Queerying 5th after Epiphany B

 

Rev. Emily E. Ewing queeries the Gospel reading.

 

Gospel: Mark 1:29-39

²⁹As soon as Jesus and the disciples left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. ³⁰Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told Jesus about her at once. ³¹Jesus came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.

 

³²That evening, at sundown, they brought to Jesus all who were sick or possessed with demons. ³³And the whole city was gathered around the door. ³⁴And Jesus cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. 

 

³⁵In the morning, while it was still very dark, Jesus got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. ³⁶And Simon and his companions hunted for him. ³⁷When they found Jesus, they said to him, “Everyone is searching for you.” 

 

³⁸Jesus answered, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.” 

 

³⁹And Jesus went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

 

Queeries for the text:

How are Simon and Andrew related?

Who and what else is lifted up?

Why does work start so quickly again?

How big was the whole city?

What are the gifts of deserted places?

Who hunts? Who else is hunted?

How did Jesus come out? What does Jesus proclaim?

Who is cast out?

What secrets is Jesus keeping?

 

What are your queeries?

 

 

Queerying Palm Sunday A

Rev. Emily E. Ewing queeries the Gospel reading.

Palm Processional Gospel: Matthew 21:1-11

When Jesus, the disciples, and the crowd had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, ²saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. ³If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The Commander needs them.’ And they will send them immediately.”

⁴This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying, ⁵“Tell the daughter of Zion, look, your ruler is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” ⁶The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; ⁷they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and Jesus sat on them.

⁸A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. ⁹The crowds that went ahead of Jesus and that followed were shouting, “Hosanna to the Child of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Becoming One! Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

¹⁰When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, “Who is this?”

¹¹The crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”

Queeries for the text:
Who else was entering Jerusalem at that time?
How did Jesus ride on both a donkey and a colt at the same time?  Is that what everybody remembered happening?
When else do palm branches show up?
Why do we shout Hosanna?
What other kinds of palms are there?
What happens to the prophets?

What are your queeries?

Queerying Ash Wednesday

River Needham M.A., queeries the Tanakh reading.

Tanakh: Joel 2: 1-2, 12-17

Blow a horn in Zion, sound an alarm on my holy mount! Let all dwellers on earth tremble, for the day of the Becoming One has come! It is close—

A day of darkness and gloom, a day of densest cloud spread like soot over the hills. A vast, enormous horde— nothing like it has ever happened, and it shall never happen again through the years and ages.

“Yet even now”—says the Becoming One— “Turn back to me with all your hearts, and with fasting, weeping, and lamenting.”

Rend your hearts rather than your garments, and turn back to the Becoming One your God. For They are gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, and renouncing punishment.

Who knows but They may turn and relent, and leave a blessing behind for meal offering and drink offering to the Becoming One your God?

Blow a horn in Zion, solemnize a fast, proclaim an assembly!

Gather the people, bid the congregation purify themselves. Bring together the old, gather the babes and the sucklings at the breast; let the bridegroom come out of his chamber, the bride from her canopied couch.

Between the portico and the altar, let the priests, the Becoming One’s ministers, weep and say: “Oh, spare your people, Becoming One! Let not your possession become a mockery, to be taunted by nations! Let not the peoples say, ‘Where is their God?’”

Queeries for the text:
What kind of horn is blown?
What emotions does the day of the Becoming One bring up in you?
How is darkness good in this text?
What is missing from the pericope?
Who Proclaims an assembly today?
What is the canopied couch in this text?
Who cries out to God today?

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Queeries for Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21 can be found here from last year and here from the year before.

Queeries for the day:
What blessings does Ash Wednesday give us?
How might music guide your Lenten journey?
What other queeries come up for you?

all saints day year b - john

 

John 11:32-44
³²When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him,

she knelt at his feet and said to him,

“Lord, if you had been here,

my brother would not have died.”

³³When Jesus saw her weeping,

and the Judeans who came with her also weeping,

he was greatly disturbed in spirit

and deeply moved.

³⁴Jesus said,

“Where have you laid him?”

They said to him,

“Lord, come and see.”

³⁵Jesus began to weep.
³⁶So the Judeans said,

“See how he loved him!”

