It Depends on What Kind of World You're Looking For (Matthew 11:2-15)

Jesus announces a different way of thinking about what's inevitable in the world, and about what's necessary to change it, to heal it. God is busy creating a new world, one that isn't characterized by its ability to mete out redemptive violence, but by its ability to usher in a new way of living together where everyone has what they need, and all are welcome—a world where the rich and the powerful no longer call the shots, leaving the vulnerable to scratch out a living, always on the verge of isolation and death.

Because here's the thing, redemptive violence doesn't bring true peace—it merely offers up the flag of a temporary cease-fire, planted on a mountain of corpses. True peace, the shalom of the Bible, requires healing and restoration, not war and destruction.

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Being All Judgy (Matthew 3:1-12)

But conventional wisdom notwithstanding, judgment and repentance aren't merely calls to sinners to feel bad about their sins. They are the way systems of oppression and domination are named, as well as the direction we must turn to walk away from those systems and toward a new way of living together as God's children.

John the Baptist calls out some religious folks who were confident that their celestial grades came not from their practice of the faith, but from their reputations as religious smarty-pants. The Pharisees and the Sadducees came to check out what John was doing, and he told them that they shouldn't count on their sanctified bloodlines to cause God to look the other way. Believing the right things isn't a shield against judgment.

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Nicole Hardin Preaches at DBCC

Done to Death (Luke 23:33-43)

No. On Reign of Christ Sunday, the final Sunday in the Christian year, holding up the crucifixion of Jesus is counter-intuitive just to the extent that what the world is generally looking for in a ruler is exactly the opposite of what Jesus provides.

The world doesn’t want a God who’s willing to be done to death, but a God who never gets put in that lethal situation in the first place.

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Tearing It Up By the Roots (Luke 21:5-19)

Jesus, upon entering Jerusalem immediately heads to the temple, the very heart of the problem of injustice in Jewish Palestine, and stages an epic political protest against a system that oppresses the children of God.

And in our passage today, Jesus says that what has to happen is that those kinds of systems have to be torn down, dismantled, torn up by the roots.

Whenever this new world God is creating displaces the old world, for the people used to being picked first in life, it's going to feel like the zombie apocalypse.

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Jesus and the #MeToo Movement (Luke 20:27-40)

In other words Jesus says to the Sadducees: "Sure, if you want to talk about the future, fine. But it's a dumb question. Because the fact of the matter is, God is a God of the living. God isn't biding time until some future day of reckoning; God isn't pushing off questions of justice until some distant time to come, a time where God can easily remedy the injustices suffered in this life. God has reminded us that eternity starts now, that the life of resurrection is one we participate in in this place and time, that justice isn't something that can be put off until God makes it right in the hereafter. No, God cares about this woman before she ever gets to the pearly gates. And do you know what that means? It means that people like you Sadducees, who are supposed to be in her corner right now, should already be helping ensure the security she needs before she dies, so that she need not live under any man's power and control."

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Imposter Syndrome (Luke 6:20-31)

We’re saints, you and I. We’re blessed because God loves us—and not because we’re rich or smart or beautiful or important.

And the wonderful thing about the reign of God is that because we know where we’ve come from, because we know our limitations, because we know we’re not all that and a glass of iced tea, we’re able to welcome the poor and the hungry, we’re able to offer hospitality to the grieving and the despised because we know what it feels like to have those kinds of external things define our lives in negative ways, and we know God’s love overcomes all of that and makes us saints anyway.

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Turning the World on Its Head (Luke 18:9-14)

Why the great reversal? Why do those folks who have it all together have to stand last in line for a change, while the people who always seem to find themselves on the wrong side of the bouncers behind the velvet ropes receive the peace and forgiveness of God?

I’ll tell you why: Those are the people closest to God’s heart; because too often in the world we live in, they’ve not had much experience with being close to anyone else’s heart. The people who can’t assume justice will be kind to them, who carry the weight of being from the wrong place on the socio-economic food chain, or from the wrong country, or with the wrong race or sexual orientation or gender expression, who know the pain of living life on the outside, always looking in. They’ve been kept out for so long, who can blame God for finally ushering them in and walking them to the center of the party?

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Nevertheless, She Persisted (Luke 18:1-8)

Setting aside for a moment Luke’s focus on prayer, in this parable Jesus takes aim at a state of affairs in which the powerless find themselves repeatedly at the mercy of those who have power over them. Jesus is, in other words, indicting a system in which widows can’t assume they’ll receive justice. In order to find it, they have to make spectacles of themselves, embarrassing and shaming the powerful who are supposed not only to know better, but to be better.

In other words, Jesus attacks a system in which justice is only for those who can afford it. And unfortunately, this kind of system flourishes because it flies under the radar. When nobody speaks out against it, the big shots in power get to keep fleecing those who have no power to defend themselves. Silence is a boon to injustice, which requires for its survival that nobody make it public.

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Reflections on Mexico

What If We Welcomed Them? (Luke 15:1-10)

Who are we making angry because we love the wrong people?

This is a question we need to have an answer to right now as transgender people are being harassed because they want to use a bathroom one of the morality hall monitors doesn’t approve of, and LGBTQ kids are being bullied—to death, in many cases—because they happen to be attracted to people the religious big wheels don’t endorse.

How exactly do we love the people some of our fellow citizens are comfortable putting in cages?

Which people 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—event though they were born someplace else?

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Counting the Cost (Luke 14:25-33)

And once again, Jesus is just baffling. Notice here that we find Jesus once again throwing up roadblocks to following him. In one breath he says, “If you’re invited to the party, don’t make excuses not to come.” In the next breath he says, “If you’re invited to the party, don’t come if you don’t think you can handle the conga line.”*

So which is it? Follow or stay home? It’s kind of difficult to figure out what you’re driving at here, Jesus. Kind of passive/aggressive, don’t you think? Come, don’t come?

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

But Jesus knows that there are some hardy souls who 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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It's Always about Politics (Luke 14:1, 7-14)

The world we live in tells us that the way we order our lives, who gets to sit in first class and who has to clean up after the party, isn’t a matter for religion. But Jesus says that our faith is precisely about seating charts and who makes them and who gets to sit where.

The world we live in tells us that we should only invite to the party those who deserve to be there, those who can invite us back. But Jesus says, nobody deserves to be there (not you … not me), so you’d better invite everybody. And when they get there, you’re going to have to redraw the seating chart.

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The Liberation of Sabbath (Luke 13:10-17)

Think about it: this woman hasn’t been able to look anyone in straight in the face for 18 years. She couldn’t stand up straight. She’s hobbled her way through life in a permanent bow. Her view of the world has consisted largely of staring at everyone else’s footwear.

Then Jesus comes along and offers her liberation from a life of pain and humiliation, freedom from the suffering and the sidelong glances, welcoming her back into full participation in a community she has been excluded from for 18 years—because of her affliction.

That’s right, not only did she suffer from a debilitating physical condition, she would have been denied access to the life everyone else in the community took for granted—because she would have been viewed as broken in a religious context that required health and wholeness. In healing her, Jesus gave her back her life.*

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When the World's on Fire (Luke 12:49-56)

And as painful as it is, Jesus says that in order for the fire of transformation to be kindled—that is, the fire of God’s change in the world—we have to speak the truth about the new world God desires.

We live in a world where division feels inevitable; but Jesus announces a world where divisions are healed—not by passively ignoring injustice, but by shining a light on it.

We live in a world that feels like it needs the fire of God’s transformation, a new way of living together.

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Maybe Charity's the Problem (Luke 12:32-40)

If you notice in our Gospel this morning, Jesus doesn’t try to impress on his disciples how much better off the poor will be if they receive alms. He’s not trying to persuade his followers that those who are without need charity. Jesus wants to call his followers into the new world he’s announcing, where there is enough for everyone, where people share as a matter of course, into a world that needs them to give their lives and their resources away before they calculate people’s needs—because what’s at the heart of this world is becoming the kind of people whose primary need is to participate in the solidarity that comes from giving.

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That's Not the Prayer I Remember (Luke 11:1-3)

As I’ve grown older, it’s become clear to me that the Lord’s Prayer—far from being about stuff “out there” in some gauzy unbounded ether, or as a prayer about my personal relationship with Jesus—was about the very real and gritty kinds of things that happen right here, where we worry about things such as getting grandma’s outrageously expensive medication, or making sure that our LGBTQ kids won’t get beat up and harassed on the school bus, or how our African American friends and neighbors will survive traffic stops, or whether our Muslim coworkers will have their mosques vandalized, or if our Latinx family will wake up to find someone missing, or whether that’s the bill collector on the phone.

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Nicole Hardin Preaches (Luke 10:25-37)

The Gift of Life (Luke 7:1-17)

We followers of Jesus are called to follow him into the heart of hell to shake loose the bars of oppression and death, setting loose the captives and freeing the oppressed—not because we’re capable of fixing those things, but because we follow one who’s calling into being a new world where those things no longer lay people low. Like Jesus, we’re called to be prophets of true life—who refuse to acknowledge that death is in charge.

Jesus, in walking among the dead and the dying, takes a stance against a world enamored of the spectacular, and aligns himself with the decidedly unspectacular—the poor, the outcast, the widowed, and the orphaned, with the unemployed and the uninsured, with the people forced to live in the cages we pay for—with all of those who’ve been forgotten.

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Collecting Tents for the Houseless in Louisville

In Louisville, as virtually everywhere, we have friends and neighbors who have no houses. One of DBCC's good friends, Donny Greene, is collecting tents for those in our community who need some shelter. We would like to help as a drop-off point, if you'd like to follow this link to Amazon to purchase a tent. You may purchase them and bring them to us, or you may have them sent to:

2005 Douglass Blvd., Louisville, KY, 40205

Alternatively, we are also raising money for the purchase of those tents via Facebook, if you'd like to donate there.