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 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.
Pentecost 2
This is the part of the liturgical year where the lectionary can be confusing to those to whom it is new. Because the date of Easter moves (I have strong opinions about that and believe we should be on the orthodox calendar), we have varying numbers of weeks from Easter to Advent. Their readings are organized under the category of “propers” which run from 11 May to 16 November. So whatever the date of Easter, the First Sunday after Pentecost is Trinity Sunday and the Second Sunday after Pentecost takes the propers that correspond to its date. This year, 2022, those are the readings for Proper 7, the Sunday closest to 20 to June.
I pre-recorded my sermon for this date, The Other Woman: Penninah’s Side of the Story, for the Day1 radio network. The broadcast will be available Sunday morning. An excerpt:
As it is written, the women’s story is about Hannah. She is named first and the story is told from her perspective, though not in her voice. Peninnah, the other woman, is presented as her, Hannah’s, rival. But what about Peninnah’s story? Who speaks for her? What would she say were she allowed to speak in her own voice, tell her own story, and not just as a character in Hannah’s story? What happens to the story when we hear it from the woman we’ve been trained to categorize as “the other woman”? Would it be the same story, perhaps just from a different perspective? Or would it be an entirely different story? And would we, in hearing that story, discover a word that leads to life, love, liberation – a word that we would have missed if we had continued to tell the old story the old way?
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If you ask Peninnah, she might’ve told you that she was willing to get by on the crumbs of love that fell from the table of Hannah and Elkanah’s love. In fact, the gospel lesson with which this lesson is paired is the story of a woman begging Jesus for crumbs of healing like a dog begging for scraps under the master’s table. In that story, what looks like a stingy love for some soon becomes a full-throated, open-hearted love embracing everyone and welcoming them to the table…