It’s Palm Sunday and we’re still on Galatians. Still in Chapter 4, even! This is something new for Revolution because this was a chapter that Jay always rushed through in the past. But even now, with decades of studying Galatians under his belt, Jay is still learning more and more about this letter that Paul wrote. And this year Jay saw this chapter in a whole new light—so it’s worth talking about for a few weeks! That’s why having good scholarship so important, because there is always something new to learn, and deeper depths to dive to, when it comes to the Bible. Because context matters. And learning all of that context helps us better understand scripture—especially when it comes to the letters of the New Testament. In order to have proper theology, we need to have proper scholarship. And if we want to make changes to the system, we need to learn the system better than the people teaching us. That’s how change is made, and old systems are broken. This talk is proof of that because spending two weeks on Galatians 4 isn’t something Jay ever saw coming, and yet here we are!

This talk was given on March 24, 2024 from Seattle, Washington.

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Jay has been battling a cold, but all the same he’s excited to get back into Galatians! Revolution has always tried to be a place to help those who’ve fallen between the cracks—We’re excited with the work Revolution has done so far, and we’re inspired to continue to try and be Peace Makers. We finally made it to Galatians Chapter 4! It might have taken us the longest to do this year, but it’s our most in-depth study so far. The main take away of this talk and Paul’s whole letter to the Galatians was that everyone is included. He was trying to bring the community together. He wanted them to see that they are all one. And you can almost see Paul’s frustration in some of the writing in this letter. We’ve all been adopted into Grace, it’s for us all, no asterisk. Sometimes it feels like exclusion makes people feel powerful. To be on the inside of the in-crowd. To be separate. Maybe that’s why it happens, because people would rather exclude others instead of seeing all humanity as precious. It seems like somewhere along the way we lost sight of the real message of grace, but instead have stayed under the law—treating Christianity more like sin management, rather than loving one another, friends and enemies alike. We’re all guilty of it, and will fail at it again, and again after that. But soon, we’ll see each other as one, we’ll include others. And we’ll see just how precious it all is. 

This talk was given on March 17, 2024 from Seattle, Washington.

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No Galatians today. Instead, Jay has been inspired to talk about peace and about making peace. We need to be aware of what we put out there. What we are quick to fire off in a comment, a DM, or a text. In arguments and off-the-cuff comments. Because not every victory means we’re winning, is fighting the good fight any good if we’re not changing hearts? How do we move on from things without destroying them as we leave? Why is there so much anger in Christianity? Are we walking the second mile that Jesus tells us to? And if we do, what’s our motivation behind it? Today Jay looks at a few places throughout the Bible. Both Old and New Testament. It takes a combination of both for us to come close to understanding what it means to have a peace that transcends understanding. Because anger and violence very rarely brings about any growth or any peace…or any understanding. But it’s more than that, there needs to be self-reflection in all of us too. We need to look inward and make sure the things we do and say don’t contain violence, because sometimes they do and we just don’t realize it. And when enough people are doing that all at once, not realizing it, well, that’s how we end up where we are today, and why we need talks like this.

This talk was given on March 10, 2024 from Seattle, Washington.

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It is tricky on whether to treat this as a stand-alone talk, or part of the Galatians series because it can easily be both. And it sort of is. You’ll get what we mean when you listen. This talk focuses mostly on just one verse in Galatians—Galatians 2.38. We feel it’s a good verse for how divided we are now. In this talk Jay discusses how it trying to bring people together takes patience. We have to let go of the feeling to want instant gratification, and brace for a longer haul. Patience and persistence. We have to ask ourselves who we love when we love God. In this talk Jay calls contradiction a beautiful truth. And he’s not wrong. Diversity is also a beautiful truth in that regard too. Unity through diversity seems like a contradiction, but really diversity is what is needed to have unity. Diversity of people, and diversity of the mind. Compromise and Tolerance are not bad words. They are strength and they are love. And it is all of these things together that tell us what fights are worth having, and how to fight them with what’s left after we die to ourselves.

This talk was given on March 5, 2024 from Seattle, Washington.

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Here we are back in Galatians...sort of. If last week was Part 5 maybe we should call this one 5.1 or 5a because it is a bit of a curve ball. It fits together with the end of Galatians 3 where things get a bit more uncomfortable, but stick with us. It feels important that we talk about peace these days. It feels really really important. Because as Jay puts it in this talk we all seem to be stuck in a state of monologues, preaching to our own personal echo chambers and stating our views and then being done with it. But how can we switch from monologues to dialogues? How do we build a community? How do we disagree well? Today Jay brings in ideas from John Hume and MLK and what they did for civil rights and sort of applies it to what Paul writes about here in the end of this chapter. We want to try and heal, but all heal together. We want to die to ourselves and our own identities and see others as worthy of being human, just like us. Sometimes it feels like we're all a long way off from that reality, but we can't stop believing that it's possible, because we really do think it is. We can do it and do it together.  

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

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We’re back in Galatians again for the next in the series. We’re in chapter 3 today! This is the longest we’ve taken to go through this study—and we’re excited about that! Context is important. We like to really dive in, go over it with a fine-tooth comb. We love seeing all the ways that the people Paul was writing to were just like us, having the same struggles with faith, grace, and humanity. But we also see how much we’ve grown and evolved since then. An interesting thing about this chapter is how it shows us that people debating grace vs. law vs. works is nothing new. It was seemingly happening back then the same as it is now. So, in a lot of ways maybe we haven’t grown and evolved. Or maybe it’s a bit of both. This talk and study have been bringing up a lot of interesting discussions—is faith a gift, or something we earn? Does good scholarship lead to heresy? Is grace a slippery slope? What is counterfeit law? What is counterfeit love? This book and this study have been opening up a lot of new avenues for understanding Paul’s writing more and more. We know he’s not always the most popular guy in some Christian circles these days, but we think understanding the context of Paul as a person, and the time he lived in, can help clear up a lot of those misunderstandings.

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

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Our Galatians study has been so in-depth this year, and so jam-packed with new scholarship, that we’re taking a break this week. This way the other talks can settle, and Jay can get back to studying. But even though we’re taking a break from Galatians, that doesn’t me that Paul won’t still be present all throughout this talk. Today Jay is actually going to go through some scripture and verses that he just straight up does not like. Verses that that rub him the wrong way, or we at Revolution feel have been misrepresented. Mostly it’s scripture about conformity and nonconformity and what that means. What does “sober judgement” mean? What does Paul mean when he’s warning us about being self-important? Do we need to be part of groupthink in order to be part of that group? Does our misunderstanding of these passages accidentally make Jesus’s death in vain? What this world needs more than anything is love, and more love on top of that. But how can we make sure the love is real and not counterfeit love? Here at Revolution, aside from our love of Galatians, we feel strongly that the shift in a lot of todays culture gives Paul a bad rap. When he’s held to today’s rules and standards, he can seem problematic, for sure. But what happens when we add context and nuance back into it. What happens if we just let Paul be Paul. Is it too late to reclaim him? Because things are getting out of hand. We need to be the voices calling out in the wilderness if we want to see real change. We need to stop making our politicians into gods and we need to stop building our spiritual beliefs based on a certain party and their stance. Because that’s been the way of things for too long now, and society seems to have gotten to a place where we know more about what the church is against, rather that what it is for. And…well, that’s not very good news at all. How can we fix this?

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

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This is the longest we’ve ever taken to get through the first 2 chapters of Galatians! That’s because Jay has learned so much new scholarship, and it unlocked all sorts of nuance and context and a deeper understanding for all of us. So, let’s get right into it! Today we’ll be talking about some pretty uncomfortable stuff at times, mainly the idea of Nationalism. This was something Paul was dealing with in his time just as we are dealing with it now. Just another example of how Galatians is just as relevant today as it’s ever been. We spend a lot of time today dissecting Paul’s rebuke of Peter. What was the whole story? Why does he do it? Did him and Peter have issues in the past? Was Paul just making a name for himself? Or was there something deeper than all of that that we aren’t aware of. Jay also discusses the idea, and dangers, of taking the Bible at face value. Something so many of us were taught to do—but can that lead to trouble, separation, and even hatred? Paul seems to be very uninterested in the life of Christ, putting more focus on the fruits of Jesus’s death and how it unites all of us. Makes us one. How his death stopped making us each others “other.” Jay also shares a great story about the moment Revolution Gathering was born thirty years ago. This is a real good one, folks!

This talk was given on February 04, 2024 from Seattle, Washington.

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Here we are with more Galatians study! We have a lot to go through today. Jay’s continued studying and research really makes this study stand apart from other years, bringing a fresh take to our annual study. Paul gets a bad rap these days, mostly because when held up to the standards of today’s way of thinking he often feels problematic—but was Paul more progressive and ahead of his time than he gets credit for? Is he one of the most misunderstood authors of the New Testament? Is Paul’s humanity something we can be inspired by? In this chapter Paul calls out Peter about his behavior and his view of others. Calling into question Peter’s exclusivity and how what he was preaching didn’t fit with how he was living. What does Paul have to say about “important” people and social hierarchy? Is social hierarchy an issue we still struggle with today? Have politicians become gods? Is Grace out the door now? Do we only have room for judgement and division? How does thinking like that stake up with the idea of ‘taking up our cross?’—Like I said, this year’s study is something different and is uncovering a whole new set of questions. It’s exciting stuff!! We mean it when we say that we have a lot to go through today!

This talk was given on January 28, 2024 from Seattle, Washington.

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Jay is back from Sundance Film Festival where they premiered the new documentary he worked on about his mom Tammy Faye. Jay shares with us some stories about Sundance and the people he met and which celebrities he had some close encounters with. He also takes some time to reflect on some of the friends we lost last year and how this documentary brough up some of that pain. The best way to help with that pain is to dive right into the Book of Galatians! A book of love and grace! This is part 2 of the Galatians series. Jay’s never broken up the first chapter into multiple talks like he has this year, but we want something new, and he’s been learning all sorts of new and interesting stuff about this letter to the Galatians—so this study is not like the previous years. While Jay was interacting with the Hollywood crowd in Sundance, he observed their exclusivity too and it struck him that Christianity gets a reputation for being exclusive, but humanity as a whole is pretty exclusive. So it is up to us to change that and to be inclusive. This is some of the stuff Paul talks about in his writings as well. Before his conversion on the road to Damascus, Paul wasn’t the best person out there. In his religious zeal he hurt people, destroyed communities, sown discourse—what makes this letter very interesting is see how Paul learned from his own past and changed. And now he’s writing to a divided community to try and stop them from doing what he was once responsible for doing himself. It really adds a whole new layer to this study.

This talk was given on January 21, 2024 from Seattle, Washington.

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