That's What She Said

Warning: Jesus widens our circles. And not everybody enjoys the widening of our circles. We like to imagine that we’re on an elite, “insider” tier. What does it do to our sense of self-worth if everybody can get in? How do we reorient our estimation of self so that we love to share the privilege we’ve been granted? (This is a key difference between patriotism and nationalism, by the way. Patriotism wants to share the bounty of one’s homeland; nationalism is stingy and protectionist.)

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Warning: Jesus changes literally everything. John the Baptist was suspicious of those who came for his baptism without any intention to let go old ways of being and take up a new life. All he could do was wash away the old, he said; but Jesus would burn it off. How does the bright-hot Light of the World laser away the accretions of life in this weird world?

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Warning: God is not done with us yet. Jesus warns his followers to “stay awake,” because the current iteration of God’s presence among them is not the last. As we contend with over- saturation of our spirits by bad news and constant policy alarms, how do we remain people who are watchful for God’s presence, not in an “end of the world” kind of way but in an awareness of God in the everyday-ness of life?

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Money gives Jesus a headache. What kind of dummy goes to Jesus to ask for a ruling on an inheritance? But it’s a good thing someone did, because we got a lot of financial advice from Jesus from that dumb question. His main word to the wise: God provides, and if you think otherwise, you’ll waste your life working and hoarding and imagining you’ve done it all yourself.

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Blasphemy gives Jesus a headache. There are better and worse ways to talk about God’s power and presence – and there’s a way so much worse that we call it blasphemy. Jesus cautions us to be careful how we talk, how we articulate what God is and isn’t doing in our world. It’s not always easy to know; and part of what we do in church together is practice talking in the better ways we learn from scripture, song, and spoken word.

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Posturing gives Jesus a headache. The VRPs (Very Religious Persons) are doing their jobs: rigorously patrolling the boundaries of their religious community for its protection. But Jesus can see through their surface-level service, right into their self-righteous hearts. Finally, with Jesus, there aren’t any secrets. What would it mean to live life so transparently with everyone?

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Evil gives Jesus a headache. The demonic forces Jesus exorcised held people captive, so his liberating work meant setting people free from those psycho-spiritual chains. But that liberative work makes privileged people suspicious. Plus, sometimes it doesn’t exactly “work” – seven more troublemakers come in to replace what’s been kicked out. It’s tricky, fighting evil.

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God Is Love. The story goes: the elderly apostle John is asked to preach to the gathered crowd. He creaks to his feet and says, “Little children, love one another.” And he creaks back into his chair. “Brother John, don’t you want to say more?” asks the host. “What else is there?” old John replies.

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Now You Are God’s People. The author writes to people for whom God’s merciful selection is new, and delicious (“if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good,” v. 3). And so he exhorts them to remember that theirs is not an individual project, but that their identity is collective. In partnership with Jesus, the “living stone,” they themselves become living stones, built together into a place of worship – not a building but a people. “Once you were not a people” – there was no community, no solidarity, no companionship for life’s journey. But God’s mercy includes the gift of com...

A Threefold Cord is Not Quickly Broken. The poet decries the (neoliberal capitalist?) project whereby we work and work and work, “no end to all [our] toil” (v. 7), as “vanity.” Then they move into a rhapsody about loving friendship, where people in loving relationships “have a good reward for their toil” (v. 9). Why do we need friendship to temper and redeem our work? And who is in that “threefold” cord? (Spoiler: it’s God?)

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The Joy of the Lord is Your Strength. Ezra and Nehemiah worked together to rebuild Jerusalem following the Babylonian sacking of 586 BCE. Along the way they re-established Israel’s religious identity, including this scene of reading re-discovered scripture, with interpreters helping the people understand. And when the people are overwhelmed by the beauty? challenge? of what they’ve heard, they’re overcome with emotion, even weeping. But Nehemiah says the more appropriate response is joy – because it’s not too late, because God is ready to receive us even when we’re late.

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The Leader, in Diligence. How do congregations of people discern collectively who their leaders should be? What help does God give in that process, and how do we access that help? (Spoiler alert: Something, Something, Holy Spirit.)

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Last of All, Servant of All. God has always employed real live humans for the task of directing and caring for God’s people. What kind of people are best suited for this work? Those who serve relentlessly, conscientiously, joyfully. We’ll celebrate stories of church leaders who have sacrificed much for the sake of the “flock” they “shepherd.”

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There Is Still a Vision. Habakkuk is a prophet with writer’s block – he does not have a word from the Lord or from the distant battlefield, and that’s making him antsy. He climbs the ramparts of Jerusalem’s wall to scan the horizon, trusting that a runner will come. And instead, he gets a word from the Lord, kinda: “Wait, and listen, and trust that I’ve got something in mind, and it’ll be good.” Tomás Halík has said that faith is trust + patience. How much patience have we got for God?

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I Will Pour Out My Spirit on All Flesh. Joel’s prophetic call to repentance urges Judah (the southern kingdom remaining after northern Israel’s fall to Assyria) to repair their social structure and return to faithfulness. And assuming they will, God promises bloody revenge on the nation-states that have taken advantage of their weakness. The prophet imagines a restoration of trust between God and God’s people, and an abundant outpouring of God’s Spirit that douses all people, irrespective of human difference and hierarchies, with the ability to see what God sees and hope for what God hopes fo...

The Lord Bless You and Keep You. The Book of Numbers is filled with census data of the wandering Israelites, and a collection of laws for keeping social order among those thousands of people. One tribe, the Levites, and all its subfamilies, is designated to translate between God and the people as temple-servants (or priests). The Levites are given an all-time blessing to say over the people, which, God says, “puts [God’s] name on them.” What does it mean to move in the world with God’s name on you?

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New Mercies, Every Morning. Lamentations is a collection of poetry composed and compiled shortly after the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. The poems name God as the punisher of all Israel’s sin. This is a God who initiates massive, generational suffering and blames the victim for it; imperial armies are only God’s instruments of torture. BUT in the middle of the Lamentations comes an ode to God’s mercy and steadfast love. In the chiastic structure of this book, the reader is invited to believe that this counter-testimony is the ultimate reality, the revelation of God’s true, li...

Love the Earth. Jesus’s first parable (in Luke) is about growing food – the experience of planting grain in plowed earth, watching it grow, observing where it thrives and where it doesn’t. Of course it’s metaphorically about the reign of God – in whom it takes hold and in whom it doesn’t. And it’s meant to be at least a little bit funny; the farmer in the story isn’t a very careful one. But the parable works because Jesus’s audience was agrarian; they were close to the food production cycle. In the Information Age we have to be more...

Be in Your Body. Jesus points out to his host that his body could have used care – his head, his hands, his feet were all in need of gentle attention. The uninvited woman who gave care to his body used her body for his sake, kneeling to wipe his feet with her hair. It’s a sensual service for a sensual savior who cares for his fully embodied self. No less are we meant to appreciate and occupy our sensual, beautiful, exhausted bodies.

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Speak Truth to Power. John the Baptist reappears in this gospel from a prison cell, conducting a conversation with Jesus via messengers. Jesus follows up with a deeply complimentary description of John’s brave work, acknowledging the reality that the gospel of God’s reign is not good news for everyone (i.e. those in power with so much to lose).

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Cross a Boundary. The centurion (Roman officer) should not care about his enslaved person. Jesus should not care about the centurion. But here they all are, caring about each other across the boundaries humans make. What if a deliberate demographic crossover (generational, class, language, and otherwise) could make more room for God to work in the synergy? Carissa Robinson is preaching.

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Be the Neighbor. How are we meant to comport ourselves in a world where our neighbors scorn our existence? When we are made to feel unwanted, even unsafe, by our fellow citizens? Jesus has an idea about that: love, blessing, non-judgment. This is likely a life-long practice, quite impossible to get quickly “correct” and move on.

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Lament Honestly. The “Sermon on the Plain” is noticeably more grounded than Matthew’s version. Jesus here attends to the material condition of his followers’ lives, and dares to speak the truth about that. He says God knows it’s true, and has in mind a reversal of fortune that will honor the truth of their daily experience of lack. Carisa Robinson is preaching.

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Honor Your Ancestors (Maybe Not All of Them). Think about where you came from. For most of us, there’s a wide variety of good, bad, and ugly in our heritage. Jesus is accused of not honoring the ancestors’ teachings; his replies show that he’s discerning what he takes and what he leaves behind from the history he inherits.

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Praise Aspirationally. Levi throws a great banquet with all the wrong guests... Jesus’s disciples aren’t ascetic enough... Jesus responds to accusations with “Look, we’re doing the best we can with the time we have.” It’s not a huge, triumphal claim; it’s a right-sized hope in God’s coming redemption. “Maybe...all is not lost.”

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Reckon with Your Past. When you encounter Jesus, he goes straight to the heart of the problem. The healing he offers could be physical, or emotional, or spiritual. You have to be ready for him to clean things up, re-order your psyche, put you back together from the inside out. How do we partner with Jesus in this self-rehabilitation? What about therapy as a spiritual practice?

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Ask for Help. Jesus calls his first disciples in an exchange of mutual aid. He needs a platform; they can share one. They’ve caught nothing; he can direct them to a big catch. He needs assistants; they can follow. The best relationships function this way, like a seesaw, in complementary partnership.

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The church that dreams together celebrates together! This Sunday we celebrate Pentecost and the beginning of the church all over again. The church continues on in the midst of chaos, dreaming and reconfiguring itself in order to be the body of Christ in this here-and-now world. 

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Cultivation of spiritual gifts for the life of the church and the community. This is the grand ending to John’s dream. John here is imagining in binaries: the forces of good and the forces of evil. Everyone who hears his message is invited by Jesus to “come,” partake in the water of life. 

What was it for John who had been the subject of imperial subjugation to imagine himself a free agent, able to discern what was the will of God? What was it for John and his faith community to think of themselves as followers of Jesu...

Presence, physical and emotional, at gatherings of the church. In this dream, John sees a river that is clear as crystal, and whose water gives life, flowing from the throne where God and the Lamb (Jesus) are. The river flows down the middle of the streets, so it is always accessible, and there is a tree of life whose leaves are medicine that can heal the nations. God’s subjects serve God faithfully and bear God’s name on their foreheads. God will become their light.

John, from the midst of the hardship and loneliness he is endu...

Discernment for our next steps together. In this dream, John imagines God and God’s people forever united. The imagery involves a bride/groom and a new city, with “beautiful” used as a descriptor. God in this vision erases death, mourning, crying, pain, and also tenderly wipes tears out of eyes. This is God making everything new; the old order that felt so impossible to unravel or escape from, that felt so impossible to repair or untangle, is subverted with finality. What is it to dream of such a fixed finality of perfection and beauty from a place of hopele...

Gracious receipt of care from the church family. In this dream, God’s people who have been subjected to societal violence wear their suffering like robes of honor. They worship God and serve God around God’s throne— and God shelters them. Their shepherd is this Lamb (Jesus); it is said this Lamb will make sure they are never hungry or thirsty or even hot and will lead them to springs of living water. Then, any tears that were in their eyes, God will wipe away.

In this dream, John, who’s clearly been through hardship, imagines a situat...

Sharing material resources to further the church’s goals. In this dream, John sees a diverse, numberless crowd surrounding a throne declaring that the “Lamb who was slain (Jesus)” is worthy of power, wealth, wisdom, strength, glory, honor, praise, and dominion. In John’s world, the people calling for this sort of attribution were imperialistic rulers, and here John is dreaming of the slain one (the threat-to-empire, criminalized Jesus) as the one who is worthy. What is it to dream a dream like this when the powers-that-be are breathing down your neck, crying out for loyalty daily? When folkx don’t ha...

Extension of the Church’s Welcome to Friends, Neighbors, Strangers, and Enemies. Just like when you wake up from a strange dream and you want to tell someone about it, in this passage, John experiences a dream/vision from God, who tells him to write it down.

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Feral Hope. Here’s a quote from an essay I’ve been reading and re-reading: “Feral hope is radical hope. As Jonathan Lear describes it, ‘What makes this hope radical is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is. Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it.” Like… going to a tomb, finding it empty...

With thanks to Cody Sanders for his essay ‘Feral Hope for Futurist Leaders,’ accessed here.

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The Expanse of His Care, from Small to Ginormous. (There is a section just before this, Jesus teaching in the Nazareth synagogue, that we read recently.) Here we see Jesus coming into his power as a holistic healer: tending t

The Hardest Part, For Now. Jesus told us to pray to escape trials, because he himself endured trials. “Trial” is more than temptation, right? It’s about the deep-down questioning of whether God is trustworthy. Pray that you d

Double lineage: Born of God, Born of Adam. Where does Jesus come from? From the transcendent God… from the human community of his ancestors… from the cosmic materiality of creation (water, dove) – and these all converge to ma

Building on a Legacy. Jesus doesn’t invent his “reign of God” preaching from whole cloth; he builds it on a legacy of teaching and prophecy that comes before him, including from John the Baptist, his single biggest influence.

Growing Up Jesus. What is it like to grow a child into a messiah? And what does it mean that we, too, are growing? “Wisdom” is not something we gain suddenly, but a slow ascent toward maturity that takes our whole life long.

Go. The radical act of worship requires that we stop and leave, carrying with us the gifts we’ve received, newly energized for our work in the world God still loves. I can’t quite imagine carrying on with Christian discipleship without the weekly reset of worship; how does one maintain an endless and unchanging line of faith-hope-love without the Sunday peaks in the graph? It’s a full-circle concept – you can’t “go” from worship until you’ve come to worship.

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Share. Our days are consumed by the impulse to get – consumed by consumerism! But generosity is a muscle that atrophies as our consumption grows. The paired stories about Barnabas and Ananais-n-Sapphira can be told as fables: “Here’s how they’ll remember you someday.” And the small “gives” we give today add up over a lifetime to form that story.

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The Table. Jesus just has this whole way of upending the traditional “table math” – seats of honor, who’s invited. (I think that at my grandmother’s house he would’ve sat at the kids’ table, with his knees up under his chin.) Scripture often compares being at home with God to being seated at a banquet, secure in plenteous food and gracious welcome. This is the “eucharistic economy,” the radical way God has of giving generously without consideration of merit; and it’s an economy we’re invited/challenged to practice beyond the table of our Lord.

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Preach. “Churches get the preaching they deserve,” Katie’s spouse has said, quoting someone else. Meaning, preaching is inherently dialogical. It has the form of monologue, but at its best it reflects the preacher’s conversations with the church, with the culture, and (most obviously) with the scripture itself, and thus with our ancestors in faith. This is the space where the Whole Project is called into question, and where the preacher demonstrates the Wrestling-with-God, and where the congregation is invited to imagine their own participation in God’s Big Story of Everything. “This is Who God is. This is who you(w...

Sing. Singing before a crowd of people requires some courage; most of us aren’t that good at it and shouldn’t be on a mic. But singing with a crowd is different. It releases us from self- consciousness about raising our own voices. It requires that we breathe together, in and out. It puts the words of faith, hope, and love in our own mouths, even if we can’t quite muster those things ourselves. It’s like a spiritual workout, where the hymn is the personal trainer encouraging you to bend a little deeper, try a little more wei...

Read Scripture. This is how we introduce “trouble” into the narrative of worship. The stories our ancestors told assert that “the earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it” – i.e. that God gets everything God wants. It does not always appear to be true in our experience. And so every Sunday the text invites us to wrestle with tradition, promises made but not yet fulfilled. We let it trouble us, and sometimes let the tension stand, refusing the easy resolution that condescends both to us and to the text. (Also, sometimes scripture pisses people off.)

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Pray. Bowing our head, bending our knee, pledging our allegiance – this is the subversive work of prayer. Corporate prayer in worship is a stay against idolatry. We remember again that our time here is for the re-ordering of our lives: “God is God, and we are not. (And nothing else is God, either.)” The counter-narratives say that our lives depend on capitalism, work, the military, government, our own capacities. Even the simplicity of the Lord’s Prayer says otherwise.

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Arrive. King David, having recovered the Ark of the Covenant, dances his way home. He is essentially bringing God’s Presence back to Israel, and his enthusiastic showing-up dance is unnerving to some (his wife!) who wish for more decorum, more “demure”, in worship. But it matters how we arrive for worship – do we bring our whole (exposed) selves, or do we hold back? Additionally, there are many “Psalms of Ascent” in Israel’s hymnal, designated for climbing the temple mount in Jerusalem – meaning that our ancestors gave some thought to how we gather for worship. As do we. (parts of worship...

Simeon, Anna, and I can die now. Simeon is our final singer. He and Anna have waited many years, decades of waiting, for the fulfillment of one small piece of God’s big promise to redeem Israel and save the world. Waiting is a virtue, a practice, a skill that becomes a disposition for we who are tracing the long arc of the moral universe... (Carissa Robinson is preaching.)

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Angels, shepherds, and all that had been told them. The angelic announcement (the third of four arias in this opera) stokes the shepherds’ curiosity, and they are the first “come and see” invitees. Do we imagine the angels only sang to these shepherds? Or did their song perhaps go to others who were not quite interested enough to drop everything and go?

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Jesus: born under the boot of empire. Luke here situates Jesus’s birth in its political and economic contexts. Babies born now could be similarly announced: “When So-and-So was president, and So-and-So was governor of Texas; when interest rates were thus, and employment was such...” And what would it mean? If Jesus’s nativity happened now, where would it likely take place?

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John, Zechariah, and being filled with God’s Spirit. The songs we sing to our children matter. What are the melodies and lyrics we fill their imaginations with? Songs of longing and lament; songs of empowerment and good cheer; songs that transport our spirits into God’s good future – these are the songs we must sing for generations to come.

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Elizabeth, Mary, and the strength of God’s arm. The story of sisterhood, and the subversive lullaby that rumbles up from Mary’s spirit after some time spent soaking up Elizabeth’s company, are scenes that ignite our own communal spirit. What happens, what becomes possible in your imagination, after spending time with someone who can help you see God’s future? Cultivate those relationships. (And be that sister/friend for someone else, too.)

Gabriel, Mary, Joseph, and nothing is impossible with God. If Mary’s virginity means anything, it means that God bounds over obstacles to get what God wants. At the same time, God seeks consent for this particular intervention; Mary’s yes is imperative to the forward motion of the story and God’s incoming Presence. (Note: this is a very Mary-centric story, compared to Matthew’s Joseph-centric story.)

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Zechariah, Elizabeth, and what the Lord has done for me. Elizabeth’s “barrenness” was a source of shame (“disgrace”), the brokenness that we associate with bodies that don’t behave as they should according to norms we have inherited. Scripture often speaks of shameful bodies being liberated/received by God – eunuchs in Isaiah 56, for example. The incarnation itself is God’s display of solidarity with our embodiment, and the grace God intends for our bodie

Luke, Theophilus, and the well-ordered account. Luke’s gospel is epistolary, with an intended (if imagined) recipient, Theophilus (“Friend of God”). Luke acknowledges that there are competing narratives of “the events that have been fulfilled among us,” and offers his reporting as “well- ordered.” This is an important assertion: that Theophilus (and the whole audience) deserve an account that assumes their intelligence and their right to know. We who foll

Love. The Sunday after our national elections, how does it look to proceed in the love that God calls us to, and upon which God’s empire is built?

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Give God what belongs to God. The Sunday before our national elections, let’s reflect on what we’re meant to release to the empire vs. what we give only to God. “Do not put your trust in princes” from Psalm 146 becomes “Do not put your trust in politicians.”

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The Son of Humanity in service. There’s no escaping the upside-down power structure of Jesus’s campaign (or God’s reign). Finally, it gets down to really small things, like who takes the trash out at the end of the night.

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Beware of wealth, and redistribute it to dispel its power. In the tradition of the prophets, Jesus was suspicious of accumulated wealth, and urged his followers not to be trapped by it. Money demands loyalty (sweat, time, relationships, wellbeing...). God’s reign competes with money for our dependence and loyalty. Carissa Robinson is preaching.

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Light up each person’s dignity. In a training for non-violent, peacekeeping poll chaplains, a rabbi instructed us to “light up the dignity” of both perpetrators and targets of abuse. Jesus’s reversal of blindness sounds ableist to our ears, but what if we can see his work as lighting up the dignity of the shushed Bartimaeus? And what if that is Josh’s work, too, in hospital chaplaincy? Josh’s ordination!

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Collaboration across difference. There’s no need, Jesus says, to fence off good work to ensure our exclusive claim to power. Good work happens in lots of places, apart from us, and it’s the goodness that matters, not who gets credit. Also, side note: stay salty, disciples.

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Generational thinking. It’s not only trauma we pass on from generation to generation...it’s also the sequoias we’re planting now that will come to fruit only for our descendants. Jesus’s time is short, but his vision is long, and it begins with the snot-nosed kids right in front of him.

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Abundance, abundantly clear. The age-old question regarding material resources: is there enough? or should we hoard and hand-wring, worrying that we’ll be left empty-handed? In the world Jesus is building, there is always enough if we trust God’s provision.

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Getting Low, Saying Thanks. Real gratitude requires vulnerability. Paul alllllmost didn’t make it in his thank-you note to the Philippians. Rev. Dr. Katie Hays is back!

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Did Jesus Really Call the Syrophoenician Woman a B****? Or was something profound taking place as Jesus ceded power in the conversation to this foreign woman and allowed a historic breaking of glass ceilings and agency for all who are marginalized in the church and beyond.

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Religious Loopholes: The Danger in Claiming Spiritual Exemptions. n this cluster of scripture from Mark, Jesus is letting the community know that those with religious/cultural power have been nullifying scripture, twisting commandments to benefit themselves and those who serve their purposes, and in 2024, this is a relevant message. Loopholes have always existed to protect the interests of certain groups, special groups that often need protecting, but we all know there are corrupt loopholes. Loopholes that have been integrated into most systems to protect and provide for those who created them; sadly, the church is no different. But, in...

The Armor of Each Other. The "Armor of God" has often been used as a weapon against us, and as a tool of empire. Is there a way to draw meaning from it still? Is there a useful ethic for approaching these militant texts in the midst of a violent empire? As always, we do it together. Josh Bridges-Hickey is preaching.

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Which Jesus is on the Menu? How do the frequent metaphors in the scripture help us to transcend the literal and go deeper in our relationship with God. David specifically examines Jesus’ invitation to eat the bread and become intimately engaged with Jesus for our own growth and to better represent love and justice in the world around us. David Clarke is preaching.

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What’s your reason? We are required to love, serve, forgive, etc., well, all that good stuff is impossible when our “reason” is temporal, not organic or authentic, not focused on being an offering to God. We get tired when the energy behind our reason is solely our own and not God’s. What is your reason? Rev. Yevette Christy is preaching.

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A Creed, A Preposition, and a Love Letter. Growing together as the body of Christ is a lifelong project that we can only do with the help and the faith of one another and of Christ Jesus. Together, we grow toward Christ, we grow toward one another, and we live lives worthy of the life to which we have been called. Rev. Remi Shores is preaching.

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An Endless Thread. Love calls us through our knowledge, but ultimately that same love shatters our knowing and awakens us to something deeper, wider, more. Rev. Yevette Christy is preaching.

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Wrestling for Identity: Embracing the Limp. Life often presents us with struggles, some of our own making, but often, as in the case of the story of Jacob in Genesis, they present an opportunity to wrestle through a divine encounter and find ourselves different on the other side.  We may walk with a limp, but our journey has found new direction.  It is not how we look but who we are that matters. David Clarke is preaching.

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At church, we practice relationships with one another so that we can learn to love. Then, we take that love out into the world God still loves and Christ goes with us. Remi Shores is preaching.

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Nostalgia is Bullshit. Amid growing pains after the 10-year mark, Galileo is working on their 4th missional priority: Real relationship, no bullshit ever. How do we keep nostalgia from getting in the way of that work? How do we keep believing that this moral arc of the universe is, somehow, bending towards justice? Remi Shores is preaching.

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Great is Thy Faithfulness. One of the ways the ancient Israelites mourned the destruction of Jerusalem was by doing so as a community, together. Our cities may not be destroyed, but we have all lived through hard things. What can learn from our ancestors in faith about grieving together? Josh Bridges-Hickey is preaching.

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Declaring the Day of Salvation. What does it mean to announce that today is the Day of Salvation? Carissa Robinson is preaching.

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Working Out an Embodied Faith. What happens when we fully inhabit our bodies? And what happens when the Christian church returns to the broken body of Christ? Carissa Robinson is preaching.

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We Miraculous Specimens. Shit is hard, we're all going to die, and every living body is still a relentless miracle. When everything dies and everyone grieves, what hope do we have to hold onto? What, and who, is this all for? Josh Bridges-Hickey is preaching.

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God Calls Out to Us - A look at what's stirring in the silent, empty, and barren places, and a challenge to tune in to the questions these stir up— for from them, we might just hear the voice of God, calling out. From 1 Samuel 3.

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To tell us your thoughts on this sermon, click through to the web posting and leave us a comment. Or, find us on social media: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Or, email us the old-fashioned way: info@galileochurch.org. To contribute financially to the ongoing ministry of Galileo Church, find us on Venmo, Patreon, or Zelle (generosity@galileohurch.org), or just send a check to P.O. Box 668, Kennedale, TX 76060

Happy Birthday, Church! Having contemplated our way of belonging and beholding, it’s time to consider the co-conspiracy once again. Also to commission our leaders on MLT and SCT.

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Be-Holding Each Other. Jesus identified his followers as “family,” and prayed that we would be as unified as he and God were unified. That’s not an idea – it’s a set of practices that we’ve been talking about all these weeks.

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Cultivation of Spiritual Gifts and Sharing of Resources for Our Life Together. Even Jesus needed help – the needs of the world were crushing him! His work in the world was a collective enterprise almost from the beginning. And so is ours... What help does each one offer?

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Participation in the Church’s Discernment for Our Next Steps Together. God has got stuff going on – new wine, if you will – and sometimes it’s the church’s job to just catch up. We’re in perpetual discernment mode, never wanting to get stuck – because God will move TF on.

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Gracious Receipt of Care from the Church Family. The man on the mat has to let himself be moved...examined...forgiven...healed...challenged. It’s a level of vulnerability not everyone can achieve. Deanne’s ordination!

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Extension of the Church’s Welcome to Friends, Neighbors, Strangers, and Enemies. The leper couldn’t help himself: Jesus said “Shhh” but he told everybody.

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Easter service at Galileo Church 2024.

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The Scattering. In a sense, the creation-of-the-world story isn’t over until chapter 11. Throughout, God has been observing, evaluating, demolishing, renovating... and now God is redecorating, scattering and spreading the human family. That spread was God’s intention all along – that the human family would “fill the earth.” It’s our tendency to clump together in silos of sameness, but God is here hopeful that we’ll find beauty in diversity.

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“I will never again.” God makes a decision: wipe it out, start over. But then God decides differently: “I’ll never do that again.” How do we wrestle with a God who learns as God goes?

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East of Eden. The enmity between human beings is the immediate symptom and consequence of the brokenness. In the world “east of Eden” – which is the world we all live in now – competition for scarce resources feels real.

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Truth and consequences. Even the ground is broken now – yielding thorns instead of food. God names the consequences for the humans’ impudence, and also clothes them compassionately.

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They knew that they were naked. The originary humans come of age, their naivete spoiled. Let’s talk about whether that’s the ruination of humanity, or the completion of our “image-of-God- ness.”

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Naked and Unashamed. We probably can’t talk enough about the loving care that God has for our bodies, especially because the counter-testimony (your body is wrong, dangerous, untrustworthy, problematic) is so strong. We remember that one of the first signs of the humans’ brokenness in chp. 3 is their strong desire to cover up. Genesis 2 calls us back to an exalted state of “body positivity” – though there ought to be a better way to say that.

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Tilling & Keeping this Blessed Rock. When we think of “relationships” we’re usually speaking of people or Persons – relationships with family or friends, or perhaps with God. Maybe, for some of us, there’s a sense of “relationship” with an animal companion, but we sense that it’s not entirely mutual. (Fight me.) But what is the nature of the relationship that God designates for human beings with the planet God built us out of? “Tilling” and “keeping” (and “dominion,” from chp. 1) are words that deserve our attention, especially in this age of eco-anxiety after a long era of eco-domination.

To t...

Rest Finishes the Work. Fundamentalists speak of a “six-day creation” – but that misses the work of the seventh day, which is rest. What if no job is really complete until there’s been time to rest from it? To let it sink into our tired bones, for us to process the work with our loved ones or in our dreams, to get some distance from the work and let it become meaningful... Being in the image of God as we are, rest is one of the ways we can be godly.

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The Quotidian Mysteries. In a book of this name, Kathleen Norris explores laundry as a spiritual practice. It relates to God’s creative work on the first several days when God is not mainly making something out of nothing, but rather separating this from that – light from dark, water from land, sky from surface, etc. God as an Orderer calls us to mimic this work in our own ordered lives – materially and ethically. A theological argument for making the bed?

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It’s all good. In the opening story of our sacred text, we encounter God’s imagination and intention in making a world that is good, and very good. Our faith has sometimes jumped too quickly to the brokenness of all things, but that’s not where God starts, nor where we begin. How would our theology be different if we started, always, from the goodness of all things, including ourselves?

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Judea. Jesus’s sense of self requires that he turn toward Jerusalem – toward the concentration of religious and political power that will steal his life and threaten his followers. In what sense is this destiny his “home”? In Christian iconography, he has lived on the cross for 2,000 years...

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Galilee. Jesus hits his stride in his home territory – at the height of his powers, he calls disciples, exorcises demons, heals diseases, and preaches his heart out. It’s a good New Year’s theme: what does it look like when you’re firing on all cylinders, doing exactly what you were baptized to do? When your life