³⁷But some of them said,

“Could not the one

who opened the eyes of the blind man

have kept this man from dying?” 

³⁸Then Jesus,

again greatly disturbed,

came to the tomb.

It was a cave,

and a stone was lying against it.

³⁹Jesus said,

“Take away the stone.”

Martha, the sister of the dead man,

said to him,

“Lord, already there is a stench

because he has been dead four days.”

⁴⁰Jesus said to her,

“Did I not tell you that if you believed,

you would see the glory of God?”

⁴¹So they took away the stone.

And Jesus looked upward and said,

“Father, I thank you for having heard me.

⁴²I knew that you always hear me,

but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here,

so that they may believe that you sent me.”

⁴³When he had said this,

he cried with a loud voice,

“Lazarus, come out!”

⁴⁴The dead man came out,

his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth,

and his face wrapped in a cloth.

Jesus said to them,

“Unbind him,
and let him go.”

Queeries for the text:
Who is Jesus weeping for?
How did Jesus love Lazarus?
Why do they call Jesus Lord so many times?
How often are our prayers for the sake of the crowd? Can they be for us and the crowd?
Does Jesus know something about Lazarus that we don't?
How is the church bound?
What did Lazarus think about coming back from the dead?  What did he say?
How did the religious authorities respond to this?
How many saints have been killed by guns and hatred this year?

What are your queeries?

a blessing for those beyond the binary

At the beginning of October, I was in Chicago for our Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries in-person board meeting.  After the meeting, I stayed in Chicago for a few extra days to visit friends.  One of the stores I went to had two free items:

When I picked them out I had no idea how life-giving they would become in just a few weeks.

This last month has been filled with complicated feelings from the joys and struggles of Coming Out Day to the administration’s racist and transphobic policies, plans, and actions, and yet this sticker and this button bring me back to the love of the One who loves me best and remind me of the importance of blessings and affirmation.  So, I have a blessing for my fellow beloveds.

-----

To you beloved children of God who are intersex, trans, gender expansive, and gender nonconforming:

May the Holy One who celebrates the gifts of Joseph, whose beautiful dress bore the full diversity of rainbow colors and whose dreams stretched beyond their imagining, bring you energy and empower your resistance to what this administration intended for harm.

May the Spirit who poured Herself out on the Ethiopian Eunuch, whose gender and sex helped them break down binaries and break open the church’s barriers, pour over you, breaking through every barrier that keeps you from wholeness.

May the Divine One who brought into being the very first of humanity—the intersex human from humus, the earthling from the earth—renew your connection not only to the dirt of the earth, but also to the stardust scattered throughout the cosmos, which join together to form you.  May this Divine One, whose image you bear, breathe new life into you.

May the Word made flesh, who transgresses boundaries between human and divine, who comes to us as Jesus, born of the woman Mary through the power of that high femme Holy Spirit, spur you to action and nourish you for the struggle to come.

May the One who created and creates you, who loves your whole self, who loves who you are and who you are becoming, who loves the power you hold to transform the broken world in which we all live—may this One wrap you in love that seeps to the deepest core of your being.

19th after pentecost year b - mark

Mark 9:38-50
³⁸John said to Jesus,
     “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name,
     and we tried to stop them,
          because they were not following us.”
³⁹But Jesus said,
     “Do not stop them;
          for no one who does a deed of power in my name
               will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me.
          ⁴⁰Whoever is not against us is for us.
     ⁴¹For truly I tell you,
          whoever gives you a cup of water to drink
               because you bear the name of Christ
                    will by no means lose the reward.

⁴²“If any of you put a stumbling block
     before one of these little ones who believe in me,
          it would be better for you
               if a great millstone were hung around your neck
               and you were thrown into the sea.
⁴³If your hand causes you to stumble,
     cut it off;
          it is better for you to enter life maimed
               than to have two hands
               and to go to hell,
                    to the unquenchable fire.  
⁴⁵And if your foot causes you to stumble,
     cut it off;
          it is better for you to enter life lame
               than to have two feet
               and to be thrown into hell.  
⁴⁷And if your eye causes you to stumble,
     tear it out;
          it is better for you to enter the dominion of God with one eye
               than to have two eyes
               and to be thrown into hell,
                    ⁴⁸where their worm never dies,
                    and the fire is never quenched.

