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. 

More Than Conquerors (Romans 8:26-39)

July 26, 2020  /  DBCC

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In God's story, we don't sit passively waiting for an apocalypse in which God comes to smite God's enemies and reward the faithful. In the story God tells about what's real and what's not, we work in the midst of suffering to help the world begin to see what God's reign of peace and justice will look like when it's finally accomplished.

We're not a people who sit waiting for the chaos to be tamed, for a little stability, the relief that comes when the pain stops. We are more than conquerors who work with God in Christ to proclaim a new story of welcome and abundance, of truth over lies, of equity for all over access for a few, of just laws over the self-interested edicts of the powerful. We work with God to tame the chaos for everyone, not just for the few at the top of the heap.

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[1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gr0fVY3ysakSix_9w3NHmJbSnj6SWq-b/view?usp=sharing

Our Cross to Bear (Matthew 16:13-28)

July 19, 2020  /  DBCC

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In a world obsessed with its own private longings, following Jesus frees us from ourselves, and redirects our longings, focusing them no longer on ourselves, but onto the people who need our passion most—the despised and rejected, the misused and forgotten, the voiceless and the vulnerable. In other words, the people who are always at the mercy of the powers who make crosses.

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[1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hAtwOH8iw2yvab50NJ4rOwg0i3jKbwKs/view?usp=sharing

Not Like Any Family I've Ever Seen (Matthew 10.24-39)

June 21, 2020  /  DBCC

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The reign of God announces a new kind of family, the beloved community, one that doesn’t underwrite a system built on racism, patriarchy, cisgender heterosexual norms, or wealth, or social position.

It’s a different kind of family—one that makes room for those for whom there never seems to be enough room.

The family Jesus announces isn’t first about destroying what you love; it’s about destroying that which—because of its need to retain power, to keep those in control … in control—could never love you back.

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[1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Km-fDr41IgLlicLgPm7NliNPfnkBxy2Y/view?usp=sharing

Protesting in Publice (Mark 2:23-3:6)

June 14, 2020  /  DBCC

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But it’s important to remember that Jesus’ protest, his public testimony, isn’t just a “no” to the folks in power; it’s a resounding “yes” to people who need the powers and principalities to step off the necks of the powerless, to work for the vulnerable—not against them.

Jesus’ ministry is about laying out for us a vision of what God desires for all humanity, not just those who believe they can afford to look the other way at injustice.

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[1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15LNGgWXxCydW7G7-Z6yYKPtq4MPjdG7E/view?usp=sharing

The Voice of God (Genesis 1:1-2:4a)

June 07, 2020  /  DBCC

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We need to find our own voice in the voice of God who cries out for a new creation, a new world, formed from the chaos—a world where the poor and the powerless finally have the seats of honor at the table…

—a new world where immigrants are treated with the respect and dignity of those who are native born…

—a new world where LGBBTQ people can flourish as full participants in this beautiful dance of community and solidarity…

—a new world where poor black people and poor white people are no longer pitted against one another by the people who have a heavy stake in their continued division…

—a new world where the needs of the many are taken more seriously than the demands of the few…

We plead with God to create something new, and to give us the responsibility to help see it birthed.

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[1]: [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gLwdyBBKIboM44JE9VCQg__6kYVyQuUI/view?usp=sharing

For the Common Good (1 Corinthians 12:3b-13)

May 31, 2020  /  DBCC

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Paul says that the beloved community is about community. If someone is only concerned with “What’s in it for me?” the body will be miserable, just to the extent that a body cannot withstand an eye, an ear, or a pancreas that acts as though its function has no impact—except on itself.

We are bound together you and I, a community given the task of living out the good news that Jesus seeks out those who’ve too often been cast aside, left to rot in the convenient waste bins of a disinterested world.

The body of Christ, the community of faith anticipates the beloved community in which it is impossible to say to people of color, to the poor, the sick, the aged, the spat on, the pepper-sprayed, the victims of state-sanctioned terror, the forgotten ones: “‘I have no need of you.”

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Why Unity Matters (John 17:1-11)

May 24, 2020  /  DBCC

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What Jesus prays for ultimately isn’t that we might be protected so that we can live happy lives, untroubled by inconvenience. He prays that we might be protected … as a way of safeguarding our unity. Because if Jesus’ followers can’t stand together against the things that cause God grief, then anything else we might have to say about love and peace and justice isn’t anything anybody ought to be expected to take seriously.

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What Does the Spirit of Truth Look Like? (John 14:15-21)

May 17, 2020  /  DBCC

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It’s difficult, I know. But think about what the first Advocate, Jesus, looked like, how he acted, who he loved and who he stood up for. The poor, the hungry, the sick and despairing, the forgotten and the powerless, right? Then look around you for those who look like *that; look for the advocates.

Standing up for people this culture doesn’t think are worth it is hard, painful work. But that’s what the Advocate looks like, that’s how the Spirit of Truth sounds.

Every time you see someone standing up for the vulnerable—you’ve seen the Holy Spirit. Every time you hear a voice raised in opposition to oppression and violence, you’ve heard the Spirit of Truth. Every time you’ve felt the hand of someone on your shoulder, holding you up against the wave of dehumanization that threatens to overwhelm you—you’ve felt the Advocate.

We are the presence of the Holy Spirit in the world. We put flesh on the abstraction. We incarnate the breath of God right here.It’s difficult, I know. But think about what the first Advocate, Jesus, looked like, how he acted, who he loved and who he stood up for. The poor, the hungry, the sick and despairing, the forgotten and the powerless, right? Then look around you for those who look like *that; look for the advocates.

Standing up for people this culture doesn’t think are worth it is hard, painful work. But that’s what the Advocate looks like, that’s how the Spirit of Truth sounds.

Every time you see someone standing up for the vulnerable—you’ve seen the Holy Spirit. Every time you hear a voice raised in opposition to oppression and violence, you’ve heard the Spirit of Truth. Every time you’ve felt the hand of someone on your shoulder, holding you up against the wave of dehumanization that threatens to overwhelm you—you’ve felt the Advocate.

We are the presence of the Holy Spirit in the world. We put flesh on the abstraction. We incarnate the breath of God right here.

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Greater Works Than These (John 14:1-14)

May 10, 2020  /  DBCC

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Following me isn’t paint-by-numbers, no easy way to look like you know what you’re doing, without ever putting in the effort to become a master. That would be nice, but that’s not how it works.

If you want to know the way to God, you’re going to have to live the way I live, challenge the injustice I challenge, show mercy the way I show mercy.

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Hanging onto the Best Things (Acts 2:42-47)

May 03, 2020  /  DBCC

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All who believed were together and had all things in common, the writer of Acts says. They’d sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent time together in the temple, they broke break together at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the good will of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

Now, it may very well be that this earliest description of the church is nostalgic, an idealized account of something that never really existed in quite the mist-enshrouded way everybody liked to remember it, except in the imaginations of those who longed for a church that only seemed possible in simpler times.

But so what? So what if we’re getting a sepia-toned picture of an idealized past? Because the “ideal” is precisely what I’m after. If the question is “What should the church be?” it seems plausible to go back to the earliest idealized accounts of what the church was supposed to look like.

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Believe Harder (John 20:19-31)

April 19, 2020  /  DBCC

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The call to follow Jesus isn’t a call to give up your reason. It’s not about believing harder. It’s about being committed to moving forward, not knowing what you’ll encounter, but convinced you’ve got to do it anyway.

You ask me … “Doubting Thomas” is the hero of this story, not because his doubting is somehow a map to mustering up belief for Post-Enlightenment moderns, but because he’s the guy that kept showing up, absent empirical evidence and verifiable truth. Everybody else got a sneak preview, right?

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Death (Isaiah 65:17-25)

April 12, 2020  /  DBCC

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I’ve heard a story about a different world, a world unlike the one we inhabit—where Death is king and we are his pawns and victims.

I’ve listened to the tales of another world where there’s enough to eat and everyone has a safe place to lay their heads at night, where people don’t have to wonder whether they’ll be welcomed and embraced because of the color of their skin, or the country of their birth, or the people they love.

I’ve heard a story about a different world where on Friday Death is King, but by Sunday Death is dead.

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Whistling Past the Graveyard (Ezekiel 37:1-14)

March 29, 2020  /  DBCC

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We have a chance to be the miracle God is unleashing on a world plagued by deaths of despair. We can bring hope to the hopeless, a light to a dark world.

Hang on. God is still breathing. The spirit still comes from the four winds. Life may seem to be having a rough go of it in the valley of the dry bones right now. But God’s isn’t finished yet.

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Heading Out (Genesis 12:1-4a)

March 08, 2020  /  DBCC

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God says, “Go.”

And Genesis says, “So he went.”

Don’t you find that peculiar? Faced with a choice between a past he knows and the promise of a future he can’t quite wrap his head around, Abram throws up his hands and walks into the unknown.

We who live in a world beset by a whole caravan-load of problems ourselves—problems that make the future just as uncertain for us as it was for old Abram—we understand how difficult a choice he must have had. With the fate of healthcare for millions of people up in the air, with questions about Russian interference in our elections, with the fate of millions of immigrants and refugees in doubt, with the stock market taking another swan dive, with the Coronavirus and a president who’s never met a doctor he didn't' think he knew more than prompting people to wonder whether or not we’re in some kind of apocalyptic Hollywood blockbuster, we know that the future is much more unstable than we’d anticipated … only a short time ago.

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