Douglass Church - Douglass Blvd Christian Church

Image by Gonzalo Acuña But who said anything about deserving? In the reign of God, we’re valuable not based on our production, not based on how much we’re worth, not based on how many hours we’ve put in out in the fields. We’re valuable because, by the grace of God… God says we’re valuable. People who work for two hours and people who work all day. Impoverished people. The uninsured. Immigrants. L...

So, here’s the thing: If the shepherd and the king are meant to represent God in these parables, then we’re left with two choices: either God doesn’t quite get how the world operates and gets swindled by forgiving an ungrateful jerk, or God’s playing a completely different game from the one we’re used to playing. I’m going with the latter. Whatever God’s role in all of this forgiveness stuff is, i...

Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash So what do we do in the meantime, in a field we're not allowed to sort, standing next to plants whose allegiance we don't know? I don't have a good answer for you. I'm starting to think the parable doesn't want me to have one. This story won't let us pull the weeds, and it won't let us pretend the weeds don't matter. It won't let us play executioner, and it...

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash For people who don’t know what they really want, who don’t know real freedom, everything and nothing looks good. “We played the flute for you, and did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn." But if you’ve been living at the bottom of the pile, living with the pain of being last in line, of always feeling like your life is lived at the mercy of a sys...

Jesus was an advocate for the poor, the hungry, the sick and despairing, the forgotten and the powerless, right? If you want to see the Advocate Jesus sent, then look around you for those who look like that; look for the fruit they produce. Standing up for people this culture doesn’t think are worth it is hard, painful work. But that’s what the Advocate looks like, that’s how the Spirit of Truth s...

Photo by Yetkin Ağaç: https://www.pexels.com/photo/industrial-factory-interior-with-conveyor-belt-34718926/ So, maybe the promise isn’t that we’ll always get the sign we asked for. Maybe the promise is that when we’re driving through the dark toward the thing we dread, when we’re standing in the room where the future’s come apart, when we’re begging God to be obvious for once, we’re not praying in...

https://www.pexels.com/photo/shepherd-leading-a-donkey-through-a-flock-of-sheep-26800637/ We've built walls in Jesus's name. You know, around who can receive communion, and who has to sit with their hands in their laps and watch. Walls around who can be ordained and who can feel the call, and still be told the door is closed to them. Around who can be married in the church and who has to find anot...

Luke's making a specific claim about where resurrection actually shows up. Not in the place of triumph or the halls of power. It doesn't show up among the people who've already got everything figured out. Resurrection shows up on a dusty road outside a dangerous city, seething with violence. At an ordinary table. In the company of the stranger that their world told them to be super careful about....

The Emperor Domitian wanted to be addressed as “lord and god.” So, we’re not talking about John employing poetic language. Having Thomas address Jesus as “my Lord and my God” was treasonous language backed by the full weight of Roman imperial power. So when the community John’s writing to hears Thomas say "my Lord and my God," they catch it immediately. John’s doing what writers under empire have...

Photo by Cdoncel on Unsplash The women tell the truth first, while the systems take their time catching up. The people with the least protection and the least institutional credibility see something real, but the people with money and power move faster than the speed of sound to explain it away. But that pattern isn't just first-century Jerusalem, is it? Any community that's ever watched an offici...

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons Yesterday, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets across this country. The signs they carried said: “No Kings.” I think Matthew's crowd would have known exactly what they meant. Because the people shouting "Hosanna" on that road into Jerusalem weren't cheering for a king in the conventional sense. They were crying out against everything the kings of the...

Photo by Pisit Heng on Unsplash Before Jesus does anything about the grave, he stands beside the grieving and lets his tears mingle with theirs. We don't worship a God who observes our pain from a safe, hygienic distance. We don't lay our sorrow at the feet of a celestial efficiency expert who says, “You know, technically, this will all work out." No. We bring our pain to the One who weeps. And th...

