Wild Lectionary: Purge Me with Hyssop

On March 15, 2018March 15, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Uncategorized, Watershed DiscipleshipLeave a comment

Screen Shot 2018-03-04 at 8.43.44 PM Lent 5B
Psalm 51:7b

The psalmist says “purge me with hyssop” –clean me with a scrubby aromatic plant.

Mediterranean Hyssop— Hyssopus officinalis is a pungent-leafed bush with blue flowers that is used medicinally, mostly in teas as an expectorant, antiseptic and for cough relief. But the qualities that the bible ascribes to Hyssop: it grows in walls, can hold moisture, has a long, stiff stalk, has a purgative effect, appear in no one plant. Other suggested candidates for biblical Hyssop include caper, Syrian oregano, and za’atar a word which Palestinians use for a family of aromatic herbs (and the ubiquitous condiment made from their dried leaves). Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Purge Me with Hyssop” →

Let the Children Lead Us

On March 14, 2018March 15, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Just Peacemaking, UncategorizedLeave a comment

#enough
By Leah Grady Sayvetz, Ithaca, NY. 3/14/18

This morning, March 14, I woke late and as I looked at the numbers 9:24 on the clock I remembered that today is National School Walkout Day. At 10am, the students from the middle/high school across the street from my house would be leaving school, walking out of class as part of a nationally coordinated protest for an end to gun violence. I wanted to be with them. Thirty-five minutes later, as I stepped out of my front door, my breath caught in my chest: hundreds of children clad in coats and boots filed silently past. They filled the snowy sidewalk as far as I could see, many carrying signs drawn with colored markers on pieces of large white paper. My first instinct was to cheer, to encourage the students, to let these youngsters know how proud of them I am. But each small face passed me by in solemnity; a quiet, focused march through the falling snow. Their spirit drew me, then, into reverence. I fell in step with the crowd, following in silence, letting the children lead. The beanie-clad heads before and behind me rose no higher than my chest. I felt a deep sense of humility to be following the lead of such little ones. Today the children are showing us where we need to be.

Continue reading “Let the Children Lead Us” →

Digging In

On March 14, 2018March 21, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation2 Comments

Last month, Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries hosted its annual Kinsler Institute in Southern California’s Ventura River Watershed (right). This year’s theme was “Digging In: Heels, Histories, Hearts,” an exploration of the roots of individual and collective stories and an examination of what it takes to recover from addictions and renew spirits for long term healing and movement building (all photos from Clancy Dunigan).

The reviews are sprouting forth, testifying to a mind-blowing and heart-expanding week.

From Grace Aheron, a poet, pastor and gardener living on 8 acres of land in an intentional community in the vicarage of a rural Episcopal Church in Charlottesville, Virginia. Continue reading “Digging In” →

The Ties that Bind: The Integrity of Penitence, on the 50th Anniversary of the Massacre at My Lai

On March 13, 2018March 7, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Just Peacemaking, Uncategorized1 Comment

By Ken Sehested

Concealment makes the soul a swamp. Confession is how you drain it.

—Charles M. Blow

Except in a few traditional religious settings, penitence is a relatively unknown word. While its more common synonyms—confession, apology, contrition, and repentance—are standard parts of many church liturgies, the images they convey have generally fallen out of favor. There are good reasons why this is so. The primary definition of penance is “voluntary self-punishment inflicted as an outward expression of repentance for having done wrong.” A web search for penance reveals more than a few pictures of people whipping themselves. Continue reading “The Ties that Bind: The Integrity of Penitence, on the 50th Anniversary of the Massacre at My Lai” →

Dos ancianos locos una para otra

On March 12, 2018February 14, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Race, Identity, and History, UncategorizedLeave a comment

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA Author asked to remain Anonymous.The author and her novio have been in relationship for over six years. When people ask why they don’t get married so he can get a green card, her answer is, “It only works that way in the movies.

So we’re walking through slush on a February Sunday

Going up to the drugstore so you can get some medicine for your friend Continue reading “Dos ancianos locos una para otra” →

Fallen Upon Me To Do So

On March 11, 2018March 8, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, Cloud of WitnessesLeave a comment

Re-posted from the brilliant New York Times series of fifteen obituaries written for women that were overlooked over the decades. This piece on Ida B. Wells was written by Caitlin Dickerson, a national immigration reporter who still uses the reporting techniques that were pioneered by Wells.

It was not all that unusual when, in 1892, a mob dragged Thomas Moss out of a Memphis jail in his pajamas and shot him to death over a feud that began with a game of marbles. But his lynching changed history because of its effect on one of the nation’s most influential journalists, who was also the godmother of his first child: Ida B. Wells.

“It is with no pleasure that I have dipped my hands in the corruption here exposed,” Wells wrote in 1892 in the introduction to “Southern Horrors,” one of her seminal works about lynching, “Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so.” Continue reading “Fallen Upon Me To Do So” →

The Joke Is All We Have Left

On March 10, 2018March 7, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Watershed DiscipleshipLeave a comment

By Jim Perkinson (right), an excerpt from “Jesters, tricksters, taggers and haints: Hipping the church to the Afro-hop, pop-‘n-lock mock-up currently rocking apocalyptic Detroit,” a November 2017 article in Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies (HTS):

In many places today, the joke is all we have left to pry open the prison gate – a jest and a belly laugh rooted in the deep past and the abandoned margins. But its truth remains absolute, despite corporate pretention otherwise. We all finally will come apart at the seams and decay into streams of composting liquid and molecules – even US drones and bankers’ computer screens, blinking with algorithms. The only question is when and for what.

In recognition of such an eventuality of equality, may we choose well where to expend our breath and exercise our push back and dreaming otherwise. May we become soldiers of the unrepentant joke, militant laughers learning our hope from the least. May we keep our jest visceral and its spear-point like a razor, ready for whatever crack of freedom the Mystery of Wild Hilarity that created this planet may open. May we do so, even if that possibility is ephemeral and uphill as a spray-painted st and a stenciled demand on a tower and the political struggle to ‘free the ow’ that follows! Indeed, may we finally be strong like water and as insurgent as a tower growing from concrete!

40 Birds of Lent: Water

On March 9, 2018March 8, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, Watershed DiscipleshipLeave a comment

By Laurel Dykstra

I woke up this morning humming:

Water heals our bodies
Water heals our souls
When we go down, down to the water
In the water we are whole.

The song I learned in water ceremonies at Standing Rock, is the chorus of Coco Love Alcorn’s song The River. It’s not so surprising that these were the words in my head as I spent the better part of yesterday morning singing them outside the gates of Kinder Morgan’s Westridge Marine Terminal—the intended shoreline destination for transferring Tar Sands bitumen from the proposed Trans-mountain expansion pipeline project to ocean-going tankers. Beside the water of the Burrard Inlet on unceded Coast Salish Territory we sang as trees were limbed and cut in anticipation of a tunnel through the mountain. Continue reading “40 Birds of Lent: Water” →

Wild Lectionary: This Text Bites Back

On March 8, 2018March 9, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Uncategorized, Watershed Discipleship1 Comment

17626669_10154197866197434_8979553795951658612_n copy(2) — Mating ball of garter snakes, Lent 2017, Richmond BC

Lent 4B

Numbers 21:4-9
John 3:14-21

By Laurel Dykstra

Today’s gospel reading contains perhaps the best-known verse in the bible, certainly the New Testament passage that is known best in modern North America.

It begins like this, “For God so Loved the World… Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: This Text Bites Back” →

The Subject of a Carceral State

On March 7, 2018March 9, 2018 By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Subverting Empire1 Comment

Sonia From the conclusion of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in Utah, Petitioner v. Edward Joseph Strieff, Jr. (June 20, 2016):

This case involves a suspicionless stop, one in which the officer initiated this chain of events without justification. As the Justice Department notes, supra, at 8, many innocent people are subjected to the humiliations of these unconstitutional searches. The white defendant in this case shows that anyone’s dignity can be violated in this manner. But it is no secret that people of color are disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny. For generations, black and brown parents have given their children “the talk”–instructing them never to run down the street; always keep your hands where they can be seen; do not even think of talking back to a stranger–all out of fear of how an officer with a gun will react to them. Continue reading “The Subject of a Carceral State” →