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
Lent 1
Umm, did you mean to/why did you use an Easter reading for Lent?! I received this text and call more than once.
This week’s readings invite us to reflect on the whole of our human story from the dust of our creation to the hope of our redemption, to carry that story with us as we journey through Lent. We sojourning through the Lenten wilderness because we have heard and believed the good news. And perhaps, because we are horror struck at the cost of that gospel. We are preparing for the next forty days to hear and receive that good news with clean hands and hearts. The epistle provides one set of thunderous instructions on how to do so. The psalm offers a portrait of the majesty of God before which we must repent and concludes with the grace of the spirit to renew us and, the whole earth.
Ash Wednesday
Psalm 51 symbolizes this season of repentance and reflection and at the same time its use as a liturgy of confession illustrates the need for A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church. The Church has long prayed this psalm without its first verse, the verse that frames the psalm as a confession for the sexual abuse of a woman, for David’s rape of Bathsheba. (For a detailed explication of the signs of rape rather than consent in the narrative, see the corresponding chapter in Womanist Midrash.) That act of liturgical editorial censure testifies to how the Church treats women in and out of the scriptures, silencing us, repackaging our stories so they will be more palatable and, ignoring acts of violence against us especially by people we are supposed to revere. Let the Church repent for all its sin without taking one back from the altar of confession and clutching it to its breast to retain for use at a later time.
The Ash Wednesday readings in the lectionary reflect the use of Psalm 51 in the liturgy and so offer another psalm with the preaching texts. These lessons include a prophet’s traditional call to repentance and fasting and a reminder of the limits of our mortality in the psalm along with the reminder that we are dust in the epistle and, a teaching from Jesus on avoiding showy displays of our prayer and fasting.