Proper 15(20) C
Jeremiah 23:23-29
Hebrews 11:29-12:2
Luke 12:49-56
By Rev. Dr. Victoria Marie
Recently, I had the honour of participating as the resident elder in the Sacred Earth Camp for youth, a project of Salal + Cedar Watershed Discipleship Community. The lectionary readings, in light of the Camp experience, motivated me to revisit and reflect on certain current truths and issues of concern. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Prophets False and True”
By Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. This article first appeared in Geez magazine’s winter 2014 issue, Geez 36: The End.
It seems strange to me that ideas of invasion, attack, occupation, and dispossession are recent fodder for television series such as The Walking Dead. This fictional reality is so strikingly close to the colonial legacy I was born into, at least in concept, it is sometimes difficult to see it as entertainment. Continue reading “Indigenous Resistance Lifts the Veil of Colonial Amnesia”
By Kateri Boucher at Day House Catholic Worker August 11, 2019
Luke 12: 32-4
Hebrews 11: 1-2, 8-19
Wisdom 18: 6-9
Some of you may have heard the story about the man who was being chased by a tiger and falls off a cliff. Luckily he catches a branch and is hanging there from it, trying to figure out what to do. In desperation he cries out, “If there’s a God up there, I’ll do anything if you’ll save me!” Suddenly a voice booms down from the heavens, “This is God and I want to save you! All you have to do is let go of the branch!” There’s a long pause as the man thinks that over, then he finally turns back up and says “Is there anyone ELSE up there?”
By Wes Howard-Brook and Sue Ferguson Johnson
Proper 14 (9) C
Solomon offered as sacrifices of well-being to the LORD twenty-two thousand oxen and one hundred twenty thousand sheep. So the king and all the people of Israel dedicated the house of the LORD.
—1 Kings 8.63What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the LORD; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me.
—Isaiah 1.11-13I will not accept a bull from your house, or goats from your folds.
For every wild animal of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills.
I know all the birds of the air, and all that moves in the field is mine.
“If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and all that is in it is mine.
Do I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?”
—Psalm 50.9-13
By adrienne maree brown, re-posted from her website.
dear men.
this is mostly a note to straight, cis men; but also includes trans men, queer men, and all who participate in masculinity – if you see yourself in these words, this is a love note to you.
patriarchy (the system of society/government in which men hold the power and women are excluded from it) is collapsing, and it’s time for you, too, to give it up, to get yourself out.
it won’t be easy.
i don’t believe total revolution or liberation happens in one generation, but i know from my own life and many lives i have witnessed and accompanied, that it is absolutely possible in your lifetime, in a generation, to personally relinquish an unjust ideology, to begin to practice a more evolved way of being.
Continue reading “relinquishing the patriarchy”
By Joyce Hollyday
In honor of his 75th birthday, I was inscribing to my friend Randy a cop
y of a book that I co-authored. I wanted to thank him for inspiring me to “greater commitment, deeper compassion, and…”—well, something about courage. Having already used “greater” and “deeper,” my mind was momentarily absent of adjectives. After a little thought, I settled on “stronger.” Continue reading “Stranger Courage”
Proper 13(18) C
Hosea 11:1-11
By Laurel Dykstra
Today’s lectionary passage from Hosea is a potent cocktail that mixes parental love and anger with political violence and nature imagery. More broadly and more problematically, the prophet’s oracles:
By Rose Marie Berger, re-shared from Sojourners
I spent five hours as a guest of the U.S. Capitol Police last week. It was hot, really hot. And those plastic handcuffs leave bruises.
I was one of 71 Catholics arrested by the U.S. Capitol Police in the rotunda of the Russell Senate building in Washington, D.C., for “crowding, obstructing, or incommoding” while praying the rosary. My prayer was — and is — to end the warehousing of immigrant children in cages — 63,624 of whom have been apprehended by border patrol at the southwestern border between October 2018 and June 2019 and seven of whom have died after being in federal custody since September. More than a dozen Catholic orders and organizations sponsored the event. Seven Catholic bishops sent letters of support. Continue reading “A Cross of Human Bodies: How 71 Catholics Were Arrested for Protesting Immigrant Child Detention”
Katie Aikins is pastor of Tabernacle United Church in Philadelphia. She and her wife Heather Bargeron are parents to their adopted 20-month-old son Oscar Emmanuel Aikins-Bargeron. Katie preached this sermon on the occasion of Oscar’s baptism on July 21.
Baptism without the church, without the community of faith, would make no sense. One of the promises we make as parents is to raise our child in the community of faith.
This Heather and I know: That though we will make our promises to Oscar and to this church to raise him to follow in the way of Jesus Christ, to show love and justice, to resist oppression and evil, we also know that alone, we as parents will not be enough for Oscar to live into his full calling and identity as a child of God. The community of faith —the place where we are practicing resisting evil together, where we are growing together in our practices of justice and love – this is the context in which baptism unfolds in its meaning and fruitfulness. Continue reading “Named and Claimed By God”
Proper 12(7) C
By Lini Hutchings
O God, come to our aid.
O Lord, make haste to help us.
Glory be to the One who is making the heavens and the earth
and to the One who comes in solidarity to heal all division,
and to the One who sustains us in the Spirit,
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and ever shall be,
world without end.
Amen. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Swimming in the Wastestream”
