By Michael Lauchlan, printed in Trumbull Ave, WSU Press
When the gas man came for your meter,
your oldest let him in. You jumped
from your chair and handed him the baby—
“Take her, too! How will I feed her
if I can’t warm the milk?” After he fled,
you were ashamed. You were nursing,
of course, and had never lied to a soul.
Five decades later you could still see him,
nearly as hungry as you, his wrench
in one hand and, from the other,
your quiet Ellie gaping up.
By: Chris Sabas. Chris identifies as a Follower of The Way, Anglican, but also Catholic Worker, mystic, former attorney (owned own law firm in U.S., with almost 10 years of living in a courtroom before the Gospel awakening). Now a reservist with Christian Peacemaker Teams (“CPT”) and an At-Large Member of CPT’s Steering Committee.
Today is truly a historic…but somber day in and for Canada.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (“TRC”) released its long anticipated report today, finding Canada guilty of cultural genocide against Indigenous Peoples by way of the state sponsored, and church run Indian Residential Schools. Continue reading “Canada Guilty of Cultural Genocide Against Indigenous Peoples”
By Ched Myers, for the 2nd Sunday of Pentecost (Mk 3:20-35)
Note: This is an ongoing series of Ched’s brief comments on the Markan gospel readings from the Revised Common Lectionary during year B, 2015.
The first major narrative cycle in Mark’s gospel (1:16-3:6) ends with Jesus’ rejection by the authorities in a Capernaum synagogue. The following episodes serve to regenerate the story by a withdrawal and summary scene (3:7-12) and then by a reconsolidation moment (3:13-19a). The latter mountaintop scene boldly re-contextualizes two of the most revered traditions of Israel: God’s covenant with Moses on Sinai, and Moses’ founding of the free tribal confederacy in the wilderness. Jesus, who has taken the torch from the prophets, prepares to pass it on to twelve disciples he has called, named, and commissioned to proclaim, heal and exorcize (3:14f). Shortly they will be sent out to practice this charge – a second regenerative episode that follows upon another synagogue rejection (6:1-13). Continue reading ““BINDING THE STRONG MAN”: Jesus’ Master Metaphor”
By Tommy Airey
*This is the second post in a three-part series exploring more compelling ways to follow Jesus.
On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway.
Martin Luther King, April 4, 1967
In a conversation we were having on a prairie highway about 30 kilometers north of Saskatoon, Ched Myers, predictably, got pedagogical. “When we become jaded or wounded, one of three things happens,” he exhorted.
1. We blame others and stay in denial, inflicting our pathologies on to others.
2. We bail out or burn out, escaping into a myriad of copings.
3. We traverse the road-less-traveled: we do the hard work of personal inventory.
Over the course of the past decade, as my Evangelical categories crumbled in the face of experience, theological reading, deep dialogue, prayer and social analysis, I’ve struggled through all three of these phases.
Continue reading “A Post-Evangelical Pilgrimage, Part II”
“I love nature. Nature is cool. The forest is my classroom. The earth is my school. Trees are my teachers. Animals are my friends. And on this school all life depends.” Joe Reilly, I Love Nature
Isaac tiptoes through the forest, climbing over fallen branches and stopping to smell each flower. We follow behind delighting in the comfort he finds in the place. Down the hill and around the bend of the stream, we walk the deer’s path honoring their daily wisdom and knowledge of this wood. Continue reading “Learning from Laughter: Beside the Beaver’s Dam”
From cartoonist Dan Piraro:
From Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things (2008):
…the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.
That is their mystery and their magic.
“They say Aslan is on the move perhaps has already landed.”
And now a very curious thing happened. None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different. Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don’t understand but in the dream it feels as if it had some enormous meaning—either a terrifying one which turns the whole dream into a nightmare or else a lovely meaning too lovely to put into words, which makes the dream so beautiful that you remember it all your life and are always wishing you could get into that dream again. It was like now. At the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump in its inside. Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror. Peter felt suddenly brave and adventurous. Susan felt as if some delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by her. And Lucy got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or beginning of summer. – C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
We reject the false doctrine that the Church could have permission to hand over the form of its message and of its order to whatever it itself might wish or to the vicissitudes of the prevailing ideological and political convictions of the day.
An Excerpt from the Barmen Declaration, May 29-31, 1934
This weekend, we celebrate the anniversary of the birth of the “confessing church” in Germany, standing up against the idolatry of the State. This is a nice summary from the United Church of Christ “beliefs” page:
The Barmen Declaration, 1934, was a call to resistance against the theological claims of the Nazi state. Almost immediately after Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, Protestant Christians faced pressure to “aryanize” the Church, expel Jewish Christians from the ordained ministry and adopt the Nazi “Führer Principle” as the organizing principle of church government. In general, the churches succumbed to these pressures, and some Christians embraced them willingly. The pro-Nazi “German Christian” movement became a force in the church. They glorified Adolf Hitler as a “German prophet” and preached that racial consciousness was a source of revelation alongside the Bible. But many Christians in Germany—including Lutheran and Reformed, liberal and neo-orthodox—opposed the encroachment of Nazi ideology on the Church’s proclamation. At Barmen, this emerging “Confessing Church” adopted a declaration drafted by Reformed theologian Karl Barth (above photo) and Lutheran theologian Hans Asmussen, which expressly repudiated the claim that other powers apart from Christ could be sources of God’s revelation. Not all Christians courageously resisted the regime, but many who did—like the Protestant pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Roman Catholic priest Bernhard Lichtenberg—were arrested and executed in concentration camps. The spirituality of the Barmen Declaration profoundly influenced many of the first generation of pastors and laypeople who formed the United Church of Christ in 1957
*This post is excerpted from a longer piece entitled “Lamuwan Kata: Experiencing Loob at CfBS Conference,” written in the aftermath of The Center of Babaylan Studies Conference, last weekend.
Lamuwan kata means “we are one.” It speaks of the relational connectivity that ties a tribe, a community, a people together. It spoke volumes to me this past weekend at the Center of Babaylan Studies Conference held in Glouster, Ohio, a very small, almost hidden town on the outskirts of Columbus. I came to the conference seeking guidance, hoping to quell a heavy, unmothered heart that burdened me since youth. And I say “unmothered” in so many ways: unmothered by my biological mother who abandoned me a few months after I was born; unmothered by the country I grew up in, America, as if I were an outsider, a pariah, in the city that raised me with its unloving arms; and unmothered by diaspora–unmothered because the land that gave birth to my ancestors was colonized and enslaved, and the caprices of history flung its children to the farthest corners of the earth.
Continue reading “Unmothered & In Halves: From The Center of Babaylan Studies Conference”
Radical Discipleship 