by Marcia Mount Shoop
Mark 1:1-8
“How ironic that Christianity so early on became the destroyer of indigenous cultures that understood the human place in the created world. What a bitter and destructive and grievous irony that Jesus’ name became the one uttered to justify genocide and colonization.
As Christianity became more and more colonized, the Wild Man took to the shadows, and we became ashamed of this part of ourselves. We scoffed at indigenous cultures as superstitious and ignorant. We suffocated their teaching about food and medicine and taking care of the earth. And we built our institutions on the graveyards of the buffalo, and the biodiversity of God’s creation.
John the Baptist was calling humanity back to our created nature, our divine purpose–what a tragedy that he has been used to prop up systems of shame, blame, and judgment on those Christians that have been labeled as “uncivilized.”
John the Baptist was not a colonized believer, he was not an apologist for institutional Christianity, he did not lose his life to King Herod because he propped up the powers that be.
He was not calling people to capitalist assimilation. He was not calling people to a patriarchal Christian piety. He was not calling people to consumptive productivity.
He was calling people back to God, back to right relationship, back to a life lived in balance.”
Watch the full GCPC service on 12/10/23 here
(Scripture and sermon begin at 48:45)