Category: Uncategorized

Connoisseur

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, UncategorizedLeave a comment

indexBy Kate Foran

For Steve

Your appetite has a reputation of its own. Dinner hosts glow as you ask for seconds and thirds and they marvel that a person of your moderate size can put so much away. You must have several hollow limbs, they wonder, and you offer your compliments to the chef, tasting everything again. Before you go to a party you “pre-eat,” you say, so as not to embarrass yourself. You remember your life as a series of meals—the loaf of bread Mrs. DiMartino baked you for your seventh birthday, the pasta your grandmother made and draped over chairs and towel racks in the kitchen, the collards and fried chicken you ate with gusto, to the delight of the local cook in Memphis. You never encountered a meal you didn’t like. Continue reading “Connoisseur” →

Wild Lectionary: Of Raspberries and Eternal Life

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August 5-18 picProper 13B, Year B
August 5th, 2018

John 6:24-35

By Svinda Heinrichs

I pondered the Gospel of John passage for this Sunday as I took a walk down the hill into the ever-expanding raspberry patch in the field to the place where the raspberry bushes and forest meet. I ate my fill of the red, juicy, sweet bursts of sunshine and made my way back up the hill marvelling at how the shrubbery had grown up over the two years since we cleared the space to make a better view for ourselves. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Of Raspberries and Eternal Life” →

Raising Boys

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Feminist/Womanist/Queer Liberation and Theology, Uncategorized1 Comment

20180722_114619By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann. Published in Geez Magazine‘s most recent issue on Gender Flex.

“Mommy, baby is tired. I need to put baby in the pack and walk,” says Cedar, my two-year-old. I quickly design a make shift baby carrier tying his baby doll to his stomach. He walks back and forth across the house and then stops and sways. After five minutes, he heavy sighs and says disappointedly “baby is still awake.” He walks on mumbling to himself about how baby needs his milk and how the baby is too little to drink water out of a cup and baby just needs his milk. Continue reading “Raising Boys” →

Choose Life

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20180713_100030By Katerina Friesen

Praising/ Adoring
We are Your field, O Lord,
and we praise You as Your planting, the work of Your hands!
We praise You for Your watchful eye,
for the way You bend over us and smile
as we grow from tender stems to ripe harvest,
for giving us rain and sun in due season.
We praise You because You never give up on us,
but coax new life from barren ground again and again.
We are Your field, O Lord,
and we praise You as Your planting, the work of Your hands!

Affirming Faith
Voices 1: We will not bow down to serve other gods:
the gods of war, the gods of greed, the gods who destroy the Earth.
Voices 2: We will not bow down to the gods of racism,
to gods who make us feel either inferior or superior,
to gods who do not love us, but demand our devotion.
All: We choose life!
Voices 1: We choose to serve the God of Abraham, and Isaac,
the God of Sarah and Rebecca, of Mary and of Jesus,
Voices 2: We choose to serve the God of our ancestors in faith,
of Paul and Lydia, of Menno Simons and Margaretha Sattler,
of Vincent and Rosemarie Harding.
All: We choose life! We will hold fast to the Lord, the God of life.

Sending
God has set before us today life and death. Let us continue
to walk in God’s way, assured that our ancestors walk before us,
that Christ walks with us, and that the Spirit binds us together
and helps us to choose life.

 

Wild Lectionary: It’s not about the bread

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raspberryProper 12 (Year B)
July 29, 2018
John 6:1-21

By The Reverend Marilyn Zehr

Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.”  Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all.  Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted.  When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.”

Funny story, true story:  As I write this I am at a large Church Conference as a “guest,” where on Sunday, I heard an inspiring sermon on the feeding of the multitude story as told by Mark.  After worship and communion where we shared a morsel of the Bread of Life dipped in grape juice, we eventually found our way to the cafeteria for lunch.  As a “guest” for a couple of days I had not purchased a meal plan and so was hoping to purchase a random ticket for lunch.  Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: It’s not about the bread” →

Jesus is our Messiah because He Broke Laws

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, Uncategorized1 Comment

crucifixion_of_christ_mdq5jp.jpgShared with us from Friendly Fire Collective.

