Seventh Sunday After Pentecost
Proper 11 (16)
Romans 8:12-25
By Nelson Lee
I am an engineer working to address climate change, writing from the Coast Salish Seas where the city of Vancouver, BC has been established. First son of a refugee from China and an immigrant from Germany, both fleeing war. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Earthkeepers”
By Tommy Airey, co-editor RadicalDiscipleship.Net
In the early 1980s, historian William Appleman Williams described the state of affairs in the United States in the title of his book Empire As a Way of Life. For centuries, The Imperial Script has called for “manifest destiny,” imposing our political, social and economic policies on people all over the world—from the genocide of native Americans in “the new world,” to importing slaves from Africa, to imperialist wars with countries from Mexico to Iraq, stealing land, resources and cultures. The United States was, and continues to be, built on what Dr. Lily Mendoza calls “the undeniable debris of dead bodies, stolen wealth, and the enslavement of other beings, both human and non-human.” These were the secret steroids injected into my family’s “success” story. Continue reading “Subverting the Script”
By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann, co-editor of http://www.radicaldiscipleship.net
Day House, Detroit Catholic Worker
July 16, 2017
Isaiah 55:10-11, Psalm 65,
Romans 8:18-23, Matthew 13: 1-9
This week I noticed some large scratchy leafed plant pop up on our driveway. It winded its way out of a narrow patch of dirt between a rotting log and the spot where we prop our gate open when we are driving in and out. It has unmistakable orange flowers, each day it is multiplying in size. The seed must have planted itself in the small bit of soil after rotting there from neglect after celebrating the season when the veil is thin. It has always been my dream to have a huge pumpkin patch. So, for now, I am cherishing this unexpected gift. I have dragged more logs over to protect it and will give it whatever space it needs. I can’t open our gate all the way and I drive into the driveway in the most peculiar way. It feels like a little miracle that I get to tend and delight in each day. Continue reading “Sermon: Creations Groans: In the snow, the seeds, and our breath”
Another gem from Hafiz, the 14th century Sufi poet:
The great religions are the ships,
Poets the life boats.
Every sane person I know
Has jumped overboard.
That is good for business,
Isn’t it, Hafiz?
From the late theologian Walter Wink, in his book Just Jesus: My Struggle to Become Human (2014):
God is not just within us, but within everything. The universe is suffused with the divine. This is not pantheism, where everything is God, but panentheism where everything is in God and God is in everything. Spirit is at the heart of everything, even down to the smallest particle of spirit-matter. Hence all creations are potential revealers of God.
Turn off your radio. Put away your daily paper. Read one review of events a week and spend some time reading good books. They tell too of days of striving and of strife. They are of other centuries and also of our own. They make us realize that all times are perilous, that men live in a dangerous world, in peril constantly of losing or maiming soul and body. We get some sense of perspective reading such books. Renewed courage and faith and even joy to live.
Dorothy Day
By Joanna Shenk, First Mennonite Church of San Francisco
Song of Solomon 2:8-13
Zechariah 9:9-12
I had a hard time getting out of bed yesterday morning. I was feeling the weight of a lot of things and wondered if it was futile and disingenuous to write a sermon that offered hope. I wasn’t feeling hopeful. I was feeling more like the title to the most recent Metallica album, “Hardwired… to Self-Destruct.” The bad guys keep winning. Vulnerable people are endlessly oppressed. And it seems like so many people don’t even have a moral consciousness to appeal to.
Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 10 (15)
Ps. 65:9-13; Is. 55:10-13; Mt. 13:1-9, 18-23
By Jason Wood
Seeds, seeds, seeds.
Three of six of the appointed texts for today talk about them. The Psalmist refers to seeds implicitly, praising YHWH as the source of life-giving rains, fertile fields, and abundant harvests. Isaiah meditates upon seeds as the inevitable byproduct of the rain watering the earth, assuring his audience that, in the same way, God’s word is fruitful and effective. And Matthew relates one of Jesus’ most well-known parables, one of broad-scattered seed, thwarted growth, and stunningly rich production from the few that fall on good soil. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: The Good Seed”
An important report from National Catholic Reporter’s Brian Roewe on shareholder activism:
When ExxonMobil shareholders overwhelmingly voted in late May in favor of a resolution aimed at shedding light on the impacts of addressing climate change on the oil company’s long-term assets, Dominican Sr. Patricia Daly was among those beaming brightest.
“This was very sweet,” said the director emeritus of the Tri-State Coalition for Responsible Investment, which spans Connecticut, New Jersey and New York.
Through investment groups like the coalition, which comprises 40 Catholic institutions, and the larger Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, she and other faith-based investors have been working for two decades to bring about change at Exxon in how it recognizes and responds to climate change.
At the annual ExxonMobil meeting in Dallas May 31, the shareholder resolution, co-filed by the New York Common Retirement Fund and the Church of England and joined by the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility and 50 other institutions representing $5 trillion in managed assets, received 62.3 percent of the shareholders’ vote — the highest ever at Exxon for a climate-related measure.
The resolution, which Exxon opposed, seeks for the world’s largest energy company to produce an annual report of the long-term impacts on its oil and gas reserves from global climate policies aimed at restricting average temperature rise well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and as low as 1.5 degrees C — the primary goal of the Paris Agreement on climate change, which calls for drastic cuts in carbon emissions and a global shift toward a zero-carbon economy in order to meet the 2 C target and avert the worst climate impacts.
Read the rest of the article HERE.
For the first time in a long-standing campaign to remove US nuclear weapons from Germany, a delegation of US peace activists will participate in protests at the Büchel Air Base, in west-central Germany, July 12 to 18, demanding the withdrawal of the last 20 US H-bombs still deployed there. Notable among the 11-person delegation are seven participants who have served a combined total of 36 years in US jails and prisons for protest actions taken against nuclear weapons programs and the war system. Continue reading “Press Release: US Peace Delegation: “Nuclear Weapons Out of Germany.””
