We seek and shelter spiritual refugees, rally health for all who come, and fortify every tender soul with the strength to follow Jesus into a life of world-changing service.
OUR MISSIONAL PRIORITIES:
1. We do justice for LGBTQ+ humans, and support the people who love them.
2. We do kindness for people with mental illness and in emotional distress, and celebrate neurodiversity.
3. We do beauty for our God-Who-Is-Beautiful.
4. We do real relationship, no bullshit, ever.
5. We do whatever it takes to share this good news with the world God still loves.
Trying to find us IRL?
Mail here: P.O. Box 668, Kennedale, TX 76060
Worship here: 5 pm CT Sundays; 5860 I-20 service road, Fort Worth 76119
Trying to find our Sunday worship livestream?
click here!
We began worship in our brand-new space with a contemplation of the first lines of the Lord's Prayer: "Our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy name." Hallowing, holy-ing, remembering that God is God and we are not. And we asked God to hallow the theater by praying all over it -- backstage, the balcony, even the bathrooms.
A well-known homiletician says the most important part of the sermon is the first paragraph; within a few lines people decide whether to keep listening or check out. So this sermon begins with maybe the best/worst first paragraph ever. Exodus ends in Galatians: "For freedom Christ has set us free!" We read selections from Galatians 5 -- see the photos below.
Have you ever tried to find music to celebrate ethical monotheism? Like, the "ethical" part of that? It was a good set for this night, but hard-won. And our 6th-grade reader of the 10 Commandments from Exodus 20 did the best job ever. Can you name all ten?
Here was our communion devotion for the service with Exodus 16. Wowie kazowie.
Tonight we skipped ahead in our story, reading all of Exodus 16. "Freedom from Pharaoh's economy" was our theme. We made pillows. You'll see why.
We're making progress through the Exodus story, and landed here on Mount Horeb with Moses and that spontaneously combusting-but-not-consumed shrubbery. We read Exodus 3:1–4:5, then sang the strangest song I've ever had the pleasure of yelping along with in worship. Then a sermon about the ineffable Deity we like to call God.
Listen to the strange and perfect song here.
Continuing our reading of Exodus, we took a chunk from the latter half of chapter 2 (verses 11-25), a piece of the story not often told. Moses is a confused adult, driven to rage and exile by his identity crisis. Hebrew? Egyptian? Who is he?
And who are these people he leaves behind, the suffering slaves that are Moses' biological kin? They have been "Hebrews" up to now, ethnically kin but fragmented from each other. By the end of the chapter, they will be "Israelites," one people united in suffering, heirs to the promise of God to their ancestors. How do they change from one to the other?
God promises us freedom from isolation and fragmentation. Pinky swear.
And now, Exodus. The prequel for Moses, 1:8–2:10. Before anybody says, "Let my people go," five women have to say, "Let this baby live." Can they do it? You bet your buttons. Our service was about "freedom from helplessness."
Tonight we started a new worship series, "For Freedom Christ Has Set Us Free: Stories from the Exodus." But we weren't quite ready to read Exodus. We started with a condensed version of the Genesis-to-Exodus narrative from Psalm 105. We read the whole darn thing, and so should you before you listen.
Also, we had a worksheet. Fun times. (One of those Hs should be a Z. Bonus points if you find it.)
Erin James-Brown has a way with words. But really, she has a way with life. We love the way she describes the with-God-way, with longing — and also with her teeth gritted, because, as she says, "doing what Jesus proposes here is stupid. Watch out." Yeah, we really should be able to admit that what we're doing, seeking this treasure with our whole lives on the line, is reckless and risky. Matthew 13:44-46 and following.
Confounding questions for our post-sermon conversation:
1. Have you ever found something for which you were willing to give up something valuable? Was it an easy decision, or difficult? Would you do it again?
2. What do you think about Jesus' scandalous relationship to money (i.e. asking people to sacrifice it all, requiring his disciples to depend on the hospitality of others)? How does his way of talking about money strike you? Does it challenge? inspire? leave you with more questions?
Just two little short ones for this night: parables from the deli, Matthew 13:31-35, mustard and yeast. And Galileo Church's very first dedication of a baby to the reign of God, our very own mustard seed, CC Bates. Kinda scary. Kinda awesome!
For today we read Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43. Can I just say, this church is bold for confronting texts in the Bible that don't square with our own ideas about how nice Jesus really ought to be? To disorient ourselves in preparation for a disorienting parable, we sat on quilts on the floor; during the sermon I moved from microphone to microphone around the perimeter of the room so that people had to pivot on their behinds to keep facing me. The message was something like, "Don't get too comfortable." And we did not.
