Douglass Church - Douglass Blvd Christian Church

If the church can’t find its voice when immigrants are being threatened in our own state, or when women bear the onerous burden of proof (while their abusers go on with their lives), or when houseless people are harassed because their very existence is inconvenient to society … if the church can’t stand together with the oppressed and the forgotten ones with all that going on, then whatever else it might think of itself, it’s not the church. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Justice isn’t going to be brought forth by hiring more police and investing in bigger prisons, or by some cease-fire that promises not to kill people if they promise not to kill us first. Justice will only finally be established when God raises up a people who embody the justice of God—the same God, who when faced with our propensity for violence and hatred, offered us not the sharp end of a stick but the fragile body of a Jewish peasant. That’s God’s idea of how you go about bringing forth justice. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

The world feels perilous, the shadows long. But God has shined a light on us—and partly through us—a light that illuminates for all to see what kind of a world God is busy revealing. God shines a bright light on a new world, a new kind of community—one that feels so different from the kingdoms of this world that “nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.” Instead of the murderous regimes that exercise power over the powerless, jealously guarding that power with murderous precision, God offers us the opportunity to participate in a light-filled world turned on its head—where the last shall be first and the first shall be last, where those who’ve been barred entry because they didn’t fit with somebody’s idea of the caliber of people who should be included on the guest list are finally ushered up the center aisle as the guests of honor. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

With everything feeling like it’s going to seed, the world needs a sign of God’s salvation. The world needs a God who isn't afraid to jump in, stomp around in the mud, and get some dirt under the fingernails. The world needs a God who isn't ashamed to walk the roads we walk, who isn't afraid to be with us. We need a God who embraces our humanity, and not only our humanity but a God who embraces us in the midst of each of our weak and frightened humanities. When we cry out in the dry night of our shattered existences, we need a God who listens. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Jesus announces a different way of thinking about what's inevitable in the world, and about what's necessary to change it, to heal it. God is busy creating a new world, one that isn't characterized by its ability to mete out redemptive violence, but by its ability to usher in a new way of living together where everyone has what they need, and all are welcome—a world where the rich and the powerful no longer call the shots, leaving the vulnerable to scratch out a living, always on the verge of isolation and death. Because here's the thing, redemptive violence doesn't bring true peace—it merely offers up the flag of a temporary cease-fire, planted on a mountain of corpses. True peace, the shalom of the Bible, requires healing and restoration, not war and destruction. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

But conventional wisdom notwithstanding, judgment and repentance aren't merely calls to sinners to feel bad about their sins. They are the way systems of oppression and domination are named, as well as the direction we must turn to walk away from those systems and toward a new way of living together as God's children. John the Baptist calls out some religious folks who were confident that their celestial grades came not from their practice of the faith, but from their reputations as religious smarty-pants. The Pharisees and the Sadducees came to check out what John was doing, and he told them that they shouldn't count on their sanctified bloodlines to cause God to look the other way. Believing the right things isn't a shield against judgment. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

No. On Reign of Christ Sunday, the final Sunday in the Christian year, holding up the crucifixion of Jesus is counter-intuitive just to the extent that what the world is generally looking for in a ruler is exactly the opposite of what Jesus provides. The world doesn’t want a God who’s willing to be done to death, but a God who never gets put in that lethal situation in the first place. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Jesus, upon entering Jerusalem immediately heads to the temple, the very heart of the problem of injustice in Jewish Palestine, and stages an epic political protest against a system that oppresses the children of God. And in our passage today, Jesus says that what has to happen is that those kinds of systems have to be torn down, dismantled, torn up by the roots. Whenever this new world God is creating displaces the old world, for the people used to being picked first in life, it's going to feel like the zombie apocalypse. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

In other words Jesus says to the Sadducees: "Sure, if you want to talk about the future, fine. But it's a dumb question. Because the fact of the matter is, God is a God of the living. God isn't biding time until some future day of reckoning; God isn't pushing off questions of justice until some distant time to come, a time where God can easily remedy the injustices suffered in this life. God has reminded us that eternity starts now, that the life of resurrection is one we participate in in this place and time, that justice isn't something that can be put off until God makes it right in the hereafter. No, God cares about this woman before she ever gets to the pearly gates. And do you know what that means? It means that people like you Sadducees, who are supposed to be in her corner right now, should already be helping ensure the security she needs before she dies, so that she need not live under any man's power and control." Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc