#AbolitionAdvent 2020 (Year B)

This is the first week of Advent, and we join with Isaiah and Jesus in asking God to intervene in our world for justice and flourishing.

Transcript here:
https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/the-word-is-resistance.html

TWIR 11.29.20 #AbolitionAdvent: Tear Open the Heavens

What if COVID-19 is our King Cyrus, inviting us out on that highway back home to right relationship with sacred land, our God, and each other?  What is the cost of our return, and how do we begin to pay it?

Buckle up; according to Nichola Torbett, "It's demolition time."

Transcript available here: www.showingupforracialjustice.org/the-word…nce.html

TWIR 12.06.20 #AbolitionAdvent:  Demolition Time

"If Advent is about anything, it’s about the heartbreaking longing in the midst of despair because of oppression.  It’s about looking at the world and longing for something different, something *better* than the violence of Babylon, or of Rome, or of the US."

Join Rev. Anne Dunlap for this week's episode in the #AbolitionAdvent series.

Transcript available here:
https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/the-word-is-resistance.html

TWIR 12.13.20 #AbolitionAdvent In the Midst of Ruin, the Longing

Join Rev. Drew Bongiovanni as she explores the annunciation text in the gospel of Luke for our series on advent. How is confession and repentance part of advent? How do we build love up inside ourselves to counter the culture of whiteness? How does Mary show us the way?

Transcript here:  https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/the-word-is-resistance.html

TWIR 12.20.20 #AbolitionAdvent: Turning the World Around, Starting With Ourselves

***SPOILER ALERT*** Hark! Jesus is Born!!! 

After #AbolitionAdvent, Rev. Margaret Ernst shares a Christmas message for 2020: including stories of feeling shame at needing support and solidarity after loss, and reflections on something Rev. Lynice Pinkard said in a recent bible study that she can’t get out of her head: that in a world full of Empire and suffering, it’s not that God is not powerful. It’s that God needs more friends. 

Our solidarity with God. 
God’s solidarity with us. 
Our solidarity with each other. 

  For a Christmas call to action, raise your voice to call for safety, and justice, for those who are incarcerated in a rapidly growing COVID-19 outbreak in Pennsylvania prisons, in a holiday season that has left so many of us isolated, but in drastically different ways. Learn more: https://www.decarceratepa.info/COVID-demands

Transcript available here:
https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/the-word-is-resistance.html

TWIR 12.24-25.2020 #AbolitionAdvent: I'm With You. I Need You.

From January 2017 to December 2023, “The Word Is Resistance” was a weekly podcast from SURJ-Faith by white anti-racist Christians based on the Christian lectionary, offering an anti-racist Word for other white Christians -- though all are welcome to check it out.  We are pleased to keep this incredible resource alive here as an ongoing resource to help us all get free.

What do our sacred texts have to teach us about living, surviving, even thriving, in the context of empire, tyranny, violence, repression - the times in which we are living today?  What do they have to teach us, as white Christians, about our role in resistance, in showing up, in liberation?  They teach us this: 

Our traditions were made for these times.  They come from these times.  So we have resources in our texts, our practices, to help us right now.  We can reclaim our stories and re-tell them to nourish our resistance against white supremacy and our work for collective liberation.