Douglass Blvd Christian Church

an open and affirming community of faith

2005 Douglass Blvd

(502) 452-2629

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

Lent and Pancakes

February 14, 2013  /  Geoff Wallace

Obviously, Lent is a time that is set aside for Christains to focus on our spiritual lives with prayer and fasting. However, the fasting of things that separate us from God often is equal to vices in our lives of which we are trying to rid ourselves of anyway.

Coffee, anyone? 

So, in fact, Lent often becomes everyone's last ditch effort at a New Years Resolution until Jan. 1 rolls back around. Now, I'm not saying that reneging on your Lenten fast for the Creator is going to land you in eternal Hellfire (or am I?). But if you've had trouble ridding yourself of bad habits or vices, maybe you've just been going about it from the wrong angle.

Maybe you're just not making enough pancakes.

“Regarding “The First Pancake Problem”
Anyone who’s ever made America’s favorite round and flat breakfast food is familiar with the phenomenon of The First Pancake.
No matter how good a cook you are, and no matter how hard you try, the first pancake of the batch always sucks.
It comes out burnt or undercooked or weirdly shaped or just oddly inedible and aesthetically displeasing. Just ask your kids.
At least compared to your normal pancake—and definitely compared to the far superior second and subsequent pancakes that make the cut and get promoted to the pile destined for the breakfast table—the first one’s always a disaster.
I’ll leave it to the physicists and foodies in the gallery to develop a unified field theory on exactly why our pancake problem crops up with such unerring dependability. But I will share an orthogonal theory: you will be a way happier and more successful cook if you just accept that your first pancake is and always will be a universally flukey mess.
But, that shouldn’t mean you never make another pancake.”
— http://www.43folders.com/2011/01/07/first-pancake

I love Merlin Mann. And while he isn't a Master of Lent-ology, he does have a way of understanding how screwed up we can be when we're trying to fix how screwed up we are.

So, read his article, and, you know, if you really want it to say "Lent" somewhere, this one.

Hint: One is way more entertaining.

And then, read this one if you don't believe Pancakes and Lent are related.

r-PANCAKE-RACES-large570.jpg

Happy Fasting!

Shouldn't I Look More Like My Role Models?

January 31, 2013  /  DBCC

Martin Luther King.jpeg

By Derek Penwell

Shouldn't a question about who you consider to be your role model elicit some kind of immediate response? Shouldn't a face or a name pop into your mind? The names I think of seem too easy: Jesus and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Perhaps I have something of the martyr about me.) If those are the people who come to mind when I'm asked about my role models, shouldn't I have some sense of how I model my life after them? That is to say, shouldn't role models occupy some more tangible place within one's life than easy go-to answers, used to forestall reflection rather than to encourage it?

I can't explain why I find this troubling. Perhaps, because as an Aristotelian, I take emulation to be the sine qua non of growth, learning, and maturity. In other words, I believe that everything worth being in life comes from emulating the actions, behavior, emotions, and gestures of others. That's how children learn, how arc-welders learn, how doctors and philosophers and fry cooks learn. Our cultural fantasies about the self-made individual notwithstanding, we learn who we are not by making it up as we go along, but by watching and imitating--even when we don't realize that's what we're doing.

So, what does it mean that I don't have a more conscious idea about how I imitate the people I say I admire? Does it mean that I'm kidding myself about how invested I am in becoming like them? It could be that I only like the idea of Jesus and Martin Luther King, Jr., but am unwilling to take the difficult steps to live my life like them--a possibility I don't like, even though there may be some truth in it. It could be that I have so thoroughly identified with them that I don't have to think about living like them--a possibility I'd like to think is true, even though I realize it's not. Perhaps, my attachment to Jesus and MLK as role models is some strange admixture of the two--a hybrid of fear and stumbling attempts at getting it right.

I'd like to give a more certain answer to the question about the place of role models in my life. But I will console myself with the knowledge that, though naming a role model is insufficient to the task of emulating a role model, not having any names is a recipe for failure.

Sermon Podcast: The Year of the Lord's Favor (Luke 4:14-21)

January 29, 2013  /  DBCC

Rev. Penwell:

"So, just so we have this straight, Jesus comes to the synagogue on the Sabbath, “as was his custom”; he stands up to read, and is given the Isaiah scroll. At which time he reads a well-known Messianic text. Shaping up to be an interesting day, right?

"But then, in the first words Jesus speaks as an adult in Luke’s gospel (apart from reading scripture), he says “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

"Yikes!"

Enough said?

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Sermon Podcast: I Will Not Keep Silent (Isaiah 62:1-5)

January 22, 2013  /  DBCC

Rev. Penwell on the voice in the lonely silence of despair.

But then God speaks a Word into the tumult—not much, a whisper, a baby in a cow barn in the middle of nowhere—and we’re given a name, we’re made kings and queens, “crowns of beauty in the hand of the LORD, and a royal diadem in the hand of [our] God.” And we’re aware that our lives are a gift of God, that we are no longer forsaken and desolate.

Good stuff this week.

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Excelente Series from NPR - "Losing Our Religion"

January 22, 2013  /  DBCC

Any NPR listeners out there?

If you are, you’ve probably heard some, if not all, of this series.

Morning Edition (WBUR Boston) ran a series last week based upon the trend of emerging generations clicking “none of the above” on the existential religious affiliation survey.

Rev. Penwell’s last post on [D]mergent engages this very topic, tying it to the somewhat ominous (if not prophetic) quote by the Rev. Dr. MLK Jr.

Check it out. You’ll be glad you did.

Losing Our Religion

The Gospel according to ... Dave Matthews?

January 15, 2013  /  DBCC  /  Source

“I love that this word comes from some guy who got kicked out of Chicago for being too much of a rock star. Can’t we see? Can’t we hear? The Gospel does not belong to the Church. It never did. It belongs to the world, to any and all who lift up their eyes, their hearts. Dave is a present day Magi.
”
— http://anglobaptist.org/blog/posts/sermon-the-gospel-of-the-world/

This is just a taste of the awesomeness of Tripp Hudgins, otherwise known as Anglobaptist. This is from a sermon he wrote, which is linked above.

Progressive Christian Hipster-ism: A Cautionary Tale.

January 10, 2013  /  DBCC  /  Source

Christian Piatt, Director of Church Growth and Development at First Christian Church in Portland, OR, wrote a series of articles at the end of last year spelling out the biggest “Christian Cliches” in more traditional churches.

The Emergent Church (our categorization as such notwithstanding) has a very different set, that could be just as damaging in our interactions with others of faith and otherwise if we fail to acknowledge them.[1]

  1. It is important to note that in none of these suggestions is he denouncing anyone's intentions when using these turns of phrase. He simply offers one an awareness of the kind of unappealing front one can put up to those outside one's own social circles.  ↩

Awesome New Series on Sexuality and The Church by Rachel Held Evans

January 08, 2013  /  DBCC

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.

Sermon Podcast: Your Light Has Come (Isaiah 60:1-6)

January 07, 2013  /  DBCC

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

January 03, 2013  /  DBCC

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.