That's What She Said

NSFC: Spirituality, Sex, and Longing in the Song of Songs 5/6 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Monogamy is Sexy. These lovers anticipate their marriage, but even before the covenant vows they are pledged solely to each other. This is not a constraint on their freedom but the very nature of the height of love: that each lover is so consumed by passion for the other that there is simply no room for anyone else i...

NSFC: Spirituality, Sex, and Longing in the Song of Songs 4/6 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Mutuality is Sexy. Notably, the SoS is a duet between lovers – a woman and man, in this case. Moreover, the woman’s voice is first and last, and it is she who sets the terms of their relationship in both love and sex. The lovers seek each other, wait for each other, ask for each other, pine for each other, in a way t...

NSFC: Spirituality, Sex, and Longing in the Song of Songs 3/6 Jillian Moran Come as You Are. The Corinthian Christians worried about what they needed to change, repair, or complete before they could be accepted into the fellowship of Christ. Paul responds that God’s call comes before our lives are well in order, and perfection (or even having your shit together) is not a prerequisite. God invites...

NSFC: Spirituality, Sex, and Longing in the Song of Songs 2/6 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays The Earth is Sexy. The SoS overflows with imagery from the natural world – flora and fauna, sights and smells, an extravaganza (orgy?) of appreciation for a well-watered spring. The lovers meet and make out (make love?) outside; they compare each other’s beauty to things they’ve seen in nature; nature stirs their des...

NSFC: Spirituality, Sex, and Longing in the Song of Songs 1/6 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Your Body is Sexy. We can’t get around it in the SoS – bodies are beautiful, especially in the eyes of someone who knows and loves your body. And sex, too, as something (most of) our bodies want, is sexy and good and blessed and biblical. To tell us your thoughts on this sermon, click through to the web posting and l...

[Redacted]: Conspiring with Jesus 7/7 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Contemplation of your baptism, past or future. Through our baptisms, we join the communion of the saints around the world, past and future. We are a link in a long chain of those who preserve the story, “the keepers of the horn” in Cormac McCarthy’s phrase in No Country for Old Men . How wonderful to be part of something so old and so beaut...

[Redacted]: Conspiring with Jesus 6/7 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Presence, the best you can, at gatherings of the church. Jesus’s assessment of the times he lived in was pretty grim: arrests and trials, intra-family strife, secrecy and murder. It’s no less (or more) true now – discipleship is a dangerous business. This is no time to cocoon at home alone. To tell us your thoughts on this sermon, click thr...

[Redacted]: Conspiring with Jesus 5/7 Rev. Remi Shores Cultivation of spiritual gifts for the life of our church and community. “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few,” Jesus says, and it feels true today, too. What does it take to be part of a DIY church? What’s the difference in a consumer-client culture and citizenship in a community? To tell us your thoughts on this sermon, click...

[Redacted]: Conspiring with Jesus 4/7 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Participation in the church’s discernment for our next steps together. There are so many decisions to be made when we are confronted with Jesus’s presence and power. Who is he? Can he really do what he says he can do? Whose side is he on, anyway? And in contemporary life: what does he intend for us to do and be now, and next? To tell us you...

[Redacted]: Conspiring with Jesus 3/7 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Extension of the church’s welcome to friends, neighbors, strangers, and enemies. Two stories of invitation: the friends who bring a paralytic to Jesus’s feet, and Jesus calling Matthew to come along. None of us comes to faith alone; our discipleship journey is the opposite of the U.S. American “self-made man [sic]”. Who are the helpers who...

[Redacted]: Conspiring with Jesus 2/7 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Sharing of material resources to further the church’s goals. Jesus has a way of commandeering resources for his own use – that boat, e.g., and those swine – probably because he has so little of his own (“Foxes have holes... but the Son of Man has nowhere...”). In what sense have our own resources been conscripted for his work? To tell us yo...

[Redacted]: Conspiring with Jesus 1/7 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Gracious receipt of care from the church family. One thing that Jesus recognizes in us is our need – our brokenness, unhealth, lack of resources. It’s not our favorite thing to show him, or each other. But to conspire with the beloveds who gather in his name, the confession of need is essential. To tell us your thoughts on this sermon, clic...

