The Cross in Everyday Life: Embracing the “Least”

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation5 Comments

crucifixionBy Ched Myers, for the 17th Sunday of Pentecost (Mark 9:30-37), re-posted from September 2015

In the wake of the “confessional crisis” (last week’s reading), Mark’s narrative now turns to a triple cycle of object lessons and teaching I call the “discipleship catechism.” This Sunday’s gospel text comes from the second and longest cycle, with its focus of instruction on the less heroic, yet perhaps more difficult, practice of the Way in daily life.

The cross represents more than nonviolent resistance to the Powers; it includes the struggle against patterns of domination in interpersonal and social relationships as well. Thus Mark here addresses several expressions of social power imbalance: greatest and least (9:36f); outsiders and insiders (9:38-41); offenders and victims (9:42-50); male and female (10:2-12); children and adults (10:13-16); and rich and poor (10:17-31). This sequence exhibits certain similarities to catechetical traditions found elsewhere in the New Testament relating to family and community life such as the so-called “House-tables” (e.g. Col 3:12-4:6). Continue reading “The Cross in Everyday Life: Embracing the “Least”” →

Black Like Me: Gay, Free and Happy!

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By Johari Jabir

In Memoriam: Carl Bean (May 26, 1944 – September 8, 2021)

It is an old story. Some ultra-talented Black singer leaves the church in order to pursue a career in a more lucrative career in secular music. Never mind the fact that the binary divisions between the sacred and secular have never really worked when it comes to Black music, Carl Bean is one of those many examples of Black gospel talent who may have momentarily left the building but took the spirit of the church with him. Born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, Carl Bean grew up attending Providence Baptist Church where Rev. Marcus Garvey Good was pastor. In his autobiography, I Was Born This Way: A Gay Preacher’s Journey Through Gospel Music, Disco Stardom, and a Ministry in Christ, Bean describes his childhood church as a community of, “strivers, those looking to advance themselves in not only the intellectual and spiritual realm but the economic as well” (49). The music at Providence was very proper, but Bean was drawn to the more “rootsy” music played in his household and in the storefronts he visited. Bean’s own church preached acceptance, but the churches he visited were the first spaces he heard anti-gay theologies.

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Collective Memory

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Race, Subverting Empire1 Comment

From Rev. Jim Bear Jacobs, re-posted from Facebook (9/10/2021).

Before you post that #neverforget sentiment tomorrow, ask yourself; in the last 20 years have I told any Black or Indigenous person that they need to “get over it” “move on” “forgive and forget” when they posted about historical trauma? I know for a fact that some of you have. You no longer get to choose what is preserved as collective memory.

Summer Reading Subverting Supremacy Stories

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By Tommy Airey, exclusively for RadicalDiscipleship.Net

This summer, Lindsay and I maneuvered a ministry of migration. We pivoted between and beyond the Kirkridge Retreat Center in the Poconos of northeast Pennsylvania, a studio apartment two blocks from the Deschutes River in Central Oregon and a wide stretch of beach on the Pacific Ocean on Acjachemen land in Southern California. I spent some of this time working on a book that lays out a biblical spirituality for white folks and middle-class people breaking rank from the default narratives of dominant culture. Those of us navigating the wilderness that borders both fundamentalism and liberalism need a spiritual training program for the ultra-marathon race of recognizing and resisting the supremacy stories scripted by whiteness, hetero-patriarchy, the profit motive, the penal system and patriotism.

My friend Sarah Nahar says this kind of inner work is like shedding colonial codes of conduct. Rev. Lynice Pinkard compares it to learning another language: speaking treason fluently. I like breaking rank because it sounds so subversive—what spirituality should be. Break rank with supremacy stories and you’ll gain your soul—and lose your social respectability. Try calling out capitalism at your church potluck. It sounds like a conspiracy, which in Latin means “to breathe with.” To grow our souls, us middle-class folk need mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Because our hearts have stopped. But here’s the rub: we can only get CPR from those chronically oppressed by supremacy stories. So we start breathing with those who are Black and Brown, Indigenous and Immigrant, women and working poor.  

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Learning from the Other

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation2 Comments

lentzBy Ched Myers, for the 15th Sunday of Pentecost (Mk 7:24-37)

Note: This is a re-post of Ched’s brief comments on the Markan gospel readings from the Revised Common Lectionary during year B, 2015. The original piece was posted on September 3, 2015.

In a doublet I called a “tale of two women” (5:21-43; see my blog on the gospel for 5 Pentecost) Mark presented two linked healings in “Jewish” symbolic territory. He now narrates a corresponding doublet in clearly marked “Gentile” space (7:24). Tyre and Sidon were coastal cities not only well outside Palestinian Jewish society, but historic centers of the Phoenician naval empire, a legendary adversary of Israel (see e.g. Ezekiel 26-28), though now part of the Roman province of Syria. These healings of a woman and man are thus surprising, and serve as object lessons in the inclusivity just advocated in the previous Markan episode. Continue reading “Learning from the Other” →

It Is Harder to End a War Than Begin One

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By Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler, Senior Minister, Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ & Director & Chief Visionary, Faith Strategies, LLC

Twenty years ago, planes crashed into the World Trade Centers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. There was disbelief, weeping, and shock as people in the affected areas looked for their loved ones. There was a deep eeriness in the air, and grief and disbelief set in, and then the tone began to shift to revenge and retribution. Chants began to arise like “USA! USA! USA!”  Politicians and preachers began to use the phrase “God bless America,” as if America was somehow more deserving of God’s blessings than anywhere else.

