The Year of the Lord's Favor (Isaiah 61:1-11)

The year of the Lord's favor, when God comes among us and puts things right that have been wrong for so long, delivering the weary and the dispossessed from their oppression, such glad tidings don't come as good news to the folks who have everything to gain by things staying the same. Because God isn't just saying pretty words. God will persist until the scales of justice have been balanced, until those who've lived so long with nothing have enough, until the widow, the orphan, and the stranger are accorded the dignity and protection their status as God's beloved confers. God will be their champion—not just in pretty words, but in the very real press of life.

---

Subscribe to us on iTunes!

Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2]

[1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fHWeFGKOkHQdfisXu1I51y0VwQcCDsp_/view?usp=sharing

Our Community Partners: JCPS Pod Instruction at DBCC

At DBCC, we're fortunate to be able to provide space for a learning pod for students at JCPS. They meet ever day in The Commons and the Adult Sunday School Classroom. Because of your generosity, we're able to make the space available free of charge, so children can continue to learn during this difficult time.

Reaping What You Did Not Sow (Matthew 25:14-30)

The third slave is treated like whistleblowers regularly are when they lay bare the despicable truth: The master in this story, as has so often been the case throughout history, isn't a benevolent employer handing out generous Christmas bonuses; he's a boss who's gotten rich by exploiting the labor of others—and when he's called on it, he lashes out to defend himself.

In fact, if the third slave looks like anyone, he looks like Jesus before both the Roman authorities and their collaborators in the temple in the next two chapters. And what do the masters of empire do to Jesus for presuming to speak the truth to power?

They do what they do to every whistleblower: they "vilify, shame, and humiliate him so that his words will carry no weight."

And then they kill him.

---

Subscribe to us on iTunes!

Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2]

[1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O_xr5ZQdfUTGKEmON2mrb0bu7mgVw3VP/view?usp=sharing

Our Community Partners: Feed Louisville

During our Stewardship emphasis, we are highlighting our community partners who make the work we do at DBCC possible. This week we are featuring Feed Louisville. Under the direction of Rhona Kamar and Donny Greene, since the pandemic began, Feed Louisville is making and distributing hot meals to the houseless community in Louisville. Based out of our kitchen at DBCC, Feeed Louisville has partnered with 14 area restaurants to serve 500 meals a day to the houseless and food insecure. They've now served over 50,000 meals!

You Had One Job! (Matthew 25:1-13)

Unfortunately, over the past four years, our country has been manufacturing more of these people who show up at our door, in our world, asking to be welcomed, asking to be allowed some human dignity, asking for a little peace and justice. So, we have an even bigger job than usual in trying to shape the world we live in to look a little bit more like one Jesus will recognize when he knocks on our door.

The hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the sick, the imprisoned—Jesus is all around us. Our job isn’t to figure out how to impress him when he comes at some future awe-inspiring apocalypse. According to St. Benedict, according to our Gospel for this morning, our job is to wait at the door and welcome him right now in the sometimes dark moment we live in.

---

Subscribe to us on iTunes!

Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2]

[1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cilvek0ykPvf2n4UBwQNGjUckHJw-Fgj/view?usp=sharing

Humility Ain't Easy (Matthew 23:1-12)

Even so, this is difficult to listen to if what you think Jesus came to do was to inflict niceness on an otherwise testy Near East. Jesus just sounds so … cranky.

Couldn’t we get the nice Jesus—the one who loves children and little old ladies? This whole fire-breathing itinerant prophet thing is tough to watch. I mean, this is going to be a difficult story to teach in Vacation Bible School.

But why?

I think it’s because that kind of honesty makes people uncomfortable, and our culture tells us that our responsibilities lie in lubricating the social gears rather than throwing sand in them. But sand is sometimes exactly what’s needed to get the machinery of the status quo to stop and look at the damage it’s producing.

---

Subscribe to us on iTunes!

Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2]

[1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TfmUsQ3MwqfTYObLg9PeomxRbCquNPh7/view?usp=sharing

Our Community Partners: La Casita Center

During our Stewardship emphasis, we are highlighting our community partners who make the work we do at DBCC possible. This week we are featuring Karina Barillas, Executive Director of La Casita Center. Karina and La Casita Center do vital work serving the Latinx population in Louisville. La Casita Center is also one of the partnering agencies involved with Colectivo Esperanza, a consortium of local agencies serving the Latinx community and Douglass Blvd. Christian Church, charged with distributing funds to Latinx families during the pandemic who don't otherwise have access to assistance from the local, state, or national government.

That May Be Enough (Deuteronomy 34:1-12)

Moses could tell us: only God knows where it all leads, what it finally means. We are the story God writes. God only knows. Whatever we or our lives as preachers, homemakers, executives, factory workers, or second sopranos means is ultimately up to God. We live therefore with the conviction that God really does put us to good purposes, even though we may not see clearly, even though we may not enter the promised land of concrete results and visible fulfillment in our exodus from here to there.

This is God’s rodeo, after all, not yours or mine.

---

Subscribe to us on iTunes!

Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2]

[1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c3m39THuuiyBMXZzia1NoPgUo5r8WUXo/view?usp=sharing

There's No Place Like Home (Jeremiah 24:1, 4-7)

It’s so easy to think that the safest place to be ... would be ... to be ... where we’d been ... where we used to be.

It feels so simple to think that if we could just recapture what was here before, we’d be able to handle what was happening now.

The message of Jeremiah, however, is that the safest place to be is the place where God has placed us—which is to say, where God has made a place for us. .

A World Worth Working for (Matthew 22:1-14)

And if the King is unworthy to rule his subjects, how do we who follow Jesus challenge such a leader? What is our responsibility in standing athwart one ruler's unjust treatment of his own subjects?

What this parable invites us to do in our context isn't necessarily to equate God and the King, but to contrast them. And if the King is unworthy to rule his subjects, how do we who follow Jesus challenge such a leader? What is our responsibility in standing athwart one ruler's unjust treatment of his own subjects?

What this parable invites us to do in our context isn't necessarily to equate God and the King, but to contrast them.

---

Subscribe to us on iTunes!

Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2]

[1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DeiARBjtkXFp-0y-z9mBOiYeDb-eYFhw/view?usp=sharing

Telling the Truth (Matthew 21:33-46)

As those who follow Jesus, our job is also to read the world in which we live, and to hold it up against the world God intends in God’s new creation. In other words, it’s our job to help paint a picture of the way we’re truly meant to live together—where everyone is taken care of, not just the high-rollers who have the power and the money live it up while making everyone else’s life miserable—those able to avoid paying their taxes and skate past the consequences of their actions, those able to get the best healthcare (the kind denied to the masses), those able to use or ignore those they consider beneath themselves.

Telling the truth about the world isn’t “divisive,” since true unity can’t be realized without truth-telling.

When Words Aren't Enough (Matthew 21:23-32)

The reign of God does not exist where black people have to cry out against state-sanctioned violence against them … sometimes, even in their own homes … where they have to live with a justice system that is designed to punish them disproportionately, where black families have to walk out into a world every day that has shown time and time again that they’re not valued, not welcome, and therefore, not safe.

We keep working on behalf of those who’ve been turned away by the very people who are supposed to be tending the vineyard—but who’ve proven themselves inadequate to the task by their continued failure to actually pull the weeds and dress the vines.

---

Subscribe to us on iTunes!

Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2]

[1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1N_cu6lxc-DCK1kcELwQ1dblTOaIOV2h3/view?usp=sharing

Collective Bargaining in the Reign of God (Matthew 20:1-16)

To the peasants Jesus was addressing, this is how the story would have been heard: the rich vineyard owner goes out to exploit the expendable people who otherwise can't feed themselves. (They are literally some of the most vulnerable people in the world.) Then the vineyard owner humiliates them by forcing them all to take the same pittance—regardless of how much they’d worked. In essence, the owner said to these desperate workers: “Your labor has only the value I give it.”

Rich landowners, in other words, would have been difficult to imagine as the hero in any story about peasants in Jesus' day. It would be like Jesus speaking to an immigrant community in New York City, and starting it by saying, "For the kingdom of heaven is like a sweatshop owner … or a payday lender.”

---

Subscribe to us on iTunes!

Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2]

[1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fMnLhctK5OSa-KWsMTslwI94P7m-dtPW/view?usp=sharing

What Does Forgiveness Even Mean? (Matthew 18:21-35)

So, what does that forgiveness look like? When, and under what circumstances should I offer it?

I wish there were an algorithm into which I could plug my experience, the depth of the hurt, the nature of the offender’s remorse and recovery, and have it spit out answers to those questions.

But I don’t have such an algorithm. All I have is a community—a community that, paradoxically, teaches me both that I’m always in need of forgiveness for my own boneheadedness and my complicity in systems that abuse and neglect those who are more vulnerable than me, as well as my own need to learn how to forgive others.

---

Subscribe to us on iTunes!

Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2]

[1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nia4YX01WdqxmcKwblQgTvCIEXm7SMQv/view?usp=sharing

The Truth Necessary for Community (Matthew 18:15-20)

This thickheaded shepherd is missing one sheep. He’s got 99 other sheep.

What does he do?

Does he write off the one lost sheep on his tax returns?

Does he casually post on other people’s Facebook page, “All sheep matter?” I mean, he’s got 99 well-behaved sheep, ones that haven’t given him heartache. Why risk losing anymore by going out hunting the one wayward sheep?

Who knows why he does it? But he leaves the 99, looking with knowing, loving eyes for that one inveterate, wandering little sheep—as a way of saying that this one is worth risking all the rest.

---

Subscribe to us on iTunes!

Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2]

[1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LjCHM8gGgHBPUowpYnJqUeH25vA7G6Zb/view?usp=sharing

The Geography of Revolution (Matthew 16:13-20)

Jesus announces a new reign that will stand in stark contrast to the empire of Rome.

In the old empire, the first shall be first, and the last shall mind their p's and q's and stay in their place.

In the new realm, conventional wisdom—and the social arrangements that ensure it—will be turned on its head. The first will be last, and the last will finally get the red carpet treatment to the front of the line.

---

Subscribe to us on iTunes!

Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2]

[1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qwTaCiByEUnxmqJ1tK1acqpTOPP7Rl8d/view?usp=sharing

The Bread of Mercy (Matthew 15:21-28)

There are people who’ve been red-lined clean out of the conversation about what a just society might look like, people who’ve effectively been barred from the voting booth where they might be heard about what equity might entail, people who’ve seen the dreams of their children squashed under the boot of those who’ve been told some people don’t matter.

But Jesus shows us by example that that’s not only not right—it’s the exact opposite of the new creation God is busy preparing.

---

Subscribe to us on iTunes!

Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2]

[1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OqkSZHP0B9EdS0AByxRU4YVMO2Ev-LgA/view?usp=sharing

The Teeth of the Storm (Matthew 14:22-33)

According to the text, Jesus says to him, "You of little faith, why did you doubt?"

Generally, we’re tempted to interpret this as a scolding, as Jesus' annoyance with Peter for not keeping his eyes on the one who walks on water.

And yet, it may not be a scolding at all. It sounds so much more like pleading: "How could you not know it was me? How could you not believe that as you walked into the terrifying darkness that there was a hand to hold you up? The hand that formed creation from chaos, the hand that brought forth water from the rock, is the hand that reaches out to you as you walk into the teeth of the storm."

---

Subscribe to us on iTunes!

Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2]

[1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UwdM8uWHQ9OTTG56txkxF_YhFxrVXpx2/view?usp=sharing

A Different Kind of Party (Matthew 14:13-21)

Matthew shows us something about the way the rulers and the powerful of this world usually operate: there’s often more than enough for everybody to enjoy, but somebody always ends up dead. But when God gets the world God wants, though scarcity seems to rule, there’s more than enough to give life to everyone.

---

Subscribe to us on iTunes!

Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2]

[1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AFfQEHsYIN7lV6ueFTijB6t4tlVdXqW-/view?usp=sharing

More Than Conquerors (Romans 8:26-39)

In God's story, we don't sit passively waiting for an apocalypse in which God comes to smite God's enemies and reward the faithful. In the story God tells about what's real and what's not, we work in the midst of suffering to help the world begin to see what God's reign of peace and justice will look like when it's finally accomplished.

We're not a people who sit waiting for the chaos to be tamed, for a little stability, the relief that comes when the pain stops. We are more than conquerors who work with God in Christ to proclaim a new story of welcome and abundance, of truth over lies, of equity for all over access for a few, of just laws over the self-interested edicts of the powerful. We work with God to tame the chaos for everyone, not just for the few at the top of the heap.

---

Subscribe to us on iTunes!

Sermon text: [ web][1] | [ doc][2]

[1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gr0fVY3ysakSix_9w3NHmJbSnj6SWq-b/view?usp=sharing