Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 58:1-12
By Valerie Luna Serrels
We enter this week’s story through a blind spot. The people who historically have awakened to and connected to God, find themselves unable to see, disconnected from God, one another, and the land. This blind spot invites us to reflect on the ways in which we too are unaware and disconnected. Unaware of which world’s code of conduct we abide. What religion we practice. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: An Unordinary Time”
From Martin Prechtel in The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise (2015):
That feeling of frustrated justice and hatred for the unpunished “perpetrator” is the hardest thing for people who cannot truly grieve. On the other hand, it is also not any good to become people who glide along on bliss and don’t care about anything, either. It’s needful for the peace of a people, peace of the human heart, peace of the earth, for grief to be there, not transcending on a bliss journey to avoid grief. Being zoned out, numb, unconnected, “above it all,” and not caring is just the lazier flip side of the coin of vengeance. They need one another. Continue reading “A Culture of Passionately Gradual People”
By Joyce Hollyday. January 29, 2017,
Circle of Mercy, Asheville, NC
Micah 6:8; Matthew 5:1-12
On the night of January 19th, the eve of the inauguration, several of us from Circle of Mercy’s immigration mission group gathered at the home that Bill and I share. We kept a vigil in the tradition of the Watch Night Service.
Watch Night is typically traced back to New Year’s Eve of 1862, when enslaved communities stayed up all night waiting for the Emancipation Proclamation to take effect on January 1st. When I was collecting oral histories among African-American UCC churches during my time as an associate conference minister, I was told that the custom is actually much older—that enslaved families stayed up every New Year’s Eve, because January 1st was when masters decided whom they would sell off. Families facing the imminent threat of separation spent all night singing and praying and hoping that they would be together for another year. Continue reading “Sermon: Grounded in the Bedrock of Faith”
From the Facebook page of Fr. James Martin:These measures, which mean the rejection of the stranger, the rejection of the person in need, the rejection of those who suffer, are manifestly unchristian and utterly contrary to the Gospel. Indeed, last year, Pope Francis said, “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not the Gospel.”
By Ric Hudgens
I resent your condescending remarks
about my fetal position. I am not overly
sensitive, depressed, incapacitated, nor
escaping adult responsibilities. When
I curve my back, bow my head, pull both
knees to my chest it is not weakness
that bends me so. What you never
understand is that this is my haven
of health, my reservoir of renewal. If
womblike, it is some placenta of hope
that nourishes and sustains me. We
must all find strength where we can.
I will unfold a fiercer soul.
From the introduction to Ched Myers’ “A House For All Peoples? A Bible Study on Welcoming the Outsider” (2006):
There have always been two Americas: that of rich and poor, of inclusion and exclusion. The America of inclusion found expression in the ideal of “liberty and justice for all,” and has been embodied whenever Indian treaties were honored, and in the embrace of civil rights, women’s suffrage, or child labor laws. The America of exclusion, on the other hand, was articulated in a Constitution that originally enfranchised only white landed males and has been realized in land grabs, Jim Crow segregation, Gilded Age economic stratification, and restrictive housing covenants.
These two visions of America continually compete for our hearts and minds, not least in our churches. On one side are the voices of Emma Lazarus in her poem “The New Colossus” (“Give me your tired, your poor…”), and Martin Luther King Jr. when he preached “I Have a Dream.” On the other side are those of George W. Bush’s imperial politics and James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family.” Click HERE to read the whole article.
By Talitha Fraser
A pigeon and I shared morning tea,
Coconut rough and brine of the sea
Our feet rest on yellowed moss over stony cement
I think he talked, or perhaps I dreamt
“see these clouds, this sky, the fountain,
The roads, the houses and there a mountain
…these are connected but you cannot see
These must co-exist in harmony
You affect I and I affect you
In the ways that we go and the things that we do
Some have plenty and some not a lot,
It seems that we ought to share what we’ve got
It is as clear as the water, firm as the ground
Certain as sunrise, at least, I have found.””But pigeon,” I ask, “”What can we do?”
“Next time,” he answered, “You might buy two.”
4th Sunday after Epiphany
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
by Tevyn East and Jay Beck, excerpted from Watershed Discipleship: Reinhabiting Bioregional Faith and Practice
The Catholic Feast of Fools was a day for liturgical dramas that dissolved church hierarchy, celebrated becoming a “Fool for Christ” (1 Cor) and enacted the Magnificat’s call to turn society upside down (Luke 1:52–53). This feast day was later suppressed by authorities lived on for centuries within medieval folk culture. Europeans eventually brought many such religious festivities to the New World under the common label “carnival.” Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Holy Fools”
By Joyce Hollyday
My memories of childhood family camping trips swirl around discomfort and disaster: rocky ground and a leaky air mattress, a skunk ambling through our campsite at dinner time, the hurricane that pelted us with rain and blew over our tent in the middle of the night, a sneak attack by a swarm of black flies the size of blue jays. But in every summer misadventure, there was always one moment of grace. Amid the endless parade of canned-soup suppers heated to either lukewarm or scalding over the camp stove, there was always a night when we fixed “hobo stew.” Continue reading “Stewing in Grace and Gratitude”
By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann. Written on January 11, 2017.
11 years ago today, I was heading back to school, to community two weeks after my mom died.
9 years ago today, I was getting off a plane from France having just met the love of my life.
8 years ago today, I was in Washington DC protesting Guantanamo as Obama prepared to take office.
2 years ago today, I was working on a Word and World school in Detroit on Environmental Justice.
1 year ago today, after a labor that was cooped by the medical industry, I gave birth to Cedar.
And today?….
Today I lost the battle to get Isaac to school. I couldn’t get him out the door. Knowing that I couldn’t let him just stay home and have fun if I wanted him to go next week, I told him that I could not play or engage. That this was my working time. I set a timer for when school would end. Told him I loved him and I would talk to him when the timer went off (a mantra I would repeat a hundred times over the next two hours). I handed him a yogurt stick and a box of blueberries and left him alone. After some protesting, he got quiet…so I peaked in. There he was in the living room, using his yogurt stick to make twenty yogurt circles on the floor and carefully putting one blueberry on top of each pile. When his work was finished, he yelled “Mommy!” He was good at this game. He wasn’t going to let us not engage for two whole hours. He was ready to destroy the house if need be. I took a deep breath and told him I would talk to him after the timer. Continue reading “Learning from Laughter and the Trees: Yogurt and Blueberries”
Radical Discipleship 