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
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Epiphany 2
In the first lesson, God reveals herself and makes her glory manifest through her redemptive love for her people, expressed here through a marriage metaphor. God will lead her people and her land and be their protector. It is a patriarchal construct, particularly when read with the original masculine grammar. However, just as we have grown in our understandings of the ways in which hearts bind to each other and commit to love and nurture, support and protect each other the metaphor can expand with our understanding. While salvation is most often a corporate endeavor throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, in the Psalms it is frequently an individual’s plea or testimony. In this Sunday’s psalm a single soul tells the story of her miraculous deliverance and the awe inspiring revelation of God that she encountered, one that is more theophany than epiphany. The community receiving the epistle waits for such a moment of redemption with God’s saving presence made fully known in their midst. The Baptizer proclaims the day has come, the One has come and bearing witness, God comes down like a dove in thundering love for an only begotten beloved holy child.
Epiphany 1
The 12 day Christmas party is over. But there are yet more treasures in store. Epiphany is a season of revelation. God draws back the curtain on mystery and wonder granting us a glimpse of unfolding redemption. In these lessons, devastated, conquered, ravished Jerusalem is raised up by the tender hand of God, presented here as her parent, from the dust into which she has been cast. As with the exodus past, God’s faithful promises become a path into the future upon which one can look back in each season of terror and devastation a know that God has never abandoned her people. The psalm widens the perspective on God’s love. It reaches from the very heavens to the ends of the earth and is bestowed upon all the woman-born and more, extends to all the creatures of Earth. There are no biological or geographical limits to God’s love. The revelations in the lessons from the second testament are even more epiphanous. Jesus is identified with and as the Wisdom of God, that feminine aspect of God with and through whom creation unfolded according to Proverbs and later writings. And, having grown up quite a bit in the past two weeks (but will return to toddlerhood for a brief moment soon) Jesus is a revelation full of revelations. The God in him is made manifest, drawing him to the house of God, to the word of God, to himself. He is a sage child, a holy child, a boy on the cusp of manhood and, he is still Mary’s baby.