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
Epiphany 3
Reading Jerusalem presented as God’s daughter and seeing and hearing the words, “your God is in your midst,” I can’t help but to read with early Christian writers and the continuing Church who read Mary’s pregnancy through Zephaniah’s prophecy. However, an Israelite or later Jewish reader or hearer would understand that the prophecy is about God’s enduring presence with her people in every circumstance, enslavement, exile, liberation, return and renewal. Epiphany celebrates the many ways God makes herself known to us for example, gathering the outcast in the first lesson. The psalmist prays for that kind of epiphany, that God would make her “wondrous faithful love known.” The author of the epistle has a much more narrow view of the way in which God reveals Godself but observes that everything God has made is good making possible a reading of God made known to us through all of creation. In the gospel, Jesus reveals he is God in the flesh with every miraculous touch and every act of embodied love; sometimes, the two are the same.
Epiphany 2
In the first lesson, God reveals herself and makes her glory manifest through her redemptive love for her people, expressed here through a marriage metaphor. God will lead her people and her land and be their protector. It is a patriarchal construct, particularly when read with the original masculine grammar. However, just as we have grown in our understandings of the ways in which hearts bind to each other and commit to love and nurture, support and protect each other the metaphor can expand with our understanding. While salvation is most often a corporate endeavor throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, in the Psalms it is frequently an individual’s plea or testimony. In this Sunday’s psalm a single soul tells the story of her miraculous deliverance and the awe inspiring revelation of God that she encountered, one that is more theophany than epiphany. The community receiving the epistle waits for such a moment of redemption with God’s saving presence made fully known in their midst. The Baptizer proclaims the day has come, the One has come and bearing witness, God comes down like a dove in thundering love for an only begotten beloved holy child.