Douglass Church - Douglass Blvd Christian Church

"I’ve seen people proclaim their love in some pretty suspicious ways. "I’ve seen women with bruises all over their bodies, permanently scarred on their souls from having been “loved” too intensely by the men in their lives. "I’ve seen homeless LGBTQ kids who’ve been “loved” out into the street by families with Jesus dripping from their lips. "I’ve seen women clothed in shame by people who loudly proclaim their “love,” as these women seek to make decisions about their health, their bodies, and their lives. "I’ve seen people kicked off food stamps by Christian politicians who announce their “love” with words like “personal responsibility” and “incentivizing the poor.” "I’ve seen people who claim to follow Jesus “love” immigrants by putting their children in cages. "Love, at least the way it gets enacted in our world, appears to be a much more malleable concept than we like to believe." Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

It strikes me that much of what drives this unenthusiastic response to religion—at least in the case of Christianity—centers on the apparent inability of Christians to hear Jesus, and then to live like him.  The “Nones” have heard endlessly about Christianity and how everybody would be better off if the world would just believe the stuff Christians believe. But many of them have read the Gospels. They’ve seen all the stuff Jesus did. But then they look around at his followers, and they see something different. They see people worried about stuff Jesus never uttered a single word about, stuff he never spent a single minute worrying about. Here’s a thought that ought to scare all Christians: What if part of the reason the “Nones” are so underwhelmed by organized religion isn’t because they don’t find Jesus interesting, but because it appears to them that Christians don’t find him sufficiently interesting enough to take seriously?

  Real forgiveness is tough. It’s not for cowards. Forgiveness requires truth-telling, a willingness to decide that maintaining relationship means more to you than the pain of walking away. Forgiveness costs … sometimes everything. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

The most tempting thing to do is to hunker down, and wait for Jesus to show up and calm the storm, re-order our worlds, take the heat off, make everything all right.Jesus asks us to throw open the doors and announce a new world not only absent violence and hatred, but filled with the goodness of God’s blessings—a world in which the poor have enough to eat, enough to care for the health of their children and their aged; a world in which those who’ve been turned out, sent away, shuffled off because they don’t look right, don’t love right, don’t have the right papers—so that everyone might finally find a place at the table, finally find the outstretched arms of embrace, finally find a home. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

What does the resurrection mean? If it means anything, it certainly means God’s cosmic “yes” to Jesus and the reign of peace and justice he fought and died for, and God’s “no” to the systems of domination and death that killed Jesus for challenging the powerful by seeking to center the needs of the vulnerable Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

But please don’t misunderstand me; I’m not suggesting that the humiliated just bide their time until some day in a diaphanous and distant future. Because, if that were the case, there would be no need for resistance—since there would be no more shame. The Suffering Servant is, if anything, one whose denial of the power of the system to shame renders that system impotent right now. The Suffering Servant in Isaiah is talking about setting our “face like flint” in ... the present, refusing to allow a system of honor and shame to continue to order our lives and confer our identities ... today, looking to the one who vindicates us ... in this moment. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

We need to think carefully about what Jesus is selling here. Since we’re the children of this parent who stands looking out the window—waiting for us to come home, waiting for us to come inside—we need to ask ourselves, 'Who are we looking for?' Because here’s the thing, there are an awful lot of people who’re trying to find their way back home—but they’re scared that we who’ve been here for so long, we who’ve faithfully tended the fields for all these years—they’re scared we don’t want them here. They want to know if they’re just as welcome in this home as we are. And if we’re ever going to be like the parent who waits for us, our job isn’t deciding who should be on the guest list. Our job is popping champagne corks when another one comes home. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

We serve a God who came among us, who refused to stand back from us in the comfort of heaven. We model our life together on the God who forsook security to become vulnerable by coming down among us, placing God’s life in our hands. God is able to “transform the body of our humiliation,” because God took on that body … felt the humiliation that comes from living in a commonwealth where the wealth is anything but common. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

You see the thing that’s so amazing to me about this passage isn’t that the powerful want to kill a prophet, the one who’s sent to turn a stable world upside down—that’s what the powerful always seem to want to do. No, what I find so amazing is that … knowing the danger ahead of him, Jesus goes to Jerusalem anyway to challenge the old kingdoms with a word about a new reign—all because he can’t keep quiet about the world God wants to create to replace the old one. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Now if you begin your history with the exploits of the privileged and the powerful, it’s easy to justify organizing your political and economic life around the people born on third base—because those are the very people history is meant to recall, and their lives, therefore, are enshrined as the purpose and meaning of true life. But if you begin the telling of your history by being reminded that you literally came from nowhere and that your ancestors were nobodies from nowhere ("A wandering Aramean was my ancestor"), that makes a difference in what and who you should value, doesn’t it? Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc