Embracing Mystery in the New Year: Ten Essential Practices
Imagine if your New Year's wasn't about fixing or improving, but about deepening and transforming, about embracing the holy mystery at the heart of the world.
Awesome New Series on Sexuality and The Church by Rachel Held Evans
Rachel Held Evans, author of Evolving in Monkeytown and A Year of Biblical Womanhood, has begun a new blog series for 2013 called Sexuality and The Church. Throughout the course of the coming year she will be discussing what scriptures have to say about sexuality, as well as inviting the stories of folks who have dealt with these themes in their own lives.
This is one of the good ones, y'all.
If you'd like to find out more about her, click here to visit her website. You can also follow her on Twitter at @rachelheldevans.
Thank YOU for making their Holiday special.
Sermon Podcast: Your Light Has Come (Isaiah 60:1-6)
Rev. Penwell brings in the new year with a bang!
Do you see? Our ability to hear this passage has as much to do with where we’re standing when the message comes as with what the message says. There are a lot of folks here today who are pretty well situated. But there are other folks in the world who are trying to figure out how they’re going to make it through the week without their whole world falling apart.
Heavy.
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A Bit of Humility for the Journey
Instead of complaining that God had hidden Himself, you will give Him thanks for not having revealed so much of Himself: and you will also give Him thanks for not having revealed Himself to haughty sages, unworthy to know so holy a God.
Two kinds of persons know Him: those who have a humble heart, and who love lowliness, whatever kind of intellect they may have, high or low; and those who have sufficient understanding to see the truth, whatever opposition they may have to it.
Pascal, Pensées
I find it fascinating that in a faith, as complex and ambiguous as Christianity can sometimes be, there are people who are altogether too eager to claim that they have cornered the market on God. Even more fascinating, and perhaps more disturbing, is the grand certainty with which people make claims about that God—who God hates, for instance. There are people who can give you five steps to a better prayer life, eight steps to reaching the lost, three principles for ethical living, and ten days to a deeper faith. There are people that are too quick with an answer to tough questions: Why did my child die? Why do I need to pray? Why has Jesus not returned? Why are there hungry people in a world that produces more food than it can consume?
For Christians, faith is paradoxical. On the one hand, we find simplicity: We were separated from God because of sin, and God took pains through Jesus to reconcile us to God’s self. On the other hand, the way that that faith plays itself out in everyday life is vastly more perplexing: How am I to live as a Christian in the context of a cut-throat business environment? Are my loyalties to God or the country of my birth? How do I cope with the feeling that God is somehow absent? How do I hold love those who are different from me?
For those of us for whom it is not always possible to affirm that faith just “gets sweeter and sweeter as the days go by,” for those of us who don’t have the handy theological slide-rule that much of popular Christianity seems always at the ready to produce, providing a snappy answer to the faith’s toughest questions, for those of us for whom faith is oftentimes more a “Jacobian” struggle with God than a tender walk “to the garden alone,” we must remember that our job as Christians is not to produce trite sayings in the face of difficult questions, but to struggle together in humility toward the truth.
Humility and truth—it is next to impossible to find the latter without the former. Perhaps the three most important words in theology are “I don’t know.” Faith is an arduous journey, often through deep darkness, which frequently provides more questions than answers; it is not a sunny jaunt that requires nothing more of us than to memorize a few trite sayings. Don’t be overly alarmed, though, because the journey upon which we embark has as its solace the fact that we do it together, hand in hand, with Jesus ever near.
Rev. Blanchard rolls in at #12!
Rev. Bojangles Blanchard (Highland Baptist Church), Rev. Sherry Roby (Open Door Community Fellowship), and Rev. Derek Penwell (DBCC) at a public rally this summer.
The ordination of our good friend Maurice 'Bojangles' Blanchard was featured in the Courier Journal's Unforgettable Images of 2012. Of course, we already know he's a pretty unforgettable guy.
Here is the article he was featured in this summer.
Congrats, Bojangles!
Happy Holidays! (Belated)
We hope you've all enjoyed the Holidays with your loved ones. After a wonderful break for Christmas and New Year, we are ready to get back to delivering content and keeping you updated on all of the things going on here at DBCC, our community, and our world.
Merry Christmas!
Happy New Year!
Welcome to the year of our Lord, Two Thousand Thirteen. We're excited to be spending it with you.
Veni, Veni Emmanuel
The Lord Is Coming: Look Busy! Reflections on Malachi 3:1-4
"There is more to him than a mere warm-up act for the main stage appearance of Jesus. Still, I fear he will be remembered by Christians as a predictor rather than a truth-teller for his own time and ours. We would all do well to take him more seriously as a prophet who warns us that when the messenger of the covenant shows up, he will have more in mind for us than a sweet baby and a tinsel-filled tree."
Gaudete Sunday: How Can You Feel Joy After Newtown Shooting?
“This morning we hold our pain and we look for something better. And maybe, just maybe, we see glimpses of the joy that not even the greatest violence can totally destroy.”
In our attempts to process the horrors of this world, we are reminded that the Peace of Christ lives in these moments of pain, suffering, and confusion. It trancends them all to create a light in our darkness.
Sermon Podcast: The Best News (Luke 3:7-18)
A Prayer Upon the Death of Children
Rev. Penwell in response to Friday:
“Help us to find the words to put to our rage and despair, to find the words to comfort those who need be comforted, to find the words to speak justice and peace to a world bent on filling graves with the bodies of children, to find the words necessary not to meet this violence with more violence.”
And all of God's children said, "Amen."
David’s Sling: Israel, Hezbollah, and the Path to Peace
Adam Ericksen hits the nail on the head. Great commentary on the lessons of violence embedded in the story of David and Goliath, as well as the misuse of scripture as a beacon for glorified violence.
Sermon Podcast: Crying Out in the Wilderness (Luke 3:1-6)
Rev. Penwell examines what "the Wilderness" really is, and gives insight to John the Baptist during this Advent season.
We're on a timeline! (it's a good thing)
The website Religious Tolerance.org has listed us in their timeline for significant steps toward marriage equality!
Click here to see what they said!
Looks like we're in good company.
Suicide Prevention Seminar w/ Donald Taylor
Mark your calendars, folks.
On January 26th from 9:30 to 11:30am, Donald Taylor of Louisville Youth Group (LYG) is going to be visiting Douglass Blvd. to educate us and the Highlands Community on suicide prevention.
Think of it as a CPR/First Aid course. The idea is to empower ourselves with tools to save lives in our everyday. If you'd like to know more about the program, check out the Kentucky Suicide Prevention Group website.
Sermon Podcast: The Fierce Urgency of Now (Matt. 4:12-23)
Well, the title pretty much speaks for itself, now doesn't it?
Rev. Penwell, folks.
The Gift Tree is up!
Want to shop for yet another person this Christmas? Of course you do!
In order to help our friends at the Freedom House, we have a tree full of Christmas Wishes from their children. Just take an ornament, buy the gift, wrap it, and bring it back to the DBCC Church Office with the Ornament attached.
Truly, you all, this is a fantastic partnership we have with these folks and the Volunteers of America. Be sure to pick one up this Sunday.
Merry Christmas!
It's All about Community
At one point the blog, [D]mergent, posed the question: Where is the church's greatest strength? It offered six possible answers: community, worship, personal morality, spirituality, social justice, and other. The poll wasn't intended to be scientific in either its methodology or its conclusions. Nevertheless, I think the results are important to highlight.
With six possible answers one would assume that the leading vote-getter would garner only a plurality, that a majority would be difficult to come by. In this case, however, 'community' received 50% of the vote (or as near a majority as it's possible to get). Tied for second were 'worship' and 'social justice,' followed by 'other,' 'personal morality,' and last, 'spirituality' (which received no votes). Some of the answers included under 'other' could be summarized in this way:
- Centrality of Christ, Jesus
- Clear proclamation of the gospel
- The potential the church enjoys
- The church's preoccupation with self-preservation (sarcasm, I think)
- All of the above
In my interactions with people about how the church is changing in these uncertain times, it has become increasingly clear that whatever else the church may be (or fail to be), it has the potential in many people's minds to offer some kind of meaningful place for people to belong. For a variety of reasons (e.g., a more mobile and transient work force, a decreasing sense of being rooted in a particular place, longer work weeks with longer commutes, etc.) finding community gets harder as time passes.
Previous generations (not that far back) in the U.S. could reliably depend on living within rooted frameworks of social interaction--which is to say, you used to be able to count on being born, working, and eventually dying within the same nexus of communal relationships. And while such a life rooted to a particular place is still a possibility, very few people can trust in it as a likely option for themselves anymore.
This social fragmentation has people yearning for human contact within the structural framework of community--whether that's through clubs, sports teams, non-profit volunteerism, or other affinity groups. The church must come to terms with the intense longing, especially among young people, for a place to belong. The church is a community. And rightly ordered, it is a beautiful community.
- It should both challenge and nurture you.
- It should provide accountability across a broad spectrum of human endeavors and interests, as well as a place to be free from the expectation that you are somebody's "project," the object of someone else's self-improvement agenda.
- It should inspire you to be better, refusing to let you off the hook too easily, but also holding your hand when you can't remember why being better is something anyone would want to do.
- It should both give you a chance to make friends, as well as to help you understand what true friendship looks like.
Community, however, is not a good as such. Communities improperly ordered, like families, can do indescribable damage. Moreover, similar to other communities, Christian community can fail to live up to its highest calling--which is to equip people for the reign of God--wreaking just as much havoc in the process. Consequently, we ought to be careful not to romanticize community--Christian or otherwise.
But rightly conceived, community seems to be very much what the church at its best has to offer. We would do well to reflect more intentionally about just how we can cultivate the kind of space that people seem increasingly to need.
Sermon Podcast: The Alpha and the Omega ( Revelation 1:4-8)
On Sunday, we were delighted in welcoming Rev. Joseph Pusateri to the pulpit to deliver the sermon in Rev. Penwell's absence. Just in time for the holidays, Rev. Pusateri examines time, tradition, and our service to a God that both encompasses and transcends them.
If you'd like to read more of Rev. Pusateri's stuff, check him out at his blog, Isa 61.
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