Douglass Blvd Christian Church

an open and affirming community of faith

n open and affirming community where faith is questioned and formed, as relationships are made and upheld. 

When Grace Runs Headlong over the Cliff of Entitlement (Luke 4:21-30)

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Coming to terms with our own privilege is a tricky thing. In my experience, most people resent the idea that they’ve somehow been given a leg up. But the problem with our privilege has less to do with what we’ve been given than with what we’re willing to sacrifice so that others can have the same advantages we do.

From God’s perspective, from the perspective of the new world Jesus is painting as he begins his ministry, the walls have been torn down so there’s no 'us' and 'them,' no 'insider' and no 'outsider,' no 'hometown folks' and no 'aliens.' There are only God’s children and the joy of the responsibility of announcing liberation from the tyranny of our own sense of entitlement.


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I Will Not Keep Silent (Isaiah 62:1-7)

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The need to cry out on behalf of people who feel like their world is about to chew them up didn’t die with Isaiah and the children of Israel. There are still people—many who live here among us—who urgently want someone to take their side, to refuse to remain silent in the face of despair and injustice—not so much as a white knight coming in to save the day, but often just as a reminder that they’re not the ones always left holding the bag by themselves.

Part of what it means to follow Jesus is to take our place upon the walls with Isaiah, refusing to remain silent, giving God no rest until God establishes the reign God promised and makes it renowned throughout the earth.


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On the Way (Matt. 2:1-12)

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The question for those of us committed to following in the steps of the magi, and ultimately in the steps of Jesus is: When we spot the old world trying to stamp out the new, the powerful trying to subdue the powerless, will we take the easy way and acquiesce to the whims of a tyrant, or will we resist?

Bethlehem—and the gospel toward which it points—is the focal point of the politics of empire. Don't kid yourself.


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The Gift of Epiphany (Luke 3:15-17, 21-22)

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We were important enough to God that God had it figured out from the beginning how to bring us home. We, therefore, if we are to be like God, must devote ourselves to the prospect of making a home for one another—both the kind we live in, as well as the kind that lives in us.


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The Redemption of the Humiliated (Luke 1:39-55)

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The question posed by Advent is: How do we who live at the front of the line make Mary's song our song?

Ironic that we, whom most of the rest of the world envies, might have to sit at the feet of Mary and Elizabeth to learn how to sing the song God gave all of us to sing about the reign of the coming messiah, a song for the humiliated and disposable people sung in anticipation of Emmanuel—God with us.


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Who Needs the Truth Anyway? (Luke 3:7-18)

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Following Jesus isn’t about securing our own piece of the heavenly pie, it’s about living with and loving those about whom John the Baptist speaks, and those whom Jesus loved.

Living under the reign of God isn’t about escaping this world; it’s about offering God’s welcome to those whom the world has marginalized and forgotten. It’s about God pitching a tent in the muck and the mire of our sometimes godforsaken lives and living with us in the midst of the madness and horror.


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Unsettling the World (Luke 3:1-6)

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Luke’s quoting of Isaiah isn’t meant to help us visualize a flatter, smoother world, or to help us to feel better about the hilly, bumpy world we live in. In this context John the Baptist’s call to repentance isn’t about trying to be more sincere about our remorse. It’s about shaking up the world as it’s currently situated, so that something new can be born.

In Luke’s hands these words are about tearing things up, about unsettling the way things are currently arranged. But this time around, what’s going to be disrupted, what’s going to be toppled aren’t hills and valleys in the wilderness that stand between Israel and home, but the powers and principalities that stand between God’s people and the future God has planned—between the way things are and the reign of God, the way things ought to be.


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Breaking Through the Numbness (Luke 21:25-36)

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Apocalyptic is always a difficult word for those used to a world that serves them. People at the top of the food chain, people satisfied just fine with the way things are, don’t want to hear that things are about to be shaken up.

But there are other people for whom such news is a long awaited word of redemption, a bit of hope in a dark place. Those on the bottom, the small and the forgotten, those who have little to gain from the preservation of the present arrangements, get all kinds of hopeful upon hearing Jesus talk about a new world designed with them first in mind.


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Adjusting Our Expectations (Luke 23:33-43)

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Not only does God not respond to us with violence—God, in Jesus, has a front row seat to the very systems of domination that deal in the kind of death Jesus suffers—the kinds of death people continue to suffer at the hands of the wealthy and the powerful—the very people Jesus announces from the beginning that his new reign will lift up: the poor, the prisoners, the blind, and the oppressed.

It’s hard to imagine Luke getting any further away from our established understandings of what constitutes a viable kingdom in our world. After all, crosses don’t make good political mascots."

Editors note: Please forgive a few techincal difficulties.


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What Will Be the Sign?

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"Look at popular Christianity and you’ll find that what many people want out of faith is not a way to relinquish control. Many Christians don’t live as though they believe God is in charge even when they don’t understand how it’s all going to work out. Instead, people often look to faith for a way to order their existences…a way that will inoculate them against pain.

"But we trivialize the gospel when we convince ourselves that it’s possible to be a disciple of Jesus without it ever costing us anything."


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Everything She Had

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We need to advocate for a just economic system that looks out for the needs of those on the margins, that refuses to devour widows houses—that refuses to make the poor feel like they’re not full participants until they cough up their last five bucks until payday.

But in the meantime, we need to work like crazy to be a church worthy of the kind of financial sacrifices people make.


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What If Love Isn't a Second Hand Emotion?

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And the fact that Jesus links love for neighbor and love for God together suggests that the way we love God is through our love for our neighbors. Jesus doesn’t offer up some vague notion of love that centers first on our ability to muster up the correct emotional responses.

In fact, if we’re ever going to feel love, then, in all likelihood, we’re going to have to act lovingly first.

The secret of love that our culture seems not to know is that the feelings of love generally follow loving action; they don’t necessarily precede them. It is easier, as the saying goes, to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.


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Just a Crumb (Mark 7:24-37)

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I love the idea that the Jesus I’ve spent my life learning how to follow is big enough to allow himself to be stretched by a Gentile woman with a sick kid—about the very last person in the whole world Jesus ought to be taking religious instruction from.

I love the idea that Jesus is big enough to listen for the voice of God in even the most unlikely places—not in the institutions busy authorizing and credentialing everything, making sure that it meets all the government standards for cage free, free range faith.

But here’s what I want to propose: I think this Syrophoenician woman challenges us to encounter newness and change not as a threat, but as God trying to break in among us and stretch our understanding of how big this welcome is we’re supposed to be giving, how expansive is the vision of just who God wants to offer hospitality to."


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Clawing Our Way up to Middle Management (Mark 10:35-45)

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Popular Christianity promises a Jesus who wants to be your pal, a Jesus who doesn’t want you to be inconvenienced, a Jesus whose real concern is that all your biases are continually reconfirmed for you. A Jesus who knows what true glory looks like. And, let me tell you, that would be a whole lot easier on me.

But unfortunately, I’m not good enough at this to give you that Jesus. Instead, I’m so incompetent at my job that all I can manage to figure out how to give you is a Jesus who seeks out the small, the irrelevant, and the marginal. I’m only skilled enough to show up on Sunday mornings with a Jesus who thinks glory looks like losing, sacrificing, and dying on behalf of those everybody else walked away from a long time ago. I hope once again that you’ll forgive me my vocational inadequacies.


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The Question Is: Who Gets into the Party? (Mark 9:38-50)

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Let me put it this way, in the reign of God not only do I want everyone included, I want it so badly that I don’t want anything to stand in the way. I don’t want your need to have final approval on God’s guest list to be an obstacle to them knowing they’re welcome to the party.

Moreover, I don’t want your zeal to scare off the people who’ve spent so much time convinced that they’re not welcome at any party—let alone one thrown by God. And, just so you know, your judgmentalism isn’t helping. It’s scaring off the people I’m most interested to see have a seat at the head table.


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