Tag: Advent

An Alternative Advent Calendar

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

A gift from FOSNA to help us reorient Advent around direct action for Palestine.

🍉 Sun, Nov 30 – Read the Palestinian-led call to BDS. Join the Complicit Corporations campaign (as a community.) Sign the pledge as an individual.

🍉 Mon, Dec 1 – Microsoft is perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal occupation, apartheid regime and ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza – which is why Microsoft is also now priority BDS target. Before the Christmas shopping season, take the pledge to boycott Xbox. Invite a person in your life (who plays Xbox!) to join you.

🍉 Tues, Dec 2 – Eat something you consider to be a treat today. Remind yourself that liberation work is sweet and the revolution ends with dancing.

🍉 Wed, Dec 3 – Listen to Palestinian Christians. Read Kairos Palestine 1, written in 2009.

🍉 Thurs, Dec 4 – Listen to Palestinian or protest music as you put up Christmas decorations.

🍉 Fri, Dec 5 – Look up whose land you’re on: native-land.ca

🍉 Sat, Dec 6 – Watch a Palestinian documentary. Invite someone to join you.

🍉 Sun, Dec 7 – Find the nearest Chevron-linked target near your community on this map. (Note: they are not all gas stations!) Share the story of it with your network this week. Can you imagine a collective action you might participate in together?

🍉 Mon, Dec 8 – Plan a local Boycott Chevron caroling action with friends or family. Not prepared for that stage of action yet? Make a plan to play or share Boycott Chevron carols while hosting people at your house one day in Advent. Plan to discuss what you’ve learned about boycotts with them. (Shout out to our friends at CFP for these awesome caroling action materials!)

🍉 Tues, Dec 9 – Print or adapt these flyers and ask a local community or your favorite local business to pass them out over the Christmas shopping season.

🍉 Wed, Dec 10 – Read Kairos Palestine 2, published Nov 2025.

🍉 Thurs, Dec 11 – Donate to FOSNA, Sabeel, or a mutual aid campaign in Gaza. (Or all three!)

🍉 Fri, Dec 12 – Watch the boycott Chevron training from USCPR.

🍉 Sat, Dec 13 – Watch a Palestinian documentary. Invite someone to join you.

🍉 Sun, Dec 14 – Request with your church’s worship team or leadership that Palestine (not simply “Gaza”) to be added to the prayers of the people on Sunday or Christmas Eve.

🍉 Mon, Dec 15 – Tell Chevron CEO Mike Wirth you’re boycotting Chevron.

🍉 Tues, Dec 16 – Familiarize yourself with discriminatory laws in Israel.

🍉 Wed, Dec 17 – Sticker around your town. (Here are some Boycott Chevron sticker templates!)

🍉 Thurs, Dec 18 – Call/text a friend. Tell them about your direct action Advent experience so far.

🍉 Fri, Dec 19 – Make a list of 5 things you wish every kid in the world had. Begin working toward that world.

🍉 Sat, Dec 20 – Watch a Palestinian documentary. Invite someone to join you.

🍉 Sun, Dec 21 – Join the Freedom Church of the Poor’s Longest Night service tonight (6p ET / 5p CT / 3p PT; join here) or spend a moment in quiet lament for all who we have lost on the way to liberation.

🍉 Mon, Dec 22 – Eat another treat today. Remind yourself that liberation work is STILL sweet.

🍉 Tues, Dec 23 – Write your Congressperson a Christmas card! (Here’s an example to get you started.)

🍉 Wed, Dec 24 – Name Palestine in your local Christmas Eve service. (Get creative! Submit it in a prayer request form. Wear a keffiyeh to worship. Bring it up in conversation with your pastor, leadership board, or congregation.)

🍉 Thurs, Dec 25 – Begin to organize your community (church, town, business) to become Apartheid Free in 2026.

Advent for Palestine

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, Subverting Empire, Theological AnimationLeave a comment

Re-posting this beautiful children’s Advent calendar from the Rev. Stands for the Revolution, the Substack newsletter of Rev. Addie Domske, an ordained minister and trained movement chaplain who lifts up queer abundance and Jesus’ rebellious message.

One thing I want to be when I grow up is a cool, radical auntie.

I have been trying to be good at this role for about 15 years now, starting when the first of my four niblings1 was born. I will find out from them in their collective adulthood if I succeeded.

I have lived far, far away from all four of them for their entire lives, so most of my interactions come from mailing them things, (I had the cutest pen pal relationship with my oldest nibling when he was a wee lad.) A few years ago, I started the tradition of sending them all advent calendars each year based on their interests at the time. This year I’m proclaiming that they are all interested in Palestine, because my spouse and I decided to spend all of our Christmas gift funds for our external families on products from Palestinian artisans.2

Continue reading “Advent for Palestine” →

First Advent: A Call to Insomniac Eco-Theology

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By Ched Myers

Note:  I shared the comments below on the gospel reading for the First Sunday in Advent (Dec 3, 2023) as part of Creation Justice Ministries’ “Green Lectionary” podcast.  You can hear my whole conversation with Derrick Weston & Debra Rienstra here. (above image: “All the stars in the sky will be dissolved and the heavens rolled up like a scroll,” Elena Markova, U.S., 2022; image found here)

Apocalyptic texts tend to make churchgoers nervous. In every lectionary cycle, however, the penultimate Sunday of Ordinary Time and first Sunday of Advent turn to what I call the “apocalyptic season” that bridges the end and beginning of the liturgical year. The gospel reading for First Advent always comes from the “synoptic apocalypse” (Mt 24, Mk 13, or Lk 21), before turning to the ministry of John the Baptist in Second Advent. This Year B we have the second half of Mark’s “Little Apocalypse” (13:24-37); the first part occurs at the end of Ordinary time. The lectionary’s brief apocalyptic focus functions to help us look at the “end of the world” as we prepare for it to be “born anew” in Advent and Christmastide.  

Here are some brief thoughts (especially on the underlined phrases) on Sunday’s reading, with our ecological crisis in mind.

Mk 13:24-25:  “But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. 

For us, apocalyptic images of the cosmos falling apart obviously correlate with the climate catastrophe that is upon us.  Interestingly, the root of our term “disaster” comes from aster, or stars in Greek; we are indeed amidst a disaster. But too often we still apprehend ecological disaster as something happening to us, rather than engineered by us. In fact, the biblical idea of nature in revolt does not actually originate with apocalyptic literature, but with the Exodus liberation story.  In that old wise tale, enslaved Hebrews are struggling for liberation against Pharaoh’s oppressive regime, an obvious mismatch. But the Creator has animated this movement, so Creation aligns against the empire in a series of escalating plagues that ultimately force the tyrant to relent (if you haven’t had a chance to look at my longer piece “Nature Against Empire: Exodus Plagues, Climate Crisis and Hard Heartedness,” go here). This profound framing lies in the background of Jesus’ vision here, and it’s not too difficult to see its relevance for our moment of imperial oppression of both people and Creation—in which we are each and all deeply implicated.    

Continue reading “First Advent: A Call to Insomniac Eco-Theology” →

A Dark Virgin’s Magnificat

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Working at the intersections of Abolition, Black Spirituality, and Scholarship, Johari Jabir (Black Studies, Univ. of Illinois Chicago) taught the course, “Black Lives in Historic Context” at three sites concurrently; on campus as an undergraduate course, Covenant UCC in South Holland, Ill, and Stateville Penitentiary outside Chicago. Students at Stateville enrolled in the course through the Prison Neighborhood Arts Project (PNAP), of which Johari is an ongoing instructor. The course focused on themes of Slavery, Abolition Democracy, and Citizenship in the 19th Century. A concluding colloquium brought these three learning communities together in person, with PNAP students joining by zoom. “The Urgency of Abolition and Ethical Futures” was the writing and discussion prompt for the group. When PNAP students were finally able to sign on the greeting between these three populations was a kind of advent miracle, a flash of God’s light. 

The event inaugurates something Johari has founded called, The Faith and Abolition Network, a radical ecumenical network of people in support of grassroots anti-prison activism. This is the context Johari crafted this poem on Mary’s Magnificat. 

——————————–

I wish I had been there
when Mary got the news
Hark the herald the angels sing
but Gabriel sang the blues

Continue reading “A Dark Virgin’s Magnificat” →

Expecting Emmanuel

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Advent is coming up in two weeks. If you are looking for a devotional brimming with hope and meaning in these darkening days, check out Expecting Emmanuel from Joanna Harader, a progressive pastor in Lawrence, Kansas. She animates eight women from the family tree of Jesus. Their stories are far from perfect. Good news for us! Lindsay and I got know Joanna a dozen years ago during a summer internship with her. I am thrilled that she is putting stuff like this into the world. I am going to post some reflections here and on social media during the Season, as I spend some time reading this book and summoning up some of the women in my own family tree. If you are interested in joining this journey during this Season, send me an email. – Tommy Airey (tommyairey@gmail.com)

Not a Disembodied Hope

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Biography as Theology, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Mt Erbal caves
Mt Arbel Caves

By Wes Howard-Brook and Sue Ferguson Johnson, reposted from Advent 3 2017

Just north of Magdala in Galilee stand the cave-pocked cliffs of Mt. Arbel. Twice in a hundred years, Roman soldiers shot fire into the caves to destroy Israelites who refused to give in to imperial rule. The first occasion was the imposition of Herod as king in 40 BCE, while the second was during the Roman-Jewish war of the mid-60s CE.

