Last Sunday, Caroline Park gave a sermon titled "God in Our Messy, Complicated World." Caroline encouraged us to be intentional about noticing the world around us and seeking meaningful connections within it, particularly "with people who are different from you, in places where you don’t feel completely at home, with books that stretch you" and "with the larger world, with the other-than-human world around you."

For those who are interested in learning more about living in respectful relationships with the earth and other species who share space with us, Caroline recommended the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, an Indigenous botanist. Caroline said this, "Her beautifully written book is readable, moving, and deeply wise." 

Here's Kimmerer's author bio:
"Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants as well as Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. Kimmerer is a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment."

We've ordered some of Kimmerer's books for the River Lending Library! Feel free to check them out!

This past week the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, Mariann Edgar Budde, made headlines for the final portion of her homily during the inauguration prayer service. Budde made a plea to President Trump "to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now." As a result of these words, Budde has simultaneously been praised for preaching the heart of Jesus's gospel message and prophetically speaking truth to power, and has also been accused of weaponizing the pulpit in order to attack the president.

Though the final portion of Budde's homily is what went viral, it is worth giving her entire message a read. Budde spent most of her time speaking about unity as an antidote to divisiveness and a culture of contempt. Budde said this about unity:

"Joined by many across the country, we have gathered this morning to pray for unity as a nation—not for agreement, political or otherwise, but for the kind of unity that fosters community across diversity and division, a unity that serves the common good. Unity, in this sense, is the threshold requirement for people to live together in a free society, it is the solid rock, as Jesus said, in this case upon which to build a nation. It is not conformity. It is not a victory of one over another. It is not weary politeness nor passivity born of exhaustion. Unity is not partisan. Rather, unity is a way of being with one another that encompasses and respects differences, that teaches us to hold multiple perspectives and life experiences as valid and worthy of respect; that enables us, in our communities and in the halls of power, to genuinely care for one another even when we disagree."

Budde acknowledges that unity is not something we can just hope and pray for. Instead, it requires commitment and must be built on the foundations of dignity, honesty, and humility.

If you are interested in reading more from Budde, you may want to read one of her books!

In her sermon last Sunday, Alison shared some frameworks to help us think about God's power in the world. One of those frameworks was theologian Thomas Jay Oord's concept of God's "amipotence" — a term he coined by combining a Latin word for love with a Latin word for power.

According to Oord’s conception of amipotence, God is neither omnipotent (all-powerful) nor impotent (powerless). Instead, God’s power in the world is the non-controlling, non-coercive power of Love.

​Oord (and co-writer Tripp Fuller) says this:

“Amipotence describes God’s uncontrolling love for all creatures and all creation. It’s an amipotent God’s nature to love everyone and everything without forcing anyone or anything. An amipotent Spirit will be neither overriding or absent, neither inactive nor the sole cause of everything, neither utter mystery nor an impersonal force. Like a good mother who neither manipulates nor neglects her children, God can be seen like a universal Mother always influencing for good. The idea that God can’t control better fits our experience of making free choices among limited options. We aren’t controlled; we really choose. It fits the agency, spontaneity, randomness, and indeterminacy of the universe. We think existence isn’t entirely determined by the Creator, nor by creation. Rather, moment by moment, creation is made free, and creatures can work in tandem with God.”  —Thomas Jay Oord and Tripp Fuller in God After Deconstruction 

To learn more about "amipotence," and open and relational theology, check out these and other writings from Thomas Jay Oord!