Douglass Church - Douglass Blvd Christian Church

Welcoming the wonderful (and newly ordained) Rev. Nicole Hardin to the pulpit. Subscribe to us on iTunes!

What if the cross, as fearsome and terrifying as it is,is the place where we meet Jesus? What if the cross allows us to consider that cross-carrying is not an individual, but a team sport? Even Jesus needed help lugging that lumber up the road. Not only do we find Jesus struggling under the load, but we find one another there too. Moreover, being near Jesus puts us near the poor, the disenfranchised, the powerless. That’s good news. Because since we’ve embraced the cross, we’ve already embraced powerlessness, not as a strategy for effective living but as a way of life that seeks above all else to follow Jesus wherever he goes. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Abiding, which on the surface feels so passive, is just the opposite. If we abide in Jesus, if we live out the vision of the world he sees, we can’t help but take on the work of dismantling the systems that result in the shedding of the lifeblood of the poor and the outcry of the oppressed. We have no choice but to stand against the powers that foreclose on the futures of the defenseless, in the service of adding to the stockpiles of their own avarice. Abiding, at least as Jesus imagines it, is the greatest act of communal resistance there is. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

When Paul says that our struggle isn’t against enemies of flesh and blood, but agains the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places—he’s not talking about some other worldly weirdness. The cosmic powers of this present darkness, the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places aren’t some kind of super demon army, some version of Indiana Jones and the Flaming Arrows of the Evil one. And he’s not talking about our personal demons for which we need a mystical Batmobile and sanctified kevlar. He"s talking about the powers and principalities that institutionalize injustice and subjugation right here, right now. The kind of powers and principalities that let LGBTQ people die alone with no one to speak their name, the kind of spiritual forces of evil that have systematically terrorized African Americans for four hundred years, the cosmic powers of this present darkness that lock immigrant children not in spiritual prisons tended by celestial guards, but in actual cages tended by agents of Caesar. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

We’re conditioned, socialized to the see the world through lenses that magnify everything. Ministers often keep score the way everyone else does. What we rarely stop to ask ourselves is whether, in all our scorekeeping and advanced measure-taking, we’re keeping score of the right things, measuring the stuff that really matters. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web

Welcoming David Sprawls to the pulpit today! Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web

Eternity can, of course, mean in the great forever in the future—some endless span of time. But eternity doesn’t just have to be about the length of time; it can signify the depth of time, which is to say the quality of time. In that sense, then, food that endures for eternal life can be about food that deepens the quality of time right here and now by having enough, so that people no longer need to follow a potential messiah around the wilderness in constant search for a little relief from the hunger that besets them—so that eternity can begin to break into the world right now. Notice that Jesus doesn’t talk about bread that lasts forever; he offers bread that endures for eternal life. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Jesus in this meal isn’t just—as Pastor Bob says— 'staying out of politics and unconditionally loving, comforting & healing all the hurt and damaged people.' In feeding the 5,000 Jesus disrupts one of the political and economic tools the powerful use to keep the peasants in their place—hunger and scarcity. And in so doing, Jesus offers up a political challenge to the ruling authorities. That’s why Jesus was always getting sideways with the Romans. His ministry was by its very nature a threat to the political and economic status quo. In other words, in accounting for his conflict with and eventual execution by the Roman state, we have to come up with a picture of Jesus as something other than a nice guy dispensing Deepak Chopra-nuggets of wisdom. If that’s all he were, the Romans would have loved him. It’s because they understood the political implications of his teaching that they killed Jesus. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

On Easter God said 'no' to the death-dealing powers that divide us on the basis of money, power, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and immigration status. Indeed part of the reason Jesus was killed was because he announced a new world breaking in, a completely different kind of politics that has as its primary focus the destruction of the walls that divide us—since the powers that be always have the most to gain by keeping people divided, and therefore, powerless. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Rev. Mary Ann Lewis in the pulpit today! Subscribe to us on iTunes!