“Anxiety/ Why do you always get the best of me/ I’m up here living in a fantasy/ I can’t enjoy a thing” - Jason Isbell.
What hope does Jesus have for an anxious world? Check out our new sermon below!
What To Do When Being Kicked In The Head
“When I was nine, some kid beat me up for amusement, and when I came home crying to my father, his answer- Fight that boy or fight me- was godless, because it told me that there was no justice in the world, save the justice we dish out with our own hands. When I was twelve, six boys jumped off the number 28 bus headed to Mondawin Mall, threw me to the ground, and stomped on my head. But what struck me most that afternoon was not those boys but the godless, heathen adults walking by. Down there on the ground, my head literally being kicked in, I understood: no one, not my father, not the cops, and certainly not anyone’s God, was coming to save me.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy.
James KA Smith calls this “a respectable atheism.” There is no pretense of cool detachment or objectivity; only the visceral emotional objection to an unjust world. What does Jesus say to people getting kicked in the head? Or better, what does he do when he is getting kicked in the head? Check out our sermon on revenge and love below!
Lust and the Transcendent
Sex sells, because sex is about power. You can understand the mistake. After all, sex is close to the core of our identity; its “the closest a finite creature can come to the infinite.” Or is it? Check out our sermon on lust and the transcendent below.
“Thank you Lord for her beauty. Thank you that it is not mine.”
Ordinary Light
We live in a world where BIG matters- big money, big business, big followers, big. In a world that privileges economies of scale, it can be tough to feel like an ordinary life matters.
Jesus disagrees.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus takes a bunch of ordinary people and tells them that they can be the light of the world. The question is, How?
New Sermon Below!
Celebratory Suffering
Jesus promises that persecution is inevitable. It’s a mark of the Christian life. He calls us to rejoice in it. So why are we always whining? And how can we become celebratory sufferers? New sermon on “Blessed are those who are persecuted” below!
Upside Down Kingdom
Upside Down Kingdom
“Paradox is a truth standing on its head to get attention.” -GK Chesterton
My 4 year-old son had all the power, standing in the middle aisle of the church 2 minutes before our service was supposed to start. “Where do you want to sit while you wait for mommy to come back?” He dithered. Equivocated. Listed four totally impossible options. The anxiety rises within me. What to do? Scream? Cajole? Beg? Everybody is watching now, the people to whom I’m getting ready to talk about God. I wish there was a simple answer. There wasn’t. That’s life.
When Jesus sits down to give the sermon on the mount, he says all sorts of paradoxical, counter-intuitive things. Like “happy are those who mourn” and “love your enemies.” And we look at him like he is upside down. Just give it to me straight, Jesus. Just tell me what to do. Give me an instruction, a principle, that I can take away and apply in every situation so that I never have to experience any tension or uncertainty or chaos. Give me something to stabilize me, to take away the anxiety of life, so that I can know, so that I can be sure, so that I can be right. And when he doesn’t? We lose interest. On to something more promising, the next thing, the next answer, the big show, the people who are necessarily like us in age, race, class, so that they don’t introduce any tension or uncertainty into our neatly packaged way of being in the world.
So maybe part of the reason Jesus looks upside down to us is because we are standing on our heads. We want principles, but he gives us paradox, not because he is being difficult, but because he knows that the desire for a principle is a desire to do life, to be human, without the presence of God. And he knows that that is impossible, that humans cannot flourish without him. So he says things that seem upside down, to help turn us right-side up; to force his people to carry, not his principles, but his presence, into the world. Knowing that ultimately those paradoxes find their resolution, their culmination, in the person of the God who once sat on a mountain, but now sits on a throne.
Sermon on the Mount: Blessed are the Meek
As we work our way through the beatitudes this week we arrive at Matthew 5:5, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” But what is meekness and how do we live it out honestly? Consider it in light of the two beatitudes before it: “Blessed are the poor in spirit” and “Blessed are those who mourn.” It will also need to be considered in Christ who was meekest of all.