Douglass Church - Douglass Blvd Christian Church

No less for us, the promise of plenty in the new world God is creating isn’t available to us after we’ve checked out of the current world and its uncertainty and taken up residence in another more stable home. The promise of enough lives in the very heart of the chaos we find ourselves in right now. Jesus’ followers aren’t looking for deliverance out of this world but for directions into the very dark and grubby center of it. Put more simply, the future for us lies not in surviving the disorder of this world—with its pandemic panics, cultural battles, and economic uncertainties—but in doing a full-on belly-flop into the untamed mess at the beating heart of it.

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Jesus goes home and kicks a hornet’s nest of hospitality and inclusion to all—one that won’t finally settle down until the powers and principalities, the folks at the top, finally get their way and push him over the cliff on Good Friday.

Apparently, in the reign of God that Jesus announces, that’s what love requires.

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The good news of the reign of God is an exercise in narrating the possibilities of a world where everyone is invited to the party and nobody has to settle for crumbs and leftovers because there’s enough to go around.

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The good news of the reign of God is an exercise in narrating the possibilities of a world where everyone is invited to the party and nobody has to settle for crumbs and leftovers because there’s enough to go around.

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We’re called not just to point toward justice and peace but to be people who embody justice and peace.

We’re not just given the task of telling people about God’s grace and compassion; we’re given the responsibility of extending God’s grace and compassion to our neighbors—even the ones (perhaps especially the ones) with whom we wouldn’t be caught dead on a Saturday night.

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In order to see what Isaiah 'calls the brightness of your dawn' though, you’ll have lift up your eyes—not just so you can see it, but so that that light might be reflected in your eyes to the rest of the world.

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In other words, what endears Mary to God, at least according to Luke, has more to do with her poverty than with her probity. She probably is a really great person on the inside, but that's apparently not what draws God's attention.

God is moved by the fact that Mary's the perfect candidate for the kind of person on behalf of whom Jesus is being born to fight: a soon-to-be unwed mother from a backwater town on the poor side of nowhere. Her prospects in life added up to just about nothing.

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How do you think the poor, the outsiders, the depressed, the bereaved, and those who’ve felt abandoned by a system that values its own interests above all else would hear John the Baptist telling the followers of God to think first not about themselves, not about their pocketbooks, not about their profit margins and brokerage accounts, not about their reputations in the community, but to think first about the last, the least, the lost, and the dying?

What constitutes good news may just depend on where you’re standing when you hear it.

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If it feels like we already live in the lush lap of paradise, then maybe we aren’t properly situated to entertain the voice of liberation.

But if we’re in a hard land where things are fractured and flimsy, if we roam through forsaken country where the streams have dried up and the flowers have wilted in the blazing heat, if we find ourselves in a realm where dust fills our nostrils and tears leave tracks on our dirt-brown, weathered faces, then a voice crying out in the wilderness is music to ease our souls for ten thousand years.

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Apocalyptic is dismissed with a patronizing wave by the well-situated as fine for rubes and dullards. Sophisticated people, however, don’t pay much attention to the end-of-the-world talk.

But, I would like to suggest to you that the tendency to shrug off apocalypticism is a sign that we’ve grown too used to the way things are—which is to say, too used to a world that seems designed with people like us in mind. A world where one group enjoys a life of relative ease, while others do not is not the world God has in mind.

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