Douglass Church - Douglass Blvd Christian Church

Of course, the church seeks to meet people’s needs. But one of the most pressing needs people have is to see a vision of the world the way God envisions it—a world in which sick people, and poor people, and hungry people, and disabled people, and immigrants, and LGBTQ people, and marginalized people not only have a seat around God’s table . . . but have been made the guests of honor. We ought to spend more energy worrying about how the church should form its community and its members as stirrers of the waters, as a sanctuary for compassion, as healers of brokenness and isolation, as lovers of all people, as Dr. Martin Luther King called us, members of the 'creatively maladjusted.' Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

When Jesus walks the margins looking for those who creep around the edges, he redefines the edges, so that the margins are set in the center; and it's the folks who usually occupy the center who risk finding themselves on the margins. When Jesus starts looking for people to love, he first starts with those who have for too long been hiding in the shadows. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Welcome to the pulpit, Dawn Wilson! May her words move and challenge us.

And Jesus looks at this giant mess of a world and says, 'Peace. Be still'—not, like some mystical incantation, but in a sweeping new act of creation. Jesus speaks into existence the possibility of a new world of shalom, where the scales are rebalanced in favor of the poor and the powerless, where things are finally made right for the vulnerable and the dispossessed. Jesus offers the possibility of a mega-calm, the power of which, overwhelms and subdues the mega storm. The difference is that this new act of creation places us at the center of the chaos as Jesus’ shalom. We are the word Jesus hurls against the tumult, expecting the wind and the sea to respond to our presence in the midst of the maelstrom. You and I are the power of God that Jesus expects to shelter a world buffeted by the enveloping storm. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Welcome to the pulpit, Paula Spugnardi!

So why does Jesus perform his protest in the way most likely to make his opponents want to destroy him? Why not just do his good work without making waves? Do you recognize those questions? Those are the kinds of questions I learned as a middle class suburban kid to ask of protesters when they did something outrageous. Those are the kinds of questions I might have asked of Colin Kaepernick: “Why protest in such a public and controversial way?” Or Black Lives Matter: “Why not just protest in a less confrontational way?” Or the Poor Peoples Campaign: “Is it necessary to be so disruptive?” Or the Parkland young people: “Can’t you just grieve without getting all political?” But the problem with those questions is that they assume that everything is basically all right, and that what is needed isn’t a radical dismantling of an unjust system, but a few cosmetic tweaks. Because if we take seriously the public testimony of the marginalized and the vulnerable, we have to come to terms with the fact that we’ve participated in systems that by their very nature protect the interests of the powerful at the expense of the powerless." Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

I don’t think being a follower of Jesus makes any sense without hope. We’re trying to paint an image of a world that doesn’t yet exist, but one that needs to exist if we’re to remain anything like faithful to the Jesus of the Gospels. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

I think Jesus prays that his disciples will be sanctified in truth, not as a way of 'taking them out of the world,' but as a way of embracing the world in which they live—not the world they imagine God should surely want if God were paying attention to the way things are currently situated. The disciples are looking for a world where everything turns out well for the good guys, a world where it doesn’t cost anything to follow Jesus. But according to Jesus, this world is the one we’ve got—and God wants to save it, not the one we think is worth saving. This one . . . in all its messiness and violence and pettiness, in all of its craven sneaking around and brazen wantonness. This is the world dying for the truth. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Following Jesus is scary because, according to Acts, God moves us to go to 'even the Gentiles,' to those people who might not look like us or talk like us or love like us or dress like us, and invite them to sit around God’s table, the same one that so many us were taught was reserved for people like us. Following Jesus is scary because it asks us to live out the story about how God has shown us a vision of a new world, where the word “even” is stricken from the lexicon—a world where everyone’s welcome, without regard to their their race, their immigration status, their sexual orientation, their gender identity, or their bank account. Following Jesus is about confronting our fear of 'those people,' and learning to love the people God loves. And, in case there was any question, God loves everyone—even the people who seem unlovable by the standards of polite society. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Those who trump up fear are at odds with God, whose primary action and identity is love. Preachers preach. Engineers engineer. Doctors doctor. God loves. Consequently, sowing fear against those who appear different is an act in direct opposition to God. John says, “We love because God first loved us.” The way we typically read that passage is as an exhortation: “God loved us; therefore, we ought to also love others.” But the older I get, the more convinced I am that it’s not an exhortation but a description: “God loved us; therefore, we are now capable of loving . . . where before we were incapable, bound up in our fear of losing our place to someone else.” Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc