By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann
Reflection offered at Day House Catholic Worker in Detroit on June 9, 2019
Psalm 104
Acts 2:1-11
John 20: 19-2
I admit that I come to these readings today carrying my own fear and anxiety. The kind of fear that can force you to lock yourself in a room. I’ve been scrolling through too many headlines these past few weeks that make it hard to breath. Continue reading “Pentecost: Bellies in the Mud”
Pentecost, Year C
Acts 2
By Wes Howard Brook and Sue Ferguson Johnson
“In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young people shall see visions, and your old people shall dream dreams.” (Acts 2.17)
Late this past winter, we had to remove a big, old spruce tree from the south side of our little house here in the Issaquah Creek watershed. The City had replaced a sewer line adjacent to our house a few years earlier, and it had severed a major root of the tree. We knew it was only a matter of time for that old spruce. It finally gave up and down it came to protect our house from the risk of it falling on the roof. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Pentecost”
Pentecost B
Acts 2:1-21
Proverbs 9:8
By Andrew Hudson
Salvation. I imagine my educated friends skating over the term in today’s reading. After all, Pentecost is an incredible story about harmony in diversity. That is an important theme, and one most educated folks are eager to pick up in these troubled times. Let’s find a way to have that kind of unity, they say.
By Sarah Thompson, Albany Mennonite Church
4 June 2017
Ruth 1:11-18
Acts 2:1-12
I was glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord.
It is indeed good to be with you today in Albany. The first time I came this way was to begin a cross-country bicycle trip that focused on the needs of young adults in the Mennonite church and raise money for Mennonite World Conference, an experience that brings Anabaptists together from all tribes and nations and tongues. It was a really good experience. Continue reading “Sermon: Pentecost”
Pentecost
Acts 2:2-21
John 7:37-39
Psalm 104:25-35, 37
By Ragan Sutterfield
They were gathered for a festival of word and wheat, the harvest of plants grown from soil–breathing carbon, exhaling oxygen. Beneath the soil, the plant roots had spread a sugar feast for microbes who in turn gave their bodies for the wheat’s growth. Those plants had now gone to seed, passing on their life to another season’s crop and in their abundance there was a harvest of bread for people and seed for birds and field mice and the life upon life that lives close to the ground. It was at a festival for all these interactions, joined with a celebration of the coming of the Torah, those books that offered the story of a God who gives life to soil and cares about every detail of the material world. The festival was Shavuot, Pentecost. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: The Coming of the Holy Breath”
By Ken Sehested
Pacem, pacem, pacem in terris
Easter’s focus is always sharper when allied with Earth Day. We sing, properly, of being wayfaring strangers. “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor” (Deuteronomy 26:5) is among the oldest testimonies of fate and faith. An alternate translation—“A Syrian ready to perish was my ancestor”—brings added poignancy to the text
We are indeed strangers; but not foreigners. In common usage these two words seem similar. Biblically speaking, though, the theological difference could not be greater. Continue reading “Pacem in terris: Easter, Earth Day, and Pentecost’s promise”
By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann. A Pentcost sermon given on May 15, 2016 in celebration of her dad, Bill Wylie-Kellermann’s 10 years as pastor at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Detroit.
It may be a little known fact around here- but I was once in a mime troop. We did the whole thing- white face, bow tie, suspenders. We were invited to events around the area. Christmas was a particularly busy time for us. We put on shows with short skits and we also were able to just mingle in the crowds. I loved it- particularly the wandering aimlessly with no other job that to be subtly funny and of course not speak with our mouths. Continue reading “A Pentecost Sermon: They become the storytellers”
By Ched Myers
Note: This is part of an ongoing series of Ched’s brief comments on the Revised Common Lectionary during year B, 2015.
How is it that we heard, each of us, in our own native tongue?
Acts 2:8
Since the dawn of colonization, the Americas have been defined by the struggle between dominant culture ideologies of conformity imposed by those in power, and grassroots cultural diversity among those on the margins. This tension between fantasies of racial supremacy and realities of racial diversity remains one of the supreme challenges facing the U.S., and thus our churches, today. The future of North American society depends upon our ability to live peaceably and justly with human diversity — and the same can be said of the human experiment as a whole. The question is whether we can, in church and in society, forge models of coexistence-with-congruence rather than unity-by-uniformity.
Continue reading “Pentecost: Divine Polyculture vs. Imperial Monoculture (Genesis 11 and Acts 2)”
Radical Discipleship 