Douglass Church - Douglass Blvd Christian Church

The good news of the gospel is that Jesus announces that a party’s being thrown in the light, a party the whole world’s invited to—even those people the cool kids are convinced don’t have any business being there. Are you sure he meant the 'whole' world? Surely, Jesus didn’t mean everyone. That seems unnecessarily generous, don’t you think? Yep, the whole world. And no, I don’t think it’s unnecessarily generous. It sounds like good news to me. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2] [1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10kvIyBUiYAjcgkTnjMP7y6dLGr1QYSpd/view?usp=sharing

Don’t let anyone fool you. When Jesus went into the temple that day, it was an explicitly political act. It was an ancient Near Eastern version of John Lewis marching across the Edmund Pettis bridge. So, knowing that the people who are the most vulnerable are the ones getting fleeced by the folks in power, maybe the question shouldn’t be 'How can Jesus be angry?' but 'How could he not?' Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2] [1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vG_XvZjG0a_TlyRs7hwCaGLClH-nAJ3M/view?usp=sharing

Once you start talking about LGBTQ people having the same rights and protections as everyone else, you’ve put yourself in the crosshairs of everyone who likes the world the way it is. Just say what should be obvious to everyone—that Black Lives Matter—and you’ll start experiencing the power of the people who employ crosses as a threat. Speak up and tell the world that children ought to be free to go to school without the fear of some aggrieved loner with an AR-15 busting in, or that houseless people ought to be afforded the space to live and retain their dignity, or that people who come to this country in search of a better life for their families ought to be received with hospitality and the love for the foreigner that God commanded of us, and you’ll witness the assembly line that mass produces crosses fire up in earnest. Our cross to bear, like Jesus before us, isn’t just a question of suffering our own private indignities; it’s a question of who we’re willing to suffer indignities for. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2] [1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TRYPdnB0aZ2D2ukdplG7tGGsH83YiFv9/view?usp=sharing

When Jesus meets us out in the wilderness, he doesn’t magically cure all the violence, doesn’t stopper the mouths of the wild beasts who reside there. Instead, he provides healing … which is a different frame, one that offers hope where before there was only the inevitability of fear and death. Healing gives us enough space to consider new possibilities, to truly see those with whom we were formerly at war as themselves children of the God who breaks in on all of us. God ripped open the heavens, the Spirit descended, and drove Jesus out into the wilderness. And in the world Jesus is busy announcing, now those stranded out in the wilderness will finally be find a home. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2] [1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PUXk6rzfdea-b0WLjm7oP6Un78KHmkY_/view?usp=sharing

Why does he leave—when it’s safer to just camp out here? Jesus goes down the mountain into the valley of the shadow of Lent, because that’s where his presence is needed most. That’s where the last, the least, and the lost scramble to survive. Down there. I suspect he goes down there because he’s heard the voices of people terrified at the thought of what the future holds. Jesus heads down there because that’s where the action is, where the tempest toss’d live in fear of the night. Down there. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2] [1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ikth_8rUZCHIoYrzFAVFwykzA-kThL6K/view?usp=sharing

If we take the first two stories of Jesus’ ministry in Mark seriously, we’re left to conclude that Jesus understands the right thing to be the restoration to full participation in the community to those who’ve been cut off, left on the sidelines, forced to press their noses against the stain glass windows to try to get a glimpse inside. He offers not just a cure, but what people really need: true healing. Because here’s the thing for those who follow Jesus: there are too many people who’ve been cut off from the community that the church at its best has to offer. The mentally ill, the physically sick, the immigrant, the poor, the imprisoned, and those just too scared or too tired to risk walking up the steps and through the front door. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2] [1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AZyVWNjiRTuHat5YGRb1YNc1ueR1KoCm/view?usp=sharing

There are all kinds of people who would love to hear about a God who raises an arm against injustice, who will not tolerate bigotry, who refuses to sit by while the work of the laborers is monetized in ways that only benefit the people in charge, who are desperate for a word from a God who is incensed with a world in which Black parents lie awake at night in fear of what might happen to their children on the way home from school or their families on the way home from the grocery store. If you happen to be one of the people kicked to the curb by the folks in charge, God's outrage may just be what grace sounds like. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2] [1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/183nQGOfi5vfNlR-4ECTHAiSigE6E3lxS/view?usp=sharing

As Jesus says, these tyrants and oppressors need to repent, because there's a new ruler who is going to go fishing, hooking the jaws of the unjust and the proud, leaving them out in the wilderness for the carrion-eaters to pick apart. The kingdom of God is at hand. So, when Jesus calls Simon, Andrew, James, and John to follow him and he will make them fish for people, he's issuing a call to a kind of revolution against the powerful enemies of God who have been grinding them and their families to dust beneath the heels of their boots. This call to the very people who've been taxed into starvation, who've been persecuted and killed for any resistance to the king, who've been trampled on and used as beasts of burden is a powerful call to rise up and work toward establishing a new political realm in which God and not Herod Antipas is ruler—a new realm in which those who've been taxed into abject poverty are finally the ones who will have enough, while their tormentors are sent to lowest places at the feast, a new realm in which those who oppress the poor and crush the needy will finally be removed and will now have to serve those whom they've relegated to the status of outcast and untouchable. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2] [1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/196Zpk_ok8U1ZS9K6zOZV0z5C9DDtL7HI/view?usp=sharing

So, this story of Samuel’s courage is an uncomfortable one. It raises questions: "Where are those places in our world where justice has been cast aside?" "Where is God asking us to tell those in charge that they've failed to do what's right, failed to treat those at the bottom of the pile in a manner pleasing to God?” “Where are we when the cries of millions of grieving and terrified Black people tear the night in two, or tens of thousands of immigrant children torn from the arms of their families lift up their plaintive cry?” “Where are we when White Supremacists and White Nationalists answer the call of their benighted leader to tear up our country and punish anyone who refuses to sing the song of the malignant narcissist under which they march and destroy?” Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2] [1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16UYsyRP__h8e4mJmXiaap97q5nAcwvMi/view?usp=sharing

Mark opens and closes the ministry of Jesus in spectacular fashion. He announces that in Jesus—in his life and work and death—God has come among us. God has torn the veil that formerly separated humanity from the divine. And this tearing is no sweet opening of a door. Open doors can be closed again. In Jesus, God has ripped the door off the hinges! God has transgressed the boundaries that separated us from God. But unlike Wednesday, God’s breaking in isn’t about trying to retain the power necessary to exclude the vulnerable. When God breaks in, it’s about making sure that the people who are usually forgotten—the poor and the powerless, the people who try to survive eating only the bread of injustice and drinking the fetid water of bigotry from a cracked cistern—finally get to sit in the places of honor at the table that Jesus sets in the new world God is creating. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2] [1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m1i2v-w9v1o4s3x8wOuwhGQacj_IvRdz/view?usp=sharing