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Galileo Church – a congregation of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) – is a progressive Christian faith community in Mansfield, Texas. Our pastor – Rev. Dr. Katie Hays – likes to talk. She really loves to talk about the difficult, messy, and confusing questions that arise from trying to understand Jesus. These are some of the things she (and occasionally other friends of ours) shares with us in her sermons.
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Presence, physical and emotional, at gatherings of the church. In this dream, John sees a river that is clear as crystal, and whose water gives life, flowing from the throne where God and the Lamb (Jesus) are. The river flows down the middle of the streets, so it is always accessible, and there is a tree of life whose leaves are medicine that can h…
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Discernment for our next steps together. In this dream, John imagines God and God’s people forever united. The imagery involves a bride/groom and a new city, with “beautiful” used as a descriptor. God in this vision erases death, mourning, crying, pain, and also tenderly wipes tears out of eyes. This is God making everything new; the old order that…
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Gracious receipt of care from the church family. In this dream, God’s people who have been subjected to societal violence wear their suffering like robes of honor. They worship God and serve God around God’s throne— and God shelters them. Their shepherd is this Lamb (Jesus); it is said this Lamb will make sure they are never hungry or thirsty or ev…
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Sharing material resources to further the church’s goals. In this dream, John sees a diverse, numberless crowd surrounding a throne declaring that the “Lamb who was slain (Jesus)” is worthy of power, wealth, wisdom, strength, glory, honor, praise, and dominion. In John’s world, the people calling for this sort of attribution were imperialistic rule…
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Extension of the Church’s Welcome to Friends, Neighbors, Strangers, and Enemies. Just like when you wake up from a strange dream and you want to tell someone about it, in this passage, John experiences a dream/vision from God, who tells him to write it down. To tell us your thoughts on this sermon, click through to the web posting and leave us a co…
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Feral Hope. Here’s a quote from an essay I’ve been reading and re-reading: “Feral hope is radical hope. As Jonathan Lear describes it, ‘What makes this hope radical is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is. Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet la…
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The Expanse of His Care, from Small to Ginormous. (There is a section just before this, Jesus teaching in the Nazareth synagogue, that we read recently.) Here we see Jesus coming into his power as a holistic healer: tending to the spirits and bodies of all those who suffer. He has a remarkable capacity to deal compassionately and powerfully with bi…
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The Hardest Part, For Now. Jesus told us to pray to escape trials, because he himself endured trials. “Trial” is more than temptation, right? It’s about the deep-down questioning of whether God is trustworthy. Pray that you don’t ever have to really ask that – but if you do, know that Jesus did it first. To tell us your thoughts on this sermon, cli…
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Double lineage: Born of God, Born of Adam. Where does Jesus come from? From the transcendent God… from the human community of his ancestors… from the cosmic materiality of creation (water, dove) – and these all converge to make him completely human, as are we. To tell us your thoughts on this sermon, click through to the web posting and leave us a …
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Building on a Legacy. Jesus doesn’t invent his “reign of God” preaching from whole cloth; he builds it on a legacy of teaching and prophecy that comes before him, including from John the Baptist, his single biggest influence. Did they have a friendship before? Did he listen to John’s preaching before the day of his baptism? What did he take from it…
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Growing Up Jesus. What is it like to grow a child into a messiah? And what does it mean that we, too, are growing? “Wisdom” is not something we gain suddenly, but a slow ascent toward maturity that takes our whole life long. (The song referenced at the beginning of the sermon is Sunday Mornings by Susan Werner) To tell us your thoughts on this serm…
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Go. The radical act of worship requires that we stop and leave, carrying with us the gifts we’ve received, newly energized for our work in the world God still loves. I can’t quite imagine carrying on with Christian discipleship without the weekly reset of worship; how does one maintain an endless and unchanging line of faith-hope-love without the S…
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Share. Our days are consumed by the impulse to get – consumed by consumerism! But generosity is a muscle that atrophies as our consumption grows. The paired stories about Barnabas and Ananais-n-Sapphira can be told as fables: “Here’s how they’ll remember you someday.” And the small “gives” we give today add up over a lifetime to form that story. To…
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The Table. Jesus just has this whole way of upending the traditional “table math” – seats of honor, who’s invited. (I think that at my grandmother’s house he would’ve sat at the kids’ table, with his knees up under his chin.) Scripture often compares being at home with God to being seated at a banquet, secure in plenteous food and gracious welcome.…
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Preach. “Churches get the preaching they deserve,” Katie’s spouse has said, quoting someone else. Meaning, preaching is inherently dialogical. It has the form of monologue, but at its best it reflects the preacher’s conversations with the church, with the culture, and (most obviously) with the scripture itself, and thus with our ancestors in faith.…
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Sing. Singing before a crowd of people requires some courage; most of us aren’t that good at it and shouldn’t be on a mic. But singing with a crowd is different. It releases us from self- consciousness about raising our own voices. It requires that we breathe together, in and out. It puts the words of faith, hope, and love in our own mouths, even i…
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Read Scripture. This is how we introduce “trouble” into the narrative of worship. The stories our ancestors told assert that “the earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it” – i.e. that God gets everything God wants. It does not always appear to be true in our experience. And so every Sunday the text invites us to wrestle with tradition, promises ma…
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Pray. Bowing our head, bending our knee, pledging our allegiance – this is the subversive work of prayer. Corporate prayer in worship is a stay against idolatry. We remember again that our time here is for the re-ordering of our lives: “God is God, and we are not. (And nothing else is God, either.)” The counter-narratives say that our lives depend …
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Arrive. King David, having recovered the Ark of the Covenant, dances his way home. He is essentially bringing God’s Presence back to Israel, and his enthusiastic showing-up dance is unnerving to some (his wife!) who wish for more decorum, more “demure”, in worship. But it matters how we arrive for worship – do we bring our whole (exposed) selves, o…
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Simeon, Anna, and I can die now. Simeon is our final singer. He and Anna have waited many years, decades of waiting, for the fulfillment of one small piece of God’s big promise to redeem Israel and save the world. Waiting is a virtue, a practice, a skill that becomes a disposition for we who are tracing the long arc of the moral universe... (Cariss…
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Angels, shepherds, and all that had been told them. The angelic announcement (the third of four arias in this opera) stokes the shepherds’ curiosity, and they are the first “come and see” invitees. Do we imagine the angels only sang to these shepherds? Or did their song perhaps go to others who were not quite interested enough to drop everything an…
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Jesus: born under the boot of empire. Luke here situates Jesus’s birth in its political and economic contexts. Babies born now could be similarly announced: “When So-and-So was president, and So-and-So was governor of Texas; when interest rates were thus, and employment was such...” And what would it mean? If Jesus’s nativity happened now, where wo…
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John, Zechariah, and being filled with God’s Spirit. The songs we sing to our children matter. What are the melodies and lyrics we fill their imaginations with? Songs of longing and lament; songs of empowerment and good cheer; songs that transport our spirits into God’s good future – these are the songs we must sing for generations to come. To tell…
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Elizabeth, Mary, and the strength of God’s arm. The story of sisterhood, and the subversive lullaby that rumbles up from Mary’s spirit after some time spent soaking up Elizabeth’s company, are scenes that ignite our own communal spirit. What happens, what becomes possible in your imagination, after spending time with someone who can help you see Go…
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Gabriel, Mary, Joseph, and nothing is impossible with God. If Mary’s virginity means anything, it means that God bounds over obstacles to get what God wants. At the same time, God seeks consent for this particular intervention; Mary’s yes is imperative to the forward motion of the story and God’s incoming Presence. (Note: this is a very Mary-centri…
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