Category: Watershed Discipleship

Wild Lectionary: The Trinity, An Invitation

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The Trinity, Andrei Rublev, 15th C

Trinity Sunday C

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Psalm 8:4-9
Romans 5:1-5
John 16:12-15

By Rev. Dr. Victoria Marie

Several years ago, Sarah and I were on a Global Awareness Through Experience or GATE program in Mexico. One of the places we visited was a café-general store and guest house in Cholula (Mexico) run by an Aztec family. While we were chatting with owner’s daughter, our GATE program director asked her, if God was male or female in Aztec theology. Her answer gave me one of those “Yes!” moments. She said, “God is neither male nor female. God is energy.” The gods and goddesses in the Aztec pantheon are aspects of the Divine Energy that attends to a specific need of the people at a specific point in cyclical time, for example, harvest time or during drought , etc. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: The Trinity, An Invitation” →

Pentecost: Bellies in the Mud

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20190608_144453By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann
Reflection offered at Day House Catholic Worker in Detroit on June 9, 2019

Psalm 104
Acts 2:1-11
John 20: 19-2

I admit that I come to these readings today carrying my own fear and anxiety. The kind of fear that can force you to lock yourself in a room. I’ve been scrolling through too many headlines these past few weeks that make it hard to breath. Continue reading “Pentecost: Bellies in the Mud” →

Wild Lectionary: Pentecost

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20190221_073837Pentecost, Year C
Acts 2

By Wes Howard Brook and Sue Ferguson Johnson

“In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young people shall see visions, and your old people shall dream dreams.” (Acts 2.17)

Late this past winter, we had to remove a big, old spruce tree from the south side of our little house here in the Issaquah Creek watershed. The City had replaced a sewer line adjacent to our house a few years earlier, and it had severed a major root of the tree. We knew it was only a matter of time for that old spruce. It finally gave up and down it came to protect our house from the risk of it falling on the roof. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Pentecost” →

To Enlist

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J PerkAn excerpt from Detroit-based theologian Dr. Jim Perkinson’s classic piece “Theology and the City: Learning to Cry Struggling to See.“

*To live in a suburb “neutrally” is to participate in the American fiction of innocence.

…In complex, globally interdependent societies like those we now live in, theology that is not simply ideology requires a kind of militancy. It must enter a fray that is neither gentle nor innocent. But it has not ever been different for Christian “God talk.” In the first centuries of the church’s life, for instance, the early meaning of paganism was both “rural-dweller” and “noncombatant.” To become a believer in the early church meant to enlist. In the Roman imperial order, a sacramentum was an oath of loyalty taken by a soldier to Caesar. For Christians living under that imperial regime, celebrating “sacraments” like the Eucharist was a practice of political resistance in a struggle that engaged war-making as its nonviolent, but combative opposite. From the beginning, Christianity has been about spiritual warfare, when it has not forgotten its calling. And Christian theology in the mix is the articulation of where God is most likely to be encountered in the ongoing conflict.

Wild Lectionary: God’s Own Pocket

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Batch hills(1)
Bachelor Hills, Secwepemc Territory

Easter 6C

Revelation 21:10; 21:22-22:5

And in the spirit he carried me to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God…I saw no temple in the city.

by Rev LeAnn Blackert

Forty-five minutes into our hike, we crest the last steep stretch and find ourselves standing on a flat section of land with limitless views in all directions. The snow covered peaks of the mountains of Wells Gray Park highlight the northern view, while off to our west the sun begins its descent to the horizon. Blue gray hills rim the southern exposure and to the east the city of Kamloops nestles in the valley. I recall words offered to me years ago on a trail leading to the water’s edge in western Vancouver: “Truly we are being held in God’s own pocket.” Our Wild Church group’s experience atop one of the hills in Kenna Cartwright Park in Kamloops, BC, comes to mind when I read the words from Revelation. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: God’s Own Pocket” →

Wild Lectionary: Trees, a Gift for All or Entitlement for Some?

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226AtlanticAveEaster 5C 5th
Revelation 21:1-6
John 13:31-35

By Rev. Dr. Victoria Marie

And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals.”

I imagine that a new Jerusalem, where God will dwell, will most definitely have tree-lined streets. I also imagine that God’s design for the present Jerusalem—for Earth’s cities in general—is that all should benefit from the Divine gift of trees.

Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Trees, a Gift for All or Entitlement for Some?” →

Wild Lectionary: Sheep, Gazelle and Rock

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45073825842_789e1c317b_bActs 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” →

Wild Lectionary: Raised for the Great Turning

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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” →

Wild Lectionary: Thomas, Bodies, Touch, and Violence

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Hold Fast by Thor (Creative Commons License)

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” →