Wild Lectionary: An Ecological Preaching Resource

With Anglicans across the globe our diocese shares a commitment to the Fifth Mark of Mission, “to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.” Although connection to and responsibility for creation is an ancient aspect of our faith, Anglicans are fairly new to understanding it as such. The Fifth Mark of Mission was adopted in 1990 and many of us are still learning to draw the connections between scripture and nature.
For church leaders who want to integrate environmental justice into their teaching and preaching, our watershed discipleship ministry, Salal + Cedar, is curating an excellent resource with contributors from around North America. Wild Lectionary is a weekly contribution to the Radical Discipleship blog; it appears on Thursday and engages one or more of the following Sunday’s lectionary texts from an ecological perspective. Recent posts have included: plastics as a spiritual crisis, the intersection of racism and access to parklands, species of birds in scripture, clean water and baptism. This week’s contributor is diaconal postulant and permaculturalist Ron Berezan from St. David and St. Paul Powell River, who writes: "From orcas to grizzly bears, banana slugs to fungi, Douglas fir to bald eagles, the first and most essential need of all life is respiration. The air we breathe travels through the fluids of our bodies joining the elements of earth we have ingested to ignite the fires of metabolism within us. And so we live, move and have our being."