By Jim Perkinson, a sermon for St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Detroit, Michigan (March 5, 2023)

Last week Carvan asked me “What’re you gonna preach on!”  I said something like, “I don’t know yet—we’ll see.”  Only partially truthful—but human “knowing” is always a work in progress and for a 71-year old man, more like a bird flitting “now here, now gone,” than a rock sitting hard and fast on the ground.  But the response was also a way of keeping the door open, letting the wind in, as the gospel today retorts, making womb-space for new seeds to plant themselves and grow.  And sure enough, a new seed showed its face on the very morning of my beginning to sprout whatever it was I was going to say.  And contrary to our modern dried up relations with the plant world, seeds do have faces.  So, I will start there.

The New York Times this past Friday had a feature on the most recent museum display of Wangechi Mutu, Kenya artist straddling the Atlantic like her people have been made to do for 500 years now, crafting pain into vision, trauma into beauty, haunting and clairvoyant.  She sees the past and future all in one glimpse.  And opens the sight for any who would dare look.  But only, as John enjoins, if you are willing to be “born again.”               Am I?  Are you?  Hmmmm . . .

By Jim Perkinson, a sermon for St. Peter’s Episcopal, a riff on Luke 12:22-31 for “Animal Sunday” in the Season of Creation Readings: Year C

I woke up this morning an old man—an experience recurrent over recent months here at the far end of pandemic shifts in life and schedule and interaction.  I have not the energy I had before my classrooms miniaturized from a 20 by 30 ft space of animated bodies to a 12 by 15 inch screen flattened into pixelated colors and shapes.  I cannot strut and gesture, advance and retreat with my ideas taking on flesh and then resounding, reverberating, up-thrusting like rock or quieting like mist in the rhythmic back and forth of in-person engagement.  My body is bereft and grieving.  And that grief is but a minute fragment of what ghosts my bones now, as I become ever more aware of what I have lost—not just in recent years, but recent centuries and indeed millennia, that yet echo as traces and sighs, unspoken and unspeakable in my veins and hair, my nose and ear—ancestors that whisper and pulse and haunt, whose own grief and jubilation has no anatomical muscle adequate to its tones and cadence. 

By Jim Perkinson

One of the effects of the irruption of Global South thought into Global North theology in the last half century is a re-reading of the bible from within the experience of poverty.  Not least among the new insights occasioned by this re-reading is that concerning the parables.  Scholars like Walter Wink and William Herzog and popular cultural educators like Ched Myers have made us aware that such folk stories, read in social context rather than spiritualized and universalized, have the character of political cartoons.  Rather than allegories offering us characterizations of God or Jesus, they are better understood as politically-coded riddles, inviting their hearers to judge for themselves the situations they find themselves in.  In 1st century Palestine among an oppressed people, they often served a function of consciousness-raising, provoking peasant listeners to dare risk thinking and voicing their own interpretation of events and discover their own wisdom.  Only indirectly and obliquely do the parables speak about God, and then only by way of unmasking domination and uncovering the cry of anguish it silences.  The results of such a contextual reading can be startling. 

By Jim Perkinson, a sermon on Transfiguration, St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Detroit, MI, February 27, 2022

I have developed a late life habit.  When the snow falls around our house, these days, the bird seed comes out.  I am a bit loath to invite too much wild dependence on human provision, so I normally don’t lay out food that way. But given our urban Detroit encampment on the habitat of so many wild creatures, I figure snow may interrupt some of the other foraging possibilities and so sprinkle some seed. The local sparrows and chickadees are quick to spy out the offer and just as quick to spread the word, sparrow style.  But it is especially the cardinal pair whose territory we occupy that I delight in.  For two winters now, when my gift-giving begins, they are adept at the uptake and 2-3 times per day, beginning around noon, will summon me by cavorting in the front bushes outside my second-story study-window.  Once I see, I get up, go down to the front door while they vigil in a front-row, top-of-the-bush seat.  I give a little throw onto the sidewalk from the open door; they hop down and feast.

By James W. Perkinson

The clear untouched pool accepts me into its emerald depths like a big drop of water . . . I dive down again and again, feel the water-fingers softly caressing my hot face, tracing my underarms, my neck and breasts—nipples raised hard against the cold . . . and though the water is not going anywhere, it seems to move against me still, even as I lie immobile on its surface.  I flip and turn, purring to the sensual caress.  I have dipped into a private treasure and am wrapped in the arms of the True Gods (Lee, 132, description of Glen Canyon pothole only fifteen feet wide, whose smooth sloping sides refuse her efforts to climb out wet and nearly kill her over the next hour).

I begin in the unlikely place of a quote from raconteur Katie Lee—author, musicologist, folk singer, storyteller, Hollywood actress, song writer, filmmaker, photographer, poet, and river runner (in the words of her bio, Lee, 273).  She is not indigenous.  But she is a “grit” person, as Terry Turner Tempest offers in the Foreword—a woman “not afraid to laugh and tease, cajole, and flirt, cuss, rant, howl, sing and cry.”  “Katie Lee,” says she, is “the desert’s lover, her voice is a torch in the wilderness” (Lee, ix).   I begin here, away from the subject, because that is where I begin, where most of us today begin, in this land of the less-than-free, home of the most-often-cowardly.   We who are not indigenous, not native, pretend to own the land, but we are not of the land.  Rather than belong to it, we belong mostly nowhere, counting strip malls and car interiors and I-Phone screens our domiciles of greatest comfort.