“The interconnectedness of all things…”
Thursday 28th November 2024
| Author: Annette Kaye
Simon Cross speaks to Annette Kaye from Psychedelic Christian charity Ligare.
Can you tell us a little about yourself?
I’m Annette Kaye, a southern hemisphere girl who finds herself in the far north-east of the UK, mother to two adult daughters, and tow teenage step daughters, all of whom, along with my partner, keep me challenged, and happy to be alive! In addition, I am a ceramic and mixed media artist, an Ignatian-trained spiritual director, supervisor, and trainer, a transpersonal psychotherapist, and a facilitator of eco-spirituality, as well as psychedelic, retreats. Faith-wise, I have travelled through many rooms of Christianity - conservative Evangelical, charismatic, liturgical, contemplative, and would now, with my interest in, and concern for, the natural world, call myself something of a Christian Animist.
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Progressive reflections on the lectionary #45
Monday 25th November 2024
| Author: Simon Cross
Luke 21:25-36 Beginning with the end of the world
It’s the first Sunday of
the church calendar, for anyone who cares about such things, so we enter ‘Year
C’ in the revised common lectionary, the third of three years worth of set
readings with this reading from Luke’s gospel. This time
next year we’ll be back at the start of ‘Year A’ again - if, that is, the world
doesn’t end first.
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Progressive reflections on the lectionary #44
Monday 18th November 2024
| Author: Simon Cross
John 18:33-37 'Jesus as the ideal Caesar'
I’m drawing, somewhat, on a
book by Laura Hunt for this week’s reflection. Hunt has written perhaps the
only book which explains in detail how one can read John’s portrayal of Jesus
as a picture of an ‘ideal type’ Roman emperor. She uses sophisticated methodologies
to develop this idea and her book is worth a read if you have a taste for
academic work and a library copy available to you (it’s somewhat expensive to
purchase).
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Progressive reflections on the lectionary #43
Monday 11th November 2024
| Author: Simon Cross
Mark 13: 1-8
The gospels are full of parables. Parables of Jesus, and parables about Jesus. The kind of writing we find there, invented long before the enlightenment understanding of ‘fact’ is, to modern and post-modern readers confusing and elliptical.
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Progressive reflections on the lectionary #42
Monday 4th November 2024
| Author: Simon Cross
Mark 12:38-44: Widows might just want to rise up and overthrow the system
Among the
host of familiar stories in Mark’s gospel is the story of the widow’s mite - where Jesus
and his disciples watch people paying the temple tax and Jesus notes how a poor
widow pays more than anyone.
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Progressive reflections on the lectionary #41 (Halloween spooky special!)
Monday 28th October 2024
| Author: Simon Cross
John 11:32-44: Resurrecting zombie institutions
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Progressive reflections on the lectionary #40
Monday 21st October 2024
| Author: Simon Cross
Mark 10: 46-52 Ways of 'seeing' Blind Bartimaeus
There are
tonnes of interesting things in this passage, the story of ‘blind’ Bartimaeus, and several
mysteries to ponder. It begins with a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ visit to
Jericho, the world’s oldest city, followed by a remarkable encounter between
Mark’s Jesus and a blind beggar with a strange name. The story is revisited by
the other synoptic evangelists - but without the repetition of that strange
name which I think is important for Mark.
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Progressive reflections on the lectionary #39
Monday 14th October 2024
| Author: Simon Cross
Mark 10:35-45 - Of slaves and emperors
On the
28th of October 312CE, The Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. He
believed, or said he did, that Christ had helped him triumph over his rival
Maxentius, as a result he was about to make Christianity the religion of
empire.
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Progressive reflections on the lectionary #38
Monday 7th October 2024
| Author: Simon Cross
Mark 10:17-31: Never mind the camels, here's the household revolution
There are some wonderful, eye-opening, mind-expanding curiosities to get your teeth into in this week’s passage which is all about Jesus’ encounter with a rich young man. Trouble is, most people seem to get caught up in the eye-catching ‘easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle’ phrase, trying to decode it for hidden meaning. Could there have been a gate known as the ‘eye of the needle’?
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Progressive reflections on the lectionary #37
Monday 30th September 2024
| Author: Simon Cross
Mark 10: 2-16 Jesus was creating a new system in the shell of the old
There are
key moments in the gospel according to ‘Mark’ where Jesus’ “mission” becomes
quite clear. He was creating a new system in the shell of the old one, a
network of ‘households’ where a different way of living was put into place.
