That's What She Said

Soul Food for Right Now 4/10 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Honor Your Ancestors (Maybe Not All of Them). Think about where you came from. For most of us, there’s a wide variety of good, bad, and ugly in our heritage. Jesus is accused of not honoring the ancestors’ teachings; his replies show that he’s discerning what he takes and what he leaves behind from the history he inherits. To tell us your thoughts o...

Soul Food for Right Now 3/10 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Praise Aspirationally. Levi throws a great banquet with all the wrong guests... Jesus’s disciples aren’t ascetic enough... Jesus responds to accusations with “Look, we’re doing the best we can with the time we have.” It’s not a huge, triumphal claim; it’s a right-sized hope in God’s coming redemption. “Maybe...all is not lost.” To tell us your thoug...

Soul Food for Right Now 2/10 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Reckon with Your Past. When you encounter Jesus, he goes straight to the heart of the problem. The healing he offers could be physical, or emotional, or spiritual. You have to be ready for him to clean things up, re-order your psyche, put you back together from the inside out. How do we partner with Jesus in this self-rehabilitation? What about ther...

Soul Food for Right Now 1/10 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Ask for Help. Jesus calls his first disciples in an exchange of mutual aid. He needs a platform; they can share one. They’ve caught nothing; he can direct them to a big catch. He needs assistants; they can follow. The best relationships function this way, like a seesaw, in complementary partnership. To tell us your thoughts on this sermon, click thr...

Pentecost 2025 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays The church that dreams together celebrates together! This Sunday we celebrate Pentecost and the beginning of the church all over again. The church continues on in the midst of chaos, dreaming and reconfiguring itself in order to be the body of Christ in this here-and-now world.   To tell us your thoughts on this sermon, click through to the web posting and l...

Dreaming Together at the End of the World 6/7 Carissa Robinson Cultivation of spiritual gifts for the life of the church and the community. This is the grand ending to John’s dream. John here is imagining in binaries: the forces of good and the forces of evil. Everyone who hears his message is invited by Jesus to “come,” partake in the water of life.  What was it for John who had been the sub...

Dreaming Together at the End of the World 5/7 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Presence, physical and emotional, at gatherings of the church. In this dream, John sees a river that is clear as crystal, and whose water gives life, flowing from the throne where God and the Lamb (Jesus) are. The river flows down the middle of the streets, so it is always accessible, and there is a tree of life whose leaves are med...

Dreaming Together at the End of the World 4/7 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Discernment for our next steps together. In this dream, John imagines God and God’s people forever united. The imagery involves a bride/groom and a new city, with “beautiful” used as a descriptor. God in this vision erases death, mourning, crying, pain, and also tenderly wipes tears out of eyes. This is God making everything new; th...

Dreaming Together at the End of the World 3/7 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Gracious receipt of care from the church family. In this dream, God’s people who have been subjected to societal violence wear their suffering like robes of honor. They worship God and serve God around God’s throne— and God shelters them. Their shepherd is this Lamb (Jesus); it is said this Lamb will make sure they are never hungry...

Dreaming Together at the End of the World 2/7 Maddy Hall Aaen Sharing material resources to further the church’s goals. In this dream, John sees a diverse, numberless crowd surrounding a throne declaring that the “Lamb who was slain (Jesus)” is worthy of power, wealth, wisdom, strength, glory, honor, praise, and dominion. In John’s world, the people calling for this sort of attribution were imperi...

Dreaming Together at the End of the World 1/7 Carissa Robinson Extension of the Church’s Welcome to Friends, Neighbors, Strangers, and Enemies. Just like when you wake up from a strange dream and you want to tell someone about it, in this passage, John experiences a dream/vision from God, who tells him to write it down. To tell us your thoughts on this sermon, click through to the web posting and...

Easter 2025 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Feral Hope. Here’s a quote from an essay I’ve been reading and re-reading: “Feral hope is radical hope. As Jonathan Lear describes it, ‘What makes this hope radical is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is. Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate...

Becoming (like) Jesus 5/5 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays The Expanse of His Care, from Small to Ginormous. (There is a section just before this, Jesus teaching in the Nazareth synagogue, that we read recently.) Here we see Jesus coming into his power as a holistic healer: tending to the spirits and bodies of all those who suffer. He has a remarkable capacity to deal compassionately and powerfully with big st...

Becoming (like) Jesus 4/5 Carissa Robinson The Hardest Part, For Now. Jesus told us to pray to escape trials, because he himself endured trials. “Trial” is more than temptation, right? It’s about the deep-down questioning of whether God is trustworthy. Pray that you don’t ever have to really ask that – but if you do, know that Jesus did it first.   To tell us your thoughts on this sermon, cli...

Becoming (like) Jesus 3/5 Carissa Robinson Double lineage: Born of God, Born of Adam. Where does Jesus come from? From the transcendent God… from the human community of his ancestors… from the cosmic materiality of creation (water, dove) – and these all converge to make him completely human, as are we. To tell us your thoughts on this sermon, click through to the web posting and leave us a comment...

Becoming (like) Jesus 2/5 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Building on a Legacy. Jesus doesn’t invent his “reign of God” preaching from whole cloth; he builds it on a legacy of teaching and prophecy that comes before him, including from John the Baptist, his single biggest influence. Did they have a friendship before? Did he listen to John’s preaching before the day of his baptism? What did he take from it? Wh...

Becoming (like) Jesus 1/5 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Growing Up Jesus . What is it like to grow a child into a messiah? And what does it mean that we, too, are growing? “Wisdom” is not something we gain suddenly, but a slow ascent toward maturity that takes our whole life long. (The song referenced at the beginning of the sermon is Sunday Mornings by Susan Werner) To tell us your thoughts on this sermon,...

The Dangerous Work of Worship 8/8 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Go. The radical act of worship requires that we stop and leave, carrying with us the gifts we’ve received, newly energized for our work in the world God still loves. I can’t quite imagine carrying on with Christian discipleship without the weekly reset of worship; how does one maintain an endless and unchanging line of faith-hope-love without t...

The Dangerous Work of Worship 7/8 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Share. Our days are consumed by the impulse to get – consumed by consumerism! But generosity is a muscle that atrophies as our consumption grows. The paired stories about Barnabas and Ananais-n-Sapphira can be told as fables: “Here’s how they’ll remember you someday.” And the small “gives” we give today add up over a lifetime to form that story...

The Dangerous Work of Worship 6/8 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays The Table. Jesus just has this whole way of upending the traditional “table math” – seats of honor, who’s invited. (I think that at my grandmother’s house he would’ve sat at the kids’ table, with his knees up under his chin.) Scripture often compares being at home with God to being seated at a banquet, secure in plenteous food and gracious welc...

The Dangerous Work of Worship 5/8 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Preach. “Churches get the preaching they deserve,” Katie’s spouse has said, quoting someone else. Meaning, preaching is inherently dialogical. It has the form of monologue, but at its best it reflects the preacher’s conversations with the church, with the culture, and (most obviously) with the scripture itself, and thus with our ancestors in fa...

The Dangerous Work of Worship 4/8 Carissa Robinson Sing. Singing before a crowd of people requires some courage; most of us aren’t that good at it and shouldn’t be on a mic. But singing with a crowd is different. It releases us from self- consciousness about raising our own voices. It requires that we breathe together, in and out. It puts the words of faith, hope, and love in our own mouths, even...

The Dangerous Work of Worship 3/8 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Read Scripture. This is how we introduce “trouble” into the narrative of worship. The stories our ancestors told assert that “the earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it” – i.e. that God gets everything God wants. It does not always appear to be true in our experience. And so every Sunday the text invites us to wrestle with tradition, promise...

The Dangerous Work of Worship 2/8 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Pray . Bowing our head, bending our knee, pledging our allegiance – this is the subversive work of prayer. Corporate prayer in worship is a stay against idolatry. We remember again that our time here is for the re-ordering of our lives: “God is God, and we are not. (And nothing else is God, either.)” The counter-narratives say that our lives de...

The Dangerous Work of Worship 1/8 Rev. Dr. Katie Hays Arrive. King David, having recovered the Ark of the Covenant, dances his way home. He is essentially bringing God’s Presence back to Israel, and his enthusiastic showing-up dance is unnerving to some (his wife!) who wish for more decorum, more “demure”, in worship. But it matters how we arrive for worship – do we bring our whole (exposed) selve...