#progressivetheology

[lauralzielke]

In case you were wondering: “I’m a Christian and I’m against Christian nationalism. It’s an anti-Christ ideology.” Posted @withrepost • @josh_a_scott ———————————— #progressivechristianity #progressivechristianchurch #progressivechristian #progressivetheology #progressivefaith #deconstruction #deconstructing #deconstruct #deconstructingfaith #christiannationalismisantichrist https://www.instagram.com/p/CknaippOQxh/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[brendanelliswilliams]

Homily for Holy Thursday

What follows is the homily I delivered for the Holy Thursday Liturgy at Grace and St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church (online, owing to the realities of the pandemic), on April 9th, 2020. During the present time of radical upheaval, my hope and prayer is that these words, and the worldview and invitation they represent, might inspire and support a few hearts and souls who are now seeking to find a fresh and more life giving way of walking on this sacred Earth.

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On Holy Thursday we usually speak, in one way or another, of the sustaining qualities of bread, of its symbolism translated into the Holy Eucharist, and to the ‘table of fellowship’ more broadly.

Yet on this occasion we have no sacramental bread to share. We do, however, have other forms of bread to sustain us. ‘Give us this day our daily bread,’ Holy Wisdom invites us to ask—: ‘Grant us the sustenance we need.’ In the ancient Syriac version of the Lord’s Prayer, that line translates more literally as, ‘Grant us the bread we need, from day to day.’

I wonder what bread it is that we actually need. What forms of sustenance do we really require in this life—and in this particular historical moment? It might well be that what we need isn’t at all what we’ve long assumed we needed. And now might be the perfect time for us to realize and fully come to terms with that fact. What is it that truly feeds us—body, mind, heart, and soul? In other words: What’s actually fundamental to our humanness?

The other day my Bishop in California, Marc Andrus, reminded me of a commentary on the Lord’s Prayer written by the contemporary Sufi teacher, Neil Douglas-Klotz. In this commentary, he goes line by line with the prayer and beneath each phrase gives his own reflections or petitions in response to the original text. In response to the line, ‘Give us this day our daily bread,’ he writes:

‘Grant what we need each day in bread and insight: subsistence for the call of growing life.…Let the measure of our need be earthiness: give all things simple, verdant, passionate….Animate the earth within us: we then feel the Wisdom underneath, supporting all. Generate through us the bread of life…grant what we need each day in bread and insight.’

This does a fair job, I think, of pointing—even if somewhat obliquely—to one of our chief sources of nourishment. A source to which our prodigal return is long overdue. That source is God’s manifest Creation: Nature, or, in our specific environment here and now, the Earth, from whom our very life comes forth, and from whom, as Neil Douglas-Klotz points out, comes also Wisdom: Wisdom incarnate, bodily, earthly: Christ the Word of Heaven and the Word of Earth.

‘That peace which the world cannot give, I give to you,’ says the Jesus of John’s Gospel, as he rapidly approaches the end of his incarnate life. ‘The world’ here of course means the world of human contrivance: the social and political world of human beings and our often misguided endeavors. As I hope all of us can see clearly from where we presently stand (if we couldn’t see it before), the world of human affairs, and the way in which this particular society has normatively conducted itself, are most definitely incapable of offering us any real peace—or any authentic meaning and purpose. They have separated and distracted us from who we really are, where we come from, and what it is that actually feeds us.

And now that this social construct is in many ways forced to a temporary halt, we have the opportunity to redress it: to help remediate the misguided way of life we’ve collectively created and perpetuated. Now we’re invited to consider what it would look like to co-create a different kind of world. Perhaps a world that looks more like God’s Kingdom. If we simply kill time till we can rush back to the old, established way of being, then we forfeit this sacred opportunity—this holy opportunity to deeply examine and to heal the toxicities and the injustices of the way of life we’ve too long taken for granted.

And there’s a small but significant analogue to all this in our own parochial setting. It’s of course normal that folks will have grief and nostalgia and other emotions related to being in the physical space of the church, to doing things in a certain way, as they’re used to—that’s all perfectly understandable, and we all feel it to one degree or another. And, at the same time, if all we do is linger there and bide our time till we can return to familiar routines, then what have we gained? What have we really learned from all this? How have we grown and how have we transformed? How have we then accepted the opportunity God has put before us to live into a deeper expression of Her Kingdom?

I say ‘opportunity’ here knowing full well that really engaging the challenge and potential of this time is not a given, and, if history and observation of the present are any indication, many, many people will not seize hold of this opportunity; instead, they’ll find new ways to distract themselves until they can get back to ‘normalcy’. The problem is that the normalcy we’ve had in this culture is by no reasonable standards healthy, just, or aligned in harmony with God’s Creation.

So what will we do about that? What will we who claim to be religious, who claim to follow Christ—who, by the way, has always borne witness against most of what we assume as normal and right, whether we want to acknowledge that fact or not—what will we do about this whole scenario? Will we fall back into old habits, old assumptions and old patterns of corrosive behavior, or will we finally do something fundamentally different to reshape our world for the betterment of all? That is the challenge and the invitation I humbly place before you in this week of sacred observance, here in this liminal time: this time of fear and uncertainty, yes, but also of opportunity—of sacred opportunity.

Collectively, the bread we need is not to be found in material concern. The bread we need is the bread of true communion, which begins in each of us, and is manifest as loving connection with the whole of Life, the whole of God’s Creation. And in our context as a parish community, the bread we ultimately have to share with the world that truly nourishes is not to be found in our building, in our customs, in our supposed worldview assumptions, which many don’t fully understand or accept anyway. The bread—the real nourishment we hold and have to share—is to be found in the depth and quality of our witness. In our Sacraments, yes, but even more fundamentally, in the depth of our love: for one another, and for the whole of Creation. And it’s to be found in the depth of the transformation we’ve each undergone as spiritual seekers. All the rest is ultimately window dressing.

So, I want to say to you tonight, dear friends, that the real measure of how adequately we meet this strange and challenging time—the true measure of how adequately we meet it, of whether or not we embrace the opportunity God provides in it—is how well and how fully we’re able to live now into a new and more life giving paradigm: one of true interconnection with the whole of Life, and one which privileges in our language, in our focus, and in our practice the authentic and dynamic values of Nature, which are the values of the Origin of Life.

How will you—and how will we, as the Church—bear deep and relevant witness to those values now? That, I believe, is the charge and the invitation God has placed on our hearts.

May the Holy Wisdom of our Creator—who comes not just from above, but equally from below: from the clay of which we, too, are made; from the living Earth beneath our feet—bless and sanctify us all in that endeavor of integrous action and discovery, and equip us for the difficult work of actually living into and co-creating Her Kingdom. Amen.

[lauralzielke]

Posted @withrepost • @josh_a_scott What if Jesus’s message wasn’t about how to be properly religious, but about how to resist the political and economic exploitation and dehumanization of empire? It’s not a story of EVACUATION, but a story of LIBERATION. ———————————— #progressivechristianity #progressivechristianchurch #progressivechristian #progressivetheology #progressivefaith #deconstruction #deconstructing #deconstruct #deconstructingfaith https://www.instagram.com/p/CjtTY6HOkGo/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=