By Tommy Airey
The Gospel is the proclamation and conviction that there is a Force of good that governs the universe, a Power of Love imminently saturating everything, yet bigger than that too: beyond space and time, deep into a future, animated with hope. It woos, beckons and compels people to join in on a mission that bends everything towards justice, that prefigures that hopeful future into the now. Continue reading “Some Much Needed Good News”
By Kenneth Sehested, from the new book In the Land of the Willing: Litanies, Prayers, Poems, and Benedictions
This is one of those
old fashioned, free-range,
leap-of-faith callings.
Just when you thought
our climate-controlled,
pension-secured culture
had squeezed all the
chutzpah out of the
believing community-
no more burning bushes,
flaming tongues-of-fire,
scary angelic appearances,
even still-small voices-
the Spirit erupts again
for those with ears to hear
and hearts aligned.
By Wes Howard-Brook and Sue Ferguson Johnson, commentary on the lectionary for May 22
In this ongoing season of Pentecost, we celebrate the Holy Spirit, not simply as “a spirit,” but as Spirit-infused-flesh in human bodies. This week’s reading from Proverbs 8 connects with the recent sequence of selections from the Johannine Last Supper Discourse (John 13-17) to present us with the perhaps surprising portrait of Jesus as the male-female God-made-flesh. Continue reading “The Male/Female Image of God Made Flesh”
By Wes Howard-Brook and Sue Ferguson Johnson
What transformed Simon Peter, last seen denying his discipleship, into a bold, courageous public speaker and soon-to-be Jesus jailbird? Luke’s exciting, even outrageous, story of the Pentecost outpouring of the Holy Spirit is always at risk of being domesticated as “the birthday of the church.” But heard in the context both of Luke’s two-part narrative and the wider scriptural “religion of creation” story, the Pentecost experience can and must be reclaimed as one of the opening salvos in the confrontation between the Good News of Jesus and the religion of empire. Continue reading “I Will Pour Out my Spirit on All Flesh!”
By Tommy Airey
But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the spirit is alive because of δικαιοσύνην. If the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his spirit that dwells in you.
Romans 8:10-11
The Apostle Paul wrote his Romans epistle to a network of house churches pledging allegiance to Jesus in the Empire’s capital city sometime in the 50s, two decades after the death and resurrection of their Leader. The eighth chapter is embedded right in the middle of the lengthy letter that has been cherished by Protestant Christians for the past 500 years. For all of us who first came to view Jesus through a conservative Evangelical lens, Romans has been interpreted through a magnifying glass, focusing on sinners becoming “justified,” neatly explained as “just if I never sinned” so that we can go to heaven when we die. At least, this was how the sincere leaders at Campus Crusade for Christ broke it all down to me using their 4 Spiritual Laws two decades ago. Continue reading “Re-Animating Justification, Re-Patterning Our Lives”
By Wes Howard-Brook and Sue Ferguson Johnson, commentary on the lectionary for May 8, 2016
We offer this reflection in memory and honor of Daniel Berrigan, SJ, who proclaimed and embodied Jesus’s “way of salvation” over the long haul.
This week’s reading from Acts cries out, “In your face, Roman Empire!” Sometimes, Luke keeps his anti-imperial message shrouded in “hidden transcripts,” as when he tells tax collectors basically to quit (by taking the profit out of their hated work, Luke 3.12-13). But in today’s passage, it is all out in the open, thanks to the ironic witness of a slave girl possessed by a spirit not “holy.” Continue reading “Proclaiming an Anti-Imperial “Way of salvation””
By Wes Howard-Brook and Sue Ferguson Johnson
Readers of radicaldiscipleship.net hardly need to be reminded of the sharp contrast between the pax imperium and pax Christi. It is foundational that Jesus’s messiahship is grounded not in militarism but in love. What it can be easy to forget—or to remember but not practice so well—is the holistic nature of the peace Jesus offers: the “ease of fit” between our inner and outer, our individual and communal lives. Continue reading “Not as the World Gives”: Receiving Jesus’s Gift of Peace”
Nichola Torbett of Oakland’s Seminary of the Street recently posted this great question:
Radical Christian friends, what books do you recommend that do deep exegesis of Matthew and Luke of the sort that Ched Myers has done on Mark and Wes Howard-Brook has done with John? And actually, while I have your attention, what are your indispensable go-to books for radical Christian inspiration?
Here are some of the responses: Continue reading “Radical Book Recommendations”
From Ched Myers’ Binding The Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (1988):
Mark’s Gospel originally was written to help imperial subjects learn the hard truth about their world and themselves…His is a story by, about, and for those committed to God’s work of justice, compassion, and liberation in the world…to those willing to raise the wrath of the empire, Mark offers a way of discipleship.
By Tommy Airey
A great gale arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion…
Mark 4:37-38a
A violent squall came up,
waves of shame-based codependency,
white supremacy,
addiction to efficiency,
fear of intimacy,
lack of emotional competency
flooding my boat. Continue reading “Hovering”
Radical Discipleship 