Higher: Don't Carry It All

"Don't worry," Jesus says, Matthew 6:19-34. But can it be true? That God provides, for real, everything we need? Do you believe that? Have you ever seen it? If you stopped working right now, like the lilies or the birds, how long would your pantry stay full? How long would you get to keep your apartment, or your house? What can this mean? We worked on it pretty hard, and let The Decemberists have the last word: "The neighbor's blessed burden...becomes burden borne of all in one. Don't carry it all." Give it a listen after the sermon, here. (Our congregational cover sounded even better.)

Higher: The Unmasking

Yeah, we literally wore colorful plastic party masks during most of this worship service, waiting eagerly to remove them when the time was right. Erin James-Brown's sermon from Matthew 6:1-18, where Jesus exposes the hypocrisy of religious practices performed for show, got us there. Thanks, Erin, for being good at what you do: listening for God's subtle word and bringing it to our ears and hearts.

Higher: "Long Hike: Wear Good Shoes"

It will take 6 whole minutes to read the Six Antitheses in Matthew 5:17-48, where Jesus says, six times, "You have heard it said...But I say unto you...". It will take a lifetime to live into those words. With thanks to the Bible & Beer group for helping me work through this, especially that stuff about the "right hand..." And with thanks to Steven Eason's essay in Feasting on the Gospels: Matthew, vol. 1  for helping me think about the kind of church we would be, all together now, if we took these words seriously.

Higher: "Beatitude" Is Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

We have just started our Sermon on the Mount series -- Jesus talks a lot in Matthew 5, 6, and 7, and we'll read every word over five weeks. It's answering a higher call, it's taking the high road, it's "a higher plane than I have found," in the words of the honky-tonk gospel song. With thanks to M. Myer-Boulton's essays in Feasting on the Gospels for Matthew 5:1-16. And also Janis Joplin.

Basic #4: Ta-Dah!

The last sermon in the series "Basics" is indebted to the great Southern Catholic novelist and philosopher of language Walker Percy, whose book of essays Message In a Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has To Do with the Other (1975) is one of the most important books I ever read. Also, please read Matthew 4:12-23. Also, please take a look at Rob Bell's What We Talk About When We Talk About God (2013) which I quote at the end of the sermon, from page 125 in my copy. Also, please take a look at these illustrations which popped up as appropriately timed slides during the imaginative exercise at the beginning of the sermon. Thank you for listening.

Basic #3: The Hard Part

What she said: "Honey, will you take a turn in the Galileo pulpit?" What he said: "But Galileo doesn't have a pulpit." What she said: "It's a metaphor. Will you preach the good news for us?" What he said: "Of course. What's the text?" What she said: "Matthew 4:1-11. It's the one about…" What he said: "I know what it's about. And you want good news from that?" What she said: "I know you can do it, sweetie." And he did. Please give a listen to Rev. Lance Pape, Professor of Homiletics at Brite Divinity School, spouse of our pastor. 

Basic #2: Say Yes

How do you know who you are? Who names you, and claims you, and puts their label on you? What would it feel like to reimagine your own baptism as the day you said "yes" to God's best idea of you? "Today, you are my child, my beloved, and with you I am well pleased." Can you hear God saying that to you? Take a look at Matthew 3:3-17.

Basic # 1: Do You See What God Sees?

On Sunday 1/5 we tried for an epiphany after reading Matthew 2:1-12. I think our vision is getting clearer and clearer... we’ll see. Also, we had visual aids for this sermon, and here’s a sample.

We Will Not Look Away

The text for the first Sunday after Christmas: the slaughter of the innocents from Matthew 2:13-23. Oh, joy. Where is the good news in that?!

And yeah, for those with ears to hear, that's a Foofighters song I'm quoting near the end, and yeah, Paul sang it for us after the sermon. "I am a little divided / do I stay or run away / and leave it all behind?"

God Is An Earthquake

What happens if you say "yes" to God and God ruins your life? Come on, it could happen. In fact, it usually does. Just ask Joseph and Mary, Matthew 1:18-25.

Burn It Down, Warm It Up

We looked at two texts from Matthew's gospel about John the Baptist and his complicated relationship with Jesus the Savior: Matthew 3:1-12 and 11:2-19. John predicted that Jesus would come burnin' down the house -- but it didn't quite turn out that way.

God Will Fix It

First sermon in our new space, for our new worship service. First Sunday in Advent. Before you listen, read Isaiah 2:1-5, Matthew 24:36-44, or nothing else makes sense. Also, if you dare, read Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, but fair warning: it will inflame your x-ray vision, and it will hurt.

We Are Not Casual

“Yeah, my church sounds just like yours,” he says with an affirming nod. He’s a good guy, a local businessperson, helping me complete one of the 8,000 tasks on my list to get Galileo Church a worship space. “We’re real casual, too.”

I suppress the urge to growl like a threatened animal and murmur instead, “Can you say more about that?” It’s my go-to response when I need some time to process. Plus, it’s honest. I really would like to know what he means by “casual church,” and if that’s a good description for Galileo.

“Well, you know,” he says, “we wear whatever we want; if there are some Sundays we can’t go, it’s okay; there’s nobody breathing down our neck if we take a break for a while. That’s what we’re all about. It’s…you know…casual.”

Nope. Galileo Church is not casual.

I mean, sure, you can wear whatever you want at Galileo; and if there are some Sundays (or Tuesdays or Thursdays) you can’t go, it’s okay; and there’s nobody breathing down your neck if you take a break for a while. But that’s not what we’re all about. Those are not the first three things to say about the way we are learning to be with each other. Those don’t even make the Top Ten Thousand.

Witness: later that same night, one of our G-groups is sitting in a Mansfield living room, still as statues, holding our breath all together while a young woman curls up and sobs and her young spouse wraps himself around her. We have been praying for their comfort after terrible news. We have joined our hearts with God’s heart and enlisted ourselves in their grief, as best we can.

How many times have we prayed for each other in the weeks past? How many times have we bowed before God’s throne together, just 6 or 7 or 8 of us, in the dim light of a friend’s living room lamps? Long before this bad news: all the practice, all the care we have taken to cultivate trust and share life together.

We will sit here for a few minutes more while she pours out her flood of sadness. We will squeeze his shoulders and kiss her hair and whisper our love and pray God's comfort. This is not casual. We are not casual.

Should've Been Scared of the Girls

I preached for the METRO Christ's Church Women's Revival in September 2013. What a warm welcome from those fabulous women, for the only pale chick in the house that night. MWAH to each of them. Warning: This is a long sermon. The METRO women wouldn't have it any other way.

You Just Love.

So here’s how I thought the study would go:

1. Read the Ten Commandments from Exodus 20, note how simple they are. Black and white. Don’t do this, don’t do that, and you’re good. So graciously clear.

2. Read Romans 13:8-10, where Paul says, “All the commandments – don’t kill each other, don’t lie to each other, yada yada yada – are summed up in this word: Love your neighbor as yourself.” Note how complicated that is. Love is more than “mind your own business.” Love is not black and white; it’s murky gray decision-making space, obscuring a rainbow of confusing beauty and trouble. It requires more from me than the Big Ten. I can’t just ignore my neighbor (or that stranger or even my enemy). I have to love them. Lord have mercy.

3. Everybody agrees with these conclusions; we finish our beer; we go home.

But here’s how it actually went. First we read Exodus 20, and noted the simplicity of the Ten. “Yes, exactly,” I affirmed.

Then we read Romans 13 and talked about love, and the obligation to love, and the complication of being told to love, etc. etc. etc. We were on the right track, headed directly to the pre-planned station of my imagining.

And then she spoke up, the young woman who hadn’t made much noise all night. Here’s what she said, best I can remember:

“I don’t know if it’s so hard. I was raised to believe the Ten Commandments, you know, in a religious school, and we memorized them. And the whole time I was there, one of the adults there was molesting me, and the other adults knew about it, I’m pretty sure, and they were the ones teaching me the Ten Commandments. And I would have probably killed them if I could.

“But it’s been a while, and what I’ve finally figured out is that when you don’t have anything else, when you can’t do anything else, you can always love. Love is simple. It’s not that hard. You just love, you find a way to love from your heart, and that’s all you need. That’s all there is. Just the love.”

She took a sip of her beer and looked at her hands in her lap.

Nobody breathed for a long time. We probably should have finished our beers in that holy silence and gone home, but of course there are always more words. Words of comfort and confirmation, though she was asking for neither. Words of conclusion and wrapping-it-all-up, though they fell far short. And, after a little while, words that drifted back to our present; a return to the beautiful, breezy night on the taco bar patio with the Bible. And with her, reminding us that it’s not supposed to be that hard. You just love.

Spiritual Refugees

I’m a refugee magnet. My always-expanding circle of people includes a bajillion women and men who have been tripped up, stepped on, talked about, kicked out, and left alone to the point that they don’t know if they can keep going.

(If you’re reading this and you’re one of my friends, I’m probably not talking about you. You are the exception; you are actually fine. No worries.)

When I say “refugee” I’m not thinking of actual refugees who smuggle their babies across borders in the middle of a war-torn night. If I lived in a different part of the world, maybe. If my life were more open to the literal refugees that end up in the DFW metroplex, probably.

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No, the ones who come to me are the spiritual refugees, the ones whose hearts yearn for God, whose minds cling to memories of love shared in families and churches. They are the ones who have been pushed away, pulled away, torn away from the relationships and institutions that once gave them the life they imagined God wanted for them.

They are women whose churches taught them to love God with their whole selves, their hearts and souls and minds and bodies, but then told them they had gone too far. They should not imagine that God wants them entirely, in the servant-leadership of the church, because they are women, and God knows, women are not cut out for this kind of service. Serving food from the church kitchen at a potluck dinner, yes; serving the body and blood of Christ from the table in the sanctuary, no.

They are women and men whose churches cultivated the Spirit of tenderhearted love within them, only to say later that such love is only meant for certain ones, not same-sex ones. They should not imagine that God is the source of that love, the love that wanders outside the bounds of our heteronormative expectations. Suppress it, ignore it, repent of it, exorcise it – whatever it takes to banish that love from your heart. And if you can’t do that, go away. We'll pray for you.

They are people whose churches didn’t or couldn’t make room for them in their difference, like their difference was disruptive, or too big, or too loud – like it was hurting the church somehow to have to live with it. They are people who at some point in the not-too-distant past believed that about themselves – that they were hurting the church they loved just by being the people they are. And so they left. And felt some relief, for a while, just being gone.

Spiritual refugees. Samaritan women minding their own business, drawing water at the well in the heat of the day. Pregnant, unmarried teenagers wondering if anyone will stand by them in their shame. Sick people with diseases so foul or fearsome that no one will touch them. Those who grieve too loudly and too long. Those without means to buy their way back in; those without advocates to fight their way back in. Who misses them? Who wants them? Where do they go?

Not a few of them make their way to me, and now to Galileo Church, because with us they find a place to rest, and consider whether God’s love might still be the realest thing in the world. They find a tight-knit group of former refugees who are no longer homeless, but who count each others’ living rooms and lives as home for their restless, hungry spirits.

I was a refugee once. I could tell you about that some time, if you like. But God and the people of God have taken me in, have brought me home. And now, mi casa es su casa. Come on over.

Make Some Room at the Table

This sermon was preached to a few hundred ministers at our biannual denominational event early on Monday morning. On Tuesday, we would face a vote concerning the inclusion of LGBTQ people in our church’s worship, work, and leadership. You’ll be able to guess how I voted. 

No Silverware in Malcolm’s Kitchen: the Early Days

They only agreed to meet one time. Seven or eight young adults in their twenties, curious about the conversation I promised, curious to see whether I could cook, curious to know each other. They said yeah, they’d come over to Malcolm’s house on Thursday night.

I wish I could remember exactly who was there. Malcolm, of course, the quietly hilarious engineering student at UTA who asked the guy he rented a room from if we could use the living room for a couple hours. And Kaytee B, the part-time secretary at the traditional church I was serving, with whose innate kindness and generosity I had fallen in love. And a handful of others who were not exactly lost, not exactly found, but kind of in between, wondering what kind of earth they were inheriting, wondering whether God was still paying attention.

I also don’t remember what I cooked for that night in July 2012. The story I tell is “a pot of chili,” but it could have been any of the four or five entrees I started making on a regular basis for Thursday gatherings. It had to be something I could pack in the back of my station wagon, along with the plates and napkins, cups and drinks, serving utensils and silverware. There were no forks in Malcolm’s kitchen, at least not enough for a gathering of any size, so we carried it in and carried it out, every week for what seemed like a long time. A good, very good, long time.

Every week we ate, and drank, and got to know each other a little. I would posit a question for consideration. “What is the state of your physical health? How about your spiritual health? How are those related, or not, for you?” “Are you an ethical monotheist? How do you know?” “Do you find it easier to connect with God when you’re alone, or with people? Why do you think so?” “What does ‘church’ mean to you? What do you like most about that idea? Least?”

The answers were unlike anything I could have predicted. The people sitting around Malcolm’s living room, on sofas or the floor or the giant beanbag called – I kid you not – a “Lovesac,” were disarmingly honest. One night we were talking about contemporary idolatries and I passed around Play-Doh so we could shape our own idols for smashing later. A couple of people formed their credit scores, their credit card woes, their student loans, their vocational anxiety, their relationship blunders. Oh, the honesty! It took my breath away.

After a couple of months someone suggested that we could, if we felt like it, read the Bible together… after all, if this was “church” we probably should crack open the Good Book. I was startled – I had been thinking of Galileo as a side project, a diversion from my church work. But soon after a young woman in the group took a call from her dad during supper and told him, “I can’t talk now; I’m at church.” And it hit me that what we were doing was not a side project, not a diversion, for the people who had come together in Malcolm’s living room. For many of them, it was the singular communal expression of faith of their adult lives. Galileo was their church. And it was going to take more than silverware and chili to keep it going.

Press Release After General Assembly 2013

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) Officially Welcomes LGBTQ Members

Mansfield, Texas – July 22, 2013 – At its biannual General Assembly in Orlando, Florida, last week, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), a mainline Protestant denomination, voted by a wide margin to approve Resolution 1327, “Becoming a People of Grace and Welcome to All.” While the resolution speaks broadly of the theological grounds for extending welcome to all people, the main focus of discussion was on the penultimate paragraph, which reads:

“BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the General Assembly calls upon the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) to affirm the faith, baptism and spiritual gifts of all Christians regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity, and that neither is grounds for exclusion from fellowship or service within the church, but we celebrate that all are part of God’s good creation.”

Immediately following the passage of Resolution 1327, General Minister and President of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) Sharon Watkins sent a pastoral letter to congregations, saying, “The intent of the resolution is to urge Disciples to welcome into our congregations and other ministries all who seek Christ. It serves as a reminder that among Disciples we do not bar the church door or fence the [communion] table from those who desire the embrace of God’s love.”

Mansfield has one congregation of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Galileo Church, which began meeting in June 2013. Galileo Church includes LGBTQ members and welcomes interest from all, says pastor Rev. Dr. Katie Hays.

Contact:

Rev. Dr. Katie Hays
email katie@galileochurch.org
phone 817-773-3147
1520 Hampton Drive, Mansfield, TX 76063

Building It Backwards

Galileo Christian Church: Building It Backwards

This is going to sound ho-hum to some of you, but here’s something I finally figured out after 20 years in ministry with traditional churches: for some people who aren’t “churchy” people, relationships come before worship. I know, right?

See, in traditional (established, historic, existing!) congregations, we already have times and spaces and routines set up for our one true purpose: to glorify God and enjoy God forever. We worship with joy, sometimes, and with lament, sometimes, and with “meh” much of the time. We can always invite a stranger or a neighbor to worship with us because that’s what we’re already doing. “Come on in,” we say, “and bow your head and raise your voice and attend to scripture with us. And maybe afterward someone will invite you to lunch. And maybe then we’ll become friends.” Worship, and then the possibility of relationship.

But what if, for new (potential, possible, lovingly imagined) congregations, we have to reverse the order? Relationships first; the possibility of worship later? What if a new generation of seekers wants to know, before they ever walk into a service of prayer and song and scripture, whether they will have friends there? Whether they will be loved as they are? What if they are not going to take a chance on the established routines of the traditional church, for fear of being rejected (or bored or out of place)? Could we reverse the order so that we make friends first, and then join together in worship of the one true God?

That’s just one of the experiments Galileo Church in Mansfield is working on. We’re spending the first six months of our existence making friends – within the small team we started with, and with the neighbors we’re meeting in our town. For now, we eat and drink together, we talk to each other, we share our life stories, we read the Bible in a way that is inclusive of everybody’s “take.”

Let’s be clear: it’s not worship, not really, not yet. Indeed, some of us are attending Sunday services elsewhere to make sure we remember to engage our whole selves in loving God and praising God’s name. (Thank you, established churches, for welcoming us to your tables.)

We hope that when the friendships are strong enough, and broad enough, the hallelujahs will have built up in our hearts and will burst forth from our throats, and God will receive our worship with joy.

Pray for us, friends. Many thanks, and peace – Katie.

Rev. Dr. Katie Hays began a church-planting endeavor in Mansfield on June 1 with the support of the Trinity Brazos Area of the Southwest Region of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).