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 5
The First Lesson reveals the unchanging consequences of war, women and children left to pick up the pieces after the slaughter ceases. We see that in stark fashion during the ongoing hostilities in Ukraine where those women and children who can, flee, while all men of war-fighting age are required to stay behind and join the war effort.
The selections from Psalm 77 are a lament in the face of the kind of devastation that cannot be repaired in a lifetime or perhaps even in a generation. Sometimes the only honest prayers are the pleas of an abandoned child. Even knowing God’s faithfulness, mentioned in the closing lines, our lived reality can be such that miracles and promises of old are virtually meaningless when our kin lay slaughtered in the streets, when a nation’s legal apparatus is used to be errode and degrade human and civil liberties and when it is not safe to live and love as your true self. It should not be misunderstood that the pleas of the lamenting soul are faithless. Indeed it is an act of faith to call God to remembrance.
While the epistle celebrates the endurance that suffering produces it should not be misunderstood to celebrate suffering. God does not bring evil into our lives to make us better. God can and does transform us in our suffering and out of the wreck that suffering leaves behind.
Similarly, the peace Jesus promises in the gospel will not prevent us from suffering but it like he and the Holy Spirit will accompany us in our suffering.
Pentecost 3
…you all are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own possession…
I make the decision to translate the second person plural as “you all” so the reader/hearer will know when the community is being addressed as a community.
This week in which women have been rendered less than persons in favor of non-sentient clusters of cells, it is important to remember that in spite of its Iron Age context, the scriptures and the structures surrounding them that furiously limit their rights and autonomy also present women as fully created in the image of God, fully competent.
Because of where I have been invited to preach, I will be using the old lectionary. But were I preaching from Year W, I would start where I have started above. And I would continue here:
That our founding religious documents, sacred secular, share original contexts in which enslavement was the norm and women’s liberty was infringed upon if not outright nullified by men and the social constructs with which they empowered themselves, does not make them God-ordained. We have not limited ourselves to the scope of their scientific and technological knowledge and accomplishments any more than we should to their ethical poverty and moral failings.
The insistent need for children for food production and national defense, in ancient Israel in particular, does not exist in the same way in the world reading the scriptures. The accumulation of enslaved bodies is no longer a sign of wealth – though it would be if the originalists held full sway. But, the inability of many men to identify themselves apart from hierarchy and domination perseveres.
‘Honor your mother and your father’ and ‘Whoever speaks evil of mother or father must surely die.’
You do not honor your mother or your sister or your auntie or your neighbor or strangers by returning them to reproductive slavery.