Welcome to Wading in the Waters of the Word™ with A Women’s Lectionary
Gentle Readers, Followers, Preachers, Pray-ers, Thinkers and Visitors, Welcome!
Welcome to this space where you can share your worship – liturgy and preaching – preparations – using A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church. We begin in Advent 2021 with Year W, a single, standalone Lectionary volume that includes readings from all four Gospels. (We will continue with Year A in Advent 2022 to align with the broader Church.) In advance of each week, I will start the conversation and set the space for you all. I will come through time to time, but this is your space. Welcome!
Media Resources
A Women’s Lectionary For The Whole Church
Session 1, October 16, 2021
Rev. Wil Gafney, PhD at Myers Park Baptist Church
Plenary 1 | Translating Women Back Into Scripture for A #WomensLectionary
This session introduces participants to frequently unexamined aspects of biblical translation in commonly available bibles and the intentional choices made in “A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church.”
A Women’s Lectionary For The Whole Church
Session 2, October 16, 2021
Rev. Wil Gafney, PhD at Myers Park Baptist Church
Plenary 2 | Reading Women in Scripture for Preaching, Study, and Devotion
This session provides an overview of “A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church,” its genesis, production, and content. There is also an in-depth exploration of specific passages appointed for specific days including time for public and private reading and discussion.
Lectionary Lectio
Click the Comment links to add to the conversation
Pentecost 11
These readings explore love and power, human and divine and, demonstrate how love and power can be a terrible combination on this side of heaven. Along the way, Ahinoam, Merab and Michal, a mother and her daughters are named. The daughters will have parts to play dictated by the men in their lives. The mother’s naming foreshadows the long tradition of the Judean Queen Mother. Saul is uncomfortably familiar, a man using his power to achieve his political ends on the back of a woman including by putting her on her back. In spite of the way her father and husband use her, Michal finds love, a doomed love. Marriage in the scriptures is not romantic though there are persons who are said to truly love their spouse, (all men with the exception of Michal).
The psalm offers a traditional model of love and devotion to and for God. But the epistle and gospel demand evidence of that love in how we treat each other: There is no love of God without love of neighbor. Combined with the first lesson these readings call the Church to account for the ways in which the treatment of women and girls and femme men and non-binary and trans persons fails to demonstrate the love of God professed in lyrics and liturgy.
Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary
What’s A Sista Got to Do?
Annunciation Tryptich by the late Robert Moore of the African Episcopal Church of St Thomas where it hangs in Philadelphia PA.
What’s a sista got to do to be respected in these androcentric man-besotted religious streets? Spontaneously reproduce without pleasure or pain (according to some traditions), never have sex (according to some), get bodily snatched up into heaven and avoid death (another tradition)? What on earth, in and under heaven are we doing with Jesus’s mama? Past generations of churchly men piled all their fear and loathing of women and, their desire for women and sex onto and then off of the Blessed Virgin by making her chaste before and after her miraculous conception, birth-giving and even marriage. Let a sista have an orgasm.
Judith 13:18 Uzziah said to Judith, “O daughter, you are blessed by the Most High God above all other women on earth, and blessed be the Holy God, who created the heavens and the earth, who has guided you to cut off the head of the leader of our enemies. 19 Praise of you will never depart from the hearts of women and men who remember the power of God.
What’s a sista got to do to be remembered by name in these androcentric man-besotted religious streets? Kill a man with his own sword, hack at it a bit because the spinal cord is tough, throw the head into your kosher lunch bag and sneak out of enemy territory. Even with all of this, the minor but louder tradition of Christianity, Protestantism, cut a sista out of their Bible with a quickness. The rest of us, the majority of Christians on the planet, still have Judith and her blessing that was reworked to bless the young unexpectedly pregnant virgin Miriam from Nazareth. (Or was it Ya’el’s blessing after she ghosted that rapist by penetrating him in his tender flesh? What’s a sista got to do to remain unmolested in her own damn tent?)
What’s a sista got to do to construct a holy, wholly healthy humanity (with room for horniness) out of the crumbs – crumbs under the table and crumbs that as Sista Macy (Gray) testified, “your crumbs of lovin’ no longer get me by?” Is there anything in the idolized manmade Virgin that speaks to a woman in this world of sex-positivity, gender plurality, trans bodies, frustrated angry celibates, guilt-ridden lovers, bad church teaching and worse preaching?
Deconstruct the BVM and reconstruct her in her image. It’s Ok. We’ve been doing it all along, ironically, following the in the footsteps of those old churchmen but wandering along new paths and carving out yet more.
Today I see in her, rebellion and resistance. Rebellion and resistance to family and societal and even theological norms that told her what was going to happen to her body. When she opened her mouth to question the announcement that was made to her, she took ownership of her body and her future. And to no small degree, mine.
What’s a sista got to do to stay in a androcentric man-besotted Church without losing her ever-loving mind? Have looong talks with the Ever-Blessed Virgin Mary about these men and their mess.
Elder Sister
Mother
Co-Conspirator
Intercessor
Hey Girl
Hail Mary
Full of grace
God is with you
Blessed are you among women
And blessed is the fruit of your womb
Holy Mary
Mother of God
Pray for us sinners
Now and in the hour of our death
Amen