This coming Sunday is the first week of advent. This advent we will be focusing on the story of the liberating Christ. That story begins with the land, because how a people view the land tells us a lot about their relationship with one another. Empire sees land as something to be controlled, owned, valuable for its market price and what resources can be extracted. Indigenous wisdom, however, sees the land as sacred and needing to be protected and cherished. 

This week we’re going north! Icelandic is a fun language -- and actually closer to Old Norse than any of the other Scandinavian languages are today. This is largely due to the isolation of Iceland; not so much in the modern day, but in the past. Isolated populations tend to maintain older forms of a language than non-isolated ones do, especially if they have written language as well. 

I am sure many of you were paying attention to and perhaps even praying for 41 years old Julius Jones, who was on death row, expected to be executed yesterday, but just a few hours before that Kevin Stitt, the governor of Oklahoma commuted his death sentence, reducing the sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Jones has received the death sentence for the 1999 shooting death of Paul Howell in OK but Jones has maintained his innocence.