Galileo Church

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.

5860 I-20 service road Fort Worth, TX 76119 USA

(682) 760-1274

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!

SOUL FOOD FOR RIGHT NOW

June 15, 2025 - August 17, 2025

Let’s consider contemporary spiritual practices that nourish a healthy inner life and strengthen the connection between our hearts and God’s heart. How, in a season that feels so out of control, do we hold on to our agency, refusing to relinquish responsibility for our own wellbeing? How do make ourselves available to hear God’s Spirit through the cacophony shredding our attention into a million splinters?

Let’s return to our continuous read-through of Luke’s gospel, seeking Jesus’s support for practices that can help us meet this moment with spiritual grit and sufficient shalom.

Ask for Help. Jesus calls his first disciples in an exchange of mutual aid. He needs a platform; they can share one. They’ve caught nothing; he can direct them to a big catch. He needs assistants; they can follow. The best relationships function this way, like a seesaw, in complementary partnership.

Reckon with Your Past. When you encounter Jesus, he goes straight to the heart of the problem. The healing he offers could be physical, or emotional, or spiritual. You have to be ready for him to clean things up, re-order your psyche, put you back together from the inside out. How do we partner with Jesus in this self-rehabilitation? What about therapy as a spiritual practice?

Praise Aspirationally. Levi throws a great banquet with all the wrong guests... Jesus’s disciples aren’t ascetic enough... Jesus responds to accusations with “Look, we’re doing the best we can with the time we have.” It’s not a huge, triumphal claim; it’s a right-sized hope in God’s coming redemption. “Maybe...all is not lost.”

Honor Your Ancestors (Maybe Not All of Them). Think about where you came from. For most of us, there’s a wide variety of good, bad, and ugly in our heritage. Jesus is accused of not honoring the ancestors’ teachings; his replies show that he’s discerning what he takes and what he leaves behind from the history he inherits.

Lament Honestly. The “Sermon on the Plain” is noticeably more grounded than Matthew’s version. Jesus here attends to the material condition of his followers’ lives, and dares to speak the truth about that. He says God knows it’s true, and has in mind a reversal of fortune that will honor the truth of their daily experience of lack. Carissa Robinson is preaching.

Be the Neighbor. How are we meant to comport ourselves in a world where our neighbors scorn our existence? When we are made to feel unwanted, even unsafe, by our fellow citizens? Jesus has an idea about that: love, blessing, non-judgment. This is likely a life-long practice, quite impossible to get quickly “correct” and move on.

Cross a Boundary. The centurion (Roman officer) should not care about his enslaved person. Jesus should not care about the centurion. But here they all are, caring about each other across the boundaries humans make. What if a deliberate demographic crossover (generational, class, language, and otherwise) could make more room for God to work in the synergy? Carissa Robinson is preaching.

Speak Truth to Power. John the Baptist reappears in this gospel from a prison cell, conducting a conversation with Jesus via messengers. Jesus follows up with a deeply complimentary description of John’s brave work, acknowledging the reality that the gospel of God’s reign is not good news for everyone (i.e. those in power with so much to lose).

Be in Your Body. Jesus points out to his host that his body could have used care – his head, his hands, his feet were all in need of gentle attention. The uninvited woman who gave care to his body used her body for his sake, kneeling to wipe his feet with her hair. It’s a sensual service for a sensual savior who cares for his fully embodied self. No less are we meant to appreciate and occupy our sensual, beautiful, exhausted bodies.

Love the Earth. Jesus’s first parable (in Luke) is about growing food – the experience of planting grain in plowed earth, watching it grow, observing where it thrives and where it doesn’t. Of course it’s metaphorically about the reign of God – in whom it takes hold and in whom it doesn’t. And it’s meant to be at least a little bit funny; the farmer in the story isn’t a very careful one. But the parable works because Jesus’s audience was agrarian; they were close to the food production cycle. In the Information Age we have to be more deliberate to feel ourselves connected to the earth: go outside, “touch grass,” be stirred for a bird (Hopkins, “The Windhover”), grow something.