Douglass Church - Douglass Blvd Christian Church

The temptation isn't to want bad things. The temptation is to want good things so badly that we'll accept any path that gets us there. Safety. Order. Security. Provision. These are real goods. The question is whether the path to them builds the kind of community we actually want to live in, or whether it produces the desired outcome but poisons the groundwater. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Photo by Dominique Hicks on Unsplash What comes next? They don’t know. But they show up anyway. The people organizing for immigrant rights in this city know the raids haven’t stopped. They know the laws haven’t changed and that families are being torn apart while politicians argue about masks and body cams. Those people stand in the gap between the devastating reality and whatever restoration looks like, and they show up. Not because they got a sneak preview of the end of the story. But because something holds them steady when they feel like they can’t stand up any longer. Something they can’t even explain. Subscribe to us on iTunes

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash So, what does this overflow righteousness look like when it's communal rather than private? Private righteousness claims: I don't murder, I don't steal, I'm polite to others, I volunteer sometimes, I wash my hands after using the bathroom, I'm a good person. Overflow righteousness says: Our community redistributes resources so nobody goes hungry. We shelter people the state wants to cage, and absorb legal liability to protect the vulnerable. The budget reflects that we value other people’s survival over institutional preservation. We organize collectively to confront systems that grind people down. Pr

Photo by Hugo Fergusson on Unsplash That's what the Beatitudes are meant to do to us. Not to make us feel noble about suffering, or teach us how to spiritualize oppression. But to form solidarity as a reflex. To make us the kind of people who stand up when cruelty shows up and starts pushing everybody around. The kind of people who refuse the empire's categories of real and not-real, worthy and not-worthy, counted and disposable. It’s formation for resistance. Not resistance as a moment of drama, but resistance as a way of life. The Beatitudes aren't entrance requirements for heaven. They're a description of what it looks like when peo

Photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-people-catching-fishes-2150362/ Because the measure of our faithfulness isn't whether we see the domination system collapse in our lifetime. The measure is whether we tell the truth about the Lamb who's already ended it. John the Baptist pointed to Jesus and said, "Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." He said it once. And two thousand years later, we're still saying it. Still pointing. Still witnessing. Still waiting for the fullness of what God’s already begun. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Jordan River—Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons Jesus didn't start his ministry by going to the halls of power to make deals with the folks in charge. He went to a river where ordinary people were gathering, hungry for change but with no political clout to make it happen. Jesus stood with them in the water. He got muddy with them. He submitted to the same baptism of repentance they were submitting to, even though tradition says he didn't need to repent of anything. Why? Because God's way into the world isn't from the top down. It's from the bottom up. It's from the margins in. It's Emmanuel, God with us, and the "us" isn't the people in t

Photo by Ahmed akacha: https://www.pexels.com/photo/elderly-woman-holding-shovel-10629469/ John ends the prologue with this: "From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace." Grace replacing grace. Wave after wave of divine generosity. Not scarcity and competition for limited resources. Not "there's not enough to go around, so we have to hoard and protect." Grace upon grace. Abundance. Enough for everybody, especially those the people in charge say aren't worth feeding. That's the economy of the tent. That's what happens when the throne room is among people who've lost everything, and God starts building community based on sh

I don't know what the coming year is going to hold. None of us do. But I do know this: there'll be moments when the costs are rising, the pressure’s building, and somebody near us gets exposed, and we'll have a choice to make. We can be righteous in a way that doesn't cost us anything. Or we can be righteous the way Joseph was righteous, which means stepping into the line of fire and attaching our names to the people the world would rather shame. And then trusting that Emmanuel is with us in exactly that place. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Photo by JESUS PERGES: https://www.pexels.com/photo/grayscale-photography-of-man-doing-backflip-1739321/ The church's job is painfully simple and painfully hard. We have to learn to read the signs differently. We have to stop treating the category “criminal” as if it tells us everything we need to know about a person. We have to stop assuming the people with microphones are the ones whose authority matters most. We have to get suspicious of our own instinct to label people for our convenience. Because Jesus is a terrible respecter of society's signage. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Photo by Felix Mittermeier: https://www.pexels.com/photo/grayscale-photography-of-chessboard-game-957312/ Remember: the cross is what happens when you tell the truth about power. But resurrection is God's answer to the cross. And we live between the two, in this time when the old age is dying and the new age is being born, and we have to decide which age we belong to. We have to decide whether we're going to use people as props for our comfort or see them as children of God. Whether we're going to accept a world where people are fuel for machines or build communities of resurrection. Whether we're going to stay silent while fascism ri

Photo by Min An: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-vintage-typewriter-1425146/ Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who abuse you. Turn the other cheek. Give to everyone who begs. Do to others as you would have them do to you. These aren't impossible riddles for religious overachievers. They're the habits of a people who know they've been welcomed while they were still a long way off. They're what belonging looks like in work boots. If I know my life has been called blessed before I could prove anything, then I can stop guarding my worth like a secret. I can risk forgi

But abiding teaches us a few stubborn questions: Does this freedom hold when the empire gets mad at us? Does it make more room at the table? Can it make it through Good Friday and still show up on Sunday? Jesus' freedom can. It walked through death and came out holding the keys to the jail. It taught Galilean fishermen to lay down nets and pick up neighbors. It taught a tax collector to give the money back and still feel welcome at the supper table. It teaches frightened congregations to stop asking "Who's my patron?" and start praying "Our Father, who art right here in the middle of this mess with the rest of us." Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

This table today, set by God, is its own bridge that crosses every chasm. We come to the bread and the cup as people who need help, as well as the people who can help. We come to remember Jesus, who crossed a greater chasm than any we've built, and who returns to find whether we've learned what he's been trying to teach us. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

Following Jesus costs a great deal more than we’re able to afford on our own. Let’s not kid ourselves, there are crosses with our names on them, just waiting for us. And to be clear: in Luke, “take up your cross” isn’t code for generic misery, like “my bunions are acting up.” The cross is the predictable blowback you get for aligning publicly with Jesus and his upside-down reign in a world organized to keep the powerful comfortable. It’s the social shame and concrete political and economic risk that come when you side with the people Jesus sides with. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

So what would it look like if we lived this out? It’d look like neighborhoods where homeowners invite renters. Schools where kids who get free lunch sit at the head table. Churches where people on the margins don't just get charity, they get justice. I think it'd look like budgets that stop hunting for quarters in the couch cushions when it comes to feeding the hungry, while writing blank checks for weapons and tax breaks for the folks who need them least. It'd look like communities where the poor aren't a problem to solve but guests of honor at the feast. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

And we’re the key. We need to make sure this room isn’t welcoming to indifference. We need to advocate that meetings halt until anonymous faces have names. We need to fight for budgets that carry a compass and know when they’ve strayed from their true direction. We need our prayers to have hands and feet. We need to straighten what’s gotten crooked—not because we can solve everything, but because we refuse to keep the ox watered while a daughter stays bent. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

We live in a world where so many go to bed terrified—parents for their children’s safety, and children for their parents, that they won’t be targeted and rounded up just because of the color of their skin; but Jesus announces a world where everyone has a place to go to feel safe from harm, a sanctuary from the hatred and violence. We live in a world that feels like it needs the fire of God’s transformation, a new way of living together. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

In the world God desires, apparently, the more we have, the less we get to choose whether or not to give. Viewing giving as an act of justice that the giver is obliged to perform helps correct power imbalances by affirming that those who are first will be last, so that those who are last may be first. It is God’s good pleasure, according to Jesus, to give us a world where the coin of the realm isn’t about grasping for everything we can get, but about selling what we have and sharing it. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

To be rich toward God is to divest from the myth of self-sufficiency. To stop pretending we'll live forever if we just insulate ourselves well enough. It means investing in what death can't repossess. And it means doing it now—because by the time the tow truck shows up, it's already too late to check your balance. Jesus isn't just warning us. He's calling us out of the illusion of permanence and into the grace-filled community of participation—the kind of investment where the gold doesn’t rust or the moth destroy. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc

But here’s the thing, real prayer to the God who doesn't do shame produces people who stop using shame as a sorting tool. If God rushes in to help with zero calculations, then maybe the question isn't "How do I sound more spiritual?" but "Am I reflecting God's shameless generosity or humanity's shame-soaked gatekeeping?" Refugees, broke neighbors, starving babies in Gaza, overwhelmed friends showing up at your door like it's midnight and they're out of options? They’re not a spiritual test. They're an invitation to look like the God we claim to follow. Subscribe to us on iTunes! Sermon text: web | doc