Continue reading “Not a Disembodied Hope” →

The Deeper Hope

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting Empire, Theological Animation1 Comment

SNGBy Rev. Solveig Nilsen-Goodin (right), Salt and Light Lutheran Church (Portland, OR), Sunday, November 29, 2020, Mark 13:24 – 31

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the service this week. For the season of Advent, the plan was to have a storyteller for each Sunday of the season…one story each Sunday to go along with the theme for the week: Hope, Peace, Joy and Love. Well, when I reached out to folks this week I found stories of Peace, Joy and Love, but hope…? Hope was a little harder to come by. Now, maybe not. Maybe I just didn’t happen to reach out to the people with hope stories! Or maybe, as I ultimately discerned, the Spirit was inviting ME to tell a hope story because hope has been a little hard to come by FOR ME. And I admit it! I have struggled with the whole notion of hope for a long time now, and I actually think I am not alone in this struggle. Continue reading “The Deeper Hope” →

Welcoming Illegal Life: Disciplines of Readiness

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adventA compelling Advent offering from radical disciples in the Bay. 
Somewhere in this country–out in the desert or under a freeway or in some cramped tenement apartment–an illegal baby is being born, brown-skinned and beautiful and trailing the wisdom of the ancestors that we need for this time. We can’t tell you where this birth is happening; if we did, Herod would deport mother and child, or worse. But it is happening. It is always happening.
And wherever new life is being birthed, it is vulnerable and under threat. New life, if it is genuinely new, is a danger to the systems of deathliness amidst which we live, and so new life is endangered everywhere. Women are being subjected to forced hysterectomies in immigrant detention camps while the right of any woman to have sovereignty over her birthing capabilities is under siege throughout the country.
How do we ready ourselves to welcome and protect illegal life–in the world and within ourselves? What are the disciplines of readiness? This is what we will attend to in this four-session Advent series. 
Something is being birthed in you and in us. Let’s prepare together:
Tuesdays, December 1-22
7:30-9 ET/ 4:30-6 PT
By donation to support the work of the facilitators
About the facilitators
Rev. Lynice Pinkard is a Black writer, teacher, healer, pastor, and public intellectual operating at the intersection of Christianity, economics, and social change. Her current work is dedicated to decolonizing the human spirit and freeing people from what she calls “empire affective disorder.” Her commitment is to inspire and nurture a new generation of Spirit-filled servant leaders dedicated to the remediation of day-to-day suffering, the building of collective resilience for transformative change, and the pursuit of structural and systemic justice in the world.
Nichola Torbett is a white spiritual seeker, recovering addict, gospel preacher, racial justice podcaster, nonviolent direct action trainer, and petsitter. She is committed to helping other white people recognize their own trauma and discontent as catalysts for the dismantling of systems of oppression that are killing us all, and killing Black and Brown people first. She is grateful to First Congregational Church of Oakland and Second Acts as her primary communities of accountability.
Lynice and Nichola have been teaching, writing, and fomenting communities of recovery and resistance together for eleven years. Forged by mutual longing, love, and shared risk, their cross-racial friendship forms the basis for the transformative work they do with others.

Peace on Earth and the Politics of Christmas

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An online offering from Will O’Brien of the Alternative Seminary in Philly. December 5 at 10:30amEST.

Much of the Christian church in the United States has been co-opted by an American gospel of prosperity, racism, violence, and militant nationalism. The celebration of Christmas is a victim of that co-optation: It is often wrapped in innocent, feel-good. Hallmark-card imagery. But in fact the biblical texts describing the coming of Jesus are making powerful assertions about the politics of the Bible that speak very much to our contemporary global crises. This online gathering will explore the “nativity narratives” in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke to see how they express core biblical themes of justice and liberation. We will try to “un-domesticate” these tales of liberation and reflect on how they are truly challenging us in terms of our allegiance and our discipleship. A perfect event for Advent.

Continue reading “Peace on Earth and the Politics of Christmas” →

Advent is coming

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By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann

While fires still rage in our forests and our streets, it is time to start looking towards that season when we slow our bodies down, when we welcome in the darkness, when a single flame is enough. While the work of resistance never ceases, Advent is the liturgical season where we find more time for the quiet, waiting hours to prepare our hearts. Prepare our lives for the transformative power of story and its ability to turn the powers that be upside down. It is time. 

Continue reading “Advent is coming” →