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!
Sometimes God likes to live in the fog.
Mark 4:1-34 shows Jesus thinning the crowds by his use of a rhetorical strategy most people don't understand -- parables, those pesky riddles of God's reign that might mean God is playing hide and seek with us. And hiding really, really well.
Our "family-of-choice tree" from Sunday. We added leaves with our names on them.
If your family is screwed up, you're in good company. Don't ask Jesus to preach on, or even demonstrate, "family values" the way our culture has construed them. He cares about family, but not like you think. Mark 3:31-35, with extra help from Mark 10, Luke 14.
No, not that kind of strong man.
We're picking up the Gospel of Mark where we left off before Lent. In Mark 3:7-30, Jesus is exhausted and, dare we say it, overwhelmed -- but still the Stronger Man. Don't say otherwise, or you will be sorry.
Look out, world: Galileo Church has entered the Terrible Twos.
Happy birthday, church! Take a look at our birth announcement in Acts 2, and then take a listen. "Thanks be to God?" "Thanks be to God!"
Scientists confirm it – our minds don't like to take this exit.
"Not cancer, climate change, not whether the Apple watch is the best or worst idea ever perpetrated on humankind... But the problem of how to get people to change their mind." Acts 16 and the malleable hearts in Philippi. Read Acts 16, and consider listening to this story on "This American Life."
And...here's a rare postscript to a sermon already preached and recorded: the contemporary sociological "research" that anchors this sermon turns out to be seriously flawed -- as in, the researcher faked the data. Just wow. Here's the Washington Post article that exposes the lie. Ouch.
We like to think that bacon-wrapped shrimp made an appearance in Peter's vision.
Youngster Czar (and recent winner of the preaching prize from Perkins Divinity School, SMU) Jess Schell was the voice of the good news from Acts 10. Who's being converted here?
In Acts 8 we remember Philip, another deacon whose actual work goes far beyond his job description. He runs down the road to catch up with the differently-sexed person whose souvenir scroll is causing some confusion on the road back to Ethiopia. In this order, we consider: his scroll, his race, his testicles, and the day he found himself in the Bible.
On the eve of the Supreme Court hearings on marriage equality, Galileo Church co-sponsored a rally at Sue Ellen's in Dallas. (It was raining; we had to go inside; these people welcomed us so generously.) Rev. Katie Hays took her 90 seconds to say, "I'm here because of Jesus. And Jesus said, 'Blessed are you when you're pissed off.'"
What's one of the first things the post-Pentecost followers of Jesus did? They formed a committee. A committee that could get you killed. I kid you not. Read Acts 6 and 7, please. It's long, but worth it.
WWBD? "B" is for Barnabas -- the Son of Encouragement -- who makes decisions with the community of faith in the front of his mind. We could do that, couldn't we? Or maybe I choose instead to withhold part of myself while pretending to be all the way here, like Ananias and Sapphire. Don't worry -- nobody's been struck dead for doing that for almost 2,000 years. But still.
"Silver and gold have we none, but what we have we give to you..."
In the season of Eastertide, we're looking at how the earliest followers of Jesus got together to make a church. What did they mainly do? How did they mainly do it? We started with Peter and John, empowered by the resurrected Christ to heal... and go to jail. Acts 3, 4, and the last half of 5.
It's Mark's year to tell the gospel story, so we stuck to Mark 16:1-8 for our Easter reading. Not altogether satisfying, those terrorized women fleeing the tomb that way, no Jesus anywhere in sight. But we made the best of it.
At oh-dark-thirty we huddled together to keep warm and dry, wishing for the sun and the Son to rise. We read the traditional early morning scene from John 20:1-23, including Jesus's charge to the disciples: "As the Father has sent me, so I send you." Resurrection with an agenda. Here we go.
Mary Magdalene, it could be said, is ready to be disappointed, because her whole life has been a disappointment. Whatever bad business she got into before she met Jesus, she wasn’t exactly winning in the game of life. I imagine her as an abused or neglected child, the adults who were supposed to be taking care of her falling down disastrously on the job, so that she had to figure out a way to make her own living no matter the risks, no matter the hurt, no matter the indignity. Until Jesus, her life has been pitifully short of kindness or even basic respect. And now that he’s gone, she’s ready for the world to lose its color again. Everything is gray for her this morning; the sun is not shining in her world no matter what’s happening in the sky above.
So she has come to say her last goodbye, to deliver a monologue she’s been rehearsing in her mind to a cold corpse, to say the thanks she should have said in the garden a couple of nights ago if she’d had the guts to break through the brotherhood’s endless mansplaining – and if he hadn’t seemed so preoccupied. But when she gets here and finds the stone rolled back and his tomb empty, she’s not even really surprised – it’s another insult, another slap in the face, another disappointment. The tears she thought had dried up from the endless crying of the last couple of days are back, and Mary can’t move. She’s rooted to the spot like a wilting plant in this new and hateful garden, where the grave of her friend has been desecrated by someone who wants his followers to get the ugly message: they’re done. It’s over. Rome’s arm is long, and it never takes a Sabbath rest.
But then he is standing beside her, a man who looks for all the world like the immigrants who cut the lawns of suburban Americans all summer long. Mary mistakes him for one of these yard guys, with a worker’s red neck and calloused hands, and pleads with him to tell her if he’s seen anything concerning the disappearance of her friend’s body. But when he speaks to her, saying only her name, she knows immediately that this man IS her friend, the one she would follow anywhere, from Galilee to Jerusalem to the grave in this garden to wherever he’s going next. She is overcome with joy and throws her arms around his stiff frame, perhaps still brittle from its recent transformation.
So he does not return her embrace, and strangely, he seems to have little time for affectionate displays. Instead, untangling himself from her arms, he charges Mary with a task: “Go, tell my brothers I’m here. Tell them to clear their schedules. We’ve got things to do. Go on, pick up your feet. Go.”
So Mary goes. And when Jesus next appears a few hours later, in that rented upper room his brothers have converted into a bunker, doors locked, curtains drawn, he first tells them to settle down. “Peace be with you,” he says. And then a little louder: “Peace, I said!” He gives them a minute to gawk at his scars, but like with Mary before them, he is business-like. This is a man with a plan.
“As the Father has sent me,” he says, recalling the agenda of his last several years of perpetual road tripping as an itinerant healer-preacher-teacher-prophet-provocateur, “so I send you.” And just like that, the followers of Jesus are now the leaders of the expedition. The realization dawns: they’re not going home to their spouses and their boats, their tax booths and their families, when all the hubbub in Jerusalem dies down and they feel like it’s safe to sneak out of their hidey-hole and back to their villages. Suddenly it’s clear that their adventure has just begun. Jesus is alive, yes, but there’s hardly time to scratch one’s head about that before he has charged with them with a task. No, he has charged them with a life project. “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” They’re going to have to leave the building. They’re going to have to get out in the open. They’re going to have talk about what they’ve seen and heard, what they know and believe. They’ll be his agents in the world.
Specifically, Jesus says, it’s a mission of forgiveness they’re on now. “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven. God and I are trusting you to figure that out. Because if you don’t forgive, if you let their ugliness stand, well, we won’t intervene. We’ve done all we can to make forgiveness possible for everyone who needs it. Which is, you know, everyone. In the world. So get out there, boys, and get it done. Forget about the boats. This is your work now.”
So this is a thing about resurrection that tends to get lost in the all the Easter egg-stravaganza. The way Jesus does it, resurrection is not resurrection for resurrection’s sake. I mean, it’s great that death has been defeated and all, and the grave has lost its sting. I’m all for that, because Lord knows it hurts like hell when it’s happening to you or someone you love. We need something to hold onto in the face of the terrorism of mortality.
But the way Jesus does it, resurrection is purposeful. It has an agenda, a checklist, work that wasn’t finished before he died and for the completion of which he requires a cadre of willing assistants. As he was sent by the Father, so now he sends those who have witnessed the empty tomb and are ready to believe that death does not have the last word. He sends us. And our task is clear: forgiveness, the extension of mercy he died to replenish, a never-ending supply of grace that only has to be distributed, offered into the lives of those who can only imagine that God has it in for them for the things they’ve done, maybe even because of the things that have been done to them. Like Mary Magdalene, there are lot of people out there who are ready to be disappointed every time they turn around.
But remember, Jesus spent one of his precious last breaths on the cross pleading the case of his executioners, “Father, forgive them. They have no idea what they’re doing.” And now it seems he’ll use his newly re-inflated lungs to say much the same thing. “There’s a lot of forgiving to do out there, friends, and this is your work to do. As the Father sent me, so now I send you. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven.”
If I were among those first disciples, with a brand-new job description, I suppose the first thing I would do is make a list. Sent by Jesus into the world to forgive, where would I start?
Close to home, I imagine. “So he is sending me to forgive the family members who have treated me like I’m an imbecile for staying this close to him. Check.”
“So he is sending me to forgive the employers who have used me like I’m a cog in their money-making machine. Check.”
“So he is sending me to forgive the friends who have stabbed me in the back and then pretended nothing happened. Check.”
“So he is sending me to forgive those who have done me real harm, on purpose or by sheer neglect, leaving me to limp through this world with the scars they gave me throbbing with every step. Check.”
And eventually, if my list were long enough, it would go beyond my personal résumé of insult and injury.
“So he is sending us to trust the people whose every other sentence is a lie.”
“He is sending us to like people who are unlikable because they cannot see themselves as we can clearly see them.”
“He is sending us to assume that even the nastiest people we encounter each day are, deep down, trying their best in adversarial circumstances we can’t always see.”
“He is sending us to resurrect love and hopeful friendship with the scoundrels and the scabs, the liars and the cheats, the homophobes and the haters, because it is for them, too, that he died and has been raised.”
“He is sending us to understand that anger, rage, and even violence are very often secondary to fear and despair. He is sending us to sow peace, to water liberally with mercy, to shine the light of love where there has been only darkness, so that something else can grow in the worst places in this world. In Syria. In Kenya. In Missouri. In Indiana. In the Texas legislature. In all the sketchy corners of this planet which is not, after all, Godforsaken. It turns out, the world is God-saturated, so long as we honor the sending of our risen Lord.”
I don’t know why you got up so early this morning, friends. But because we did, we are among the first to hear on this day that Christ is risen – He is risen indeed! – and that the risen Lord is busy, handing out assignments, making sure we know where to go next and what to do when we get there. Go, and forgive. This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
Communion under wraps on the back table.
Jesus is hellbent on Jerusalem, kicking ass and taking names (Mark 11) right up until the moment when he doesn't (Mark 14-15). We meditated at length on the Jerusalem-Passion narratives, and then stopped to contemplate with the author of Hebrews: "For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the sanctuary by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the camp. Therefore Jesus also suffered outside the city gate in order to sanctify the people by his own blood. Let us then go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured" (Hebrews 13:11-13).
For the last in our Lenten series (thanks be to God!) we sat with Psalm 73 and the reality that life isn't fair -- the wicked prosper, and I'm trying hard, and I'm still #notwinning. But maybe my self-absorbed feeling of #notwinning is a disposition God can work with. Imagine that.
Psalm 88. Ugh. Depression, anxiety, every form of emotional suffering we could think of. It's for real, and it doesn't mean you're faithless or weak. Indeed, "God is near to the brokenhearted," and maybe your broken heart is exactly the heart that God is looking for.
The colors of our sorrow: "WE have suffered from depression or sadness or whatever you call this." "WE have hurt ourselves physically for reasons we don't understand." "WE have taken prescription meds for emotional diagnoses." "WE have gotten help from therapists or counselors." "WE have contemplated suicide, or love someone who has died by suicide." Etc., etc. Every color, a shade of our grief. Michala said, "Look, it's all our shit. And it's so beautiful."
Youngster Czar Jess Schell, soon-to-be M.Div. Perkins (SMU), tackled the reality of loneliness and isolation, when your friends and neighbors and (maybe even) God have left you in the dust, or, as Jess says, "naked on the bathroom floor." Read Psalm 38, please. And have Psalm 23 on hand for the counter-testimony.
From the sketchbook of Paul Soupiest.
Psalm 102 evokes the pain and terror of dying. Can God really understand the SUCK of death? What if it seems like God doesn't?
Please take a look at Psalm 58 before you get started. And to cleanse the palate (and the spirit), read Psalm 103 afterward to hear the counter-testimony to this particularly ugly Psalm.
Classic 90s Benetton ad. This is important.
Malcolm-n-Lacey asked for just 3 things for their wedding: keep it short, keep it simple, and please read about the Fruit of the Spirit from Galatians 5:22-23. So we did, along with the story of Jesus at the home of Martha and Mary in Luke 10:38-42. Weddings, like all sacraments, work every time. They're married, and we're hoping for happily ever after.