Category: Theological Animation

Wild Lectionary: Learn from the Fig Tree

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, Uncategorized, Watershed Discipleship3 Comments

PhotoAdvent 1B

Isaiah 64:1-9
Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19
1 Corinthians 1:3-9
Mark 13:24-37

By Jessica Miller

Many years ago, on a prairie in Michigan, I became a student of the landscape. Officially, I tracked phenology, or the study of seasonal phenomena. Mostly I would wander the tall grass, seeking changes in the flowers. Who is blooming? Who is senescing? Whose shoots are green and growing? Some days would be punctuated by the commanding, haunting, rolling trumpet-call of sandhill cranes. The sound yanked my head up out of the grass and up to the sky. Where were they coming from? Where were they going? Learning the birds and plants and just a tiny fraction of the invisible strings that tie them to the world (the temperature, the direction of the wind, the rising and setting of the sun) taught me how to listen to the Spirit. Where does she come from? Where is she going? You can never know for sure, and yet you can become familiar with her flight-paths. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Learn from the Fig Tree” →

Peace On Earth and the Politics of Christmas

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CrossThe Alternative Seminary will be un-domesticating biblical tales of liberation for all radical disciples in the Philly area next weekend:

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

 

Part of President Trump’s vision of “making American great again” is that – to hell with political correctness – we will all be able to say “Merry Christmas!” again.

This is deeply ironic but sadly telling:  Much of the Christian church in the United States has been co-opted by an American gospel of prosperity, racism, violence, and militant nationalism.  The celebration of Christmas is often wrapped in innocent, feel-good, Hallmark-card imagery. But in fact the biblical texts describing the coming of Jesus are making powerful assertions about the politics of the Bible that speak very much to our contemporary global crises.  We will reflect on the “nativity narratives” in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke to see how they express core biblical themes of justice and liberation.  We will try to “un-domesticate” these tales of liberation and reflect on how they are truly challenging us in terms of our allegiance and our discipleship.  A perfect event for Advent.  A light breakfast will be served.  A $5 donation is requested to cover costs.

If you are interested in participating, please contact Will O’Brien at (215) 842-1790 or wobrien@alternativeseminary.net by December 3.

The Alternative Seminary is a program of biblical and theological study and reflection designed to foster an authentic biblical witness in the modern world.  For more information, see www.alternativeseminary.net.

Christ the King Sermon: Bossy and Beautiful

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Cloud of Witnesses, Theological Animation, Uncategorized2 Comments

momBy Lydia Wylie-Kellermann
November 26, 2017, at Day House Catholic Worker in Detroit

“Let me show you how to fold this, Grandpa,” Isaac said after he picked up a dish rag off my dad’s kitchen floor. He carefully folded it just as he had learned at school. At night, we’ve been reading The BFG and it is slowed down by the fact that Isaac pauses regularly to point out all the words he can read on each page. It’s incredible! I love watching all these incredible things he is learning and knowing that I am not responsible for it. I just get to delight it in. Continue reading “Christ the King Sermon: Bossy and Beautiful” →

Wild Lectionary: Soothe the Earth and Heal the Waters

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at_Nevada_National_Security_Site_2011
Western Shoshone and North American Catholic Workers at the Nevada National Security Site.

Feast of Christ the King

Ezekiel 34.11-12, 15-17
1 Corinthians 15:20-26, 28
Matthew 25:31-46

By Victoria Marie

Today is the feast of Christ the King or Reign of Christ Sunday. The mental images that the words “king” and “reign” bring to mind are based on our knowledge of the actions of kings and political leaders.  Today’s first reading from the prophet Ezekiel gives us God’s view of leadership. The image of the shepherd is commonly used to portray monarchs in biblical literature. So, if we think of Christ the King as Christ the Good Shepherd, we have a truer sense of what this day is about. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Soothe the Earth and Heal the Waters” →

There Is No End to Connectedness

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, Watershed Discipleship3 Comments

Steindl RastFrom Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast in an Onbeing interview with Krista Tippett (January 2016):

I remember, the grace that Buddhists pray before a meal starts with the words, “Innumerable beings brought us this food. We should know how it comes to us.” And when you put that into practice and look at what’s there at your table, on your plate, there is no end to connectedness. In the end, for instance, most people don’t think of it, but in the end, we always eat earth. We eat earth. Not in an abstract way, in a very concrete way. This humus is what we eat, or crystals when we eat salt, it’s pretty obvious that comes out of the earth. That’s earth, directly.

