Douglass Church - Douglass Blvd Christian Church

But God says, “If everything else you do isn’t motivated by your love of the imperiled and unremembered, then it’s worse than if you’d done nothing at all. If you’d done nothing, at least that would be an honest admission that you don’t understand. As it is, you take for granted you already know what I want. But that’s the thing: there’s no way to know what I want without looking into the eyes of those who’ve been cast aside.”“Do you know what I really want?” God says. “I want justice to roll down like water and righteousness like an everflowing stream. And I want you to be all mixed up in the middle of it.”Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web

Caesar’s always going to want what Caesar wants. Wall Street. Madison Avenue. They vie for our attention like it’s their birthright. There are so many claims placed upon our loyalties ... from every direction. And, sometimes, that which pursues us most relentlessly is our own desire to be in control, to be ourselves, gatekeepers of God’s mercy. We in the church have been guilty of spurning the gifts people bring to God. But Jesus isn’t having it. Jesus says, "Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar; give to God what belongs to God. But here’s the thing: It all belongs to God." Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Unlike Matthew's original readers, when Jesus started talking about a King giving a wedding banquet, his audience wouldn't have immediately made the connection between the King in the parable and God. They would be much more likely to see their own cultural struggles in this King—who, let's be honest, seems pretty vindictive and pouty. No, “vindictive and pouty” would have described not their vision of God but of a genuine political figure in their own world—somebody like King Herod Antipas. Jesus' listeners knew about arbitrary rulers who pursued their self-aggrandizing interests at the expense of the people they were supposed to protect. It seems clear that

Jesus heads into the vineyard to cheers of “Hosanna. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” But he can read the political tea leaves. He’s got a pretty good idea where this story is headed. So, it should be no great surprise to learn that Jesus is a little testy—even in the face of the palm branches. He knows which way the political wind is blowing—but he walks into the vineyard anyway. The parable ends. The fate of the vineyard is yet unresolved. But we know that already, don’t we? We’ve seen too much injustice two thousand years in to believe the vineyard has changed much. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

If you’re starting a revolution, you don’t have to follow the same rules designed to keep power in the hands and for the benefit of those convinced the world was made for them. You don’t have to live in fear—the kind of fear necessary to make a world where some have and some do not, where some get justice, and some silently cry themselves to sleep at night, certain that justice is just a word used to protect the powerful and punish the weak. You don’t have to choose between violence and passivity. If you’re starting a revolution, if you’re committed to following the Jesus whom the powerful killed to make a point, you’ve got choices. Subscribe to us on iTunes

Real-life virtues—the ones that help us live real lives and not just "impressive” lives among those closest to us—are the kinds of virtues necessary for us to live together in community. These soft virtues like the ability to live and speak truthfully, to be a person others consider trustworthy (and not just being reliable about taking out the garbage, but about being worth the trust necessary to hold the vulnerability of others with gentleness and care), to be able to forgive (especially those who deserve it least), to have good boundaries that communicate where “you” end and “I” begin. These are the kinds of virtues that allow us to live not just in the mem

In embracing the cross, Jesus’ followers can say of empire at its most blood-thirsty, “Is this the best you’ve got? God’s got an even more astonishing trick up God’s sleeve. It’s a little something we call ‘Easter.’” Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

My first reaction is to want Jesus to pray for it to be easy. I want him to protect me from the world by installing some kind of force field, some heat shield around me that won’t allow the slings and arrows to touch me. But he doesn’t do that. Instead, he prays not that there be a protective wall around me to guard against the damage life can cause but that I can endure the damage, that I can embrace the truth that life is full of fear and horror. Because Jesus knows that if we who follow him can’t speak the truth, everything we have to say will be easily dismissed. If we find ourselves hedging our bets over speaking what’s true, why should anyone take us seriously when we talk about a better world? Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

In other words, if you love one another, you’re already doing the works that I’ve done—and you won’t have to question the “way to the Father,” about whether you’re following the step-by-step directions since everyone will already know who you belong to. If you condemn a system that allows police officers to kill a Black man in cold blood … on video … you and everyone else will know you’re following “the way.” If you raise your voice on behalf of the unemployed and the undocumented in a culture satisfied to let them suffer unaided by the powers and principalities, you won’t have to question where I’m going—you’ll already be there with me. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

In other words, the people tasked with watching over the most vulnerable of the flock have proven themselves sightless. They care more that the sheep don’t jaywalk than about the fact that the way they run things has created even more vulnerable sheep. The trouble with the folks in charge is that being in charge isn’t the point; it’s about what kind of world we want to live in. Does it create space for the invisible people? Does everyone have enough to eat, a place to sleep, a means to care for people’s bodies and minds? Does it stand vigil against predators who feast on the weak and defenseless? Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

We heal the sick; we bind up the broken-hearted; we comfort the grieving; we pick up the downtrodden; we fight for justice … not because it makes for good strategy, but because we follow Jesus, which means we’re prepared to walk with him down any dark alley he enters—in search of those the rest of the world would just as soon leave behind. We do it because it’s right. And because God loves us enough not to let us stay where we are, because we’re the blessed who come in the name of the Lord, and because we don’t know how to do anything else. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

“Love your neighbor as yourself," as an ethical system, does have the drawback of relying entirely on me as the reference point—which, frankly, feels like something of a flaw in the system. I mean, what if I don’t love myself very much at all? What if I happen to be self-destructive? Does the golden rule relieve me of any duty I have toward another person beyond what I might expect from myself? The golden rule doesn’t work for nihilists. That’s a problem, isn’t it? Jesus, seeing that more is needed for the ordering of a new world, comes up with a different standard. No longer do I get to treat people the same way they treat me or even treat people the way I would like to be treated. He raises the ethical bar on us. According to Jesus, I'm duty-bound now, not to love my n

But the real question to us is, “Now that you’ve got this shiny new resurrection, what’re you going to do with it? Are you going to hang out with it, set up a shrine to it and serve lattes, thinking all the work’s been done two thousand years ago? Or are you going to realize that the freedom the resurrection brings is the freedom to back out of the tomb, walk down the road, and get back to work?” You see, it’s not that the resurrection isn’t cause for celebration; it’s that we’ve misunderstood celebration. It’s too easy to think that it means release from duty, a time to set down our work and head to the party. But the story of the gospel is that resurrection doesn’t free us from labor; it offers us labor worth giving our lives for. We find our greatest joy, our greatest

Death too often calls the tune to which, sad to say, so many of us feel compelled to take the dance floor. But I’ve got news for you—regardless of how it looks to you at present or who you think is in charge, Jesus is almost finished with his Lenten journey. And while the path he takes will ultimately lead him to a garbage dump on the edge of town called the “place of the skull,” the truth of the faith we profess is that that dump—which too casually deals in the art of death—is not the final destination. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Being born blind is the definition of a pre-existing condition. But according to Jesus, it should never be a pretext for finding an excuse for why helping that person to find healing is wrong. According to today’s Gospel lesson, if you’re more concerned about who doesn’t deserve help than actually helping, I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but Jesus has a fundamental problem with how you view the world. You can talk about having compassion for the most vulnerable. But if you spend more time worrying about who should be blamed for their vulnerability than finding ways to protect them, Jesus is going to be something of a disappointment to you. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc