Merry Christmas from the Killjoy Prophets! We love the holidays as much as anyone. Sure, we don’t love the rampant consumerism or the fruit cake, but we love giving gifts, baking, singing Handel’s Messiah, reading the Magnificat with family, and feasting with friends. We even love mixing it up occasionally with our toxic uncle whose political views we find troubling. Sometimes we just down an extra drink and let him ramble on, sometimes we go to another room, but sometimes... Read more
Tomorrow is Christmas, and as a friend said to me recently, it’s poised to be a decidedly minor key holiday. In the past few months we have mourned the tragic deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice. Now we grieve the loss of two New York City Police officers, whose murder has been co-opted by talking heads and exploited to justify more partisan bickering. While this Christmas seems unusually shrouded in tragedy, I am keenly aware that many... Read more
I am starting to think that all these holidays jammed up next to each other is a plot to keep the common folk in line. Halloween to Thanksgiving to Christmas to New Years all in the course of two months. And forget about quiet reflection during Advent. So, looking back on the year for most of us hits briefly for about a week. Then we’re back in it for another year. So, before we exchange gifts and drink too much... Read more
She turned out not to be one of the bookies favourites, indeed no-one had heard of her. She wasn’t someone glamourous or famous from the capital city who was chosen, but a very ordinary woman from an obscure northern town. Well I’m talking about Mary the mother of Jesus who turned out to be the mother of the long awaited Messiah, but I could have also been talking about the Revd Libby Lane, the person who is about to become... Read more
Knowledge has always fascinated me. How do we know, what do we know, how are belief patterns established? What I am primarily interested in is knowledge (and the production of knowledge), not so much belief. And so, in the spirit of the Christian Liturgical season of Advent (where there is a focus on hope, anticipation, and remembering that God was born of Mary), I say on this early Advent morning: I just don’t know. I don’t know that God was... Read more
The past month has made it abundantly clear that black people in this country suffer the fate of the exiled: those who live in an Empire as conquered, imprisoned, displaced, and invisible to the dominant institutions of power. What does Isaiah’s prophecy to the exiles of his day have to say in our moment? Raymond Arsenault tells the following story in his book Freedom Riders: The Supreme Court had ruled against segregation in interstate travel and facilities, and yet no... Read more
It’s Advent again. This is the time, leading up to Christmas, when we reflect upon the thousand storylines of prophecy through the centuries that moved in solemn procession toward that One climactic event; the incarnation, the birth of Jesus. We reflect upon the convergence of those storylines culminating in this one Messianic babe. Every sacrifice, from Abel’s altar to the last Passover lamb before the Passion, paved the Messiah’s path. Often, during Advent we use this time to reflect... Read more
Carl Sagan famously wrote, “How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophets said — grander, subtler, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed.‘? … A religion old or new that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional... Read more
What time is it? Good question. One of the side effects of my cerebral palsy is that I have trouble telling distances apart. One example of this is clocks with analog faces. The short hand is the hour. The long hand is…count by five…the minutes. But when I look at it, I can never tell. Fortunately for us, the time is now. The time is now to show up in opposition to anti-blackness, to the murder of black men, women... Read more
I used to know it all. I used to have it all figured out. I had answers for almost everything – including backup answers in case my first answer was insufficient. My “life-verse” was first Peter 3:15, which served as my motivation to “always be prepared to give an answer.” I used to be obsessed with knowledge. In fact, at times I would fall into despair if I came across a problem I could not figure out. I looked at... Read more
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