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
Sunday 2 After Christmas
The world looks new after the dawning of Christmas Day. These lessons imagine and celebrate a new day when the world will be different. In the first lesson, there will be a great diverse and inclusive gathering. God will devote special attention to bringing back home those who have been driven away. And there will be room for a diversity of belief and practice, including our neighbors who worship different gods. The psalm is a celebration of the God who does right, rightly and righteously by all the peoples of the world with special attention to those who have been oppressed. The epistle celebrates our claiming as children of God made possible by the woman-born Messiah, Jesus. The gospel looks back to the beginning of all things and finds the Word that would become flesh there, at and before the dawn of creation.
Holy Name of Jesus
It’s still Christmas! Mid-Christmas we have the most Christmasy of feasts, the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus on 1 January. Today’s readings feature a most beloved and most often misinterpreted text, “a young woman is (already) pregnant,” Isaiah 7:14. Our spiritual ancestors looked back to the Greek version of this text in which the young woman was a virgin (as opposed to the Hebrew version) and, read the text so retroactively that the Hebrew adjective, pregnant, and Greek description, “in womb” would be interpreted as and in some cases replaced in Bible translations with the future form of the verb to be, giving us the romantic completely contrived “prophecy”: a virgin shall conceive…” If we stop trying to make that passage say what it clearly does not and, look to see what it does say, we will find a God who comes to her people’s rescue to save, deliver and redeem when they need her most. As always, context is key and this passage should be read in it wider literary and cultural context. The psalm accompanies this reading, proclaiming the faithfulness of God across the ages in all circumstances. In the epistle, Jesus, in the very form of God, demonstrates what this faithfulness looks like by becoming flesh among us. The Gospel tells the story of that Incarnation, the Christmas story.