By Joyce Hollyday from February 2017
Once a week for three hours in the middle of the day, a group calling ourselves Mujeres Unidas en Fe (Women United in Faith) gathers in a church on the other side of the mountain from my home. About a dozen are Spanish-speaking women who are learning English, and an almost equal number of us are English speakers who want to improve our Spanish. Continue reading “Family Emergency Plan”
Pentecost
Acts 2:2-21
John 7:37-39
Psalm 104:25-35, 37
By Ragan Sutterfield
They were gathered for a festival of word and wheat, the harvest of plants grown from soil–breathing carbon, exhaling oxygen. Beneath the soil, the plant roots had spread a sugar feast for microbes who in turn gave their bodies for the wheat’s growth. Those plants had now gone to seed, passing on their life to another season’s crop and in their abundance there was a harvest of bread for people and seed for birds and field mice and the life upon life that lives close to the ground. It was at a festival for all these interactions, joined with a celebration of the coming of the Torah, those books that offered the story of a God who gives life to soil and cares about every detail of the material world. The festival was Shavuot, Pentecost. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: The Coming of the Holy Breath”
By Ched Myers
Note: This is an edited version of a sermon preached on the Feast of Ascension (5/28/17) at Farm Church at Casa Anna Shulz. Above: William Blake, Ascension Day poem, 1794.
“People of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” (Acts 1:11)
The Ascension is an underappreciated aspect of the Jesus story in the life of the church, both theologically and liturgically. This is understandable; for many it tends to conjure “Beam me Up Scotty” escapist theology and rapture allergies. Certainly in radical circles the Ascension has been largely abandoned or ignored. I want to contend, however, that by doing this we are conceding to the trivializers an important trope of our faith.
40/50: Ascension Day in Church History and Culture
Ascension Day is an old feast of the church, dating back at least to the third century according to patristic witness. It is traditionally celebrated on a Thursday (also known as “Holy Thursday)), the fortieth day of Easter, though many churches now celebrate it on the following Sunday, he last of Eastertide. Next comes Pentecost: 50 days after Easter. We are, in other words, in deeply symbolic terrain, given the importance of both 40 (think years in the wilderness) and 50 (think Jubilee) in the biblical narrative. Continue reading “The Feast of the Ascension, Memorial Day and Doubling Down on the Incarnation”
By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann
Day House Catholic Worker, May 28, 2017
Acts 1: 6-14
When I first looked at these readings, I couldn’t see past the ascension of Jesus rising from the ground into the clouds. What am I supposed to do with that? It felt so absurd. Continue reading “Sermon: Dinosaurs, Ascensions, and Hope: Believing in the Absurd”
By Ken Sehested
My earliest memory of Memorial Day is of my Dad, puttering in his garage shop (he was a mechanic and jack-of-all-trades fixer-upper) on a rare day off from work, listing to the Indianapolis 500 car race on a portable radio. On one of those occasions I remember using a hammer, and the concrete garage floor, helping him straighten nails for reuse.
Both my parents were children of the Depression. Thrift was a primal virtue even when it was no longer a necessity.
I have no doubt Dad would silently recall some of his war-time experience while enduring the monotony of listening to race cars doing 200 laps around an oval track at speeds in excess of 200 mph. He managed to survive being in the first wave of troops landing at Omaha Beach in the 1944 D-Day invasion of Europe, though I can remember only once in my life when he talked about those days. I was an adult before I knew he carried a bit of 88mm German artillery shrapnel, bone-embedded, behind his right ear.
Continue reading “Conflicting Memorials: The Lord’s Table of Remembrance vs. The Nation’s Vow of Preeminence”
A charge before “An Interfaith Day of Prophetic Action,” a protest in downtown Los Angeles (04.13.2017) over recent actions by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents:
We will be sanctuary for all.
No exceptions.
Not one more.
No more separating families.
Para Todos.
This is just the beginning.
There will be a next one until justice prevails.
An organized community is a secure community.
We will abide by the principles of nonviolent resistance.
We will stay focused.
We will stay in prayer.
We will stay in the radical love of God.
“Jesus knew what we numb ones must always learn again: (a) that weeping must be real because endings are real; and (b) that weeping permits newness. His weeping permits the kingdom to come. Such weeping is a radical criticism, a fearful dismantling because it means the end of all machismo; weeping is something kings rarely do without losing their thrones. Yet the loss of thrones is precisely what is called for in radical criticism.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination: Revised Edition
By Ken Sehested
Pacem, pacem, pacem in terris
Easter’s focus is always sharper when allied with Earth Day. We sing, properly, of being wayfaring strangers. “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor” (Deuteronomy 26:5) is among the oldest testimonies of fate and faith. An alternate translation—“A Syrian ready to perish was my ancestor”—brings added poignancy to the text
We are indeed strangers; but not foreigners. In common usage these two words seem similar. Biblically speaking, though, the theological difference could not be greater. Continue reading “Pacem in terris: Easter, Earth Day, and Pentecost’s promise”
Easter 7
Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. –1 Peter 5:8
by Ric Hudgens
We must not domesticate our understanding of the wild. I am not referring to domesticating wild places into civilized spaces. I am noting our tendency to romanticize the wild in a way that removes its sharp edges. In the rewilding of our theologies we must deconstruct docetic expressions that remove the divine and human from nature. Also, we must keep the divine and human embedded in real nature – not a romanticized Disneyland nature where animals sing and dance or time lapse photography makes change appear sudden.
The natural world which is filled with the divine and the contains the human is also “nature red in tooth and claw,” as Hobbes wrote. There are predators. There are prey. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: The Predator Within”
A poem from Sherman Alexie (thanks to elder Clancy Dunigan for passing this along):
My mother was a dictionary.
She was one of the last fluent speakers of our tribal language.
She knew dozens of words that nobody else knew.
When she died, we buried all of those words with her.
My mother was a dictionary.
She knew words that had been spoken for thousands of years. Continue reading “When She Died, We Buried All Those Words With Her”
Radical Discipleship 