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Wild Lectionary: Sheep, Gazelle and Rock
Acts 9:36-43
Psalm 23
By Laurel Dykstra
On this Good Shepherd Sunday, our annual engagement with the repeated biblical assertion that both kingship and divine-human relations resemble sheep husbandry, the lectionary illuminates two key aspects of the emerging Wild Church Movement. Connected to both Watershed Discipleship and Contemplative Ecology, Wild Church is nothing more than Christians who intentionally worship, or seek to experience holiness, outside of buildings. In forests, deserts, city parks, beaches, urban vacant lots we reassert the strand of our tradition where wilderness is the place of divine encounter. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Sheep, Gazelle and Rock”
To what do I devote my life?
By Dahr Jamail, excerpted from a piece from TruthOut.org
By way of the corporate capitalist industrial growth culture within which most of us have been raised and immersed, we have become disconnected from the planet we are so deeply part of. This, I believe, is the root cause of the climate crisis we now find ourselves in. Hence, the first step toward answering the question of “how to be” during this time, which must be answered before any of us can decide “what to do,” is to connect ourselves back to the planet. For we cannot begin to walk until our feet are on the ground.
Each day I wake and begin to process the daily news of the climate catastrophe and the global political tilt into overt fascism. The associated trauma, grief, rage and despair that come from all of this draws me back to the work of Stan Rushworth, Cherokee elder, activist and scholar, who has guided much of my own thinking about how to move forward. Rushworth has reminded me that while Western colonialist culture believes in “rights,” many Indigenous cultures teach of “obligations” that we are born into: obligations to those who came before, to those who will come after, and to the Earth itself.
Hence, when the grief and rage threaten to consume me, I now orient myself around the question, “What are my obligations?” In other words, “From this moment on, knowing what is happening to the planet, to what do I devote my life?“
Each of us must ask ourselves this question every day, as we face down catastrophe.
Wild Lectionary: Raised for the Great Turning
Easter 3C
John 21:1-19
Bring some fish you have caught and come and have breakfast
By The Rev. Marilyn Zehr
This week I loved reading the resurrection story of barbequed fish and bread on the beach through Joanna Macy’s three narrative lens of business as usual, the great unraveling, and the great turning. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Raised for the Great Turning”
Fifth Helpings
By Talitha Fraser
We live in times where the focus is on those things that divide rather than connect us but as Chappo (Peter Chapman) says “You should share communion together, it has a unique power to unite beyond words.” Continue reading “Fifth Helpings”
Rain
from Thomas Merton, The Rain and the Rhinoceros
“Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By “they” I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness. Continue reading “Rain”
Wild Lectionary: Thomas, Bodies, Touch, and Violence
Easter 2(B)
John 20:19-31
By Laurel Dykstra
“Doubting Thomas” it’s the name we call someone who demands hard evidence, who won’t accept what we say or who doesn’t share our beliefs.
There are all kinds opportunities in the church use that name against someone. All sorts of differences in the beliefs of faithful Christians: angels, auras, miracles, marriage, dinosaurs, women disciples, Adam and Eve, Noah, what prayer is, what happens during a sacrament, what salvation means, what parts of the creeds we say with confidence and, perhaps most pertinent here, how we understand the resurrection. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Thomas, Bodies, Touch, and Violence”
Saying Hello and Goodbye
By Linda Johnson Seyenkulo
Culture is a funny thing. You do not know it is there, until it is not. What I mean by that is the culture to which we are born is so much a part of us that we are not aware. Someone said, “It is the air we breathe.” Or if we were fish, it would be the water we swim in. Culture allows us to live and move without having to think about everything we do.
I’m a white, educated, western woman living in a West African country where many people do not have much education. Me being white, educated and western is part of my culture and my privilege. I do not think about it much, but in being all that, I carry with me an expectation that the way I live and move and have my being is normal; how things should be. I often function that way not thinking about what it means for those around me. Continue reading “Saying Hello and Goodbye”
Radical Discipleship 