⁴⁹“For everyone will be salted with fire.
     ⁵⁰Salt is good;
          but if salt has lost its saltiness,
               how can you season it?
          Have salt in yourselves,
               and be at peace with one another.”

Queeries for the text:
Who else have disciples tried to stop from doing ministry in Jesus' name?
What is the reward?
What are today's stumbling blocks?
Who is placing the stumbling blocks?
How are Jesus' hyperboles harmful to others?
What does this have to do with what's going on today?
What hell is Jesus talking about?
Is being at peace with ourselves a prerequisite to being at peace with one another?
Does salt only work when it's angry?
If bodies are mostly water, what's our salt content?

What are your queeries?

12th after pentecost year b - john

Special thanks this week to Mack Patrick and other Proclaimers, who collaborated on these queeries while we gathered for the annual Proclaim Gathering! 

John 6: 35, 41-51
³⁵Jesus said to them, 
     “I AM the bread of life. 
          Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, 
          and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.  
⁴¹Then the Judeans began to complain about Jesus because he said, 
     “I am the bread that came down from heaven.”  
⁴²They were saying, 
     “Is not this Jesus, 
          the son of Joseph, 
               whose father and mother we know? 
          How can he now say, 
               ‘I have come down from heaven’?”  
⁴³Jesus answered them, 
     “Do not complain among yourselves.
          ⁴⁴No one can come to me unless drawn by Abba who sent me; 
          and I will raise that person up on the last day.
          ⁴⁵It is written in the prophets, 
               ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ 
                    Everyone who has heard 
                    and learned from Abba
                         comes to me.
                         ⁴⁶Not that anyone has seen Abba
                              except the one who is from God; 
                                   this one has seen Abba.
          ⁴⁷Very truly, I tell you, 
               whoever believes has everlasting life.
                    ⁴⁸I AM the bread of life.
                         ⁴⁹Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, 
                              and they died.
                    ⁵⁰This is the bread that comes down from heaven, 
                         so that one may eat of it 
                              and not die.
                    ⁵¹I am the living bread that came down from heaven. 
                         Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; 
                              and the bread that I will give 
                                   for the life of the world 
                                        is my flesh.”

Queeries for the text:
Is Jesus the gingerbread man?  What about folks who can't eat gluten?
How can the bread of life keep me from being thirsty?
What did we skip from last week to this week?
How far does Jesus' apple fall from the family tree?
Are they actually trying to take a dig at Joseph through Jesus?
Is this really just the beginning of their complaining?  Do they realize Jesus can hear them?
Did Abba draw us with charcoal?  Pastels?  Crayon?
Does Jesus mostly just want to be incarnate as inanimate objects?
What is the thing that fills us? What sustains us?
How do we know that what we are eating is everlasting?
If the bread is alive, does that mean Jesus is sour dough?  Is Jesus claiming his identity as leavened bread?

What are your queeries?

from queerying to preaching: the 4th after pentecost year b

For a while now I've been sermonizing and preaching in a new way.  Now that I feel like I have a bit of a pattern to it, I thought I'd update you on the whole process.  

When I first preached this way, it was by accident and because the Holy Spirit made me do it (like she does).  Since then, I have preached several sermons with a similar sermonizing style as what that first one ended up being.

My sermons begin, about a week before preaching, with queerying the text.  This is a process I developed, after a fabulously queer text study (some might call it the queerest text study ever) with a friend, Rev. Caleb Crainer, at our annual Proclaim Gathering.  Queerying the text developed as a way for me to continue to engage devotionally with the lectionary, even as I was no longer preaching as regularly, and as a resource for others who were preaching or wanting to engage more deeply with one or more texts for the upcoming week.  

The heart of queerying is asking questions of the text, of us who engage with the text, and of the world, cosmos, and culture in which we live.  A lot of my queerying also comes with links that can problematize the text or the question, suggest answers, give examples, and more.  The particular perspectives I do my best to bring are a hermeneutic of suspicion, which I've learned from feminist theologians; a queer attention to those who are not heard and those who don't have power or names; and an attention to the intersectionality of identity, politics, power and liberation, learned from womanist, mujerista, and liberation theologians, among others.  

