Proper 21(26)
Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32
Philippians 2:1-13
Matthew 21:23-32
By the Reverend Doctor Victoria Marie
As I reflected on today’s readings the theme that emerged is: our response to God. In the first reading Ezekiel is saying that when we turn away from what is just, we die. When we return to acting with justice, we save our lives. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Our Default State is Goodness”
By Alicia Crosby, a Chicago-based community organizer, re-posted with permission from her blog Chasing The Promise
Today I find my body wrestling with illness while my spirit fights against the crushing weight of seeing the toll white supremacy is taking on the world around me. While I feel we all have some degree of complicity we can afford to address, I need to name a particular manifestation of this explicitly.
I am utterly exhausted by all the ways that progressive, liberal, and radical white folks run away from and contort themselves to avoid dealing with the truth that they too are complicit in upholding white supremacy. It’s often not overt supremacy that troubles me so much as the ways in which this particular group of folks refuses to identify, interrogate, hold, then deconstruct their own complicity in upholding this oppressive system. Read MORE.
By Tommy Airey, adapted from a sermon on Matthew 10:1-16
Most interpretations of Jesus’ “parable of the landowner” equate the vineyard owner with God and the workers with God’s People or humanity at large. God is seen as “generous” and “equitable” with the people and expands the population of those who, by grace, are ushered through the heavenly gates. The grumbling worker at the end of the story is representative of Israel at large or the Pharisees, chief priests and other Jewish leaders who confronted Jesus during his life and ministry—the lesson being that we should all be thankful for God’s equal treatment and unconditional generosity and kindness.
Infused by the scholarship of William Herzog and his former student Ched Myers, there is a more compelling and contextual interpretation of Matthew 20 flowing out of the “minority report” of the radical discipleship movement. Fortunately, nothing in the parable forces us to assume that the vineyard owner in the parable is God! Instead, like a political cartoon, the parable is an exaggerated representation of what life was actually like during the time of Jesus and in the culture of the very first hearers of the parable five decades later. Instead of offering us heavenly principles that permit us to rest easy, the parable functions as a jarring illustration that prods us to face reality. Continue reading “When the Landowner is not God”
On September 12, the brand new $800 million+ Little Caesar’s Arena kicked off with a Kid Rock concert on the southern edge of the Cass Corridor in Detroit. It was the culmination of white billionaire Mike Ilitch’s* fifteen-year “dereliction by design,” scores of properties purchased and left to rot. Land values were intentionally driven lower so Ilitch could buy even more. One week after the grand opening, prompted by this journalistic prose, Lindsay Airey was visited by a nightmare. Her attempt to relay it in poetry:
A sea of black faces.
Beaten, downtrodden
by violent displacement,
callous disregard.
Greed turned sick
the souls
of these precious ones’
attackers.
Gluttonous murder,
seeping like poison,
hemorrhaging
out their murdering pores. Continue reading “Fifteen Years Fermented”
By Rev. Neal Halvorson-Taylor, lead pastor of Grace Church | Red Hill in Charlottesville, Virginia, a deeply rooted, boldly inclusive, and fully committed to the well-being of the earth and all living things
What if the dust does not settle
From the battle,
When unleashed
Sticks and stones and words
Beat and bruised and tore open
The skin, bones, heart?
Do we breathe its particles? Continue reading “After August 12”
I will take the ring….though I do not know the way.
- The Fellowship of the Ring
“Sing about it until it can be realised” said Ched Myers at the Kinsler Institute, a call to write, play and sing the songs of freedom until freedom is won . This is not a new idea, we sing in the tradition of so many justice movements: civil rights, suffragettes, apartheid, slavery… What songs are we singing that are calling us forward and giving us courage along the way – in this place, at this time, in this context? Continue reading “Sing about it until it can be realised”
From officiant Cait De Mott Grady, for the wedding of Anna Joyce and Max Paskin in Ithaca, NY on September 9, 2017:
Good afternoon! My name is Cait De Mott Grady and it is my honor and privilege to welcome each of you to this most amazing day! The day when our dear Anna and Max, bravely and with great love and care and with the support of their family, friends, and community choose to commit to each other in marriage.
Today come together to actively witness, bless, and support Anna and Max as they enter this new phase of their couple-ship.
In preparation for today, I’ve been thinking deeply about Anna and Max’s choice to marry in this moment of history we find ourselves in. I’ve also been thinking a lot about stories and the truths they tell and the truths they erase. Continue reading “You Are Choosing”
Preached by Ruby Sales at The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine
September 10, 2017
Dr. James Perkinson, Ecumenical Theological Seminary (Detroit, MI)
The signs of our time shout! Harvey hammers Houston and the entire Gulf Coast camps out in a boat or a grave. Then comes Irma with Jose and Katya in Her wake, raking an entire peninsula with rebuke. While fire ungraced with gendered traces of naming, blisters the west. All on top of Charlottesville, itself evoking Trump, chopping restraints militant and policing, channeling a large chunk of the dominant demographic of the country! As I write, Kid Rock readies his concert of hate in downtown Detroit, as front for the Ilitch family take of Motown turf, faking concern, raking in tax dollar support, celebrating white vituperation in the gala opening of a new ice hockey stadium at the core of an 82 % black city. Little Caesar indeed! But what do all of these events have to do with each other? How might a community aspiring to some measure of humanity and morality “hear” what these events sound out? I do not yet even dare to say, “Respond.” Continue reading “Irma and La Tuna, Charlottesville and North Korea: The Voice Under the Voice, Still Unheard”
By 
Radical Discipleship 