At the beginning of the 2016 version of The Magnificent Seven, the mine owner Bartholomew Bogue gives a pseudo-sermon to the townspeople of Rose City who do not want to give him their land. He tells them that, in America, democracy is equated with capitalism and capitalism with God. Therefore, by resisting him, they were standing in the way of democracy, progress, and even God. After this blasphemous sermon, he and his men burn the church the townspeople met in. Continue reading “Jesus is our Messiah because He Broke Laws” →

Gifts on the Shelf: An invitation to a children project

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, Race, Identity, and History, UncategorizedLeave a comment

20180717_133052By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann

While I waited for my kids to fall asleep, I looked through their bookshelf nurtured by the stories and creativity that rests beside them. There, untouched, were the biographies, the history, the celebrations of protest. These ones always seemed to be neglected when the choices were made with options of talking mice, farting dogs, or gigantic excavators.

I want these stories read and loved. I want them to become part of the fabric of their ancestral history….a movement ancestry. To learn these stories by heart. I want movement history learned as a way to help these boys navigate the scary world they are growing up in. I needed to figure out how to honor the stories and bring the out with gifted anticipation. I needed to create ritual and tradition around them. Continue reading “Gifts on the Shelf: An invitation to a children project” →

Wild Lectionary: A Contrast of Economies

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wild lectionary.pngNinth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 11(16)

By Rachael Bullock

Psalm 23:1-3
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters;
he restores my soul.

If you haven’t noticed, the conversation around fossil fuels can often be a fairly tense one. This is especially true as political discourse in North America becomes increasingly polarized. As I’ve listened most recently to arguments about Kinder Morgan’s pipeline, oil sands in Alberta, the future of environmental policies, I notice that the general arguments in favour of nonrenewable energy rests on the assumption that there is not enough – in general, not just economically. This makes sense given that when discussing “environmentalism” or any other subject, it is never simply a conversation “about the facts”. Rather, it becomes a dialogue in which participants are often not even aware that underlying life experiences, societal messages, and driving ideologies are brought into play. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: A Contrast of Economies” →

Review of Dianne Bergant, A New Heaven, a New Earth: The Bible and Catholicity

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Uncategorized, Watershed Discipleship1 Comment

bookBy Wes Howard-Brook

Readers here of the “Wild Lectionary” series hardly need to be convinced of the Bible’s deep concern for all of God’s good creation. Our shared journey through the Scriptures from the perspective of Earth and her creatures has brought forth beautiful, poignant and powerful reflections on our own broken relationship with creation and the path to mutual healing.

But as we also know, humanity as a whole continues to run roughshod over the planet as if the constant alarm bells of record-breaking heat, storms and drought were not audible over the din of commerce and headphoned distractions. People who identity as “Christians” often lead the charge of climate denial and rejection of God’s love for creation. For such people, Dianne Bergant’s solid, steady, gentle overview of the Bible’s message of ecojustice may be just what is needed to shift perspective enough to join the movement to transform and to heal our relationship with creation. Continue reading “Review of Dianne Bergant, A New Heaven, a New Earth: The Bible and Catholicity” →

Trayvon Martin, the Legacy of Lynching, and the Role of White Women

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melanie-5-25-15By Melanie S. Morrison. Re-posted from LivingFormations.

 

*Five years ago , George Zimmerman was exonerated for the killing of Trayvon Martin. Three years ago today, Sandra Bland was found dead in a Waller County Texas jail cell. Just this week the Department of Justice announced a re-opening of its investigation into the lynching of Emmett Till.  It is in this context we share this piece. Melanie S. Morrison reflects on legacies of lynching and the particular roles white women and cultures surrounding white womanhood have played in the killing of Black people and the failure of any system to hold anyone responsible. Morrison reflects as she simultaneously steeps herself  in the courageous legacy of Lillian E. Smith, as an exceptionally rare white southern woman who dared challenge white supremacy and who knew all too well the role white women and white “liberals” play in sustaining it. We have much history to reckon with as we seek to do our work today. -Jennifer Harvey

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You [white women] fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we [black women] fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying. – Audre Lorde

I had returned to the Lillian E. Smith Center for the Arts in the mountains of North Georgia for three weeks of solitude in July 2013. I hoped to make significant headway on my research and writing about the intergenerational legacy of lynching and how this reign of terror remains largely unacknowledged by the descendants of its white perpetrators. Continue reading “Trayvon Martin, the Legacy of Lynching, and the Role of White Women” →