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're back into Jesus' parables, drawn this time from the set that comes late in Matthew's gospel. We're trying to learn to see the world (and its people) the way God sees it (and us). It's very strange, how this "landowning man" does business. Read Matthew 20:1-16 where Jesus quotes Bob Dylan. Or something like that.
We finished up our worship series on the Lord's Prayer, reading Matthew 6:6-13 for the umpteenth time until we've almost got it -- get this -- memorized! Leah Jordan, a third-year student at Brite Divinity School, joined us to talk about the final petitions of the prayer: "Lead us not into [temptation, the time of trial]; deliver us from [evil, the evil one, the brokenness of everything]." It wasn't an easy assignment, and we'll be thinking about her words for long time to come. The prayer, like God's mercies, like our lives, is new every day. Thanks, Leah.
"On earth as it is in heaven," we pray. So what does that mean about heaven? And what does that mean about earth? Wherein a plane ride with a fellow believer helps us clarify what we do, and don't, hope for our future with God.
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.