A lot of the time this involves google and more in-depth searches as well as cultivating from my ever growing list of resources and friends.  If you know of good connections (to resources or people) for me to make in my queeries, please let me know!  I try to do this Friday or Saturday a week before the reading(s) come up in the Revised Common Lectionary, but depending on the work (to pay the bills) that I have and other life events, sometimes it gets done and/or posted as late as Tuesday.  Sometimes I get more than one reading queeried, but many weeks it has just been one (lately, the gospel).

For this week, queerying the text looked like this:

Mark 4:26-34

26Jesus also said,

    “The reign of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground,

         27and would sleep and rise night and day,

              and the seed would sprout and grow,

                   the sower does not know how.

         28The earth produces of itself,

              first the stalk,

                   then the head,

                        then the full grain in the head.

              29But when the grain is ripe,

                   at once the sower goes in with a sickle,

                        because the harvest has come.”

30Jesus also said,

    “With what can we compare the reign of God,

         or what parable will we use for it?

         31It is like a mustard seed, which,

              when sown upon the ground,

                   is the smallest of all the seeds on earth;

              32yet when it is sown it grows up

                   and becomes the greatest of all shrubs,

                        and puts forth large branches,

                             so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”

33With many such parables Jesus spoke the word to them,

    as they were able to hear it;

         34Jesus did not speak to those around him except in parables,

              but he explained everything in private to his disciples.

Queerying the text:
What does the first parable mean in light of scientific knowledge?
Are we so distanced from the harvest that most of us no longer know how the earth produces?
How is God's reign like a weed?
What does mustard look like fully grown?
Does Jesus just want us to stop getting in the way of the reign of God?
Why does Jesus use riddles so much?  Why are the disciples the only ones that get explanations?

What are your queeries?




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After queerying the text, I continued to sit with it as well as the other two readings for this weekend.  It percolated along with unfolding events and remembrances of recent history.  It simmered in conversations with others during the present Pride month of celebration, resistance, and rebellion.  It sparkled and shined as I looked ahead.

And then I began to sketch out the sermon—to really sermonize. This week I tried to be more intentional, so that I wouldn't end up redoing a "final" (read: colorful) sermon (but I redid it anyway, which is what I have done each of the past weeks).  

This was the draft I first sketched out.

Because I haven't figured out how to practice preaching out loud by myself, I then preached to my friend, River Needham, via Skype (as has become a delightful weekly occurrence for us both) for feedback and so that I could record a draft of my sermon.  This usually happens after my first colorful draft of my sermon, but this week it happened before.

This is what I had hoped would be my final draft, but was really just my first colorful one.

Following the brilliant practice of another friend, Rev. Corrine Haulotte, I have begun recording a sermon in draft form and then listening to it over and over again Saturday and Sunday to get the words and the flow into my head.  I used to hesitate about doing this, because with manuscripts I would tweak them the morning of preaching.  Once I started doing it, I realized that listening to them over and over again let me mentally tweak and realize where I wanted to change things, where it was good, and any other shifts I wanted to make.  This helped, rather than hindering, the sermonizing process.

This is the final visual for this week's sermon.

Receiving feedback and re-listening to my sermon inevitably leads to a new draft of the sermon.  This week's sermon is particularly visual, with images in addition to words and visual movement.  This week's sermon is also covered in glitter, much like the children's message.

There is an audio for this sermon, although I am recovering from a sinus infection, so you can tell that I'm not 100%, but I don't have a way to host the audio, because it requires so much, so if you're really interested in the audio, you'll have to comment or contact me and let me know.

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This is more or less the pattern I now use for sermonizing and preaching.  I no longer use a manuscript, though some of my favorite preachers definitely do.  Particularly as someone who does a lot of pulpit supply, where I don't know the congregation(s) as well, this is helpful, because it forces me to pay attention and respond to the congregation in more intentional ways.  I am more clued in on if they're clued in or spaced out (Speaking of spaced out, have you seen this version of the new pride flag??  It's awesome!!!).

I'd love your feedback if you have questions, comments, or concerns!  Let me know what you think.  Also, if you like my queerying (whether it's the text, music, or liturgy) and/or want it to be more frequent, click the button on the right towards the top of the blog and "buy me a coffee" to help financially support me and my work!

Thanks!!