Three days later I was speaking on the phone with an insurance company representative about a personal matter, and the insurance representative paused the call so that the entire office could sing “God Bless America.” The news sources were all rattling their proverbial sabers, and it would only be a short amount of time before all the pistons would be firing in the war engine. It was a time 20 years ago, a moment, and a setting that the American public could be cajoled and sold anything seemingly patriotic and retaliatory, and it was. The military went into Afghanistan to dislodge Al Qaeda, and it stayed to create a new government and country. Something that the Soviets had tried to do previously. But that was not a history that the US learned from because the neo-cons and the defense contractors with the military industrialists decided that it was an opportunity to reconstruct a region in its own image, control the natural resources of the region, and to create governments loyal to the interest of the west and particularly the US.

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Wasichu

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An excerpt from Alice Walker’s Living By The Word (1988).

Wasichu was a term used by the Oglala Sioux to designate the white man, but it had no reference to the color of his skin. It means He who takes the fat. It is possible to be white and not a Wasichu or to be a Wasichu and not white. In the United States, historically speaking, Wasichus of color have usually been in the employ of the military, which is the essence of Wasichu.

The Wasichu speaks, in all his US history books, of “opening up virgin lands.” Yet there were people living here on “Turtle Island,” as the Indians called it, for thousands of years; but living so gently on the land that to Wasichu eyes it looked untouched. Yes, it was “still,” as they wrote over and over again, with lust, “virginal.” If it were a bride, the Wasichus would have permitted it to wear a white dress. For centuries on end Native Americans lived on the land, making love to it through worship and praise, without once raping or defiling it. The Wasichus—who might have chosen to imitate the Indians, but didn’t because to them the Indians were savages—have been raping and defiling it since the day they came. It is ironic to think that if the Indians who were here then “discovered” America as it is now, they would find little reason to want to stay. This is a fabulous land, not because it is a country, but because it is soaked in so many years of love. And though the Native Americans fought as much as any other people among themselves (much to their loss!), never did they fight against the earth, which they correctly perceived as their mother, or against their father, the sky, now thought of mainly as “outer space,” where primarily bigger and “better” wars have a projected future.

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A Kind of Radical Leaning

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A few excerpts from Angela Flournoy’s interview with community organizer, scholar and mother-of-three Melina Abdullah in last weekend’s LA Times. The entire interview is well worth the read!

When we think about the Black Radical Tradition, we traditionally go back to the ’60s. But I think that we actually want to go back further — we want to go back to the moment that we were stolen from Africa. If we think about the freedom struggle from chattel slavery, Mama Harriet [Tubman] wasn’t saying, “Just end slavery,” she was saying, “Let’s get to freedom.” That’s the Black Radical Tradition, not just freeing ourselves from conditions but freeing ourselves from an entire system that’s built on our exploitation and our un-freedom. When you talk about the anti-lynching movement, Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, they were intent not just on ending lynching but also building a world where Black people could grow and prosper. The Black Radical Tradition is abolitionist. It’s about upending unjust systems. But also, there’s another side. Angela Davis reminds us you have to upend unjust systems and you have to envision and build towards new ones. You have to have the vision to build towards a new world.

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Sisters of the Same Seed

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Image credit: Kris’ daughter Flora, 3 (top), and Em’s daughter Lorena, 2.5 (bottom) kneed dough from the same family sourdough starter 1,400 kilometres apart, Em and Kris Jacoby, April 2021, Castleton, Vermont and Chicago, Illinois.

By Em Jacoby. Originally published in Geez 61: Seeds are Sacred.

I am repeatedly called back, like a ministry, to the growing, tending, gathering, transforming, and sharing of food.

The seed was planted during one of my teenage summers spent living on my sister’s small homestead in rural Vermont. I heard my sister say: Why not centre your life around something that is essential for it? I looked down at the dough I was kneading as I heard the coos of my infant nephew.

Two decades later, though Kris remains on that rural homestead and I live in a dense urban neighbourhood 1,400 kilometres (880 miles) away, we share a calling to food as though we share a kitchen. I can still taste that dough we were kneading, rich with ricotta and basil. Only now, my ricotta comes from boiling cast-off gallons of food-bank-donated milk from a Nicaraguan neighbour; Kris’ comes from Tulip, the brown cow born and raised in view of the kitchen window, milked a few hours earlier. While my basil grows in hand-built boxes that hang over my porch railing two stories up, Kris’ comes from the rows of vibrant green herbs in her fields ready to cut for farmers markets.

I easily spend 40 hours a week in my kitchen. I find my vocation in the grinding of grains mounding into a peak in the shiny metal bowl beneath, the dripping of whey from fermenting cream cheese, the snap of a sealed jar of canned tomato sauce speckled with basil and peppercorn. Because of my sister’s words – their grounding in sustainability and history – I am repeatedly called back, like a ministry, to the growing, tending, gathering, transforming, and sharing of food. Even sitting here to write these words, my mind wanders to the seedlings sprouting up from dirt-packed milk cartons resting on my bathroom tiles, and to the pumpkin roasted last fall now thawing to bake into spice bread as edible gratitude for a neighbour.

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