Righteous Anger (John 2:13-22)

Don’t let anyone fool you. When Jesus went into the temple that day, it was an explicitly political act. It was an ancient Near Eastern version of John Lewis marching across the Edmund Pettis bridge.

So, knowing that the people who are the most vulnerable are the ones getting fleeced by the folks in power, maybe the question shouldn’t be 'How can Jesus be angry?' but 'How could he not?'

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Altering the Landscape of Our Expectation (Mark 8:31-38)

Once you start talking about LGBTQ people having the same rights and protections as everyone else, you’ve put yourself in the crosshairs of everyone who likes the world the way it is. Just say what should be obvious to everyone—that Black Lives Matter—and you’ll start experiencing the power of the people who employ crosses as a threat. Speak up and tell the world that children ought to be free to go to school without the fear of some aggrieved loner with an AR-15 busting in, or that houseless people ought to be afforded the space to live and retain their dignity, or that people who come to this country in search of a better life for their families ought to be received with hospitality and the love for the foreigner that God commanded of us, and you’ll witness the assembly line that mass produces crosses fire up in earnest.

Our cross to bear, like Jesus before us, isn’t just a question of suffering our own private indignities; it’s a question of who we’re willing to suffer indignities for.

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Out in the Wilderness with the Wild Beasts (Mark 1:9-15)

When Jesus meets us out in the wilderness, he doesn’t magically cure all the violence, doesn’t stopper the mouths of the wild beasts who reside there. Instead, he provides healing … which is a different frame, one that offers hope where before there was only the inevitability of fear and death.

Healing gives us enough space to consider new possibilities, to truly see those with whom we were formerly at war as themselves children of the God who breaks in on all of us. God ripped open the heavens, the Spirit descended, and drove Jesus out into the wilderness. And in the world Jesus is busy announcing, now those stranded out in the wilderness will finally be find a home.

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Why Can't We Just Stay Here? (Mark 9:2-9)

Why does he leave—when it’s safer to just camp out here?

Jesus goes down the mountain into the valley of the shadow of Lent, because that’s where his presence is needed most. That’s where the last, the least, and the lost scramble to survive. Down there.

I suspect he goes down there because he’s heard the voices of people terrified at the thought of what the future holds.

Jesus heads down there because that’s where the action is, where the tempest toss’d live in fear of the night. Down there.

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When Sickness Is about More Than Being Sick (Mark 1:29-39)

If we take the first two stories of Jesus’ ministry in Mark seriously, we’re left to conclude that Jesus understands the right thing to be the restoration to full participation in the community to those who’ve been cut off, left on the sidelines, forced to press their noses against the stain glass windows to try to get a glimpse inside. He offers not just a cure, but what people really need: true healing.

Because here’s the thing for those who follow Jesus: there are too many people who’ve been cut off from the community that the church at its best has to offer. The mentally ill, the physically sick, the immigrant, the poor, the imprisoned, and those just too scared or too tired to risk walking up the steps and through the front door.

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How Do We Know a Prophet? (Deuteronomy 18:15-22)

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 Black parents lie awake at night in fear of what might happen to their children on the way home from school or their families on the way home from the grocery store.

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.

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Call Them to What? (Mark 1:14-20)

As Jesus says, these tyrants and oppressors need to repent, because there's a new ruler who is going to go fishing, hooking the jaws of the unjust and the proud, leaving them out in the wilderness for the carrion-eaters to pick apart. The kingdom of God is at hand.

So, when Jesus calls Simon, Andrew, James, and John to follow him and he will make them fish for people, he's issuing a call to a kind of revolution against the powerful enemies of God who have been grinding them and their families to dust beneath the heels of their boots.

This call to the very people who've been taxed into starvation, who've been persecuted and killed for any resistance to the king, who've been trampled on and used as beasts of burden is a powerful call to rise up and work toward establishing a new political realm in which God and not Herod Antipas is ruler—a new realm in which those who've been taxed into abject poverty are finally the ones who will have enough, while their tormentors are sent to lowest places at the feast, a new realm in which those who oppress the poor and crush the needy will finally be removed and will now have to serve those whom they've relegated to the status of outcast and untouchable.

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Your Servant Is Listening (1 Samuel 3:1-20)

So, this story of Samuel’s courage is an uncomfortable one. It raises questions:

"Where are those places in our world where justice has been cast aside?"

"Where is God asking us to tell those in charge that they've failed to do what's right, failed to treat those at the bottom of the pile in a manner pleasing to God?”

“Where are we when the cries of millions of grieving and terrified Black people tear the night in two, or tens of thousands of immigrant children torn from the arms of their families lift up their plaintive cry?”

“Where are we when White Supremacists and White Nationalists answer the call of their benighted leader to tear up our country and punish anyone who refuses to sing the song of the malignant narcissist under which they march and destroy?”

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Tearing Open the Heavens (Mark 1:4-11)

Mark opens and closes the ministry of Jesus in spectacular fashion. He announces that in Jesus—in his life and work and death—God has come among us. God has torn the veil that formerly separated humanity from the divine.

And this tearing is no sweet opening of a door. Open doors can be closed again. In Jesus, God has ripped the door off the hinges! God has transgressed the boundaries that separated us from God.

But unlike Wednesday, God’s breaking in isn’t about trying to retain the power necessary to exclude the vulnerable. When God breaks in, it’s about making sure that the people who are usually forgotten—the poor and the powerless, the people who try to survive eating only the bread of injustice and drinking the fetid water of bigotry from a cracked cistern—finally get to sit in the places of honor at the table that Jesus sets in the new world God is creating.

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That's Your Idea of a King? (Matthew 2:1-12)

The world we live in is busy looking for a chief executive who’s not afraid of unleashing power to retain control—even if it undermines everything a country says it stands for or costs the lives of innocents and the dignity of the oppressed—but Matthew gives us a shepherd.

But you see, that’s the good news. Because a ruler born in a stable in a nowhere town, surrounded by filth and despair understands how the world is shaped, understands what life looks like from the underside.

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Patient Impatience (Luke 2:22-40)

Indeed, the patience we evince as followers of Jesus is one that harbors in its very DNA a kind of impatience—a refusal to remain detached in the face of wrong, a holy sense that the world as it is isn’t what God had in mind. Though we can’t set everything right by force of will, we refuse to sit on our hands, grumbling about our impotence.

Because, you see, it’s not just waiting in traffic jams that challenges our capacity for patience. We read the newspaper, listen to the news, and we see peace thwarted and justice delayed—people, after all these years, still looking for a little peaceableness and fairness. Whether because of race or sexual orientation or gender identity, or because of immigration or economic status, or because the education or welfare or Health Care system is stacked against them, there are people sitting in a whole different kind of traffic jam.

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Christmas Eve Service (Goes live at 6:00 p.m.!)

Our Christmas Eve service this year, like almost everything else, is online. The service will go live at 6:00 p.m. right here, or over on YouTube. We will also release the video on the DBCC Facebook page at 6:00.

Tune in and enjoy!

God Among the Dispensable (Luke 1:39-55)

That's the thing about humiliation, it's not just about embarrassment; it's what's left after embarrassment has moved in and made a home. It's the vulnerability so much of the world knows first hand and only too well.

Humiliation is trying to figure out how to keep the lights on and pay the rent, let alone buy Christmas presents for the kids when the Senate doesn’t think the plight of the average American is nearly as important as saving corporations from liability in their business decisions about Covid.

It's having nowhere else to go and no way to get there even if you could.

Humiliation isn't just a feeling; it's a state of being, a way of life for far too many people in the world.

And so Mary’s the perfect person to carry the child who will grow up to fight for people just like her—those who must dine daily on the bread of tears and the fruit of shame. She’s exactly the right person to sing a song of deliverance and justice for those who’ve grown used to bringing up the rear.

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The Year of the Lord's Favor (Isaiah 61:1-11)

The year of the Lord's favor, when God comes among us and puts things right that have been wrong for so long, delivering the weary and the dispossessed from their oppression, such glad tidings don't come as good news to the folks who have everything to gain by things staying the same. Because God isn't just saying pretty words. God will persist until the scales of justice have been balanced, until those who've lived so long with nothing have enough, until the widow, the orphan, and the stranger are accorded the dignity and protection their status as God's beloved confers. God will be their champion—not just in pretty words, but in the very real press of life.

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Our Community Partners: JCPS Pod Instruction at DBCC

At DBCC, we're fortunate to be able to provide space for a learning pod for students at JCPS. They meet ever day in The Commons and the Adult Sunday School Classroom. Because of your generosity, we're able to make the space available free of charge, so children can continue to learn during this difficult time.

Reaping What You Did Not Sow (Matthew 25:14-30)

The third slave is treated like whistleblowers regularly are when they lay bare the despicable truth: The master in this story, as has so often been the case throughout history, isn't a benevolent employer handing out generous Christmas bonuses; he's a boss who's gotten rich by exploiting the labor of others—and when he's called on it, he lashes out to defend himself.

In fact, if the third slave looks like anyone, he looks like Jesus before both the Roman authorities and their collaborators in the temple in the next two chapters. And what do the masters of empire do to Jesus for presuming to speak the truth to power?

They do what they do to every whistleblower: they "vilify, shame, and humiliate him so that his words will carry no weight."

And then they kill him.

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Our Community Partners: Feed Louisville

During our Stewardship emphasis, we are highlighting our community partners who make the work we do at DBCC possible. This week we are featuring Feed Louisville. Under the direction of Rhona Kamar and Donny Greene, since the pandemic began, Feed Louisville is making and distributing hot meals to the houseless community in Louisville. Based out of our kitchen at DBCC, Feeed Louisville has partnered with 14 area restaurants to serve 500 meals a day to the houseless and food insecure. They've now served over 50,000 meals!

You Had One Job! (Matthew 25:1-13)

Unfortunately, over the past four years, our country has been manufacturing more of these people who show up at our door, in our world, asking to be welcomed, asking to be allowed some human dignity, asking for a little peace and justice. So, we have an even bigger job than usual in trying to shape the world we live in to look a little bit more like one Jesus will recognize when he knocks on our door.

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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Humility Ain't Easy (Matthew 23:1-12)

Even so, this is difficult to listen to if what you think Jesus came to do was to inflict niceness on an otherwise testy Near East. Jesus just sounds so … cranky.

Couldn’t we get the nice Jesus—the one who loves children and little old ladies? This whole fire-breathing itinerant prophet thing is tough to watch. I mean, this is going to be a difficult story to teach in Vacation Bible School.

But why?

I think it’s because that kind of honesty makes people uncomfortable, and our culture tells us that our responsibilities lie in lubricating the social gears rather than throwing sand in them. But sand is sometimes exactly what’s needed to get the machinery of the status quo to stop and look at the damage it’s producing.

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Our Community Partners: La Casita Center

During our Stewardship emphasis, we are highlighting our community partners who make the work we do at DBCC possible. This week we are featuring Karina Barillas, Executive Director of La Casita Center. Karina and La Casita Center do vital work serving the Latinx population in Louisville. La Casita Center is also one of the partnering agencies involved with Colectivo Esperanza, a consortium of local agencies serving the Latinx community and Douglass Blvd. Christian Church, charged with distributing funds to Latinx families during the pandemic who don't otherwise have access to assistance from the local, state, or national government.