After the sermon, we turned again to Confounding Questions for Conversation:
1. Katie quoted a friend quoting a Russian author (Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, brought to our attention again in Brian McLaren's Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha,and Mohammed Cross the Road?: "The line between good and evil runs through the center of my heart." Does that seem true to you? How do you know?
2. If someone were going to judge you -- wheat or weed -- what evidence would you like for them to consider?
This Sunday we repeated the Parable of the Sower from Matthew 13:3-8, adding the explanation of the parable given a little later, Matthew 13:18-23. After the sermon we did lightning rounds of one-on-one conversation, switching partners for each question:
1. Imagine a Buzzfeed Quiz, "Which Soil Are You?" Which one do you think you would get -- path, rocky, thorny, good? Which one would you have gotten five years ago?
2. Do you think a person chooses to be one kind of "soil" or another? (i.e. Do you choose your disposition toward God's reign?) Or are you just born that way?
3. The church is commissioned by Jesus to share (or sow) the word (or seed) of God's reign. Based on this parable, how should we be doing that?
We're reading parables from Matthew 13 for five weeks, starting now. And everything about our worship -- the seating, the music, the table, the reflection time -- is like a parable, definitely unexpected and kind of absurd. We're trying to get in the headspace and heartspace to hear Jesus's words about God-Who-Cannot-Be-Apprehended.
This recording includes instructions from Erin F. about how to get ourselves into conversation groups after the sermon. We had a lot to talk about. Three questions:
1. How do you feel about the mission Jesus and Isaiah shared, to confuse the issue of God for their hearers?
2. On a spectrum from clarity to confusion, where do you feel most comfortable? What parts of your life are in your comfort zone? What parts of your life are outside your comfort zone?
3. Katie suggested that God is playing a game of Sardines with us. Are there other games you can think of that God likes to play?
"Hold that brick," she said. "You think I'm going to talk about it, but I'm not. I'm just asking you to hold it for a while." And everybody did, for the duration of the sermon. We read Matthew 11:16-30, minus a few verses in the middle, and contemplated our eating-and-drinking messiah, the one who promises rest for our souls. Rest from what? Man, those bricks are heavy.
It's cruel luck that the recorder we use to capture sermon audio filled up about 11 minutes into worship on 6/29. The opening prayer was barely prayed; the first song barely sung; and there sat Rev. Nathan Russell, waiting to preach his heart out. How many people told me later how amazing it was? How many of the listeners lucky enough to be there remembered the power and presence Nathan brought to the room? All of them, that's how many.
So we who weren't there can't listen to him speak the words, but he's been gracious enough to lend us his manuscript. Just imagine Nathan shining with the light of God while he tells what he knows about being a faithful follower of our Lord and brother.
Cookies delivered to working people... the risk of embrace... the terror of hope... my son's friend on his bike, needing toast and a listening ear... our neighbors, as suspicious of us as we are of them. Everybody is a stranger to somebody. Disciples of Jesus are called to stretch our arms wide and take the risk of being rejected. Matthew 9:37–10:14.
We've begun a four-week worship-n-preaching series to think about our own job descriptions as followers of Living Jesus. (If he's still working, his followers also have stuff to do.) We read Matthew 9, almost the entire chapter, and sang songs about sickness and healing. We watched a video clip from "The Normal Heart" to start things off, which you can watch here if you can stand it.
On Pentecost we were privileged to witness the vows of Ashley and Phillip, who wanted to have the wedding they didn't have when they got married the first time, twelve years and five kids ago. So how do you preach a wedding for a family of seven? Well, here's how I did it.
Acts 16:11-15
We set sail from Troas and took a straight course to Samothrace, the following day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi, which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony. We remained in this city for some days. On the sabbath day we went outside the gate by the river, where we supposed there was a place of prayer; and we sat down and spoke to the women who had gathered there.
A certain woman named Lydia, a worshiper of God, was listening to us; she was from the city of Thyatira and a dealer in purple cloth. The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul. When she and her household were baptized, she urged us, saying, “If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home.” And she prevailed upon us.
Homily
You probably noticed that this is not a very wedding-y text. The truth is, the Bible doesn’t actually say a lot about how to have a good 21st century marriage; it’s not the Bible’s job to be an advice manual. We learn from the Bible how to be the best humans we can, and how utterly dependent on God we are for every breath we take, and beyond that, God trusts us to work out a lot of the details on our own.
Plus, Phil and Ashley, y’all have been at this marriage thing for a long time. I’m not sure what I could tell you that would be better than your own experience of commitment through the ups and downs of everyday life. You have had babies together. You’ve lived through war together, literally, in ways that most of us have not. You’ve endured long separations; economic hardship; health issues; and spiritual desolation; and you’ve done it all together. I don’t think it seems reasonable that you need advice for how to stay happily married.
