A Prayer for Sacred and Wondrous Child Warriors of Mother Earth

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LylaBy Lyla June Johnston (right), a Diné singer, writer, and activist specializing in intergenerational and inter-ethnic healing, as well as Indigenous philosophy. This is a prayer she posted to social media on July 27, 2018.

Dear creator, may you help me and may you help the people of the world to release their fear and replace it with faith and compassion. May you help us to seek and find joy in this life. May we find bravery in the midst of so many shadows dancing in the mind. May you give us the strength to cry, and the courage to bear our hearts to the river and to the sky that we may bring all of those fears and worries we buried deep inside and lay them down on the bosom of the earth where they may heal. Let us not be afraid to feel and not be afraid of being afraid for a time. Let us come with our truth and come with our beauty. Help us to remember that we are beautiful sacred and wondrous child Warriors of Mother Earth. Give us the opportunities and the skills we need to give life and to protect life. And most of all give us peace when others present us with war. Give us love when others present us with hate. Give us smiles and laughter when others present us with petty lies. Give us the strength to pray for those that we respect the least. And give us the opportunity to plant seeds in the dirt that some day might grow into beautiful gifts for the next generation. Let us live our lives in such a way that our great-grandchildren look back and see that in the face of so much hardship we were brave and we were kind and we were loving.

Holy Work

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Cloud of Witnesses, Feminist/Womanist/Queer Liberation and TheologyLeave a comment

Katie CannonA compelling charge from  the late-and-still-very-present Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon (January 3, 1950 to August 8, 2018):

…it’s an abomination for those of us that hear, to be as smart as we are, trained as we are and to not know how to make it clear and gettable for anybody who wants know what we know. Theology is holy work, it’s a sacred vocation. It is our job to make it available to the masses of the congregation. To anybody who wants to be able to read what I know, I should be able to write so they can get it.

Wild Lectionary: Fleshy Bread

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Sea of Galilee from TiberiasProper 14B
August 12, 2018
John 6.41-51

By Wes Howard Brook and Sue Ferguson Johnson

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” (Jesus, John 6.51)

As we enter this shocking passage from John’s gospel, it might not seem at first very “wild” or earthy in the tradition of “Wild Lectionary.” Metaphorical bread from the sky hardly seems connected with the flowing life of rivers, forests and animals that is the focus of this series. Yet as we listen closely to the imagery of this Gospel, we may be surprised to find that Jesus’ Word about “bread” is more earthy than it appears at first glance. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Fleshy Bread” →

The Immigrants’ Creed

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Theological Animation1 Comment

ImmigrationBy Jose Luis Casal, excerpted from The Book of Common Worship: 2018 Edition. © 2018 Westminster John Knox Press.

I believe in Almighty God,
who guided the people in exile and in exodus,
the God of Joseph in Egypt and Daniel in Babylon,
the God of foreigners and immigrants.

I believe in Jesus Christ, a displaced Galilean,
who was born away from his people and his home, who fled
his country with his parents when his life was in danger.
When he returned to his own country he suffered under the oppression of Pontius Pilate,
the servant of a foreign power. Jesus was persecuted, beaten, tortured, and unjustly
condemned to death.
But on the third day Jesus rose from the dead,
not as a scorned foreigner but to offer us citizenship in God’s kingdom. Continue reading “The Immigrants’ Creed” →

Joy’s ascendance, This stuff could get you in trouble

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By Ken Sehested

“For Jesus, there are
no countries to be conquered,
no ideologies to be imposed,
no people to be dominated.
There are only children,
women and men to be loved.”
—Henri Nouwen

Yes. This. Of course. No doubt about it.
I stake everything on this claim. Continue reading “Joy’s ascendance, This stuff could get you in trouble” →

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” →

The Battle for the Bible

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BindingWe continue our celebration of the 30th anniversary of Binding The Strong Man, Ched Myers’ political reading of Mark’s Gospel.  Today, as the lectionary once again pivots to the Gospel of John, we share an excerpt from Binding, in which Reagan-era Ched clarifies the ideological nature of interpretation–almost thirty years before 81% of white Evangelicals voted for Trump.

The truth is, the “battle for the Bible” today has increasingly less to do with theological divisions and allegiances and more to do with political and economic allegiances.  This is perhaps more evident in many Third World countries, where churches are becoming polarized along class and ideological lines.  In Latin America, for example, we see the base communities empowering the poor masses through a more popular model of church.  This predominantly Catholic movement has, with almost Protestant fervor, restored Bible study, along with grass-roots social analysis, to a central place in the life of the community.  In stark contrast stand the words of Pope John Paul II in his opening address to the Puebla episcopal conference in 1979: Continue reading “The Battle for the Bible” →

The Erotic

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Feminist/Womanist/Queer Liberation and Theology, Subverting Empire1 Comment

AudreAn excerpt from Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of the Erotic.”

The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, and plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling. Continue reading “The Erotic” →

The Resistance We Want to See

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Wrecking BallToday, we highlight the subversive, sacrificial decision made by Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters in San Francisco. They turned down a $40,000 contract for a large conference because the company contracts with U.S. Customs and Border Protection to help with the agency’s recruiting and “drive efficiencies around how U.S. border activities are managed.” Below are a few excerpts from a recent article in The San Francisco Chronicle.

Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters gets opportunities to brew thousands of cups of coffee at massive conferences only a few times a year. So when George P. Johnson Experience Marketing, which contracts with Salesforce to provide catering services for Dreamforce, reached out to Wrecking Ball owners Nick Cho and Trish Rothgeb, the two said they eagerly entered into discussion. Continue reading “The Resistance We Want to See” →

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” →