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Quotes today from the books The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin and This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley.  Support the show

Quotes in this episode taken from I Want You to Be: On the God of Love  by Tomáš Halík and A Women's Lectionary for the Whole Church by Dr. Wilda C. Gafney. You can listen to "The Kingdom is Yours" by Common Hymnal here, and maybe have tissues nearby if you cry during songs. (The last time I tried to lead this in a congregational setting I literally couldn't finish the song because I was weeping. It's fine.)  Support the show

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Quotes this week taken from the documentary Crip Camp, which you can stream on Netflix. Blessed are you who wait for tomatoes. Who water and weed and pray for rain and sun. Blessed are you building a highway in the wilderness, Or at least you were, Until you were stopped by the zoning board.  Since when does the wilderness have a process for proposals and approvals anyway?  Blessed are you who are unexpectedly, wonderfully filled.And you who are becoming acquainted with feeling of leaving empty.  May this cosmic reversal be the fertile ground in which solidarity grows, rather than resentment. “Back in the day, things were different.” You’re right. And they needed to change.  We will always need to change. Soil becomes deplete if you only grow tomatoes.Farmers show us the wisdom not only of patience, but of rotation.  If we don’t change, welcome new in, dedicate our attention and shift our routines and expectations toward what is needed for renewal, we will die.  Blessed are you who look out on the stark field, wondering if all that effort worked at all.  Blessed are those, waiting, looking desperately for a crocus to bloom.  Support the show

Quotes and information this week drawn from Anna Case-Winters' commentary on Matthew, part of the Belief Series. A Blessing for Advent week 2: Blessed are you who escaped from the vipers nest.  Who found yourself growing up in a world that had so thoroughly forgotten the very-goodness baked into its bones and bark that all it offered were tenuous  pathways of escaping calamity with the smell of fire on your heels. And only if you kept on the straight and narrow.  Blessed are you who found that the ever-elusive path you were told to stick to is actually a fun house affair, where finding the on ramp may be tricky, but once you are on the whole thing opens up stretching before you until the way you are walking becomes the skyline and the desert and the trees.  Blessed are you who walked away. Knowing a vipers nest is no place to flourish. Who rejected the familiar numbness a low dose of poison can bring, because at the end of the day it’s still poison and grace doesn’t ask us to numb.  Blessed are you dreamers. Who live in the tension of hoping and working for a world in which we love our enemies, and lions nap in the meadow with lambs and yet…you cannot bring yourself to even turn toward the snake pit from whence you came.  Time may heal wounds, but this one is not even scabbed over yet and you cannot imagine a day when the mere thought of where you have been won’t rub you like salt. Blessed are you who live wild  and free in the deserted places. You who feast on the sweetness and absurdity that find you there. Blessed are the ones who have become spectacles for the respectable, as you show us the way back to life.Support the show

It's Advent y'all! Each week during Advent I'm ending the episode with a blessing I wrote, text is included below for reference: When the World is Ending...or Beginning Blessed are you who sit in stunned silence in the driveway or parking lot, on the curb for just a moment too long because the illusion has broken yet again And you remember that twinkling lights strung on gutters and trees are illuminated by power plants belching smog and making life on this planet as tenuous and flickering as the tiny incandescent bulbs. You remember the empty chairs at family gatherings, due to health or death or because someone who claimed to love you actually loves their idea of you more than the glorious human before them.  Blessed are you, sitting, fingers growing cold as the warmth fades from your now idle car, but unable to will yourself inside where you have to go back to pretending.  At least, until you remember that we contain multitudes.  The illusion shatters, then you pretend things are fine, then things are fine because while the ice caps are melting, so is your heart for those you love.  While relationships and families fracture and split, so do the ice crystals as they drift to earth, picking up all manner of dust and dirt along the way, and it’s the splitting and the grime that turns each pristine water drop into a beautiful, unique snowflake.  You chuckle bitterly, breath fogging the air.  Perhaps it would be best if we did not contain multitudes.  You trudge inside, to whatever gathering or empty house or workplace or appointment lies beyond you. Waiting for your hands to warm up and for the buoyancy of hope to return.  The red wing of a cardinal catches your eye.  The sun peaks from behind the ever-present clouds.  A child laughs.  A stranger shares a quarter with you to get a cart at Aldi.  There are a million assurances that we will be okay, and they do not negate the severity of the danger and rupture we are surrounded by.  But this season, of all seasons, we remember that the way the Divine answered the fearsome, the reductive, the shattering, was with birth.  The most vulnerable.  Flesh bearing and breaking open to bring forth new flesh.  All tenderness. All strength.  And at the moment you believe you will break, you actually do.  And you go on living, New. And more abundantly.  This is the way the world begins again.  Blessed are those who wait for it, with hope and trepidation, sitting slightly too long in the car, before walking inside.  Support the show

Quotes this week from the Luke commentary of the Belief series, by Justo González and Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. Support the show

Quote taken from Justo González's commentary on Luke from the Belief Commentary Series. Also, a few impact words toward the end of this episode, so be mindful if you're listening at work or with young children around.Support the show

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I'll be on Instagram live this coming Thursday evening (October 6th) at 7pm Central with Kelley Nikondeha talking about her new book The First Advent in Palestine. Support the show

Sources cited in this episode:You Can Talk to God Like That by Abby Norman. Luke commentary by Justo González as part of the Belief Commentary series. Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder's chapter on Luke in True to Our Native Land.Support the show

This week I gleaned a lot from the notes in my New Oxford Annotated Bible, which is my favorite study Bible. Highly recommend if you're not quite ready to buy a bunch of commentaries, but you'd still like more background info on the text as you read. Support the show

Sources engaged in this episode are The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann, Short Stories by Jesus by Amy-Jill Levine and Clarice J. Martin's chapter on 1-2 Timothy in True to Our Native Land. Support the show

Sources mentioned in this podcast include, Dr. Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder's commentary on Luke contained in True to Our Native Land and concepts from Dr. Scot McKnight's commentary on Philemon in the New International Commentary series.  I can't remember which episode it was in, but adrienne maree brown talks about the wisdom of mushrooms on her podcast How to Survive The End of The World, which I highly recommend as well. Support the show

In this episode I reference quotes from Dr. Soong-Chan Rah's book Prophetic Lament and Dr. Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder's commentary on Luke 14 in True to Our Native Land.If you want to learn more about the formation of the Biblical canon and the deuterocanonical books, I love this quick intro from The Bible Project.  Support the show

Referenced in this podcast are (again) Justo González's commentary on Luke, and the scholarship of Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg who graciously does an extraordinary amount of public theology--much of it on Twitter--you can (and should) follow her at @TheRaDR. Support the show