If God is Love, Don't Be a Jerk
What if upon Jesus’ return his first question to us is: “I asked you to do one thing: love. So, what happened?” If God is love and if Jesus is the perfect expression of that love, and if we are supposed to follow that Jesus—how can we so often be love-impaired? For as long as human beings have been declaring devotion to a God of love, they have been gloriously screwing it up by being hateful in the process. The Bible doesn’t shy away from that, and neither should we. Join us as we explore some of the ways we fall short of the call to “love God, self, and neighbor” through the book and sermon series If God is Love, Don’t be a Jerk!
Sermons in This Series
List of Services
-
Thou Shalt Not Be a Jerk It doesn’t matter how you label your religious affiliation, tradition, or the building where you gather or the creed you recite or who gets the credit on your timeline. If it doesn’t substantially or partially compel you to be more compassionate, more loving, more aware of people’s pain, and more moved to alleviate it, it’s probably not made of God stuff and it’s not going to matter to the vast majority of human beings you encounter, who consider religion to be at best superficial and at worst, toxic.Thou Shalt Not Be a Jerk
-
It’s an Inside Job People who are assailed by the storms of this life don’t need any more heartless, loveless, joyless self-identified saints claiming they are Christian while beating the hell out of them. They need people who simply give a care in a way that emulates Jesus, people who see how hard it is to be human and feel burdened to make it a little softer. Let us not be interested that people declare us properly religious or properly Christian. Let them say we cared and loved the marginalized, the alone, the hurting, the invisible, the weary, wounded tired people around us.It’s an Inside Job
-
Unboxing God When we experience moments that we identify as spiritual or miraculous or transcendent, they are seldom attached to organized religion or a single building, and rarely confined to a church service or Bible study. The less dependent we are on a building for an hour on Sunday to replicate transcendent encounters we have as we live through this life, the more we are able to understand the world as sacred, to embrace the truth that the place where we stand is always holy ground. When you begin to unbox God, you may find yourself uncomfortable in church or religion because these places begin to feel restrictive to your soul.Unboxing God
-
This Mess is Never Getting Together Faith isn’t about surety but about suspicions, it is an aspirational orientation, a movement toward something just slightly out of reach, something that propels you to ask and seek and knock—because you don’t know it all yet. When it comes to knowing all the mysteries while we’re here, the mess is never getting fully together, so we should manufacture a little grace for other people and for ourselves—and love everyone well in the mess.This Mess is Never Getting Together
-
Good Book, Lousy Hammer The Bible isn’t a textbook. It isn’t a formula. It is a complex, spacious, mysterious, sometimes nebulous collection of stories that we are invited to explore as we seek to understand this life and the life beyond it. The less tempted we are to weaponize the words against other people, the more likely we are to find a faith that does not harm. If we use it to make us better humans, that would make us wise stewards of those words. The Good Book makes a really lousy hammer.Good Book, Lousy Hammer
-
Made in America If God is as big as we claim and as loving as we contend, all life is equally valuable wherever it arrives from or currently resides—and yes, spiritually speaking, a child five thousand miles away is as inherently beautiful and worthy of protection as my own—and your own. There is no border on real compassion and there aren’t varying degrees of human worth—no matter what anyone may say or believe. If America is first, Jesus can only be a very distant second.Made in America
-
Holy Ferocity Jesus wasn’t always nice. He was always love, but not soft, saccharine, Hallmark-movie, pop song love. He flipped tables of the temple vendors because of love for his father’s house, and justice for those less fortunate. He ripped into the hypocritical religious leaders who leveraged their position and their power to exploit people. He declared that his mission was to be good news for the poor, the sick, the vulnerable, the imprisoned because he loved them—which sounded like bad news to the wealthy and the powerful and the corrupt. It’s okay to be labeled angry. We must make sure our anger is directed at the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way; all rooted in a Holy Ferocity.Holy Ferocity
-
Check Your Halos and Egos at the Door Personal morality and religious convictions tend to work from a place where no one believes they are getting it wrong. Everyone is certain their cause is just, their motives are pure, and their character unimpeachable. Many religious people think they are loving their neighbor even if their neighbor has doubts about that, and most of us fancy ourselves table flippers while presiding over that themselves could use some upending.Check Your Halos and Egos at the Door