One of the perks of doing a pre-recorded talk is that sometimes you’re midway through a talk and you realize things just aren’t clicking how you’d like, and when that happens in a live talk you just have to try to power through and hope it all works out in the end—but when it’s pre-recorded you can just put a pin in that talk and revisit it later. That’s what happened this week. Jay’s original talk turned out to need a bit more tweaking and work, so he put it back on the shelf and recorded a new talk. In this new talk Jay dives into the topic of scapegoating, what it is and why we do it. He also discusses the idea of The Lack. What is The Lack? What does it mean to embrace The Lack? Is embracing The Lack at the core of Paul’s message to the Galatians? There is a lot going on in the world. A lot of suffering. It’s at times like this society tends to do the most scapegoating, because in a strange way it gives us comfort in uncomfortable times, but at what price? Here at Revolution, we discuss disagreeing well, because maybe confrontation is needed for growth. Maybe confrontation can help us? But we have to do it right, we have to do it in a way where we find common ground and a shared humanity. It’s harder to see each other’s shared humanity through a computer or phone screen but that is where we spend the bulk of our time, so we have to find a way to recognize the humanity in others through a screen. Because arguments aren’t the end of the world, and we shouldn’t fear them…we just have to learn how to both argue and disagree well.

This talk was given on October 13, 2024 from Seattle, Washington.

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Big doings for Jay recently! He fills us in on his trip to NYC to meet with the folks who are producing and performing the Broadway musical about his mom, including Sir Elton John! Crazy! Today talk though is a bit of an audible. It’s a really great talk! It wasn’t, however, the original talk he had planned—that talk got derailed when his plane ride home from NYC lost power and had to make an emergency landing! Scary stuff, but everyone is okay and safe and sound! But with that talk being too much to tackle on no sleep and a nightmare of a plane ride, Jay switched his focus to Paul Tillich and really knocks the talk out of the park. Tillich is an absolute favorite here at Revolution. Jay discusses two of Tillich’s sermons and wow, do they get you thinking! Do non-Christians do a better job of showing love than Christians do? If we’re void of love, are we void of God? Is genuine love the presence of God? What is calculated justice? Are we living a life of passionate grace, and passionate love? Or are we just calculating justice? Does the Golden Rule have limits? Does love have a limit? And maybe the heaviest hitting question of the bunch…Where does God abide?

This talk was given on October 6, 2024 from Seattle, Washington.

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The world is always suffering, always has been and always will be—so the world needs us to show love and grace to each other constantly, as much as we can. What’s today’s talk about? Jesus and Paul, of course. Two of Revolutions biggest staples! Throw in a touch of Martin Luther King, Jr., John Hume, and Tammy Faye and you can’t go wrong! The only hiccup with getting inspiration from all of these heavy hitters is that the lessons they teach are often easier said than done, and today’s talk is no different. It’s important, but we acknowledge that it is progress over perfection. These lessons are hard. Easy to teach, harder to practice. But we should always try. Doing good today is better than being perfect tomorrow. We need to love each other. Sometimes it’s easy, and sometimes we have to love from afar. Find a new, different way to love someone while still keeping our distance. Luckily loving someone doesn’t equal liking them. Is there a way to hate evil, but not hate the people that do evil? Are they one in the same? Is groupthink our biggest downfall? Do we need more rebels—people to go against the flow. Does that help us more, or is it too scary of an idea? Or is it both? Today Jay tries to tackle some of these hard questions by diving into both Luke and Paul’s letter to the Romans. What does it mean to think like Jesus? To think like Paul? When it comes down to the beliefs of Christianity what is the hardest part? Is it the rules? Or is it loving others?

This talk was given on Sept 29, 2024 from Seattle, Washington.

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Why do we do things we don’t want to do? Why can’t we always do what we want to? These are topics that Paul brings up in his letter to the Romans. It is also a concept that Revolution favorite Paul Tillich dives into when he discusses the concept of sin. At Revolution we believe in grace and acceptance over all things, that’s why we put a lot of trust in our two Pauls! The Apostle, and Tillich. Together they make a great team in their exploration of grace, questioning the laws of religion, and what it means to truly feel accepted. At times probably almost everyone has felt that God hates them, or maybe God has left them. Where does this feeling come from? Is it possible that this feeling is also one of the closest ways to be connected to Jesus? Do the rules and laws of religion amplify these feelings? These feelings of a being sinful and useless and unloved, not accepted by God or the church or ourselves? Where does this roadblock come in? How can we get the breakthrough that’s needed to understand grace? What does it mean to have a life above ourselves? This talk doesn’t have all the answers, but it is a great, great, place to start as we try to figure out more about God and ourselves and others.

This talk was given on Sept 22, 2024 from Seattle, Washington.

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Today Jay dives into some of the philosophy he’s been reading and shares a lot of the lessons and insights he’s picked up in his studies. In this talk Jay talks about community, but hand in hand with that Jay also discusses the idea of alienation. How the feeling of being alienated is an essential bond that unites all of us. It’s our common ground. Jay also ties that together with some thoughts he has on inclusion. On what true inclusion looks like. How true inclusion involves having different views and backgrounds, this can’t be avoided if we’re seeking to actively practice inclusivity. Jay asks us to look within ourselves and our groups and ask if we have any unseen asterisks next to the grace we show people. Do we see the shared alienated humanity in everyone? Or do we make exceptions on who gets love, grace, and inclusion. How does alienation affect us? How does oppression affect us? How does it affect others? And maybe most importantly, are we becoming all the things we hate by alienating others and forming close exclusive communities that aren’t as inclusive as they appear?

