By 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”
By Mark Van Steenwyk of the Center for Prophetic Imagination (Minneapolis, MN)
This piece was originally posted on Patheos.
Ours is a civilized god. He is distant, floating high above the world, refusing to be dirtied by it. He is the Supreme Hierarch, the Ruler of All. The Great Architect, looking down over all of creation and ordering it according to his Divine Blueprint. Of all of the things he’s created, he likes human beings the best. Sometimes he communicates to some of these humans, revealing to them part of his Divine Blueprint. Our primary relationship with this god is one of obedience; we are to do his will so that things can work according to the Blueprint. Continue reading “Thoughts on an Imperial God”
From the introduction of Randy Woodley’s May 2019 Sojourners Magazine piece “The Fullness Thereof.”
CHANGE YOUR LENSES, please. Okay, maybe you can’t simply change lenses right now, but would you at least notice the lenses you are currently wearing? If you are like, say, 99.9 percent of us in the U.S., you have been influenced by a very particular set of perspectives that interpret life from an Enlightenment-bound Western worldview.
All of our lenses have various perspectival tints, but Western worldviews seem to have several in common, including the foundational influence of Platonic dualism, inherited from the Greeks. This particular influence absolutizes the realm of the abstract (spirit, soul, mind) and reduces the importance of the concrete realm (earth, body, material), disengaging them from one another. In dualistic thinking, we are no longer an existing whole. Continue reading “Changing Out Our Western Lenses”
The benediction given by the Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber at the funeral of Rachel Held Evans (re-posted by Diana Butler Bass on social media).
Blessed are the agnostics. Blessed are they who doubt. Blessed are those who have nothing to offer. Blessed are the preschoolers who cut in line at communion. Blessed are the poor in spirit. You are of heaven and Jesus blesses you.
Blessed are those whom no one else notices. The kids who sit alone at middle-school lunch tables. The laundry guys at the hospital. The sex workers and the night-shift street sweepers. The closeted. The teens who have to figure out ways to hide the new cuts on their arms. Blessed are the meek. You are of heaven and Jesus blesses you. Continue reading “God’s Blessing to the Weak”
By Ken Sehested
Pictured below is my Dad’s “Heart Shield” Bible, a copy of the New Testament on to which a metal plate front cover has been attached. The engraved cover, now smudged by corrosion, reads “May this keep you safe from harm.” It was sold by the Know Your Bible Sales Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, manufactured by the Whitman Publishing Company, Racine, Wisconsin, and was designed to fit into a soldier’s uniform shirt pocket. Multiple stories exist of soldiers reportedly spared serious injury when bullets struck this tiny piece of body armor.
An inscription inside the cover indicates that Dad’s sister, my Aunt Juanita, gave him this gift. No date is listed, but it was sometime before Dad landed with the first wave of soldiers storming Omaha Beach in the June 1944 Allies’ D-Day invasion on the French coast in World War II. Dad was among the fortunate survivors, though he carried for the remainder of his life a piece of German artillery shrapnel embedded in bone behind his right ear. Continue reading “Dad’s “Heart Shield” Bible”
Pentecost, 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”
By Bill Wylie-Kellermann
June 2, 2019
the day’s measure is more fleshy far,
more soulful even
than circles, however sweet, around our brother sun,
warming the planet this day
toward the end of an aeon. Continue reading “Seventieth with Friends”
By Kateri Boucher
Quit your prayers
for quick answers,
quick garden growth,
quick long hair,
quick flight across
the country,
quick salvation,
and even quick death. Continue reading “Quit your Prayers”
By Ben Wideman, campus minister for the 3rd Way Collective in State College, PA
*This is part of a series of pieces from contributors all over North America each answering the question, “How would you define radical discipleship?” We will be posting responses regularly on Mondays during 2019.
Discipleship is a word that gets tossed around a lot in campus ministry. It is at the core of many different organizations on our campus. We even have a campus ministry that was founded at Penn State and now present on more than a dozen campuses across the country called DiscipleMakers. Most of these organizations see discipleship as a sending call to embody a literal biblical call to make non-believers or non-practicing Christians into disciples of Christ (based on the Matthew 28 passage often referred to as the Great Commission). Continue reading “To Flip the Script of What a Christian Minister Can Be”
From the front porch of Mother Ruby Sales (May 19, 2019).
Do freedom movements seek to build a new table or do they seek to gain more seats at a broken down one? Do they create new powerful people or do they create new token elites? Do nonviolent movements use the same language to talk about ourselves and lives that we learn from the guardians of power or do we speak in new and multiple tongues that express the largeness of our individual and collective lives?
Radical Discipleship 