The Catch

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BoatBy Tommy Airey, a meditation on Luke 5:1-11

Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God…

We grope for what is spiritual-but-not-religious. Beyond the rusted institutions. These have utterly failed to meet human need. Too often, the church is a performance, a club, an obligation. So we go beyond the four walls, where Steadfast Love cannot be contained or confined. We come to the shore. Water and trees and birds bring life and hope and wonder. Jesus meets us there. He is the anti-institutional inspiration. He speaks truth and beauty. The word of God.

…he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets.

At the shore, Jesus beckons us to the simple life. Everything we need is right in front of us. Manna. Boats. Fill-in-the-Blank. Cultivating awareness becomes crucial to the spiritual life. Jesus points to the nets. Like our souls, and everything else that carries heavy burdens, they need washing. Continue reading “The Catch” →

Liberating the Bible from the Hands of the Colonizers

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index.jpgA Review of Unsettling the Word: Biblical Experiments in Decolonization
(Edited by Steve Heinrichs)

By Jen Galicinski

A timely, poetic, and prophetic new anthology titled Unsettling the Word: Biblical Experiments in Decolonization has recently been published by the Mennonite Church of Canada and will be re-published by Orbis Books in February 2019. It was edited by Steve Heinrichs, the Director of Indigenous-Settler Relations for the Mennonite Church of Canada and one of the several faith leaders who was recently arrested and spent time in prison for protesting the Trans-Mountain pipeline in Burnaby, B.C. in solidarity with the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.

For Heinrichs, it was working on the book that deepened his profound belief that we must truly listen to the voices of Indigenous peoples, who have been suffering, alongside their wounded land, since contact with European Christian settlers.  He is committed to following The Crucified One by acting in solidarity with crucified peoples, following their leadership towards self-governance and sovereignty over their own lands. Continue reading “Liberating the Bible from the Hands of the Colonizers” →

Bread of Heaven

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indexBy Katerina Friesen

Lord of the harvest, Grain-sower, Bread-giver, Life-sustainer:

We are astounded by your bounteous love, filled to the brim

with good things. You give us enough, and then some!

Bread of Life, we love You. Though You were pounded down,

You rose up again, broken so all may be fed.

Breath of Heaven, Spirit of All-Things-New,

with You, we are carried through the fire and we rise up,

we rise up again! So we praise Your name, Holy Trinity of Love.

Our Script

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BindingWe continue our every-Sunday-celebration of the 30th anniversary of Binding The Strong Man, Ched Myers’ political reading of Mark’s Gospel. This portion is excerpted from the book’s “Aftermath” entitled On Continuing the Narrative of Biblical Radicalism.

The empty tomb at the end of Mark’s Gospel symbolizes that his story, like its subject Jesus, has not ended but lives on. Just as Mark reached back across the centuries to bring the “old story” of Hebrew prophetic radicalism to life again in a new story about Jesus of Nazareth, so does he reach forward across the ages to us, challenging us to continue the story by “returning to Galilee” (Mark 16:7). But how is it that an invitation to “reread” this story is politically subversive? Does not the circle of narrative actually lead the reader away from practice, shutting out the real world and seducing us with one that exists only in our imagination? This is certainly what those who dismiss the fictions of apocalyptic narrative as the wish-dreams of the alienated would have us believe. Continue reading “Our Script” →

Instead of Calling the Police

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Subverting Empire1 Comment

Vigil2From “What To Do Instead of Calling the Police,” a living document (last updated July 15, 2018) compiled by Aaron Rose.

We’ve all been there. Your neighbor is setting off fireworks at 3am. Or there’s a couple fighting outside your window and it’s getting physical. Or you see someone hit their child in public. What do you do? Your first instinct might be: call 911. That’s what many people are trained to do in the United States when we see something dangerous or threatening happening.

At this point, most of us understand that, in the U.S., the police often reinforce a system of racialized violence and white supremacy, in which black people are at least three times more likely to be killed by the police. For years now, we’ve heard the nearly daily news of another unarmed person of color being shot by the police. When the police get involved, black people, Latinx people, Native Americans, people of color, LGBTQ people, sex workers, women, undocumented immigrants, and people living with disabilities and mental health diagnoses are usually in more danger, even if they are the victims of the crime being reported. Police frequently violently escalate peaceful interactions, often without repercussions. In 2017, the police killed over 1,100 people in the U.S. Continue reading “Instead of Calling the Police” →

The Data on Militarized Policing

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FergusonAn excerpt from The Washington Post (8/22/18), reporting on what the data is saying about police militarization.

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found that there’s little upside to militarized policing. The study looked at data from Maryland, where a state law required that police agencies in the state submit biannual reports on how and how often they used their SWAT teams. The law was in effect from 2010 through 2014, after which the legislature allowed it to expire. Author Jonathan Mummolo performed a statistical analysis of the Maryland data and crime rates, officer safety data, and race. Continue reading “The Data on Militarized Policing” →

Wild Lectionary: Nature as Divine Dwelling Place

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20180716_124708Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 16 (21) B

Psalm 84:1-3

How lovely is your dwelling place, O LORD of hosts!

 My soul longs, indeed it faints for the courts of the LORD; my heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God.

 Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, at your altars, O LORD of hosts, my King and my God.

By Celina Medrano-Miller

As I write this, I sit on the earth, of the traditional and ancestral territory of the Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish and Musqueam Nations.

I was born on this unceded territory, under the name for the new city which was built, called Vancouver.

My parents both migrated here separately… Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Nature as Divine Dwelling Place” →

There Are Other Clocks

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BayoAn excerpt from Bayo Akomolafe’s These Wilds Beyond Our Fences (2017). Dr. Akomalafe is a self-proclaimed “walkout academic,” globally recognized for his poetic, unconventional, counterintuitive, and indigenous take on global crisis, civic action and social change.

The world does not careen toward progress, and human improvement and well-being are not matters owned by the practices of economic development and growth. There are songs that trees know that we haven’t heard; there are alliances that termites and the pheromones they secrete forge that we can learn from; there are wild things that do not know the moral discipline of purpose or the colonizing influence of instrumentality; and then there are murmurations—the waltz of wind, sky, starling, and ground—which are not meant to be spoken about but merely to be seen and appreciated. In short, there are other powers, other agencies, and other clocks. And, perhaps, we release ourselves not only to the performance of our many colors, but we free those in the posh parties that have somehow denied us entry from their secret fears of losing their own seats at the table, when we say, “there are other clocks, and we will not be on time.

time(lessness)

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imagesBy Marcia Lee, Detroit, MI

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.
Albert Einstein.

Time in its measurements of hours, minutes, days, and years is a human construct that we have created to make order in our lives.  (Think of how many different calendars there are in different parts of the world and terms we use like people of color time, Asian time, etc.). We want a certain level of structure and having time to measure events allows us to have something outside of ourselves, a ‘science’ if you will, to give purpose and stability to our decisions.  This is how people come to say things like, “If only I had the time,’ or ‘there are not enough hours in a day.’ This, I call ‘human time.’ Continue reading “time(lessness)” →