Easter Sunday 2026 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Easter Sunday 2026 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: info@galileochurch.org. To contribute financially to the ongoing ministry of Galileo Church, find us on  Venmo , ...

Somersaults on a Mountainside 5/5 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Commissioning Rev. John Bowers as our Youngster Czar. 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: info@galileochurch.org. To contribute financially to the ongoing ministry...

Somersaults on a Mountainside 4/5 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays The Rains Came Down and the Flood Came Up. In this final batch of sayings (which are less thematically unified than the previous chapters), Jesus offers what we could call “rabbinic advice” for how to condition one’s spirit for harder times to come. Because it’s going to rain soon, and tidal waves of sorrow will wipe out poorly built shelters....

Somersaults on a Mountainside 3/5 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays How to Worship God, Not Money. When he smashes together the topics of religious practices (prayer, almsgiving, fasting) and financial practices (hoarding, worrying), Jesus reveals something big: our routinized religious piety runs the risk of disingenuousness, while we show by our output of emotional energy around money where our real worship i...

Somersaults on a Mountainside 2/5 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays A Crisis of Authority. Six times, Jesus speaks a formula that is intended to provoke a crisis in the listeners’ hearts: “You have heard it said... But I say to you...” Does he mean to open up the conversation about calcified religious law, doubling down on personal moral agency while releasing us from the scrutiny of rigorous watchdogs? (Yes.)...

Somersaults on a Mountainside 1/5 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Blessed Are the Who Again? This is where Jesus pokes the bears of empire, of religion, of capitalism – of all the systems that compete to define “success” and assign power to the “winners.” For him to claim God’s blessing on the losers – and furthermore to name them as the influencers, the “salt” and “light” for the rest of us – is a weird, wil...

Come On Up to the House 6/6 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays “No More a Stranger or a Guest, But Like a Child at Home.” God’s cosmic plan of salvation can be described as “reconciliation” – the putting back together that which has been separated – people from people, people from God, people from the earth – all is re-tethered, interdependent, in the household of God. To tell us your thoughts on this sermon, cl...

Come On Up to the House 5/6 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays I Was a Stranger, and You Welcomed Me. The church has long understood itself as an organization that provides basic necessities like food and clothing to those “less fortunate.” Does the church likewise have an obligation to provide accompaniment and community to those who are lonely? What if that is the gospel for our disconnected, disconsolate age?...

Come On Up to the House 4/6 Rev. Dr. Lance Pape Welcoming Jesus. Jesus depended on the hospitality of others throughout his ministry – and really, throughout his life, from the Bethlehem barn to the borrowed tomb. The Bethany sisters were two of his closest friends, and they learned how to welcome him well. Can we extrapolate better and worse ways to welcome Jesus into our lives, perhaps by busyin...

Come On Up to the House 3/6 Rev. Dr. Lance Pape I’m Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table. We use many metaphors for God, but what about God as Dinner Party Host Extraordinaire? Jesus returns to this metaphor in his parables: God prepares a table, a banquet, a party; guests are either ready or not to join the celebration. To tell us your thoughts on this sermon, click through to the web posting and leave...

Come On Up to the House 2/6 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Aliens Among Us. The language of “aliens” recurs many, many times through the Torah – compiled and written during the time of Israel’s exile to Babylon, many generations after the escape from Egypt. While the imperially conquered Judaism of Jesus’s day tended to keep Jewish identity front and center (so that Jesus himself never once ate with a Gentil...

Come On Up to the House 1/6 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Sodom, Gomorrah, and the ancient Near Eastern ethic of hospitality. The story of Sodom-n- Gomorrah’s destruction deserves theological rehabilitation, so that the intra-biblical witness to those cities’ sin can be heard. Ezekiel 16:49 and Jesus’s sending of the apostles in Matthew 10 both point to Sodom’s inhospitality (a failure to welcome and care f...

Sound the Warning 6/6 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Warning: “Nasty women” will save us. I have a “signature sermon” on this genealogy, where the 5 women are lifted up as examples of scandalous sexuality. These are our messiah’s mother and grandmothers. We should have always understood that scandalous sexuality does not disqualify anyone from Jesus’s family tree. To tell us your thoughts on this sermon, cli...