imperial Logic and Creation

On June 7, 2018June 5, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, Uncategorized, Watershed DiscipleshipLeave a comment

cows enslaved Proper 5(10)B

1 Samuel 8:4-20, 11:14-15
Genesis 3:8-15

By Wes Howard-Brook and Sue Ferguson Johnson

Then Joseph said to the people, “Now that I have this day bought you and your land for Pharaoh, here is seed for you; sow the land. And at the harvests you shall give one-fifth to Pharaoh, and four-fifths shall be your own, as seed for the field and as food for yourselves and your households, and as food for your little ones.” They said, “You have saved our lives; may it please my lord, we will be slaves to Pharaoh.” (Gen 47.23-25) Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Imperial Logic and Creation” →

The Seminary, The Sanctuary & The Streets

On June 5, 2018June 5, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

By Bill Wylie-Kellermann

There are a number of sweet connections between Word and World and the Poor Peoples Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. As the campaign heats up in the midst of these 40 days of action and witness, it’s worth remembering a few of them.

In 2003, we did one off our Peoples’ Schools, a week-long institute in Philadelphia. It was framed around a close study of Dr. King’s Riverside Church speech, “Beyond Vietnam: Breaking the Silence” which focused his national call for a “revolution of values.” In addition to the Plowshares Movement, that school included attention to the Kensington Welfare Rights Union in Philly, specifically their homeless union tent city which subsequently, as winter approached, broke open and moved into a boarded up Catholic Church, St. Edwards. Continue reading “The Seminary, The Sanctuary & The Streets” →

Ordinary Time

On June 4, 2018June 1, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, UncategorizedLeave a comment

violet By Dee Dee Risher

God, this day,
return me to ordinary time.
Small actions of love:
touching a beloved’s hand,
catching the eye of a stranger,
a pause to contemplate that single violet,
all blooming purple heart. Continue reading “Ordinary Time” →

Wild Lectionary: The Secret Place

On May 31, 2018May 31, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, Uncategorized, Watershed DiscipleshipLeave a comment

Los_Angeles_River_Bridge_B&W Proper 4(9)B
Second Sunday After Pentecost
By Victoria Loorz

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is so high that I cannot attain it.
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Psalm 139:6, 13-14

These are the words of a human in awe, trying to respond to an ecstatic encounter…with a reality much larger, an ineffable beauty… It is an open-hearted exclamation of joy, evidence of a moment of mystical glimpse into What Is that can only be expressed through poetry and singing and jumping up and down howling at the moon. These are the words of an ancient ancestor experiencing something from a totally different worldview, experience, culture, orientation than mine, and yet…and yet it deeply resonates. Buildings and jobs and culture and landscapes and governments have evolved and changed. But the embodied sensual ecstasy, the explosive awakening that happens when you are able to somehow have magical eyes that see, a heart that feels, a peek into what Jesus was talking about when he said “I’ve come to bring LIFE and not just life, but LIVES LIVED FULLY ALIVE life.” (John 10:10)…THAT never changes.

Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: The Secret Place” →

The Undoing of Theodicy

On May 30, 2018June 1, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Subverting Empire, Theological Animation1 Comment

From Bill Wylie-Kellermann’s newest release Dying Well: The Resurrected Life of Jeanie Wylie-Kellermann:

…in the course of Jeanie’s illness and death, I’ve not really found myself angry with God. I never really raged against the locked doors of heaven, or demanded to know why the Divine should permit such bad things happening to one so good as she. I suspect a reason for this that is theological. I wager it has to do with our shared biblical view of the powers. Continue reading “The Undoing of Theodicy” →

Sermon: In the water we are whole

On May 25, 2018May 10, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, Uncategorized, Watershed DiscipleshipLeave a comment

31506830_10156277998501963_6189790451906641920_n — Photo credit: Kimiko Karpoff

Acts 10:44-48,
John 15:9-17

By Reverend Clare Morgan
Preached to the beloved faithful at St. Margaret’s Cedar Cottage, Vancouver

Most of you know that last weekend I attended the People of Faith and Friends against Kinder Morgan event on Burnaby Mountain to participate in a nonviolent blockade of the gate onto the work site. It was a truly inspiring act of political resistance that made me proud to be a Christian, especially an Anglican Christian, in the Pacific Northwest at this watershed moment in human history. Continue reading “Sermon: In the water we are whole” →