What can we say in the midst of this current unfolding trauma, when even experts are scrambling? Churches can support healing when they step into the space where others retreat. The incarnate Christ who continually casts his lot with broken humanity draws us toward each other by creating spaces where we can show ourselves, wounds and all.
Anabaptist
Gifts of the Spirit…to Us
Ruth Brunk Stoltzfus
This sermon comes from the collection Weaving Wisdom: Sermons by Mennonite Women, ed. Dorothy Yoder Nyce.
True Yieldedness and the Christian Community of Goods
Peter Walpot
In this 1577 piece by Peter Walpot, we see one of the hallmarks of Anabaptist practice, economic sharing. Economic sharing here is more than simply imitation of the apostolic practice, as seen in Acts 2 and Acts 4, but a spiritual therapy designed to counter the spiritual evils of greed and consumerism.
Mary’s Magnificat and Justice
Dorothy Yoder Nyce
This sermon, exploring Mary’s words in Luke 1:46-56, comes from the collection Weaving Wisdom: Sermons by Mennonite Women, (1983) ed. Dorothy Yoder Nyce.
Keep Doing It
Rachel Ringenberg Miller
Rachel Ringenberg Miller, pastor of Shalom Mennonite Church in Newton, KS, offers an encouragement that the ethic of Jesus is an ongoing labor of love in the world, and that voting patterns are not the first or final word for Christian discipleship.
Selections from Preface and Introduction to the Dordrecht Confession
Adriaan Conelisz
Leaders from two divided groups met 50 years after their conflict. They issued this preface and introduction, emphasizing the way in which public professions of faith and peacemaking go hand in hand: for the Anabaptists to credibly speak to its well-known peace witness, it must reconcile its own history.
Men in Judgment and the Peasant Aristocracy
Pilgrim Marpeck
Pilgrim Marpeck, from “Men in Judgment and the Peasant Aristocracy,” 473-475, in The Writings of Pilgrim Marpeck (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1978). Pilgrim Marpeck joined the Anabaptists in Austria in 1528, in the region of Rattenberg and Triol, a region which had...
Reading Romans 13 Under Fascism
Eberhard Arnold
In August 1934, the Bruderhof informed the German government that it would refuse to participate in a mandatory national plebiscite to affirm Hitler’s regime. The group was already under constant police surveillance and had been raided twice by the SS. In the community’s worship meeting the Sunday before the vote, its pastor Eberhard Arnold gave the following address on the relation of church and state.
What Good is Ruth?
Melissa Florer-Blixer
Melissa Florer-Bixler, pastor of Raleigh Mennonite Church, invites us to consider the ways in which Ruth is a paradigm of how we include others. In particular, Ruth invites us to see how we belong to one another in faith, and this calls us to belong to our wounded neighbors.
A New Heavens and a New Earth
Catherine Thiel Lee
Catherine Thiel Lee meditates on Isaiah 65, and what this passage means for Christians to be “co-creators” and the hands of God in the work of mending the world. Emphasizing the value of healing of the world in which we live, Lee turns to Revelation’s vision of the world to come to call us to live well in this world.