So we have read this ancient story about the spread of a very local message to a globalized distribution of the news that God is God of heaven and earth, not just local, not just for some people, but for all. Like all history, it’s in the past. But like all history, it has a couple of clues for us today, clues that I thought you might find interesting given where life finds you today.
Here’s our first clue: the women who gathered by the river with their leader Lydia were spiritual, but not religious. For one thing, they weren’t Jewish, so they didn’t come from a heritage of deep faith and religious practice. Their hearts were inclined toward God, but they gathered informally by the river, not in the synagogue, not in the temple, not in any of the designated holy places. Like flowers leaning toward the sun, they leaned toward the Divine, without a great deal of clarity about what they believed – only the sense that something or someone greater than themselves is the Director of the cosmic project.
So the apostle Paul, the church’s first theologian, impressed with their searching, fills in some of the details about God’s intense love for all of humanity, and they decide to take a chance and believe it. That’s how the early conversions to Christianity always were – somebody deciding to take a crazy chance that it just might be true, that the God of the Universe might just be reaching out to them. And then acting on that chance, they took the incredible risk of faith. It was not easy for them; it was never simple. And that might be a familiar feeling to you, that Christian faith feels something like jumping off an intellectual cliff in your mind. But the story of Lydia and others like her show us that that’s the way it’s always been, even for the very first believers. Don’t trust anybody who tells you that believing in God, and believing that God is for you, is easy, or a foregone conclusion. The believers who are notable enough to make it into our sacred book are the ones who believed it against all odds.
The second clue for your marriage that we find in this text is that Lydia’s decision to take that leap of faith affects her whole family. The text says, “She and her household were baptized into Christ.” This is a pattern in the New Testament – that when one member of the family puts their trust in God as God is made known to us in the person of Jesus, the whole family often comes along. There are numerous stories like this – Cornelius the Roman centurion, the unnamed Philippian jailer, Crispus the synagogue leader, and now Lydia the textile merchant, just to name a few.
Things are a little different today – we tend to be much more inclined to let every member of the family make their own, autonomous decision about what to believe and how to orient their lives around those beliefs. But the inescapable truth, even today, is that you two, Phil and Ashley, are householders, you are the chiefs of your own little tribe, and as such, you have a great deal of influence over these children you’re raising together. Brendan, Ella, Evelyn, Barrett, and Brock are already becoming the kind of people they can see that you are.
They are already prioritizing the things you prioritize.
They are already putting their trust in whatever you put your trust in.
They are someday going to work as hard as you work, and love as deeply as you love, and practice mercy insofar as you have been merciful.
They will give generously of their lives in direct proportion to how generously they witness you giving of yours.
Not to put too fine a point on it: your kids’ lifelong engagement with God our Father, the Maker of heaven and earth, the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, is in your hands. And it won’t be enough for you to talk about it with them. They’ll have to see it in action. They’ll need to witness your own attachment to a community of disciples who are all trying as hard as we can to follow Jesus down this faithful path to the heart of God, our own hearts’ true home. I want to urge you to make that a commitment of your continued life together, for their sake, as well as for your own. Someday, when generations to come tell the story of the Hersman family, they’ll say how the Lord “opened the hearts of Phillip and Ashley,” and how all your household came to know the Lord, and how together you all lived happily ever after.
And listen: because you are here, you are off to a good re-start. Standing here in front of God and all your beloveds, you are declaring yourselves to be making a fresh start even as you continue the love you began well over a decade ago. We are so privileged to witness your new beginning, and to witness the vows you are ready to make to one another.
(And they did. They spoke very lovely vows to each other, and the gathered congregation vowed to help them.)
Pronouncement:
Phillip and Ashley, before God and in the presence of this congregation, you have made your solemn vows to each other.
You have joined hands with your children to symbolize the wholeness of your family.
Therefore, by the power vested in me as a minister of the gospel of Jesus the Christ, I now pronounce you husband and wife, father and mother, partners for a lifetime of love through whatever comes your way.
Those whom God has joined together, let no one separate!
I give you Philip and Ashley, Brendan, Ella, Evelyn, Barett, and Brock! The H-- Family!
On Pentecost Sunday, Galileo Church celebrated almost more than we could handle! A new baby born in the early hours of the morning... a rewedding for a family of 7... a Covenant of Co-Conspiracy and the commissioning of leaders... a concert by Paul Demer and his band... and a record-release party with enough BBQ to make you believe in the miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes. To get a little taste, here's what you do:
1. Read Acts 2, most all of it, with all the excitement that story deserves. Which is a lot.
2. Listen to this five-minute sermon.
3. Have your own concert experience with Paul Demer's new release, "Canvas of Sky." You can stream it for free here.
