That's What She Said

The Quotidian Mysteries. In a book of this name, Kathleen Norris explores laundry as a spiritual practice. It relates to God’s creative work on the first several days when God is not mainly making something out of nothing, but rather separating this from that – light from dark, water from land, sky from surface, etc. God as an Orderer calls us to mimic this work in our own ordered lives – materially and ethically. A theological argument for making the bed?

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It’s all good. In the opening story of our sacred text, we encounter God’s imagination and intention in making a world that is good, and very good. Our faith has sometimes jumped too quickly to the brokenness of all things, but that’s not where God starts, nor where we begin. How would our theology be different if we started, always, from the goodness of all things, including ourselves?

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Judea. Jesus’s sense of self requires that he turn toward Jerusalem – toward the concentration of religious and political power that will steal his life and threaten his followers. In what sense is this destiny his “home”? In Christian iconography, he has lived on the cross for 2,000 years...

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Galilee. Jesus hits his stride in his home territory – at the height of his powers, he calls disciples, exorcises demons, heals diseases, and preaches his heart out. It’s a good New Year’s theme: what does it look like when you’re firing on all cylinders, doing exactly what you were baptized to do? When your life is working in some way that you, and your beloveds, can recognize?

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The Jordan, and the Wilderness Beyond. Finally, we arrive at Mark’s “birth story” – which is not about the care that an infant passively receives, but about an adult who chooses to begin again, deliberately, with a new identity as God’s Son. Our baptisms afford us this same privilege, to choose our “yes” to God’s gift. The best Christmas present ever? (But that wilderness...)

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Egypt. The circumstances of Jesus’s birth swirl with violence, and push his family to the desperate status of refugee. When we call ourselves “spiritual refugees,” this is what we mean: we deserved the home we had, but were forced out of its comforts by threat. Jesus lived this life, too.

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Bethlehem. This is the kind of story your parents would tell about your birth – the water breaking too early, the frantic rush to the hospital in a snowstorm, a night spent in a waiting room because the L&D suites are full and the contractions are still too far apart... What does it mean, that our biographies begin before we even arrive? What does it mean, that Jesus shares this vulnerability in common with us?

To tell us your thoughts on this sermon, click through to the web posting and leave us a comment. Or, find us on social media: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Or, email us the old-fashioned way: [email protected]. To contribute financially to the ongoing ministry of Galileo Church, find us on Venmo, Patreon, or Zelle ([email protected]), or just send a check to P.O. Box 668, Kennedale, TX 76060

No place to lay his head. It’s a hard reality about Jesus, that from the very first “Come and see” to his earliest disciples, he never promised stability to his followers. His homelessness becomes definitional for us, this uneasy sense of “not-at-homeness,” the dislocation of our citizenship in God’s empire rather than U.S. America. And maybe the consumer Christmas frenzy heightens our sense of not-belonging?

To tell us your thoughts on this sermon, click through to the web posting and leave us a comment. Or, find us on social media: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Or, email us the old-fashioned way: [email protected]. To contribute financially to the ongoing ministry of Galileo Church, find us on Venmo, Patreon, or Zelle ([email protected]), or just send a check to P.O. Box 668, Kennedale, TX 76060

Christ the King Sunday. What if, on the last liturgical day before Advent (and the new year), we reflected on Jesus, our exemplar of faith, hope, and love?

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The Thing With Feathers. The greatest may be love, but the most fragile is hope: “the active expectation that God will transform the world.” If the church is a learning lab for love, it is also a catalyst for hope – because what we do in here defies expectations, pulls some of God’s future into the present. Not just because we’re nice to each other, but because lives are being transformed.

To tell us your thoughts on this sermon, click through to the web posting and leave us a comment. Or, find us on social media: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Or, email us the old-fashioned way: [email protected]. To contribute financially to the ongoing ministry of Galileo Church, find us on Venmo, Patreon, or Zelle ([email protected]), or just send a check to P.O. Box 668, Kennedale, TX 76060