The temptation isn't to want bad things. The temptation is to want good things so badly that we'll accept any path that gets us there. Safety. Order. Security. Provision. These are real goods. The question is whether the path to them builds the kind of community we actually want to live in, or whether it produces the desired outcome but poisons the groundwater. Subscribe to us on iTunes ! Sermon t...

Photo by Dominique Hicks on Unsplash What comes next? They don’t know. But they show up anyway. The people organizing for immigrant rights in this city know the raids haven’t stopped. They know the laws haven’t changed and that families are being torn apart while politicians argue about masks and body cams. Those people stand in the gap between the devastating reality and whatever restoration look...

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash So, what does this overflow righteousness look like when it's communal rather than private? Private righteousness claims: I don't murder, I don't steal, I'm polite to others, I volunteer sometimes, I wash my hands after using the bathroom, I'm a good person. Overflow righteousness says: Our community redistributes resources so nobody goes hungry. We shelter peopl...

Photo by Hugo Fergusson on Unsplash That's what the Beatitudes are meant to do to us. Not to make us feel noble about suffering, or teach us how to spiritualize oppression. But to form solidarity as a reflex. To make us the kind of people who stand up when cruelty shows up and starts pushing everybody around. The kind of people who refuse the empire's categories of real and not-real, worthy and no...

Photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-people-catching-fishes-2150362/ Because the measure of our faithfulness isn't whether we see the domination system collapse in our lifetime. The measure is whether we tell the truth about the Lamb who's already ended it. John the Baptist pointed to Jesus and said, "Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." He sai...

Jordan River—Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons Jesus didn't start his ministry by going to the halls of power to make deals with the folks in charge. He went to a river where ordinary people were gathering, hungry for change but with no political clout to make it happen. Jesus stood with them in the water. He got muddy with them. He submitted to the same baptism of repentance they were submitting to...

Photo by Ahmed akacha: https://www.pexels.com/photo/elderly-woman-holding-shovel-10629469/ John ends the prologue with this: "From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace." Grace replacing grace. Wave after wave of divine generosity. Not scarcity and competition for limited resources. Not "there's not enough to go around, so we have to hoard and protect." Grace upon grace. Abundance. E...

I don't know what the coming year is going to hold. None of us do. But I do know this: there'll be moments when the costs are rising, the pressure’s building, and somebody near us gets exposed, and we'll have a choice to make. We can be righteous in a way that doesn't cost us anything. Or we can be righteous the way Joseph was righteous, which means stepping into the line of fire and attaching our...

Photo by JESUS PERGES: https://www.pexels.com/photo/grayscale-photography-of-man-doing-backflip-1739321/ The church's job is painfully simple and painfully hard. We have to learn to read the signs differently. We have to stop treating the category “criminal” as if it tells us everything we need to know about a person. We have to stop assuming the people with microphones are the ones whose authorit...

Photo by Felix Mittermeier: https://www.pexels.com/photo/grayscale-photography-of-chessboard-game-957312/ Remember: the cross is what happens when you tell the truth about power. But resurrection is God's answer to the cross. And we live between the two, in this time when the old age is dying and the new age is being born, and we have to decide which age we belong to. We have to decide whether we'...

Photo by Min An: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-vintage-typewriter-1425146/ Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who abuse you. Turn the other cheek. Give to everyone who begs. Do to others as you would have them do to you. These aren't impossible riddles for religious overachievers. They're the habits of a people who know they...

But abiding teaches us a few stubborn questions: Does this freedom hold when the empire gets mad at us? Does it make more room at the table? Can it make it through Good Friday and still show up on Sunday? Jesus' freedom can. It walked through death and came out holding the keys to the jail. It taught Galilean fishermen to lay down nets and pick up neighbors. It taught a tax collector to give the m...

This table today, set by God, is its own bridge that crosses every chasm. We come to the bread and the cup as people who need help, as well as the people who can help. We come to remember Jesus, who crossed a greater chasm than any we've built, and who returns to find whether we've learned what he's been trying to teach us. Subscribe to us on iTunes ! Sermon text: web | doc Closing the Chasm at th...