Sharon Delgado

Pastor, Author, Speaker, Activist

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Year: 2017

  • Following Jesus Without Being a Sheep

    This post is based on a sermon I preached on Sunday, May 7, at Nevada City United Methodist Church.  You can watch the whole service here or move the curser 21 minutes into the service for just the sermon. The Gospel of John includes many metaphors.  Just in this short passage (John 10:1-10), there are…

  • God Bless the Grass

    I’ve been singing two songs lately that use images of the earth to carry a message of hope in the face of despair.  The first song is “Now the Green Blade Rises,” a traditional Easter hymn.  The second song, “God Bless the Grass,” is by singer-songwriter and social justice activist Malvina Reynolds.  Both songs present…

  • Holy Saturday: Following Jesus

    On this Holy Saturday, the last day of Lent, we continue to reflect on the death of Jesus and on what it means to follow him, as we wait for the dawn of resurrection. What does it mean to follow Jesus in this time of ascending evil, destruction, scapegoating, and death?  First, what it does…

  • Good Friday: Contemplation and Resistance

    Today is Good Friday, the darkest of days, when Christians remember the crucifixion of Jesus and stand by him in his suffering.  It is also a dark season in the world, with the Trump Administration dropping the “mother of all bombs” in Afghanistan, threatening North Korea, bombing Syria and Yemen, targeting immigrants, abandoning climate legislation,…

  • God’s Restorative Justice

    I started this Lenten Call to Resist series as a public way of rejecting the theological sadism of right-wing Christianity, which sees God as damning all humanity except those who believe in Jesus, the “perfect sacrifice,” sent by God to die in our place.  This is an ancient theology of retributive justice, based on Anselm’s…

  • Conventional Wisdom:  The Wisdom of this Age

    “Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish.”  1Corinthians 2:6 In this Lenten series I continue refuting the Christian Right’s view of the meaning of the cross and pointing to a different understanding of…

  • Creation Crucified:  The Passion of the Earth

    During Lent, Christians remember and grieve Jesus’ death at the hands of a murderous system that included official representatives, religious collaborators, a public that could be manipulated, and friends who betrayed, denied, or abandoned him.  We remember and grieve the countless others who have been executed over the years by similar systems of worldly power. …

  • The Suffering God:  Where Humanity is Crucified

    “Jesus continues to die before our eyes; his death has not ended.  He suffers wherever people are tormented…. Insofar as we forget the continued dying of Jesus in the present we deny the passion itself.”                                                                           Dorothee Soelle When we consider the growing inequity, grave injustices, and unspeakable violence in our world today, the question…

  • The Subversive Jesus

    Why did Jesus die?  His message and the movement he led was subversive, a threat to national security.   It was as simple as that. In weighing the various scriptures that relate to the question of why Jesus was killed, I give the most weight to the Parable of the Wicked Tenants (Luke 20:9-19).  This is…

  • Jesus Was Not Born to Die

    The idea that Jesus was “born to die” is central to the theology of the Christian Right.  Bestselling author John Piper wrote Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die.  Among the reasons he lists are:  to absorb the wrath of God, to cancel the legal demands of the law against us, to provide the basis…