Douglass Church - Douglass Blvd Christian Church

But in the face of failure, Jesus isn’t waiting around. He’s already headed out to the villages to continue doing what God sent him to do. And he’s not content to do it alone. He sends his followers back out into what must have felt like a hostile world to continue the work they’d already been rejected for.

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In the face of a scoffing world, Jesus demonstrates his faith in God’s willingness to snatch life from the jaws of death by ... acting faithfully. Jesus sees the woman and the young girl through the eyes of God and God’s idea of who’s valuable and who’s worth taking a chance on. In the woman who’s been dead in so many crucial ways for twelve years and in the twelve-year-old girl who’s also now dead, God sees the possibilities no one else can see.

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In the economy of God, the new creation holds a special place for the powerless, the stepped-on, and the least likely candidates to be social media influencers. In a strange and seemingly indefensible administrative move, God throws out the HR manual and starts employing the ones who show up to the interview in flip-flops and shorts.

And it’s almost never flashy, but it can leave ripples in the pond that seem to go on forever.

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Christianity, for too many people today, means “saving souls for Jesus” while often despising those same souls until they have the decency and good sense to become more like you.

But start living like Jesus—challenging the systems that keep only a handful fat and happy, hanging out with people who’ve been forced to live in the shadows to avoid being trampled by the religious folks who otherwise have contempt for them—and the wrath of the self-righteous will fall on you like Bull Connor’s billy club.

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The body of Christ is principally concerned with embodying the kind of just community that announces the reign of God to a world that needs a great cosmic cleanup of the mess humans have made of things.

Now, if I get blessed in the process—then that’s wonderful. And as difficult as that is for me personally to swallow, the church isn’t just here to bless me; I’m here to bless the world by participating in the beloved community and adding my gifts to the mix … for the common good.

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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. In other words, we’re not just innocent bystanders to all this agitation; in some way, we’re part of the reason these protests are necessary.

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True knowledge of God is always proportional to our willingness to live faithfully as witnesses of God’s faithfulness to us.

True belief is never an end in itself. We concern ourselves with believing the right things not so we can have the satisfaction of being right but so that our actions will be rightly directed.

Actually living what we know and what we say we believe is the real point.

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God comes to us and says, 'There are some folks who need my love and compassion. I want you to go to them. I want you to love them for me.'

'Which folks?'

'All my children. You know who I’m talking about, the ones no respectable church wants. The ones who’ve been systematically told they’re not welcome. The ones who don’t have anybody to speak up for them. Don’t talk right. Don’t dress right. Don’t have the right kind of money. Don’t live in the right part of town. Don’t love the right person. Don’t have the right skin color. I want you to go to them.'

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So, when Jesus arrived on the scene, Palestine was desperate for another messiah, a hero, someone to rally the oppressed locals to finally kick the Roman interlopers out of Palestine. They needed, in short, a messiah acquainted with the business end of a sword.

I suspect you can imagine that when Jesus starts talking about humiliation and death as his vision of messiahship, how it is that so many people completely fail to hear him. They didn’t quite get it.

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Jesus says, “Here’s what my glory looks like: Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life will lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever wants to catch on with my band of merry souls can look forward to the same kind of ‘glory’ with which I’m about to be ‘glorified.’”

And you can hear the wheels spinning in the Greeks’ minds: “What kind of glory is he talking about? Seeds falling to earth and dying? What does that mean? We know what glory looks like, and frankly, it doesn’t look like dead seeds. So, what’s he talking about?”

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