Clare Rutz - Youth Minister/Outreach Coordinator

My entire professional life has been built on failures. When I first got going I thought I was going to fix our country’s educational system. Then I taught public school in New York City for a quick second and realized only God himself could take on that task. Then, as many twenty-somethings do, I figured I would take a stab at global poverty. I vetted, visited, and temporarily helped small non-profits across Asia, but I was only as good as my commitment and, at 22, I still wanted to be important. So I moved to D.C. because that’s where important people move. In no time at all I figured out that theoretical work in a cubicle wasn’t really my cup of tea either.

The Peace Corps was my answer and in many ways it still is. My two and a half years in Senegal turned me upside down and inside out. And it was an uncomfortable process.

First, I learned that I will never be a capable farmer no matter how much Wendell Berry I read. Then, I learned that I am no one’s savior. I learned that the good work I always wanted to do is done through trust and understanding and, therefore, relationship. I learned there are certain people in this world who are Christ-like, but they are rarely noticed. And as much as I want to be that kind of person, I may not have it in me, but I can find them, be near them and notice, support and love them.

So when asked, What good can we do? I look to my failures to point me in the right direction.

Four years ago, when there was an unexpected sum of money from the Woodbourne House as it transitioned to affordable senior housing, the honorable David Sprawls piped up and said that we should probably practice what we preach. The amount that was not budgeted for was a total of $33,000 and after consideration and conversation we all decided to put it right back into our community. First, we gave $15,000 to New Roots to help them grow into the organization they are now. In the years that followed, they have received multiple awards and significant funding. I for one believe our initial support to what was then a small and new organization was truly catalytic. Or we just have really good timing.

We then met with Mission Behind Bars, a non-profit that is held dear by many in this congregation, and worked with them as they also looked to grow. We gave them a matching gift of $10,000 over two years to help incentivize new congregations and donors to also give. We just received an email last week saying that their second year of raising these matching funds and growing their donor base has been wonderfully successful and they are hopeful for their future.

We also started the Charlie Thompson Library with media written by, for, and about the LGBTQ community just downstairs thanks to Travis Myles’ leadership.

So much good has come from this outreach fund it would be terrible to see it dry up and never heard from again. So the outreach committee met and ate pizza and discussed how to continue all this good work. And after that very long introduction, I want to tell you what we came up with.

This month, we’re unveiling Louisville’s first public giving circle. What’s a giving circle you ask? It’s a pooled fund that individuals can give to to make their small donation have a big impact. This giving circle in particular will be distributed monthly to small, local organizations that focus on human dignity and serve people on a grassroots level.

To get the ball rolling, the outreach fund is proposing to give $500 every month in matching donations at a 1:2 ratio. So I give $10, it turns into $15. Then 99 other people give $10 and the small organization has a $1500 check that makes a huge difference to their programming and there are 100 people who know more about their work. Even better. I can sign up to be a monthly donor and make a difference across the city all year round. Think about it as another Netflix account, but instead of movies you’re subscribing to social justice and human dignity.

We are living in a time where the underserved are even more vulnerable, but throughout policy change and political shifts, there are those who continue to take care. This task is often thankless, burdensome, and will just barely pay the bills and yet there are defenders of human dignity working at this grassroots level throughout our city. It is imperative, especially as state and federal funding becomes limited, to support our social workers, educators, and counselors so they may simply continue their work.

But hard times affect us all. Many of us are living paycheck to paycheck and followed around by looming student loans or medical bills. It’s hard to part with anything extra, and the question lingers, do they really need it more than me?

The 12 vetted organizations that will receive these funds in 2018 are:

Coalition for the Homeless
Survivors of Torture Recovery Center
Family Scholar House
Louisville Youth Group
Louisville Visual Art
Backside Learning Center
Mattingly Edge
Louisville Grows
Peace Ed
Louisville Girls Leadership
Hildegard House
Food Literacy Project

These organizations serve people where they are and work on the ground. They don’t have ginormous budgets, and yes, they need my $10 more than I do.

It’s also an amazing way for Douglass Boulevard Christian Church to keep giving even after our outreach fund has been spent. In the future, we can look for grants to provide the matching funds as a sustainable option, and it’s another opportunity to extend our stewardship and community beyond these doors.

The giving circle, dubbed Cairn, is an opportunity to turn a $5 donation into something far greater. Your donation stands for action steps and starting local and taking care of our neighbors in a very real way. It stands for collaborative effort and community support. It’s telling those who don’t often hear it that we are grateful they share our home, both the served and those who are serving.

I hope you will join us.

To do just that, you can sign up to give on the website. Or you can join the team that helps spread the word, finds next year’s organizations, and volunteers by emailing hi@cairnlouisville.org.

Are We Listening? (1 Samuel 3:1-20)

January 14, 2018 / DBCC

But come on, Eli's old and blind. Why blame him? It's his sons who're the scoundrels, right? Why's God mad at him?

Because, as the chief priest, he's the one who's supposed to be looking out for the interests of God's people, especially those who come humbly seeking God. Instead those people are bullied and taken advantage of by the very people whose power Eli is responsible for overseeing.

That is to say, if you stand by and say nothing when the folks on top fleece the folks on the bottom, you've taken sides with Eli against God. I don't know how else to put it.

If you don’t stand up when those in power belittle and dehumanize the vulnerable, you’ve turned your back on the very people God cares most about.

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On Being An Imperfect Messenger

January 11, 2018 / DBCC

By Derek Penwell

When I get up on Sunday morning to deliver a sermon, everyone (I hope) understands that I’m an imperfect messenger. Preachers understand that somehow we have to preach better than we are. In that sense, then, the pulpit acts as a promontory from which a flawed emissary stands and points toward a destination on the horizon.

The tension in preaching comes from the realization that the preacher has rarely ever arrived at the destination toward which she points, but that she must continue to point nevertheless. The vocation of preaching, therefore, is a constant battle between conviction and humility. I’m pretty sure I know where we need to go, but there’s always the possibility that I may be wrong. To the extent that preachers fail to maintain that healthy tension, problems arise. If you’re too confident, you’ll never be open to course correction. If you’re too humble, you’ll never point in any particular direction consistently enough to give people a sense of where to go.

This tension is especially important when it comes to preaching privilege from the pulpit. I struggle with whether I can ever be an effective advocate for justice, all the while knowing that somehow I’m not doing what I’ve been called to do if I don’t try.

Here’s the problem I face each time I have to deal with issues of justice: I’m a straight, cis-gender, middle class white guy. From an American cultural perspective, I won the genetic lottery . . . just by being born. I am uncomfortably aware of my deficiencies when it comes to the prospect of preaching about the inequities of our social systems with authenticity. That is to say, preaching about the need to feed the hungry, protect the widow and the orphan, welcome the foreigner, embrace the differences of race and ethnicity is always something I do from the comfortable perch of my privilege, knowing that if everything continues to go the way it almost always has, I will invariably enjoy a certain amount of insulation from the the very situations on behalf of which I’m called upon to advocate.

So, why should anyone listen to anything I have to say on the issue of injustice—since, by and large, people very much like me are the ones who helped create and who continue to help sustain the systems that produced that injustice? To put it more simply, regardless of the message, I must continually come to terms with the fact that I am an imperfect messenger on issues of justice.

On the other hand, I’m also aware that if people like me don’t speak up about privilege, don’t question the power arrangements that often have injustice—as, if not a central organizing principle, then an uncanny amount of correlation—it will be almost impossible to undo those power arrangements.

Then again, even saying that I think I’m a part of the solution of deconstructing these systems of power risks being patronizing: “Y’all can’t do this without me.” The lack of humility about which I spoke a moment ago.

But if I never dare to speak the truth about my privilege and about the unjust systems that oppress others (but which implicitly benefit me) because doing so seems hypocritical, I become a silent accomplice. I become an enabler of such a system. See above: The lack of confidence.

Here’s where a really smart preacher might draw things together in a way that successfully navigates the inherent pitfalls of speaking from the pulpit about privilege. But I’m not that smart. I don’t have an algorithm that helps me to weigh all the factors, sustain the tension, and unfailingly make the right choices. I have only my good intentions, which probably aren’t enough. But most of the time, they’re all I’ve got.

And so I wrestle. I try to do the right thing, knowing that I may never know if I’m doing it correctly. My real hope lies in the belief that my intense desire to negotiate the problems of privilege from the pulpit is itself a faltering step in the right direction. But there’s always the possibility that I may be wrong.

Not Much of a King, If You Ask Me (Matthew 2:1-12)

January 08, 2018 / Geoff Wallace

The way our culture views it, victory means overcoming the odds and coming out on top, where the lights shine and glory fills the air. But Jesus transforms victory; he reshapes triumph. He goes up against the kingdoms of this world; but instead of battling on the king’s violent terms, Jesus prevails by refusing to become the kind of ruler his followers misguidedly want him to be—one who needs the spotlight, who craves glory, one who needs to tell the world how smart and successful he is—and he holds out to become the king we all need—the one who’s willing to die for a peace and justice that can never be won through conventional means—soaked to the elbows as it is in the blood of children and the humiliation of the powerless.

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Garland Instead of Ashes (Isaiah 61:1-4; 8-11)

December 17, 2017 / DBCC

But Isaiah's not content to let things stay on a conceptual level, not satisfied to speak theoretically. No, he throws in objects—gets all practical, puts a face on these lofty sounding verbs—bring good news to the oppressed, bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to the captives, release to the prisoners, to comfort and provide for all those who mourn, to give this whole sorry lot a garland instead of ashes.

The good news Isaiah announces comes, in other words, not to those who've just had temporary setbacks, to those inconvenienced by ripples in the stock market. This good news is announced to those who've been on the bottom so long, it's hard for them to remember there's a top. This good news is delivered to those folks on the edge of despair, just short of giving up.

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The Unlikeliest People in the Unlikeliest Places (Mark 1:1-8)

December 10, 2017 / DBCC

But there are other sins that also require repentance, a seeking of forgiveness—sins that are bigger than any individual, more systemic, and therefore harder to address—sins that too many people take for granted as “just the way things are.” Racism is a sin like that. Heterosexism is that kind of sin. Xenophobia and Islamophobia can be institutional sins. And as we’ve seen with sexual harassment and abuse, though such sins are usually committed by an individual, it takes a whole culture that winks at it for it to continue to exist.

And in order to address those kinds of sins, we’re going to need more than just individual repentance and forgiveness—we’re going to need a kind of collective repentance that seeks the forgiveness of all those we’ve allowed to be hurt because we refused to say no to the system that allowed those injustices to endure. It’s going to take a new world, a new reign on earth—it’s going to require someone capable of lifting up every valley, of making every mountain low—someone capable of baptizing with the Holy Spirit.

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Rethinking God's Grace

December 06, 2017 / DBCC

By Derek Penwell

Early on in my ministry, I was convinced that every sermon should have grace at its heart. I still believe that, but now I think of grace in a different way. I had thought that grace means not only a light at the end of a sometimes dark tunnel but that grace is the light that makes everything in the tunnel shine, which is to say, I had thought that grace is a gift that always makes you feel better.

Unfortunately, I’ve come to realize that the grace I believed in was a grace that affirmed my own middle-class, white existence. It meant that my faith didn’t require much of me—at least as far as everybody else was concerned. It was a grace that allowed me to focus on myself and the happiness of those closest to me, without ever prompting me to think too heavily about the non-middle class, white existence of others.

Grace, I thought for many years was my ticket to the party. The fact that I didn’t deserve that ticket was the practical limit of my understanding of grace. Other people were just going to have to claim their own ticket. I’d help as much as I could. But when it came down to it, you have your salvation, and I have mine.

But then I started reading the bible more thoroughly, and I saw a theme emerging: God actually cares about the people who weren’t born with all the advantages I enjoy. And no, I don’t mean God cares for everybody, so of course God cares for the disadvantaged. I mean, as I began to read scripture, it became increasingly clear that God holds a special place in God’s heart for those who are abused by everyone else: the poor, the foreigner, the widow, the orphan, the weak, the outcast, the prisoner, the sick and despairing. God cares about them all in really intense ways; so much so, for example, that injustice is one of the primary reasons given for God’s anger with God’s people (e.g., Isaiah 1:15–17, Amos 2:6–7).

I remember being in a preaching class one time, when one of the African American students preached on a text from the prophet Amos. It came off to me as judgmental. “You’re not doing this or this. Moreover, you should have done this and this. As a consequence, God’s really mad.” And I remember saying something along the lines of, “Well, that’s fine and all. But where’s the grace in that sermon?”

All these years later, I think I have an idea about where to find grace in that student’s sermon. I think it goes without saying that there are people who show up in church who don’t have the slightest idea why they’re even there … except that they need to hear about a God who holds the hand of the anxious, who bears up those too weak to stand, who loves those who think themselves unlovable, who forgives the unforgivable. So yes, we need to comfort and console the frightened and grieving. We need a God of grace.

But there are also people who need to hear about a God who is furious with a world in which terrified refugees are turned away, a God whose indignation burns hot against those who would mistreat women and minorities, a God unafraid of the rulers of this world who abuse the poor, who lead cheers of hatred against Muslims and the undocumented.

There are all kinds of people who would love to hear about a God who raises an arm against injustice, who will not tolerate bigotry, who refuses to sit by while the work of the laborers is monetized in ways that only benefit the people in charge, who are desperate for a word from a God who is incensed with a world in which African America parents lie awake at night in fear of what might happen to their children on the way home from school.

If you happen to be one of the people kicked to the curb by the folks in charge, God’s outrage may just be what grace sounds like.

Come Down, O Lord (Isaiah 64:1-9)

December 03, 2017 / DBCC

Yet, O Lord, you are our God; we are the clay, and you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand.”

In other words, “You’ve always been the light in our world; shine for us now . . . now that everything seems so bleak and futile, and we only realistically are able to expect more of the same. Tear open the heavens, and come down, O Lord—down here where we are, where disease and violence take precious babies from the loving arms of their parents, where fire and gunshots destroy, where politicians take from the poor and dispossessed and give to the rich and powerful, and where we sit—our eyes searching for you in the Advent darkness, waiting for you to come down and take us by the hand once more, and shine a little light into our starless world."

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Not What We Expected (Matthew 25:31-46)

November 26, 2017 / DBCC

So, maybe the idea of the Son of Man coming in glory has less to do with an apocalyptic blockbuster at some point way off in the future; maybe the glory of the Son of Man has more to do with God’s determination in Jesus to live among us, and know the lives we live. The incarnation—God becoming human—is the most profound act of empathy—God, literally, committing to live a life in our skin.

And if God does that for us, shouldn’t our lives be an attempt to imitate that empathy for others, to see not just ourselves in the faces of the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the prisoner . . . but the face of Jesus himself?

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Make up your own mind (Matt. 25:14-30)

November 19, 2017 / DBCC

We welcome Rev. Mary Ann Lewis and Rev. Chuck Lewis to the pulpit for a special Celebration Sunday. Together they remind us of the importance of giving what we have to service, and the call to live and serve with abundance.

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Waiting at the Door (Matthew 25:1-13)

November 12, 2017 / DBCC

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.

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On Being an Imperfect Messenger

November 08, 2017 / DBCC