By Joanna Lawrence Shenk, a pastor at First Mennonite Church of San Francisco
A sermon on Psalm 85:8-13
Thank you, Sarah, for that reading which offers us a compelling vision of the kindom of God. The writer of this psalm is reflecting on who they know the Divine to be – one who brings peace and thriving to a community – to the land and the people. There is so much beautiful imagery: love and faithfulness meeting, justice and peace embracing (or kissing!). Fidelity sprouting from the earth and justice leaning down from heaven. It’s an ecosystem of care and connection. The writer has a trust in something greater that is holding the world. They were part of a community that they knew was held in the care of the Creator.
Given the national and global happenings of recent days, weeks and months, some of us may say “well that sounds like a nice little image for a children’s bible, but how does it relate to the mess of a world we’re living in?! Where exactly are justice and peace kissing each other right now?”
Without a doubt, many of us have heavy hearts this morning (and what a balm to celebrate the life of little Joaquin as he was dedicated in this congregation today). We see and feel the way that capitalism is crumbling down on top of the most vulnerable. We grieve and we rage at the ongoing environmental polycrisis. We’ve said no over and over again to the bombardment of Gaza and yet the missiles paid for by our tax dollars keep raining down on Palestinians, destroying life.
An open letter from faith leaders to the administration of Wayne State University in Detroit, MI.
June 26, 2024
President Espy, Provost Clabo, and the WSU Board of Governors,
We, the undersigned faith leaders from varied traditions and denominations, write to express our profound concern and condemnation regarding the police brutality against students and community members that occurred on May 30. A number of us have been present to the Wayne State encampment and others similar. They strike us as embodying beloved community, listening and learning gatherings of conscience. Indeed we are taught by them.
We understand the demands of the students – the divestment from war and weapons manufacturing – to be a good and just pursuit for which you should take pride as university leadership. Instead, you authorized the deployment of riot police and the use of brutal force against members of our communities, including the violent removal of a woman’s hijab, a grave violation within the Islamic faith.
At the end of this month, RadicalDiscipleship.net will be joining an interfaith coalition in D.C. to take on Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the largest Zionist organization in the country. For those unfamiliar, Christian Zionism is a far-right fascist ideology that is not only antisemitic and a majority force responsible for the ongoing U.S.-sponsored Israeli genocide being waged on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, it is aggressively white-and-Christian supremacist in a way that is actively working within the highest places of power in our nation to strip us all of our rights, safety and freedoms here domestically as well. In the face of the full court press these far-right Christian extremists are waging, we will be participating in the largest interreligious protest for Palestine. Please consider joining us July 28-30 if you can! Both in-person and online options are available.
The conclusion of a piece written by Chris Hedges in June 2022, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. Originally posted on Common Dreams.
All those tasked in our society with interpreting the world around us forgot, as philosopher Karl Popper wrote in The Open Society and Its Enemies, that “unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
These scholars, writers, intellectuals, and journalists, like those in Weimar Germany, bear much of the blame. They preferred accommodation over confrontation. They stood by as the working class was stripped of rights and impoverished by the billionaire class, fertilizing the ground for an American fascism. Those who orchestrated the economic, political, and social assault are the major donors to the universities. They control trustee boards, grants, academic prizes, think tanks, promotion, publishing, and tenure. Academics, looking for an exit, ignored the attacks by the ruling oligarchy. They ascribed to the Christian fascists, bankrolled by huge corporations such as Tyson Foods, Purdue, Wal-Mart and Sam’s Warehouse, attributes that did not exist. They tacitly gave the Christian fascists religious legitimacy. These Christian fascists are an updated version of the so-called German Christian Church, or Deutsche Christen, which fused the iconography and symbols of the Christian religion with the Nazi party. The theologian Paul Tillich, the first non-Jewish German professor to be blacklisted from German universities by the Nazis, angrily chastised those who refused to fight “the paganism of the swastika” and retreated into a myopic preoccupation with personal piety.
So grateful for Ken Sehested’s ongoing work and witness over at prayerandpolitiks.org. This is from his intro to Queer Theology 101. Ken is not new to this. He is true to this.
Years ago I represented the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists on the board of the Institute for Welcoming Resources, an ecumenical coalition of networks within multiple Protestant bodies advocating for the full inclusion of the LGBTQ community within the life of the church. On the way home from one of those meetings, I began a mental outline of what would become my sermon on Epiphany Sunday. Below is an excerpt (with some revisions).
On the plane coming home I began composing a new sermon or essay—Queer Theology 101—dealing with the unpredictability, the “foolishness,” the queerness of God in choosing covenant partners and the destabilizing effect on all existing political arrangements and established orthodoxies.
While queer theology flows from the historically particular experience of the LGBTQ community, it is not only for them. I don’t think this is a cultural co-opting but rather an enrichment of theological insight nourishing the whole community.
The queer theology I envision points to the insistence of the Apostles Peter and Paul that Gentiles were to be welcomed into the household of faith. I can assure you that that the question was as controversial then as the question of queer folkx in the church over the past decades.
Queer theology references Jesus’ selection of the unclean Samaritan as a model of faith in the coming Reign of God; of pagan astrologers as the first to recognize the significance of that bright star announcing Mary’s birth pangs; of Ruth’s inclusion in Jesus’ genealogy, even though she was a Moabite, a stranger to the household of faith; of a black Baptist preacher, from Georgia of all places—Martin Luther King Jr.—who would come to be recognized among the leading figures in our republic’s pantheon of heroes and the church’s prophetic tradition. The Bible, and history, is chocked full of such queerness.
This is the heart of Epiphany’s announcement. Though the news is good, especially for those who have had no place at the table of bounty, those currently managing and policing the table sense the terror of this message. And they will resist it, with vicious propaganda, virulent threats and public intimidation, even with bloody violence.
News of Jesus’ birth, as T.S. Eliot wrote in his “Magi” poem, will be “hard and bitter agony” for some. And we could find (and have found) ourselves in the middle of such a tumultuous backlash.
As one of my theology professors, James Cone, was fond of saying, to understand the goodness of the Gospel news we must inquire as to when, why, and for whom such news is troublesome and unwelcome.
It is no accident that history is littered with marginalized, disenfranchised and excluded people. Powerful interests, often hidden from public view, are at work in maintaining established order. Disrupting this order will be considered a disruption of the “peace” and be met with demands that public authority reassert “law and order.”
Those captivated by the vision of a different Order will always chaff at the present disorder. Don’t let the bright lights and bustling headlines distract. Our job is to keep our sight on that distant horizon which, ironically enough, trains our eyes to spot the Spirit’s efflorescent work here and now—even as we speak!—with buds breaking through resistant ground and in the most unlikeliest of places, where God’s odd, irregular, unexpected, overlooked ones are at work.
For people of faith and conscience wondering what they can tangibly do right now, the Palestinian Youth Movement is organizing this compelling campaign.
The Palestinian Youth Movement’s campaign to Cut Ties with Genocide is a fight against Maersk, one of the world’s largest shipping and logistics companies that directly facilitates the weapons trade. Without Maersk, Israel would not have the weapons to commit its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. We call on Maersk to Cut Ties with Genocide!
Maersk is one of the most profitable companies on earth, with money soaked in the blood of over 40,000 Palestinian martyrs. We demand Maersk cut ties with Israel and end its complicity in the genocide of Palestinians.
Since October, Maersk has transported over $300 million of weapons components for the top 5 weapons manufacturers to the US for assembly. For example, Maersk transports the wings of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jets to the US where these weapons are manufactured. After assembly, these weapons are sent to Israel from the US. In fact, 68% of Israel’s weapons come from the US. The majority of these weapons are sent by the US Department of Defense which Maersk also has links to. Specifically, Maersk is part of the the Voluntary Intermodal Sealift Agreement (VISA) and the Maritime Security Program (MSP) which transport weapons on behalf of the US Department of Defense. Maersk is both complicit in the transport of weapons components to the US, and the transport of weapons from the US to Israel, making it a critical link in the weapons supply chain.
RD contributor Cindy Wallace has a new book out about Simone Weil, who was raised as an agnostic by Jewish parents, had mystical encounters with Christ in her late 20s and died in England at 34, after contracting tuberculosis and refusing to eat more than those who were resisting Hitler’s regime in France. This is an excerpt from a little interview Cindy did with Canadian Mennonite. Check out Cindy’s book here.
Over and over again, in moments where there’s no room to talk about religion in public life or what it looks like to choose self-sacrifice over comfort, to choose to take up our crosses and follow Jesus in a literal way—different generations of writers find a conversation partner in Weil.
She doesn’t give all the answers, but she is provocative and countercultural enough to makes us think, ‘Oh maybe business as usual isn’t the best way to live a full and fruitful life.’ She’s a conversation partner for questions about what it looks like to live a countercultural life that’s still open to beauty, goodness and joy.
By Tommy Airey, a re-posted and slightly abridged version of his weekly newsletter
Bernadette Atuahene is a Black woman who grew up fifty miles north of me in Southern California. She is my age and has multiple degrees from places like UCLA, Harvard and Yale. A couple years after Lindsay and I moved to Southwest Detroit, she moved to the Eastside to study the city’s housing crisis. Her research unveiled something truly apocalyptic.
In the decade spanning Barack Obama’s inauguration to George Floyd’s murder, one-third of the entire city of Detroit lost their homes to illegal tax foreclosures. The city overcharged its poorest residents, almost all of them Black. Residents were evicted. Homes were seized and auctioned off. At the same time, the city spent more than a half billion dollars to demolish many of these homes and wealthy white investors were given hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to redevelop the land in their own image.
The only reason that we know about this epidemic of illegal tax foreclosures in Detroit is because Bernadette Atuahene devoted three years of her life to doing the research. The only reason that we know about the poisoning of faucets in Flint is because Black women testified and tested the city’s water on a mass scale. The only reason that we know about the police murder of George Floyd is because a Black woman filmed it on her phone and posted it to her socials. The more I see this trend, the more I wonder what else is happening, hidden behind the curtain called American exceptionalism.
The Israel lobby’s buying off of nearly every senior politician in the United States, facilitated by our system of legalized bribery, is not an antisemitic trope. It is a fact.
The lobby’s campaign of vicious character assassination, smearing and blacklisting those who defend Palestinian rights—including the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein and university students, many of them Jewish, in organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine—is not an antisemitic trope. It is a fact.
Thirty-eight state governments’ passage of Israel lobby-backed legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is not an antisemitic trope. It is a fact.
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