This talk was given on Sept 15, 2024 from Seattle, Washington.

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In today’s talk Jay discussed the Good Samaritan. Like almost all of Jay’s talk, it’s about that…but really about so much more. It’s about the Samaritan, and the man beaten, it’s about Jesus and it’s about Paul and it’s about Gaza. It’s about Martin Luther King, and John Hume and Tammy Faye. It’s about forgiveness and grace! It is about Jay’s compulsion to forgive, or at least trying his hardest to. Today Jay also expands on a principle instilled in him by his mom, and that is we all have a shared common humanity that keeps use connected to each other. We can’t forget that or overlook it. Often, we struggle with the idea of forgiveness, but Jay poses the question that if we reframe forgiveness as mercy rather than sacrifice does it change things? If we see forgiveness as just more than all the adjustments we have to make and overcome, does that reframing help us? Is this how we can find ways to be kinder to everyone and build better bridges? What happens when we think like the Good Samaritan thought? If we see that all people are people and all people matter. What happens if we let grace do what grace does?

This talk was given on Sept 8, 2024 from Seattle, Washington.

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This will be a bit of a shock to our viewers and listeners but today Jay will be talking about the Apostle Paul. I know, we can’t believe it either. Paul is a bit of a troublesome character these days…or is he? That is what Jay is exploring in today’s talk. He’ll be re-examining Paul and his writings. Are we reading Paul’s letters correctly today? In their correct context? Did Paul know he was writing the Bible at the time? Is everything attributed to Paul actually Paul’s writing? These are some of the topics we’ll be exploring today. Because Paul gets a lot of hate…and also Paul is the person a lot of Christians quote when using the Bible to justify their bias…but Paul also is quoted at almost every wedding when talking about love—how can someone with a message of love and grace that echoed Jesus’s same teachings sit on both sides of the spectrum? Maybe we’ve been wrong? Maybe the context of Paul’s letters is the key to everything! The Bible is so complex with so much nuance, let’s not be afraid to take these deep dives so that we can learn more, know more, and so that we can unlock more. And let’s do all of that together.

This talk was given on Sept 1, 2024 from Seattle, Washington.

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Jay received a text that a dear friend of his, Bobby, had passed away. This news came as a shock and devastation to Jay, so today is a bit of a memorial for Bobby. This talk is hard to summarize, because it’s not just about Bobby, but it’s about grace, and how grace is for us and for others, that there is no asterisk. It’s about telling people you love them, while you can. It’s about letting people know the impact they have on your life while you’re able to tell them. It’s about realizing that grace isn’t too good to be true. It’s about the nuance of life. It's about being there for people when they need you. It’s about the dangers of pushing people away. The dangers of retreating into yourself. It’s about the power of community and love and the impact we can have on each other’s lives. It’s about love, it’s about friendship, it’s about grief, it’s about loss. It’s about togetherness. It’s about Bobby. 

This talk was given on August 25, 2024 from Seattle, Washington.

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Lately a lot of our talks seem somber but recently we’ve been living in some tough times, and here at Revolution we try to live life on life’s terms, but as of lately those terms are pretty somber. There is a famous quote about some of the things we’ll remember most in this life will be the silence of our friends when we needed them. We don’t want to stay silent, and we don’t want to make our friends or any loved one feel alone, like they don’t have anyone in their corner—that is for our brothers and sisters both local and abroad. All over the world. Today Jay discusses how all conflict stems from differences, the problem is that difference is the essence of humanity, so there will always be differences. Jay dives into the gospel of Matthew, as well as some letters from Paul to try and see what grace without peace looks like, and what we can do to both show each other grace, and to be peacemakers.

This talk was given on August 18, 2024 from Seattle, Washington.

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The world is upside-down and on fire. Everyone is killing each other, being nasty to each other, violence is begetting violence, bombs are falling everywhere…and our tax dollars are footing the bill. It’s making us go mad—and enough is enough. We’re stumped, we’re at a loss, so today we’re going to be leaning on King. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote a great map on how to approach conflict resolution, and on that map is his speech Beyond Vietnam. We’re going to take a look at this speech, and we’ll be treating it similarly to how we do other scripture and letters in the Bible. Why? Why not! We don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t treat it that way. King refers to speaking up and speaking out, and to peacekeeping as a vocation of agony—and here at Revolution we couldn’t agree more. It’s tiresome, constant, and unceasing. But it’s part of the work and it comes with the territory. Can you have grace without social justice? And can you have social justice without grace? Because this is part of it, right? They go hand in hand and should be talked about equally. We are all accepted as we are, not how we should be. And if we don’t grow to learn that and see that in others than have we arrived at spiritual death? Can this part of the work, speaking out against the dangers of people wielding power without compassion, be the mustard seed of faith and hope that we need? This is a good one folks, and Jay pours his guts into it. Jay is a punk rocker at heart, always has been and always will be, so when he gets to talking about Social Justice and combines it with his calling to show and teach grace, it’s hard hitting and great. Buckle up folks! We’re in this fight together, and we can only win it if we stay together and love each other.

This talk was given on August 11, 2024 from Seattle, Washington.

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