When we eat vegetables, well, the vegetables were nourished by all the nutrients in the earth, and then now we eat them, or the fruits of these plants. If you eat meat or fish, then they were nourished by vegetables, and they were nourished by the earth. Always comes back to earth. But that is only one aspect. Most of it was grown, so people had to work on sowing it, and harvesting it, packaging it, transporting it. There you have already a couple of thousand people whom you will never see, never know by name, never meet, and yet without them, there wouldn’t be anything on your plate. There’s this wonderful cartoon where the family sits at Thanksgiving around the table and says, “Thank you, Jesus.” And then in a cloud comes a farm worker, whose name happens to be Jesus, like the Mexican farm workers.

Wild Lectionary: Look to the Acorns

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, Uncategorized, Watershed Discipleship1 Comment
IMG_2956.JPG
Dark-eyed Junco
Photo Credit: Laurel Dykstra

Proper 28(33) A
Pentecost + 24

Matthew 25:14-30

By Ragan Sutterfield

I have been spending my mornings in the woods lately, a short hike before I begin to work on the tasks of the day. As fall finally arrives here in Arkansas the juncos have returned, twittering as they flash the white of their tails, and the long metallic notes of white-throated sparrows echo in the understory. Each step along the trails comes with a crunch, not only of the newly fallen leaves, but also of the acorns, cracking orange against the gray shale of the hillsides. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Look to the Acorns” →

It’s Time to Take Jesus Off the Pedestal

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation7 Comments

Lindsay GreyReyBy Tommy Airey

Like every good Evangelical, my adolescent faith was about giving all glory to the Lord. I sang praise songs to a “high and lifted up” Jesus and always concluded my prayers “in Jesus’ name” (I signed off my emails “Fool For Christ,” but that’s a story for another time). I was taught to utilize “apologetics” to defend the faith and prove that Jesus was, in fact, Divine. I revered C.S. Lewis whose Mere Christianity made a water-tight case for my beliefs. Lewis left readers three choices for who Jesus really was: a lunatic, a liar or the Lord Himself:

Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.

Lewis claimed that, when it came to the people who actually met Jesus, they responded in three ways: hatred, terror or adoration. There was no middle ground. Continue reading “It’s Time to Take Jesus Off the Pedestal” →

Wild Lectionary: Letting it flow down the creek

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IMG_4361Proper 27(32)A
Pentecost + 23

I Thessalonians 4:13-18
Matthew 25: 1-13

Keep awake therefore, for you do not know the day or the hour. (Mt 25:13)

…so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. (1 Th 4:13)

By Andrew Hudson

I’m an empty-nester, twice over. I sent my son off to college a couple years ago, and I’m still not through adjusting. And just recently, I had a similar experience, sending off a good, small Mennonite congregation to a new location at the end of my being their interim pastor.  Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Letting it flow down the creek” →

Eucharistic conventions: Why we practice these (somewhat) odd manners at the Lord’s Table

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

SehestedBy Ken Sehested, the author/editor of prayerandpolitiks,org

When three of us began daydreaming about a starting a new congregation, during long hikes in the Blue Ridge Mountains in the first year of the new millennium, one of the things we immediately imagined was worship centered around communion, including placing the table in the center of our seating. Every Sunday—which is unusual in Protestant bodies. None of us were raised that way. This tangible ritual act—of re-membering in the midst of a dismembered world—is poignantly expressive of our theological vision. Continue reading “Eucharistic conventions: Why we practice these (somewhat) odd manners at the Lord’s Table” →

Only a Love Ethic

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Feminist/Womanist/Queer Liberation and Theology, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

WinkAn excerpt from the late theologian Walter Wink’s “Homosexuality and the Bible,” written more than two decades ago:

The crux of the matter, it seems to me, is simply that the Bible has no sexual ethic. There is no Biblical sex ethic. Instead, it exhibits a variety of sexual mores, some of which changed over the thousand year span of biblical history. Mores are unreflective customs accepted by a given community. Many of the practices that the Bible prohibits, we allow, and many that it allows, we prohibit. The Bible knows only a love ethic, which is constantly being brought to bear on whatever sexual mores are dominant in any given country, or culture, or period.
Continue reading “Only a Love Ethic” →