Douglass Church - Douglass Blvd Christian Church

As I’ve grown older, it’s become clear to me that the Lord’s Prayer—far from being about stuff “out there” in some gauzy unbounded ether, or as a prayer about my personal relationship with Jesus—was about the very real and gritty kinds of things that happen right here, where we worry about things such as getting grandma’s outrageously expensive medication, or making sure that our LGBTQ kids won’t get beat up and harassed on the school bus, or how our African American friends and neighbors will survive traffic stops, or whether our Muslim coworkers will have their mosques vandalized, or if our Latinx family will wake up to find someone missing, or whether that’s the bill collector on the phone. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

We followers of Jesus are called to follow him into the heart of hell to shake loose the bars of oppression and death, setting loose the captives and freeing the oppressed—not because we’re capable of fixing those things, but because we follow one who’s calling into being a new world where those things no longer lay people low. Like Jesus, we’re called to be prophets of true life—who refuse to acknowledge that death is in charge. Jesus, in walking among the dead and the dying, takes a stance against a world enamored of the spectacular, and aligns himself with the decidedly unspectacular—the poor, the outcast, the widowed, and the orphaned, with the unemployed and the uninsured, with the people forced to live in the cages we pay for—with all of those who’ve been forgotten. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

One of the primary ways in which the kingdom Jesus’ disciples announces is different from the coercive kingdoms of this world is that the first thing they’re supposed to say when they go to a stranger’s house is, “Peace to this house!” Now, as I’ve mentioned before, in Roman occupied Palestine, everybody already knew what peace looked like in the hands of the powerful. The Pax Romana was a peace imposed on the weak by the dominant, a peace that benefitted the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and dispossessed. But the peace that these disciples offer doesn’t rely on the ability to impose its will on others; it’s a peace from a kingdom that relies on a commitment to vulnerability and the trust that there is enough for all of us, if we share what we have. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

We walk with Jesus toward Jerusalem, knowing that Jerusalem doesn’t just exist in the heart of the Middle East. The Jerusalem toward which Jesus heads is everywhere—from the U.S.-Mexico border to the West Side of Louisville. Jerusalem is wherever those in power steal bread from the hungry and slake their thirst with the tears of the forgotten. Jerusalem is wherever the vulnerable live in fear and the dispossessed die in despair. Jerusalem is wherever people suffer and die because of the color of their skin, or the object of their affections, or the country of their origin, or the God to whom they pray. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Legion’s still in power wherever the poor are kept in their poverty by those who believe they have everything to gain and nothing to lose, wherever children are bullied, and the elderly are forgotten. Legion still lives wherever people are made to believe that the way they have been created by God is not good enough—either for God or for us. Legion still runs the show whenever little children are kept in concentration camps without toothpaste, soap, and mattresses—while the folks in charge stoke the fears of the credulous. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

What Paul’s getting at is that after Easter, if it’s true that we’ve been given the assurance that “by raising [Jesus] from the dead” God has said “no” to the the systems that sacrifice our children, then we have a story about a new world that we can’t keep to ourselves. In a world willing to pray to any god who promises to keep us safe from people who don’t look like us, in a world where the music of our worship sounds like the ticking of a time clock, or the growl of an SUV, in a world in which we tithe our time and money to gods defined by national boundaries or party affiliations, we have good news about a new world God is busy creating that we can’t keep to ourselves—even knowing that in proclaiming it we risk looking like the very people we privately roll our eyes at. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

The great paradox of Pentecost is that we find ourselves not by hunkering down, trying to avoid the pain of a world that feels like it will swallow us whole, but by being led by the Holy Spirit out into that world for the sake of those who need the kind of disruption the Spirit always seems to stir up. Pentecost doesn’t necessarily solve our problems; it confronts us with a whole new set of problems. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Jesus prays that his followers might be one not for their sake, but for the sake of the world—which is, as we’ve said, fundamentally divided. He prays for unity for those who follow him, first as a sign to the world that he is who he said he is. If the world is ever to take Jesus seriously, in other words, it has to quit seeing us as wall-builders, as constructers of barriers, as those more willing to exclude than include. To the extent that those who claim to follow Jesus have continued the divisions—male/female, black/white, straight/gay, citizen/immigrant, deserving/undeserving—we’ve alerted the world that it need not take us seriously. Christians have sent out the signal to the rest of the world that we’re just like everybody else: willing to declare war on whomever and whatever we can’t figure out how to fit in the tent. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Roman peace rigs the system to benefit only the folks who were already born on third base. But the shalom Jesus gives is a different kind of peace; it draws the defenseless to his breast and extends a healing hand to the despised. Roman peace views anyone who’s at all different as a potential threat, an incipient enemy of the kingdom. But the shalom Jesus offers sees those the world has called “other” and places them at the center of the life of a new kingdom that embraces the vulnerable and the stranger. Roman peace ensures the wealth and security of the “one percent.” But the shalom on the lips of Jesus secures justice for those who’ve lived their whole lives without being able to take justice for granted. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc