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.

 

Theology in Pharoah’s Household

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation1 Comment

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 pivots to the Gospel of John, we share an excerpt from the Intro of Binding.  

Those doing theological reflection from a vantage point on the peripheries have properly focused upon the themes of liberation in the story of exodus.  We at the center, however, have no choice but to learn to “do theology in pharoah’s household“–that is, to take the side of the Hebrews even though citizens of Egypt.  There is a significant minority of Christians in the U.S.A. and other First World countries who are struggling to find a lifestyle and politics that does just that.  This movement also constitutes the site from which I read Mark. Continue reading “Theology in Pharoah’s Household” →

The Wings of My Heart Slowly Begin to Unfold

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MacrinaA morning prayer from Macrina Wiederkehr’s Seven Sacred Pauses.

Dawn, Most Generous Gift…

The words of Kahlil Gibran are sitting at the gate of my heart this morning: “To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.”  Words from Psalm 5 are also trying to get my attention: “In the morning you hear my voice; in the morning I plead my case to you, and watch.”  I don’t always rise at dawn and watch for God, nor do I consistently awaken with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.  There are times when the wings of my heart remain folded; yet prayer still happens in me.  There are mornings when I simply sit in silence trying to remember some of the things that need to rise in me: Continue reading “The Wings of My Heart Slowly Begin to Unfold” →

The Antithesis of Activism

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

bellAn excerpt from Killing Rage: Ending Racism (1995) by bell hooks:

Confronting my rage, witnessing the way it moved me to grow and change, I understood intimately that it had the potential not only to destroy but also to construct.  Then and now I understand rage to be a necessary aspect of resistance struggle.  Rage can act as a catalyst inspiring courageous action.  By demanding that black people repress and annihilate our rage to assimilate, to reap the benefits of material privilege in white supremacist capitalist patriarchal culture, white folks urge us to remain complicit with their efforts to colonize, oppress and exploit.  Those of us black people who have the opportunity to further our economic status willingly surrender our rage.  Many of us have no rage.  As individual black people increase their class power, live in comfort, with money mediating the viciousness of racist assault, we can come to see both the society and white people differently.  We experience the world as infinitely less hostile to blackness than it actually is.  This shift happens particularly as we buy into liberal individualism and see our individual fate as black people in no way linked to collective fate.  it is that link that sustains full awareness of the daily impact of racism on black people, particularly its hostile and brutal assaults… Continue reading “The Antithesis of Activism” →

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

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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” →

Sheep Without a Shepherd

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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’s passage is Mark 6:30-34.

…Mark is decidedly presenting Jesus as an “organizer,” but with the intention of feeding the needy, not plotting a military campaign on Jerusalem.  This however, hardly makes the narrative ideology less subversive!  Indeed, there is an implied political criticism here, which we see if we do not limit the intertextuality to the Joshua tradition.  The “sheep without a shepherd” motif is seized upon by the prophets to criticize the leadership of Israel.  Ezekiel 34 spins a parable around it that specifically condemns class stratification: “I will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep” (Ez 34:20).  The ruling class protects its privilege rather than the collective prosperity of the people, becoming predator instead of the shepherd: Continue reading “Sheep Without a Shepherd” →