The Biblical

A collection of 103 posts

Featured

Confronting Beastly Economics – An Anti-Imperial Look at Revelation 13

I have a chapter called “Beastly Economics” in the book, We Cry Justice: Reading the Bible With the Poor People’s Campaign. In the chapter, I discuss the concept of the “Mark of the Beast” not as some mark on a person or group in the future, but as a

Featured

Learn as we Lead: Victims of Empire and The Great Multitude in Revelation 7

I was asked to share a little during the season of “Learn as We Lead,” for the Freedom Church of the Poor on the abuses and misuses of the Book of the Revelation.  On Sunday I shared a little on Chapter 7 of Revelation (link to a live video of

Blog Entries

Join The Online Study of Poverty, Empire, and the Book of Revelation in the Time of Covid19

Friends, I am hosting an online study of my new book, “Resisting Empire: The Book of Revelation as Resistance,” and the Book of Revelation in the time of Covid19 and I want to invite you to consider participating. I am interested in these three questions with this course: how does

Blog Entries

Revelation as Resistance: Moral Imagination in an Age of Empire

How would you answer if I were to ask you, “What one book of the Bible are you least interested in studying, reading, discussing, or teaching others about?” When I considered this question in the spring of 2013, as the pastor of a Quaker meeting in the Pacific Northwest, I

Revelation

Resisting Empire: The Book of Revelation as Resistance

Order your copy of “Resisting Empire” on BarclayPress or Amazon. Purchase Your Copy Here Purchase Directly from PublisherPurchase Book/eBook from Amazon Note from Wess: Dear  readers of Gathering In Light, my second book, “Resisting Empire: The Book of Revelation as Resistance,” is now published as a paperback. This edition

Blog Entries

New Book on Revelation “Resisting Empire” Coming Soon

I’ve been working on a book about Revelation that offers a different perspective then the “Revelation as End-of-the-World” interpretation. This book, Resisting Empire: The Book of Revelation, published by Barclay Press, is coming out very soon and I wanted to give you a heads up to start watching out

Bag of Tricks

Revelation at Great Plains Yearly Meeting

This past week, I had the opportunity to travel to Great Plains Yearly Meeting, gathered in Wichita, KS to speak about the book of Revelation. The yearly meeting itself was a lovely and joyous gathering, they welcomed new meetings into their group, celebrate past members, and besides getting business done,

Uncategorized

Mary: Revolutionary for Our Time

It is advent, a critical moment in the church calendar. It is post-election, a critical moment in the life of the United States. Advent is marked as a time of quiet, expectant waiting. There is hope in birth narratives of Jesus, but it is hope tempered by loss, defeat, and

Blog Entries

Convers(at)ions With Scripture

There has been an evolution of thought for me when it comes to understanding how to read, interpret and teach Scripture within community. That evolution has taken place over the course the last 18 years or so (I’ve been leading bible studies since I was in High School myself)

lament

Lament: Brought to Speech (Psalm 13)

What is Lament? In January for the past 4 or 5 years we’ve participated in Peace Month with other churches from our Yearly Meeting. This January our focus is Lament and peace. We are going to talk about personal lament, communal lament, and more. You may wonder the connection

The Biblical

No! Yes and… (Matthew 3)

“Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in

The Biblical

Presence Matters (Matthew 2)

“In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.

The Biblical

On Quaker PR: Salt, Light and Transformation (Matthew 5:13-20)

“You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.  “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be

Featured

Prayer: Identifying Our Blind spots (pt. 3)

This is the third of four short meditations on prayer based on Luke 18:9-14: “He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other

Featured

Prayer: Don’t Trust the Labels! (pt. 2)

This is the second of four short meditations on prayer based on Luke 18:9-14: “He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other

Featured

Prayers of Offense and Defense (pt. 1)

This week I have four short meditations on prayer based on Luke 18:9-14: “He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a

Featured

Revelation #Sketchnotes

Reading Revelation #Sketchnotes, a photo by cwd1978 on Flickr. Here are some sketchnotes I’ve put together as a kind of overview of some of the things I’ve tried to focus on as I was reading, studying and preaching through this difficult book. You can find the rest of

Revelation

Darkness, Lampstands and Light (Revelation 2-3)

The Lampstands in the Darkness This past week the American consciousness has been tilted towards the East Coast. Every news source, every line posted to social media, and many of the prayers offered up have been on behalf of those who were injured, killed and/or traumatized on Monday in

Uncategorized

The Bible is the People’s Book

This is a message I gave a couple years ago and coming across it today I feel it’s worth sharing again. We in the church have a paradoxical relationship with the bible. Many inside and outside the church have misgivings about certain texts or whole swaths of texts, while

Featured

Scarcity, Abundance and the Sharing Economy (Mark 6:30-44)

This is the sermon I preached on October 28, 2012. It comes from the story of the feeding of the 5,000. Also, note that the general scope and interpretation of this sermon comes from Parker Palmer’s book The Active Life.* The Problem with Scarcity This morning I want

Creativity

Remixing the Bible

I bumped into this little cover image for the bible a few days ago and it got me thinking what people find acceptable when it comes to redesigning or “remixing” the bible through art. This has been happening for centuries. Sacred text depicted in art-form is nothing new.* This particular

The Biblical

The Politics of Surprise (Matt. 25: 31-46)

This is the text to the message I gave at Camas Friends Church on Jesus Sheep and Goats parable in Matt. 25. Matthew 25 (From Clarence Jordan’s Cotton Patch Gospel): When the son of man starts his revolution with all his band around him, then he was assume some

The Cultural

Modern Day Parable on Environmentalism (Joel Salatin)

Reading in the Christian Century today there was a review of Joel Salatin’s newest book “Mad farmer?” and read this parable from the “Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic,” as Michael Pollan describes in Omnivore’s Dilema. Salatin writes: We have neighbors—I’ll call them Cleve and Matilda—who

Advent

‘Hail, space for the uncontained God’ (Luke 1:26ff)

This is my sermon from December 18. So far this advent we have focused largely on preparation. What is it we prepare for exactly? 2,000 years after Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection, hasn’t it already all happened? Advent means coming, but hasn’t Christ already come again

The Biblical

The Inevitability of Absence (Ex. 32)

This is the message I gave at Camas Friends Church this past Sunday. We’ve been doing a series on the book of exodus with an eye, or an ear, or both, to God’s concern about liberation and concern for the poor. A couple of weeks back I shared