Douglass Church - Douglass Blvd Christian Church

The wonderful thing about the popular version of Christianity is that it can be done with minimal inconvenience to one’s otherwise comfortable lifestyle. Much of it can be accomplished without ever making your back sore or getting your hands dirty. The trouble is ... that doesn’t sound like the Jesus of the Gospels at all. Jesus, it turns out, is interested in establishing the reign of God; but that reign is first about the lives we live as we try to love others before it’s ever about suspending the living of our lives until after we’ve died. It’s about what’s going on around us as much as it is about what’s going on inside us. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Unfortunately, what too many people mean by “freedom” is freedom from responsibility for anybody but myself and those I love. Freedom on this reading means something like, “You can’t tell me what to do. I can do whatever I want. Why? Because this is a free country.” But, I mean, come on. That’s how children think, isn’t it? Freedom read this way amounts to an ever more elaborate rationalization of selfishness. Think about the issues you can pass through this lens. Healthcare, unemployment insurance, immigrants, state-sanctioned violence against Black people, houselessness, student loan debt, food insecurity. Think about the refugees from Ukraine who’re living their worst nightmares right now because of the selfishness of another fox, a Russian Herod whose desires always seem to center on himself. Subscribe

You get to choose how you’ll view the world, to whom and what kind of attention you’ll give. Nobody is the boss of how you choose to act but you. No one can tell you what to do about the kind of love you offer to others. The whole “you’re-not-the-boss-of-me” thing is always about power. But here’s the thing, you don’t have to give yours away. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Jesus says, "I’m talking about a cosmic rebalancing of the scales, where those who’ve had to hide who they are and whom they love will be welcomed and celebrated, where parents will no longer have to live in fear of their children being stopped by the police—just because they happen to have skin with a different color or worship in another way, where strangers and immigrants won’t have to endure the spite of the 'home team' and their children being ripped from their arms and thrown into cages, where women no longer have to be afraid that their gender will put them at greater risk for violence and exploitation, and where the people in power will no longer acquire and maintain that power on the backs of the poor and the voiceless. “And all of this isn’t merely a hope for some world in the future … after you di

No less for us, the promise of plenty in the new world God is creating isn’t available to us after we’ve checked out of the current world and its uncertainty and taken up residence in another more stable home. The promise of enough lives in the very heart of the chaos we find ourselves in right now. Jesus’ followers aren’t looking for deliverance out of this world but for directions into the very dark and grubby center of it. Put more simply, the future for us lies not in surviving the disorder of this world—with its pandemic panics, cultural battles, and economic uncertainties—but in doing a full-on belly-flop into the untamed mess at the beating heart of it. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Jesus goes home and kicks a hornet’s nest of hospitality and inclusion to all—one that won’t finally settle down until the powers and principalities, the folks at the top, finally get their way and push him over the cliff on Good Friday. Apparently, in the reign of God that Jesus announces, that’s what love requires. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

The good news of the reign of God is an exercise in narrating the possibilities of a world where everyone is invited to the party and nobody has to settle for crumbs and leftovers because there’s enough to go around. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

The good news of the reign of God is an exercise in narrating the possibilities of a world where everyone is invited to the party and nobody has to settle for crumbs and leftovers because there’s enough to go around. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

We’re called not just to point toward justice and peace but to be people who embody justice and peace. We’re not just given the task of telling people about God’s grace and compassion; we’re given the responsibility of extending God’s grace and compassion to our neighbors—even the ones (perhaps especially the ones) with whom we wouldn’t be caught dead on a Saturday night. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

In order to see what Isaiah 'calls the brightness of your dawn' though, you’ll have lift up your eyes—not just so you can see it, but so that that light might be reflected in your eyes to the rest of the world. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

In other words, what endears Mary to God, at least according to Luke, has more to do with her poverty than with her probity. She probably is a really great person on the inside, but that's apparently not what draws God's attention. God is moved by the fact that Mary's the perfect candidate for the kind of person on behalf of whom Jesus is being born to fight: a soon-to-be unwed mother from a backwater town on the poor side of nowhere. Her prospects in life added up to just about nothing. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

How do you think the poor, the outsiders, the depressed, the bereaved, and those who’ve felt abandoned by a system that values its own interests above all else would hear John the Baptist telling the followers of God to think first not about themselves, not about their pocketbooks, not about their profit margins and brokerage accounts, not about their reputations in the community, but to think first about the last, the least, the lost, and the dying? What constitutes good news may just depend on where you’re standing when you hear it. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

If it feels like we already live in the lush lap of paradise, then maybe we aren’t properly situated to entertain the voice of liberation. But if we’re in a hard land where things are fractured and flimsy, if we roam through forsaken country where the streams have dried up and the flowers have wilted in the blazing heat, if we find ourselves in a realm where dust fills our nostrils and tears leave tracks on our dirt-brown, weathered faces, then a voice crying out in the wilderness is music to ease our souls for ten thousand years. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Apocalyptic is dismissed with a patronizing wave by the well-situated as fine for rubes and dullards. Sophisticated people, however, don’t pay much attention to the end-of-the-world talk. But, I would like to suggest to you that the tendency to shrug off apocalypticism is a sign that we’ve grown too used to the way things are—which is to say, too used to a world that seems designed with people like us in mind. A world where one group enjoys a life of relative ease, while others do not is not the world God has in mind. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

It’s possible to live in fear, and to fail to live lives recognizable to Jesus—the one who embraced his fear, who—when presented with the opportunity to let love show the way—was never shy about walking down the dark alleys where fear lives and appears to make all the rules. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc