The Problem with Empire (Matthew 4:12-23)

But this new realm Jesus announces is the kind of good news that appeals to everybody else—the other 99%. In fact, the news is so good that, according to Matthew, "Jesus went throughout Galilee teaching in [the] synagogues and proclaiming" it—healing the social, physical, and economic disease in the land.

Because this new realm is best exemplified not so much by Jesus' rhetorical gifts but through his traveling about and “curing every disease and every sickness among the people."

In other words, the “kingdom of heaven” concerns itself with healing instead of domination and violence. It seeks out not the most powerful but the people everybody else walks past without noticing—the sick, the poor, the hungry, the houseless, and those who've lived virtually every day with the fear of what tomorrow holds for them.

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Come and See (John 1:29-42)

The scriptures present any number of images of God—God the Lion of Judah, the watchful shepherd, the heartbroken lover, the vigilant protector, the loving parent who expects more from us than we’re often willing to give, the vulnerable shepherd who places God’s life in our hands. So why focus all your energy on a God who seems perpetually aggrieved, who prefers manipulation to attraction, whose greatest desire seems to be to set down impossible expectations in the hope that nobody will meet them so God can finally do what God, according to them, has wanted to do all along? Lower the boom and send us all to hell.

And if that’s the God you serve, isn’t that the example you imitate? If you believe that a bitter, resentful, and suspicious God is the image in which you were created, is it any wonder when you turn out to be bitter, resentful, and suspicious of everyone else who doesn’t meet *your standards?

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The Clash of Kings

But that gives us a clue about the character of the new world God is creating. True power, God’s creative power, will never be found in the place logic tells us to look, among the people logic tells us to expect.

This new realm that Jesus inaugurates will always be found among the least likely people in the most outrageous places. People and places no intelligent, successful, influential folks would ever think to look.

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Help Is on the Way! (Luke 23:33-43)

Jesus was crucified not because he annoyed the Jewish religious leaders, as has been popularly taught for years, but because Caesar’s goons were afraid he’d lead a revolt and try to take over Jerusalem. And they wanted to nip that one in the bud while communicating to the hoi polloi that making political noise could land you in hot water.

And this, in a nutshell, is why everyone was so baffled and upset by Jesus. Everybody, his followers, the general population, the two criminals whose company he was now keeping all expected something different from him. They wanted a messiah—which was as much a political term as a religious one. Everyone, including the Romans, thought Jesus was going to incite a rebellion to overthrow the Roman government.

In other words, they wanted Superman—not some humiliated peasant.

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But What If It’s Only a Dream? (Isaiah 65:17-25)

What if, for a world satisfied with things it already takes for granted—that white men should always occupy the top of the food chain and that a person’s money or power ought to be the measure of their worth—what if our job as God’s children is to unleash the poetry about a “new heaven and a new earth”—a place where preposterous, unthinkable things are possible?

A place where there are no more cries of distress, where the work of our hands is not claimed by someone else for their profit, a place where children are blessed and protected, where the wolf poses no threat to the lamb, where people live without fear that those in power can come along and steal their security, or their dignity, or their bodies.

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Blessed? (Luke 6:20-31)

According to Jesus, the reign of God is for losers. It’s for all the people who’re afraid that they’re not worthy, that they don’t have enough going on to commend themselves. It's for everyone who's spent too much time feeling left out, left behind, left holding the bag—all those people who are so casually ignored by everyone else every day.

The good news of the Gospel is that no one has it all together—least of all, the people who cling to wealth and power like a life preserver in an angry sea. Our lives aren’t blessed because we’ve managed to do amazing and wonderful things that make everybody else envious. Our lives are blessed because God desires us, regardless of our condition. We are saints, in other words, not because we’re perfect but in spite of the fact that we’re not.

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Trying to See (Luke 19:1-10)

The promise of the reign of God is that we will all be seen for who we really are … and we won’t have to worry anymore about everyone seeing all of us—even the humiliating parts.

And now, if we want to follow Jesus, our job is to try to seek out others who are desperately trying to be seen themselves—to see them as they truly are … children of God, people God loves just as much as God loves us.

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Getting Angry for the Right Reasons (Luke 18:9-14)

It should come as no surprise that Jesus sets this parable within the confines of the temple in Jerusalem, which kept you constantly aware of where everyone fits into the great cosmic org chart. There was a wall in the temple to separate the Gentiles from the Jews. A wall separating the women from the men and the priests from the *ordinary men. And there were walls separating the high priest from everyone else.

Walls divide us by identifying who’s allowed in and who has to stand outside with the other riff-raff.

But Jesus says that all the walls that decide for us who’s in and who’s out are the problem. They’re convenient, to be sure. But the real problem is the walls render people disposable without requiring us to look them in the eye and peer into the brokenness of their hearts to see the children God created. Children God loves as much as us.

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Grant Me Justice (Luke 18:1-8)

We pray not so that God might get frustrated and finally provide us with what we think we deserve but so that God's reign here on earth might be revealed. A reign where the vulnerable and the destitute, the unseen and the unheard, the abused and the neglected will not be an afterthought to those in power but whose protection is the very reason power gets wielded in the first place.

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Using Only What You've Got (Luke 17:5-10)

And Luke doesn’t seem helpful when he says, “What? Did you think you were getting a Barcalounger and a lifetime supply of attaboys?”

But you see, in the reign of God, that’s good news. You don’t have to feel like a failure just because your life with Jesus isn’t one long unbroken string of notable successes. Just because you don’t always feel like you believe hard enough. Just because people aren’t breaking down doors to tell you what a great job you’re doing.

If you’re doing it the way Luke suggests, following Jesus may not only not feel like a reward; it may be the very thing that lands you in trouble.

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Navigating the Thin Places (Luke 17-11-19)

In a world where crosses and leper colonies exist to dispose of “human waste”—Jesus says “no.”

In the face of all the name-calling and lynching and fighting and warring, Jesus appears, takes his place on the tree, and offers up what, at first, sounds like a whispered “no”—weak and ineffectual. Just the words of a dying man on a government hit list.

But the echoes of that “no” reverberate.

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What Happens When You Realize the World You Thought You Lived in Isn't the One You Inhabit? (Luke 16-19-31)

I mean, if the rich man isn’t the hero and Lazarus isn’t a cautionary tale you tell your kids, so they’ll do their geometry homework and get into Harvard, then everything we’ve taken for granted as true about *this world gets chucked out the window.

If we’re judged more by how we treat the invisible people, the people everyone agrees it’s okay to ignore, than by whether or not we’ve checked all the boxes for morality everybody can see when we go out in public, that changes everything, doesn’t it?

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Blaming the Wrong Person (Luke 16:1-16)

But here, I would like to suggest that Jesus isn’t just talking about people with money. He’s talking about the systems of domination, exploitation, and violence that keep money in the hands of the powerful and out of the "grabby" hands of the perpetually unsatisfied poor—because they’re always complaining about how they don’t have enough to eat or find shelter.

But Jesus turns that whole way of conceiving the world on its head. He winds up celebrating Robin Hood and trashing the Sheriff of Nottingham.

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The Real Reason for Rejoicing (Luke 15:1-10)

Because they bear part of God’s heart with them, who do we care about so much that we’re willing to risk the wrath of the folks in charge just to welcome them, to have a meal with them, to call them our family?

We need to be acutely aware of the implications of this question in a world in which some of our fellow travelers have to point out to the rest of us that—given the suffering they’ve historically endured (and endure to this day)—their lives matter too.

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Don’t Bring Anything with You (Luke 14:25-33)

Part of the reason Jesus puts out this disclaimer about counting the cost is that too often people think they what they want from faith is ease-of-use, friction-free, pre-packaged, no muss—no fuss, no ironing necessary.

But Jesus knows that a few hardy souls aren’t in the market for easy; they want interesting. The kind of people Jesus is appealing to are looking for meaning, purpose, adventure.

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Playing by the Rules (Luke 14:1, 7-14)

Jesus isn’t inviting us to forget about this world and concentrate on the next. He’s inviting us to begin living as if this new realm of God’s hospitality were already present, fully realized right here, right now.

And the thing of it is, when we begin to practice this sort of countercultural hospitality, we soon come to learn that we were never in charge of the guest list or the seating chart in the first place.

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Adult Sunday School on Modern Christian Thought Resumes on September 11

Because of the pandemic, we haven't had Sunday School for almost 2 1/2 years. But as things seem to be improving, we've decided to resume Adult Sunday School on September 11th, at 9:45 a.m.

We're going to be studying Modern Christian Thought, the class that Derek taught at the University of Louisville last semester.

Note: You don't have to have any knowledge of the subject to participate in the class (though many of the things we'll discuss will be familiar to many people).

Note 2: You don't need to sign up for the class. Just show up, and we'll take it from there.

Note 3: Everyone's welcome! You don't need to be a member of Douglass Boulevard Christian Church to participate.

Here's a blurb from the syllabus:

The focus of study will be on the development of Christianity from the Pre-Reformation through the rise of Evangelicalism in the U.S. Exploration of the ways that Christianity has responded to and/or helped shape modernity will give the student a more complete understanding of some of the reasons for the emergence of certain social, economic, and political themes that have led to Christianity’s significant impact on Western culture.

The background texts (not required for this class, but helpful if you're into that kind of nerdy thing) are:

Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity: The Reformation to the Present Day, Harper One, 2010. Stephen Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2003. Randal Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right, Eerdmans, 2021.

Being Set Free (Luke 13:10-17)

So the question this story raises for us is, where are we working to bring tear down the barriers put in place by the powerful (intentional or not) that serve to keep people isolated, unseen, forgotten, but not yet gone?

Who are the bent-over people whose faces we lift to finally look in their eyes?

Will we be the people God depends on to see the invisible people and remember their first names?

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You Who Were Far Off (Eph. 2:11-22)

The thing is, though, you can’t see them from far off. You have to get right up next to people in order to see them, I mean really see them. And by the grace of God and the mystery of Christ, we’ve been brought near enough, according to Paul, to see them no longer as enemies, or aliens, or foreigners, or strangers, but as human beings, as the children for whom God is creating a whole new world.

And it is the one whom I thought was my enemy, the one whom, to me, was a stranger, who is bound with me (walls torn down) to be now the dwelling place of God.

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Guest Preacher: Chuck Lewis