Tasting and Baking our Call to Discipleship
By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann
Over the last several weeks, I seem to have developed a chronic chocolate chip cookie baking problem. I would say that Isaac and I are baking a batch almost every other day. And it’s not just the baking that has become chronic, but the eating too. I think it is because I am waiting for my sister to give birth. It could really happen any second. It feels like all I know how to do in the waiting is bake these cookies. Continue reading “Tasting and Baking our Call to Discipleship”
Wild Lectionary: Dove Descending
By Ted Lyddon Hatten
John 1:29-42
John the Baptist saw the Holy Spirit descending like a dove.
Doves/pigeons (they are the same, like canine/dog) hold a central place in our most sacred stories. From Noah’s ark to burnt offerings, these birds are easy to see if you have eyes that see.
Pigeons are easy to see in most major cities and have a reputation for being unclean. But for the poor, the outcast, and women of the ancient world, doves were the only way to be made clean. Pigeons purchased for pocket change were beheaded and burned by the Temple priests. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Dove Descending”
The Dirty Little Secret
By Tommy Airey
The dirty little secret is that
we are the carriers of all the unfinished
Stories of our fathers. She qualified
the process for me: healing comes only
when we covenant ourselves to
the tireless work of
examining our past,
assessing the pain and
unlearning the patterns. Continue reading “The Dirty Little Secret”
Sermon: Epiphany under Empire: Remembering Resistance
By Ched Myers
Caspar, Melchior, Balthasar, behütet uns auch für dieses Jahr, vor Feuer und vor Wassergefahr. (“…protect us again this year from the dangers of fire and water.”)
— prayer uttered during the traditional German feast of the Three Kings
The origins of the Feast of the Epiphany are historically complicated and ecclesially disputed. We might think of it as a kind of peace offering from the Western to the Eastern Church, given the latter’s (surely older) January 6th date for the Feast of the Nativity. The Twelve Days of Christmas, in turn, represent a bridge between the two traditions, straddling exactly our celebration of the New Year. Continue reading “Sermon: Epiphany under Empire: Remembering Resistance”
This Should Be Our First Clue
From late Fuller Seminary professor Dr. Jaymes Morgan, in a talk to college students at Southern California’s Forest Home on September 2, 1968:
We claim to represent someone who exhausted his life with publicans and sinners, healing the sick and feeding the hungry. Our churches attract the people Jesus alienated and alienate the people Jesus attracted. This should be our first clue that something is wrong. We must affirm ourselves as called of God to meet human need. To restore broken relationships with God. To restore broken relationships with people. To save men [sic] from hunger, disease and poverty and a thousand miscarriages of justice. We have attracted an awful lot of people into the church under false pretenses. No wonder they don’t look like Christians. They didn’t have the terms explained to them at the beginning.
They and Us
Reprinted from an interview Rex Weyler and Catherine Ingram did with Brother David Steindl-Rast in New Age, September 1983:
How can people learn to communicate effectively, without anger or aggression?
That is where we have to work with ourselves. Anger in itself is not really wrong, but we cannot allow our anger to carry us away and make us violent. This I find myself a most difficult task: to always think in terms of “we” and not “they and us.” The moment that you divide people with they and us, you’re always on the right side and they are always on the wrong side, and I find that makes communication very, very difficult. Continue reading “They and Us”
EPIPHANY: Light to the Powers
Excerpt and reflection from Bill Wylie-Kellermann’s Seasons of Faith and Conscience: Explorations in Liturgical Direct Action
Among the liturgical ironies of Epiphany is that the date of this ancient feast should be rooted in a heresy and then subjected to the interests of Roman imperial manipulation.
There were many gnostic approaches to Jesus, all tending to assault the integrity of his person. He wasn’t human,he only ‘appeared’ to be. He floated through life, his feet barely touching ground. Or,as some had it, the divine spirit swooped down on him at a certain point, occupying his body and slipping away just before the agony of the crucifixion. In short, he never died. Nor was he ever born. Against such the creeds,indeed the scriptures themselves, avail. Continue reading “EPIPHANY: Light to the Powers”
Wild Lectionary: Water is Life
Baptism of the Lord
January 8, 2017
Laurel Dykstra, priest in charge of Salal + Cedar, a watershed discipleship community in Coast Salish Territory near Vancouver BC, and Steve Blackmer, priest at Church of the Woods in Canterbury, NH discuss the readings for January 8.
Steve: There’s so much here but what stands out to me is water, living, real water.
Laurel: What do you mean by “real water”?
S: Real water as opposed to tame water that is contained in the font, sometimes even covered up with a lid, the water itself is tamed and the act of baptism is tamed. But this is actual flowing water. You can imagine Jesus—not a casual surfacing but a splashing, bursting forth! In the psalm the voice of the LORD over mighty waters, powerful and present there’s a sense of divine power. It makes oak trees writhe, that is not a tame God but something wild and untamable.
L: Let’s look at the readings verse by verse. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Water is Life”
Radical Discipleship 