Many of us rail against the injustices and evils of exploitation, prejudice and
hierarchy, part of the genius of Jesus as a man was that he demonstrated a
genuine alternative.
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Progressive reflections on the lectionary #36
Monday 23rd September 2024
| Author: Simon Cross
Mark 9:38-50: "If your eye offends you..." Marginalisation and the 'trap' of social status
In the reading this week John asks Jesus about
someone who is ‘casting out demons’ - but isn’t ‘following us’. Someone, in
other words, who isn’t part of the in-crowd. The reading follows on from the
previous week’s discourse about ‘greatness’ and the link shouldn’t be lost.
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Progressive reflections on the lectionary #35
Monday 16th September 2024
| Author: Simon Cross
Mark 9:30-37: Where Jesus flips the gender script on leadership and greatness
The
lectionary is spooling through the greatest hits of the Gospel of Mark at the
moment, and this week’s passage is another stone cold
classic - Jesus notes his disciples arguing, asks what they were fighting about
and finds them strangely silent on the matter. “For on the way they had argued
with one another who was the greatest.”
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Progressive reflections on the lectionary #34
Monday 9th September 2024
| Author: Simon Cross
Mark 8:27-38: The turning point of the whole gospel
There’s a
huge amount we could say about the gospel passage set for this week by the common
lectionary. Not only does it contain one of the most famous phrases
in the Bible - certainly a ‘top forty’ entrant, if perhaps not quite a ‘top
ten’ - but it functions as the key pivot point for the Gospel, packed full of
symbolism.
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Progressive reflections on the lectionary #33
Monday 2nd September 2024
| Author: Simon Cross
Mark 7:24-37: Reading the story of the Syrophoenician Woman with Strain theory
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Progressive reflections on the lectionary #32
Monday 26th August 2024
| Author: Simon Cross
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 - Who's unclean anyway?
One of the
main differences between the gospel of John, where we’ve been for the last few
weeks, and the gospel of Mark to which we now return, is the way that the book
is written. ‘John’ is highly schematic, it has styles and themes, and uses
clever storytelling techniques.
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Progressive reflections on the lectionary #31
Monday 19th August 2024
| Author: Simon Cross
John 6:56-69: Who cares about popularity anyway?
The
several weeks that the lectionary readings have spent in John’s gospel is
nearly over, and with that, in the UK at least, the summer holiday season also
draws to a conclusion. Soon we’ll be back to Mark’s breathless prose and to
school too.
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Progressive reflections on the lectionary #30
Monday 12th August 2024
| Author: Simon Cross
John 6:51-58 - eating and drinking
The gospel reading this week is part of the ‘bread of
life discourse’ which is a continuation of the last couple of weeks
readings from the gospel of John. The discourse follows directly after the
‘sign’ of the feeding of the 5000, and this part of the passage has at its
heart one of the famous 'misunderstandings’ that are so characteristic of the
writing found in ‘John.’
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Progressive reflections on the lectionary #29
Monday 5th August 2024
| Author: Simon Cross
John 6:35, 41-51: The bread of life - theme and variations
“Who are the Christians that really like the gospel of John?” My youngest asked me one day, after coming home from a trip away during which there had been an encounter with some street evangelists. “They kept saying, ‘the gospel of John, the gospel of John…’” I was told, as the whole conversation was played back in detail.
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Diana Butler Bass writes about the importance of politics in church
Wednesday 31st July 2024
| Author: ProgressiveChristianity.org
I always liked religion and politics. Religion and politics made my childhood Methodist church interesting. The grown-ups got mad when young preachers from places like Yale came in and told them that Dr. King was right and that we were killing people in a jungle in a place called Vietnam. Mostly, adults seemed polite and restrained in that old world. But you could count on a passionate preacher in a formal robe creating a family argument over Sunday lunch.
Even in my working-class, non-college educated neighborhood, we heard sermons quoting writers whose work I’d later read for myself — Martin Luther King, Jr., Daniel Berrigan, Dorothy Day, the Niebuhr brothers, William Sloan Coffin, Thomas Merton, and Harvey Cox. Indeed, people talked about the Niebuhrs so much that I thought they lived in our neighborhood. Theologians were among the first intellectuals I knew (novelists would also be on this list).
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Progressive reflections on the lectionary #28
Monday 29th July 2024
| Author: Simon Cross
John 6:24-35 Bread of heaven
There are
seven ‘I am statements’ attributed to Jesus in John’s gospel, among them ‘I am
the bread of life’ - which appears at the end of this week’s gospel passage.
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